When people hear “professional dominant,” they know exactly what it implies. It’s going to get kinky! When people hear “findom” or “FLR,” not so much. Their confusion is understandable. Financial domination and female-led relationships may exist alongside a BDSM dynamic. Or they may be ambiguous. Or entirely non-kinky.
What that means is you can’t know by the label. You have to dig deeper. So it occurred to me that I should explain how I see these relationship styles and the characteristics that actually make them BDSM.
What Makes Kinks/Fetishes BDSM
People who don’t live in the world of fetish and kink are easily confused because the list of fetishes and kinks seems endless. Goddess worship, financial submission, power exchange, humiliation, restraint, pain. If it exists, there is probably a kink about it. The same is true of fetishes. No one has ever cataloged all the permutations of fetish imagination. The best we can do is study known fetishes, which usually means one with a few websites and chatrooms behind it.
Kink and fetish, as I’ve written before, are normal and universal aspects of adult sexuality. We may at times trace our kinks and fetishes back to childhood, when we liked to tie people up or play doctor. But those early experiments are not BDSM. They are innocent exploration. Minors cannot legally consent to anything sex-related. I love when people say “I was doing BDSM when I was seven.” No, Mortimer, you were not. You were not negotiating, and legal consent is off the table for minors. Not all the kids you played with grew up to be kinky, either.
BDSM IS ADULT-RATED
BDSM is for adults because adult mutual consent is its foundational principle. On that foundation, we’ve built a more complex structure to ensure adults can act on edgy desires safely. Not just consent, but eager consent. Limits. Safewords. Negotiation. Health status. BDSM education, and a lot of it.
Acting kinky or fetishistic does not make someone BDSM. We’ve all heard about celebrities who claimed their relationships were consensual, even as victims lined up to say they did not consent to the fetish or the BDSM-style behavior involved. Thriving careers were ruined. But the far bigger tragedy is that the emotional lives of their victims will never be the same.
BDSM ethics are the thick line you don’t cross. Following our ethical codes, like Safe, Sane, and Consensual (SSC), Risk-Aware Consensual Kink (RACK), and Personal Responsibility, Informed Consensual Kink (PRICK), helps even the hardest-playing sadist show kindness, caring, and compassion.
FURTHER READING from my blog
BDSM Rules: Understanding the Complexities of Consent
Kink and Sexual Intelligence: Partners in Consent
Is FinDom BDSM?
It can be! A findom transaction that agrees to financial limits and offers a stopping point is legitimate D/s. The submissive knows what they are agreeing to, has set their own ceiling, and can walk away happy. That’s a clean transaction.
A findom who dismisses negotiation or tells a client, “you consented when you texted me” (which happened to at least one of my clients!) is untrustworthy. Most of the findom clients who have worked with me say they were aroused at first, but felt ashamed and angry afterward. Some could not stop their compulsion, even when their finances, work-life, or relationships deteriorated. Indeed, some returned to the same abusive findom over and over again because they remembered how exciting it was at the beginning.
They end up with love/hate relationships with the findom and with themselves. Erotic experiences that leave you hating yourself or hating the sex worker are the biggest red flag that you need to see a therapist. Men in particular have a hard time accepting or admitting how emotionally vulnerable they can be. This is a huge problem therapists deal with all the time. Men think it’s unmanly to admit when a partner abuses them.
The Cerebral Domme on Ethics
My friend Caroline, known professionally as Cerebral Domme, is a real-life dominant woman who provides pay-by-the-minute domination. Her true skill is emotional sadism. The clientele have a broad spectrum of kinks, including findom fantasies. Her pay-for-play doesn’t leave room for the detailed upfront negotiation that is the hallmark of BDSM.
As an ethical dom, she works from her own safety protocols. She learns as much as she can about them and caters to their specific interests. She recognizes when a client’s life is collapsing because of an obsession with findoms, or when they can’t control or afford their spending habits.
That’s her stopping point with them. She forgoes the income rather than become the instrument of a client’s self-destruction. She has blocked clients for exactly that reason. She takes as much personal responsibility as an online findom can. She holds herself accountable. She’s willing to lose income over it. She actually cares about the humanity of the men paying her. Findoms who treat accountability as beneath them are scam artists.
But it isn’t only the doms who are responsible for a sub’s safety.
Vet your Findoms
A sub holds responsibility for their own safety. They need to understand that BDSM is based on consent. If the sub doesn’t have any voice in the session they’re paying for, it is non-consensual. If the sub can’t set a spending limit, it is non-consensual. If a sub is too timid to ask for limits and safewords, they should not sub at all.
A phone or video sex worker can’t spend much time negotiating scenes or assigning safe words. That’s because their job is to tease and satisfy the client they are speaking with, not be their nanny. So, submissive clients have to look out for themselves. Did they consent to spend $4k on someone they never met? Did they consent to a stranger taking their money but not to giving them something (a photo, a session, etc.) that made them happy?
There are ethical findoms in the world. It may take more effort than clicking the first link you see on X, but it’s worth it.
Is FLR BDSM?
Female-led relationships are a world apart, of course. They are focused on a thriving, intimate relationship in which the woman calls most of the shots. The woman being in charge is hardly a new concept. You see that in plenty of so-called traditional relationships. The wife makes most of the decisions. We have quaint sayings about that domestic arrangement: “the wife wears the pants” and “happy wife, happy life.”
Don’t automatically assume it’s kinky! Ironically, many FLR relationships are so embedded in Western culture that it’s common to see a woman making all the household decisions, picking out her husband’s clothes and food, and controlling his spending. We don’t call those FLR because they’re common enough that we rationalize that some wives are control freaks and their husbands don’t mind at all.
FLR only becomes BDSM when eroticism enters the structure. The couple may never join a BDSM group or attend club events, but they read! They follow safety protocols, negotiate, and enjoy kinky intimacy in privacy. Some of the husbands are “service slaves,” people who enjoy pampering and serving their dominant wives. And some focus on fetish/kink pleasures.
One day we may have a study on this! For now, FLR seems to be a neutral label: it might be BDSM or it might not.
TL;DR: It’s About Context
Are Findom and FLR BDSM? BDSM is defined by its ethical structure, not by the kink/fetish acts. Any brute can tie people up, but BDSM depends on consensuality and intentionality. Partners are eager and informed about what will happen; their intention is to experience mutual pleasure together.
The deciding factor is whether the people involved are mutually consenting, emotionally fulfilled, and unharmed by the sex games they play. If you leave an experience feeling broken, poorly treated, disrespected, and hurt, it wasn’t BDSM. Remember that.
You don’t have to sort it out alone. Reach out to me through gloriabrame.com. If we’re a good fit, we’ll set up your first appointment to get you started on your journey.
Photo credit: Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
