There is a man who gave away enough money to buy a house and two good cars. He has no house and no cars. He got nothing for it. No product. No photo. No date. Not even a conversation. He simply sent the money to a stranger — and the sending itself was the entire point.
That’s not a scam victim. That’s a fetish called financial domination — “findom” — and the men who practice it hand over cash, sometimes their whole paycheck, to receive absolutely nothing in return.
Your first reaction is the right one for the wrong reason. You want to laugh. Or wince. Or close the tab.
Don’t. Because almost everything you just assumed about that man is wrong, and the corrections are what should stop you cold.
You assumed he’s being scammed. Mostly, he isn’t — he chooses this, eyes open, and would do it again tomorrow.
You assumed it’s a sex thing that has nothing to do with you. It’s a money thing, and it has everything to do with you.
You assumed he could just stop. He’ll tell you himself he can’t: “for me, it’s an addiction. I’ve tried everything to get past it, but nothing works.”
Here is the part that genuinely unsettled me, after thirty years sitting across from people drowning in debt. Strip away the kink and findom isn’t strange at all. It’s the most honest picture of debt I’ve ever seen — because there’s no car, no vacation, no thing to point at. There’s only the feeling the money bought, and the receipt. It’s your debt with the disguise pulled off.
The man who gave away a house can see exactly what his money bought him: nothing but a feeling. You can’t see yours, because yours came wrapped in groceries and gadgets and “I earned this.” Same feeling. Same machinery. He just can’t hide from his receipt, and you can.
I spent this week working out exactly how that machinery runs — the four stages it moves through, why “just stop” is useless, and the one thing that actually gets a person free. It’s more hopeful than it sounds, and it is almost certainly running in some corner of your own life right now.
I put all of it in two pieces. Read them with one question in mind — not “how could anyone do that?” but the one that actually changes your life: where’s my disguise?
Findom Took My Savings and I Couldn’t Stop — for the person living it right now and too ashamed to say so out loud. The gentlest first step I know how to build.
The Four Stages of Sexual Financial Domination — the full map of those four stages, and the way out, with the research behind it.
— Steve
If this made you look at someone — or yourself — a little differently, forward it. You might be the one who hands them the door.