Inside the Hidden World of Men Who Pay Strangers to Humiliate Them

A woman snaps her fingers during a video call. Without hesitation, the man on the other end opens his phone and sends another payment. She laughs. He sends more. She tells him he is pathetic. The humiliation is precisely what he came for. There is no nudity, no physical contact and no expectation that they will ever meet again. For him, the transfer itself is the intimacy.

The 33-year-old New York finance professional has spent well into five figures over the years paying women he met online. Sometimes he buys them coffee. Sometimes he helps fund vacations or shopping trips. Often, he says, the money is less important than the knowledge that the recipient neither needs it nor cares about him. “I enjoy someone laughing while I send them money,” he says. “I enjoy that they can make me do whatever they want.”

His ritual belongs to a fast-growing online subculture known as financial domination, or “findom,” where financial submissives voluntarily hand over money to dominant partners, often complete strangers, in exchange for psychological gratification rather than sex. The practice, once confined to niche BDSM (Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism) forums, has expanded through livestreaming platforms, social media and instant payment apps, creating an economy where humiliation can be bought, sold and delivered with a tap. Charlotte Cowles, writing in The Cut, interviewed three men whose experiences illustrate how the practice has evolved from an obscure internet fetish into a digital economy built on power, shame and money.

Therapists say the fetish is widely misunderstood because it turns conventional ideas about money and power upside down. While some participants set strict budgets and boundaries, others spiral into debt, secrecy and compulsive spending. “Financial submissives are often very misunderstood,” said Sergio Rebelo, a therapist who specializes in compulsive sexual behavior. “As a result, a lot of people who are turned on by it feel very ashamed and upset by their urges.”

Dr. Kate Balestrieri, a psychologist and sex therapist, said she has worked with financial submissives who exhausted their savings or accumulated debt trying to satisfy dominant partners. Yet she argues that the practice itself is not necessarily pathological if it is negotiated responsibly.

“It allows them to not have to be in charge, to not have to be responsible, and that might give them permission to feel emotions that maybe don’t seem accessible otherwise,” she said.

For the New York financier, the attraction began almost by accident. While in college, a woman he met online jokingly asked whether he would buy her a gift card. He agreed. The transaction became unexpectedly arousing. Years later he understood that what excited him was not generosity but humiliation, the feeling of surrendering control to someone who regarded him as disposable.

His interests expanded into other forms of submission. He paid women while completing their homework assignments, tipped cam models who refused to undress, and financed shopping trips where strangers mocked him as he handed over his credit card. During graduate school, when stress was high and money was scarce, he said the behavior became compulsive. At one point he had only about $300 left in his bank account but still felt compelled to keep paying.

Today he is engaged and trying to stop.

“I think it would be considered cheating on my partner,” he said. “I don’t want to do that.”

Across the country, a 53-year-old engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area traces his interest to long before “findom” became an online buzzword. In the 1990s, he regularly met women through classified advertisements and took them shopping, fascinated by the taboo of spending money without expecting romance or sex in return.

One of his earliest cash meetings remains vivid. He handed a woman $200 inside her dungeon, exchanged almost no conversation and immediately left, wondering why he had come.

“I just gave her the money and left. I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?'” he recalled. “But then, on the drive home, that’s when it became really hot for me.”

Unlike many in the online community, he avoids discussing budgets or financial limits because, he says, predictability diminishes the psychological tension that makes the experience appealing.

“I don’t think there’s a healthy way to participate in findom from a sub’s perspective,” he said. “It’s objectively damaging.”

For a 39-year-old London social worker, the attraction emerged in a different way. The first time he heard someone describe financial domination on a podcast, he felt physically ill. The disgust, he later realized, came from recognizing himself.

He became fascinated by dominant men who embodied the traits he rejected in his own life: aggression, indifference and cruelty. Eventually he began sending them money, usually modest sums, before later working himself as a professional dominant in the fetish community. Ironically, the money he earned humiliating clients helped finance his own submission.

“When I give money to people who treat me badly, it’s almost like I become part of them,” he said. “There’s something almost religious about it.”

Psychologists say such accounts underscore that financial domination is rarely about money alone. Instead, participants often describe seeking relief from responsibility, validation through humiliation or emotional release through carefully negotiated power exchanges.

Digital technology has accelerated those dynamics. Anonymous payment methods, encrypted messaging platforms and livestreaming services have made it possible for dominant creators to cultivate global audiences while allowing submissives to indulge privately, sometimes in seconds.

For some, the transactions remain affordable fantasies. For others, therapists say, they become cycles of secrecy, escalating payments and relapse that resemble behavioral addiction more than entertainment.

The New York financier says he has managed stretches of nine months without sending money. Then the urges return.

“I’ve had nine months where I’ve spent nothing,” he said. “Then, when I relapse, I’ll send thousands.”

The money, he says, is almost incidental. What he is really buying is the feeling that comes from giving it away.

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