Strangely, it all seems more innocent when you look at it as a kink

[resonant]

Yesterday -- and I don't even remember how -- I encountered for the first time a kink called financial domination, and one of its associated kinks, forced intoxication.

My brain started out with the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (all those dates with a beautiful woman who wants a man to give her a hundred dollars of "going to the ladies' room" money), and then of course went musical with "Material Girl," and then, because I listen to a lot of folk music, it went to all those hundreds of songs where a sailor meets a fair maiden who persuades him to buy her food and drink and gifts, gets him roaring drunk, and then steals all his money and his clothes while he sleeps it off.

An awful lot of things snap into better focus for me if I think, "Oh! It's a kink!"

Maybe that's because so very much of human romantic and sexual behavior, if considered as a rational pursuit of a reasonable goal, just makes no damned sense.

Comments

[jedusaur]

Financial domination was mentioned in a recent Savage Love, I think.

[resonant]

Aha! That's a mystery solved. Because it's not something I would have gone looking for, or even theorized the existence of.

[out_there]

You know, I actually find the opposite. I understand it from a financial point of view, but once I try to think of it as a kink, I hit a huge wall of "Bzuh?"

I think mostly because the first way I respond to the idea of kinks is intensely personal (you know, that basic reaction of "Mmmm" or "Wha?") and giving financial security to someone else is something I'd never do. I suppose right there, financial security really says it all: money isn't the be all and end all of life, but it's far too essential to hand over to someone else for the sake of a kink.

Frugality outranks sexuality for me. This probably explains so much about why I'm an accountant. *laughs*

[resonant]

It's not something I respond to myself, but I thought about the guy I knew who repeatedly and ruinously fell for strippers and the other who said ruefully, "I just have a thing for bratty girls," and all this time I'd been going, do they seriously think love can be bought? Do they think this diamond necklace is the one thing that will make her truly love them? Are they *idiots*?

So to think it's a kink is kind of comforting!

[metaphortunate]

I think those are the dudes who are profoundly dubious about their ability to provide anything in a relationship OTHER than cash. So they look for people who are overtly asking for cash.

[icarus]

those hundreds of songs where a sailor meets a fair maiden who persuades him to buy her food and drink and gifts, gets him roaring drunk, and then steals all his money and his clothes while he sleeps it off.

Actually, that happened to a friend of mine. Who was, in fact, a sailor. And drunk. The girls were both prostitutes, and they didn't steal his clothes (though they did leave him buck naked with the hotel door open). They did steal his wallet but didn't know that most of his cash and ID etc was under the mattress.

It's a cliche for a reason, folks....

(Of course, he was the same guy who, working as a licensed AB on a research vessel on a trip to Antarctica, was sleeping with two different women on the boat. He thought it was great. Until he walked into his room and found the two of them talking. And they gave him this Look. Uh-oh.

The trip back from Antarctica wasn't nearly as much fun as the trip down.)

[resonant]

You're friends with Jim Kirk?

[icarus]

Basically. ;)

[jesse_the_k]

At least the three of them were wintering over.

[icarus]

Wintering over, yes, that would be bad. At least he had piloting researchers in skiffs around the Galapagos to distract him. Though I'm sure those two women would've happily left him in that skiff, trailing on a little rope all the way back to San Diego.

[carolyn_claire]

I knew a voice actress who set up a web site to be a financial dominatrix; she basically just commanded people to send her money. I have no idea how well that worked out for her, though. She had other websites for things like distance-readings, the sorts of things that tend to draw in those who want to believe and back up that belief with cash, so it seemed to be less about kink and more about finances, for her.

[resonant]

I imagine that's true for most of the sellers; the kink is with the buyers.

One of the spouse's high school friends responded to one of those personal ads in the free weeklies (pre-Internet) where a submissive man was offering to clean and worship - "it's not sexual for me," she said - "I just want a white man to clean my house." (Predictably this was more complicated than she expected.) every time she tells this story, I wonder whether her indifference to dominating him made it less satisfying to him or more so.