GRAHAM IS A regular middle-aged Irish man. He goes to work every day, he socialises at the weekends and enjoys spending time with his friends. But there’s something none of the people in Graham’s ‘regular’ life know about him – he’s also a ‘cash pig’.
The one thing that really gets his blood pumping is having a confident woman demand money from him. He’ll pay for her drinks on a night out, cover the cost of weekends away with her boyfriend and even buy her groceries. The women he serves are not grateful for these things. In fact, they act like they are entitled to his hard-earned cash and – for Graham – is a massive turn-on.
And he is not alone in this. Over the last number of years, a relatively niche fetish called Findom has crept into the Irish scene.
Readers may already be familiar with the concept of Femdom which involves a woman being dominant over a man usually through bondage, physical restraint or humiliation. Findom, as the name suggests, is all about financial domination.
Though it is something Graham has been doing for more than a decade he said the Findom circle in Ireland is very small with around 10 men, referred to as ‘cash pigs’, ‘pay pigs’ or ‘money slaves’, active online.
“In the last few years I’ve been doing very practical stuff – it’s weird you know in terms of paying people’s bills online, their phone bills, paying their UPC, paying their Sky, stuff like that,” he told TheJournal.ie.
“If Sky looked at my credit card I’m sure they’d be like ‘why is this guy paying?’ but they probably don’t mind who’s paying as long as it’s paid and there’s no hassle.”
Tesco would be a big turn on for me because the shops are over a hundred quid mostly and it would go on for a while so that’s a more prolonged aspect; they’re picking out things and filling up the basket and you’re watching it slowly increase, so that’s a real turn on.
The findom, or ‘domme’, Graham served for the longest was a woman in Dublin who he still buys things for to this day – some 10 years after their first interaction. He estimates he has spent up to €7,000 on this woman alone and upwards of €20,000 in the last 12 years.
He once paid for her and her friends to spend a night in Limerick, arranging to meet her there. “I went down and then it wasn’t happening and I was stuck in Limerick and I don’t know Limerick. But that was a big turn on,” he explained.
She was over in France once and the hotel were onto me as well because they drank the mini-bar dry on my credit card – herself and her boyfriend. And I was really annoyed but I was also really turned on by it.
Graham is regularly paying for utility bills and groceries for one woman who is living outside Dublin. She is engaged and has children. He said most of the women he has served on a regular basis are in relationships and their other halves are often aware of the arrangement.
For the ‘cash pigs’ this adds another layer to the fetish as they end up paying for the men in their mistresses’ lives too – whether it’s for a romantic slap up meal for the couple in a restaurant or shaving cream on a shopping list.
Though Graham favours covering mundane everyday costs, allowing the women to spend their own money on more extravagant things for themselves, other paypigs prefer to have their money blown on high-end items.
Darren, a younger Dublin cash pig, is one of these and once handed over €750 to a domme for a pair of shoes and a handbag.
“Expensive but wonderful taste. Did I regret that afterwards? A little! I had to cancel a lads holiday I had booked. Did I get an enormous kick from it at the same time? Yes, absolutely,” he told TheJournal.ie.
He prefers “normal women” as he puts it and most of the ladies he pays or shops for are students or fashion bloggers.
Like many other men involved in Findom, Darren is happy to hand over a pile of cash to a mistress to allow her to buy whatever she wants. These transactions are called ‘cashpoint meets’ and usually involve meeting at an ATM, the woman demanding a certain amount and the man handing it over to her.
Many people interested in this fetish use a dedicated Twitter page or the hashtag #cashpointmeets to either advertise their interest in being fleeced for cash or their willingness to meet with a paypig and take his money.
One mistress living in Dublin explained the role she plays when she interacts with paypigs:
You’re a respectable snob, you’re not a total bitch, but you are snotty – are you are above them. Before I get there I am in domme mode. They want you to be mean, they’re there to be humiliated, that’s what they’re paying you for.
She has gone on a number of shopping trips with men, allowing them to follow her around and carry her bags. Being a mistress is a vocation for this woman and she does on-camera work as well as offering meet-ups. She said she has done general Femdom work for about three years and only recently focused more on the financial domination.
It is, as she described it, “easy money” and an average cashpoint meet would earn her a minimum of €100. That is for an interaction that lasts mere minutes and involves no physical contact.
I know friends who have been doing specifically this for longer and they might meet one person and be getting €800 or a grand and that’s a cashpoint meet alone. So all you have to do is get out of your car and go to ATM and then leave.
Mistresses, particularly in the US but more recently also in the UK, are massively capitalising on this desire in some men to have a woman take control of their wallets.
A search on Twitter will show up dozens of photos of women flaunting wads of cash or packages with gifts, or ‘tributes’, they have received.
The more popular dommes have Amazon wishlists so men can easily send them their most coveted items, and gift vouchers also feature heavily in the online world of Findom.
