It starts with a spark, a twitch, a catch in your breath. She’s beautiful. She’s powerful. She’s already got you figured out and you just know it.
That’s the domme you want to serve, the domme you want to wrap you tight around her perfectly manicured finger.
And so you reach out. You hope. You send a message. You send age verification. But when it comes to your money, you hold back. It’s a pastry or a coffee and then—nothing more.
Then you wait.
I’ll send more when she impresses me, when she seduces me, when she takes over my mind, you tell yourself.
Inevitably, she never does.
Because what you don’t realize is that you’ve already put a wall between yourself and that hope.
By asking her to give and prove and invest in you without you investing in her, you’ve clung to your power instead of releasing it.
You’ve set her up to chase, to work, to beg (ew). And either she won’t because most dommes won’t. That’s not what we do. It’s not the power structure we crave, the kinds of connections we’re seeking here.
Or she will chase and beg and it doesn’t work. Because that’s not actually what you want, kitten—to turn her into someone courting your favor. You haven’t set yourself up for surrender. You have asked her to submit to you instead of the other way around.
And so you ruin your fantasy before it begins. Because of that pesky little asshole:
Fear.
One of the disservices culture offers to every person raised as a man is this: it plants in you a fear of being taken advantage of by women.
(Now, depending who you are, you might be in the findom or femdom space because you want to be taken advantage of – and hi cuties, adore you, not talking to you in this one. Y’all are already on board. But for the others, the skittish little kittens stepping into the space scared…)
You are scared of the scams, of the ripoffs, but way more than that scared of the vulnerability. Scared that if you open up, give freely of your time, your energy, your care, your truths, you will end up rejected.
That’s really what you’re scared of, isn’t it? Not even being scammed. Being rejected by a real person you admire and want.
And so you enter spaces holding back, being stingy with your money, your time, your care, your emotions—and you’re shocked when that inspires stinginess in the person you’re interacting with. When it never works.
The reality is that when you are generous—truly generous—it frees up the women in your life (be that personal connections or dommes) to be generous with you.
In other words: how you enter a dynamic either creates an atmosphere of generosity or one of stinginess. Either your domme knows from the start that she is treasured, you see her time and presence as valuable and she can trust that you will keep showing up with generosity and care—or she knows that she will have to draw every coffee send from you painstakingly.
And kittens, nobody wants the latter when they can have the former. Dommes who are successful in this space and in their vanilla careers aren’t going to chase you around for scraps. We aren’t going to trade in our power for the day just because maybe you’ll turn out to be better than this later.
For those interested in feminization or simply deconstructing the ways that society has limited you as a man, this is me ushering you into the sisterhood by telling you our secret:
Generosity is how women relate to each other.
We show up emotionally, physically, intellectually, financially. We bring each other food when we’re sick or sad. We fight over who pays for each other’s coffee. We show up planning to be generous and we are often met with generosity in return.
This takes courage. It takes a willingness to be the one who is sometimes overgenerous. It takes an acceptance that sometimes you will be generous with a person you never see again or never get anything from—and actually that’s beautiful. I’ve paid the rent of strangers on GoFundMe before just for the feeling it gives me when I think of that person checking their email and finding that stress has evaporated from their life.
This is what I personally mean when I say I don’t want findom to be transactional—not that it shouldn’t include money (lol to everyone who has suggested that; are you lost, bro?) but that you should come in with generosity, care, and admiration from the start. Show up giving. Show up sacrificing. Show up not expecting anything in return—even as you hope for connection to blossom.
That is how you set yourself up for real success in a dynamic. Any dynamic. In BDSM and in life.
This is how you make me want to surprise you with more care and play and space than you ever expected from me.
To get there, you’ll need to be brave enough to rip entitlement out by its roots, to give with only the expectation of how it will make you feel, not what you will get for it.