A series of messages and announcements online led me to investigate something that I'm not terribly familiar with. It's a subject that I immediately felt I needed to become more educated about for the same reasons that I first learned safety and boundaries. That is, to prevent something that should be a positive experience from becoming a bad one. The subject tonight is financial domination.
For those ignorant of such a term, financial domination is, almost literally, what it sounds like. Dominants (usually Dommes, though some Doms participate) insist on tributes or hush money from willing submissives (almost always male) in exchange for various forms of play. The play is usually psychosexual, degrading talk, humiliation of the sub, or "money slaves" (often called "pay pigs"). Occasionally, the power exchange can become so total, that the sub hands over complete control of their finances, with only a small allowance available to them.
On the surface, it se…

It is one of the most asked and hotly debated questions in BDSM. Countless theories, explanations and criteria have been offered. It seems like everyone has their own definitions and expectations. In fact, it is, perhaps, the most subjective question in the lifestyle, often coming down to mere semantics. Submissive and slave: what's the difference?
I'm not remotely naive enough to think that I am going to be the one to finally answer that question, once and for all. But I am going to try to offer some perspective for anyone who is genuinely confused.
Before we really get into it, it bares mentioning that the style of slavery in the BDSM lifestyle is different from what was widely practiced in ancient cultures or in the pre-Civil War Americas. Those types of slavery are violations of civil rights, crimes against humanity and illegal in most of the modern world. BDSM practitioners choose to become slaves, through risk aware consensual kink (RACK), whereas Africans were forced i…