Most findoms do not have sex with their cash slaves – that would defeat the purpose for the men – but as with all fetishes there is obviously a crossover with the sex work industry.
The women who do this professionally are extremely active on social media and fetish websites. They post photos of themselves wearing the clothes and shoes they have been sent, pictures of them drinking cocktails that are being paid for by one of their slaves or snaps of their perfectly manicured feet.
They also offer camera sessions with a variety of options, most of which involve humiliation like the domme laughing at the man. Many of their posts are extremely raunchy with some uploading photos of themselves nude or scantily clad and telling the men they could never have a woman that looks this way.
While this fetish is also a turn on for some women, the domme we spoke to is not turned on by demanding cash from men. She does finds it “funny” though.
“There’s nothing sexual about it for me. I’d laugh at it more than anything else.”
It is obviously sexual for the men she deals with, however.
“I get a rush from it, which I enjoy, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say it turns me on, which it does, but you have to be able to manage that,” Darren told us.
During the actual handover, you just have to be nice, mannerly and put the lady at ease. Anything else in inappropriate.
He confessed that he does sometimes masturbate at home afterwards but not always.
“The pleasure is more often in the power exchange. I do sometimes get off on it in that way. I never ever tell the ladies about this.”
For Darren this is all about power.
Handing something over, especially something you worked for, brings an enormous rush and a feeling of subservience. I’d rather get it through that power exchange and humiliation than being tied to a St George’s Cross and whipped senseless, but different strokes for different folks.
Though this is obviously something that is a turn on for Graham, he ultimately is looking to settle down with a woman who has this kind of dominant personality and attitude towards his money.
When he first took an interest in Findom he was in a long-term relationship in which the sexual side of things had fizzled out. His first experience was paying for a woman in the US to get her nails done and he said “it was a real rush for me to get the sexuality back in my life”.
He would have been too embarrassed to tell his girlfriend at the time but he is looking for a life partner he can be open with about it.
“I would like that in a girlfriend because there are women like that and men wonder ‘how did I end up here?’”, he said. “I wouldn’t mind that, that would actually give me a rush for them to be demanding and me paying for them to have a good life.
“And that would do it for me in a mature relationship as an aspect of my sexuality – I have always been looking for that.”
Findom plays usually involve a couple of hundred euro but this fetish, like others, does have its dark sides.
There are men who ask dommes to blackmail them. They tell them a lot of personal information about themselves or secrets they are keeping and the women will threaten to tell their families if they don’t pay up. Some men even sign contracts saying they consent to this.
Graham acknowledged that there can be a danger with these activities, having seen credit card and other personal details of men posted on online forums after they refused to pay.
“The guys may have agreed to it in the heat of the moment, when they were turned on or drunk that they’re okay with that,” he explained.
He had one bad experience with a mistress in America who started threatening him when he wanted to end their arrangement. He shut down his Twitter account for a while to avoid her.
“That was unusual and I didn’t enjoy it. It should always be consensual, everything in life should always be consensual.”
Because of the thrill men get from having women demand money and expensive items from them, it can also become addictive.
The Daily Dot noted a case of a Reddit user in 2010 who as a college student would regularly give women access to his credit card and Amazon account. One time he pleaded with a domme to cancel charges she made.
They’d hit the limit I’d request, and the nice ones would immediately back off, but some would beg and pout and tease until they had the limit raised.
He described himself as being addicted to doing it, adding “the entire time I’d be shaking”.
Addiction is something Darren also raised when he spoke to TheJournal.ie, as he revealed it has occasionally placed him in financial difficulty:
I would by lying if I didn’t say I have tried to quit at times. It’s addictive as fetishes always are, but I have enough self control – just about. I think it’s crucially important to state men enter this all voluntarily. I don’t think it’s fair to blame the dommes for people going broke when it happens. This is not for everyone – if you are paying your college debt or something, keep it a fantasy. I can afford it only because I live pretty frugally beyond it and because I have limitations.
There is no denying this fetish is an odd one and because of the stigma attached to it everyone we spoke to wished to remain anonymous.
For men like Graham and Darren this is just a part of their sexuality.
“I don’t see myself as some kind of pervert, I don’t think think it is a bad thing, and there are far worse ways to get turned on,” Darren told us. “I will admit for a period I was very ashamed and wanted to quit it. But I don’t really drink and I never smoke or do drugs – aren’t there worse ways to live?”
Graham, who would never want his friends or colleagues to find out, said he “wouldn’t want people to think I’m pathetic”. But 12 years after he started this, he is not about to stop.
If I was to die tomorrow, I would think over the last 40 or so years I’ve actually lived a very good life. There’s nothing really in my life that I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t done. I’ve ticked off a lot of boxes.
“This is just me; it’s something that turns me on and it’s not hurting anyone.”
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