She (Mistress Marley) makes money simply by demanding her submissives to send her cash gifts — and will sometimes take them for a stroll on a leash(with podcastlink)
USA – Mistress Marley came out publicly as a dominatrix when she attended her college’s homecoming weekend in 2019, just a couple years after graduating. She arrived at her alma mater — North Carolina Central University, a historically Black college — with an older white male submissive on a leash.
“A lot of people were doubling back,” she says. “My best friends were loving it. They were taking pictures and stuff. But the funny thing is, the video that went viral, I didn’t even know it was being taken of me until I logged onto Twitter and saw it the next day.”
Mistress Marley, to be more precise, is a financial dominatrix, which is exactly what it sounds like: Her clients, almost all men and almost all white, are financial submissives — finsubs in the industry jargon. Their kink? They send her money simply because she demands it of them. No sex or nudity is involved.
You might not understand it, but the human heart is boundless and unknowable. In Mistress Marley’s world, subs get off by giving her cold hard cash. It’s about loss of control. It’s about ceding power. It’s about flipping the script. And for Mistress Marley, it’s also about reparations.
USA – Those trendy red carpets at the VMAs and the Met Gala are known for hot, cutting-edge fashion — and the stars who attended both bashes flaunted a variety of looks that were razor sharp.
Or should we say whip smart? At least three women celebs wore risqué numbers inspired by the titillating world of the dominatrix at Sunday’s 2021 VMAS. The black leather fest came a day after Kim Kardashian channeled “The Gimp” from the 1994 movie “Pulp Fiction” while entering a Manhattan hotel ahead of Monday’s “American Independence” Met Gala.
But, according to two real-life dominatrixes in NYC, not all the BDSM-inspired ensembles were created equal. They applauded a couple of the kinky get-ups and dismissed another as “Dominatrix Light.” One blasted the zip-eyed hood sported by the multi-millionaire ex of Kanye West as “cheap” and “something you’d buy from Amazon.”
So, how would socialites Kim Kardashian, her older sister, Kourtney, singer-songwriter Kim Petras and showbiz veteran Madonna fare in a dungeon full of masochists? The Post asked Mistress Marley and Mistress Kimi Inch to rate each of their trendy styles.
Which suggestive garb would have their paying guest quaking in his boots? And which would be as intimidating as a highly flammable Halloween costume from the bargain rail at Ricky’s?
Marley and Inch gave the curvy mom-of-four a firm thumbs down for her “inauthentic” top-to-toe leather creation. Marley said the ill-fitting hood was “too loose and like a shower cap” while Inch ventured it was purchased from Amazon and had “restrictive” eye slits which could cause an unladylike stumble. “Did she have someone leading her by a leash?” Inch quipped. “Because how can you even see in that thing? The only advantage is that she didn’t need to do her makeup.”
The pair also criticized 40-year-old Kardashian’s trench coat – an item no working dominatrix would wear. “She must be dying from heat exhaustion in there,” added Inch. “While I’m impressed by her pushing boundaries, it just feels like she is trying too hard.” Marley concluded: “The whole thing comes across as a gimmick.”
Note: Kim’s controversial full-face mask look at Monday’s Met Gala eschewed black leather in favor of softer fabrics — but her look still dominated the event’s beige carpet with a highly “I am very in charge here” vibe.
Madonna at the 2021 VMAs
Neither dominatrix could fault the raunchy bustier which complimented the enviable figure of the 63-year-old “Vogue” singer. “She has the quintessential liquid leather look and I can see myself wearing it for a play session,” said Marley, adding that Madonna’s biker cap was the perfect suggestive accessory. “Her outfit showed off her bum and legs and it’s clear that she’s proud of her figure. There’s a lot of cleavage on show, which pulls the whole thing together.”
Kimi Inch, who explained that Madonna’s 1992 “Erotica” album sparked her interest in BDSM when she was in middle school, said the mega star “nailed it” with her plunging bodysuit, fishnet tights and Louboutin heels. “All she needed was a riding crop or a flogger in her hand,” said the Texas transplant by way of NYC.
Kourtney Kardashian’s VMAs corset
Inch also admired leather-clad Kourtney for her nod to the frequently misunderstood world of the dominatrix. However, she felt the 42-year-old “could have pushed the envelope further.” Inch said: “It would have been more fun if she’d shown up in knee-high boots instead of heels.”
“The whole thing comes across as Dominatrix Light,” Marley agrees, explaining that the look would better suit a trendy nightclub than a cellar full of chains and handcuffs. “It’s nice and cute — but it doesn’t spell dominatrix to me.” She recommended the addition of a spike-studded choker to add a sexy taste of BDSM.
Kim Petras’ latex balaclava
The dominatrixes were divided on the 29-year-old’s outfit, which was dominated by a latex balaclava that completely covered her platinum blonde hair. Marley liked the liquid-looking mask but described the rest of the ensemble as “absolutely horrible.”
She said the “frumpy” dress reminded her of the TV show “Little House on the Prairie” and the white shoes needed to be replaced by black leather boots. “It’s like Kim’s saying: ‘OK, I want to look like a dominatrix, but I’m not confident enough so I’m going to throw on this hideous dress.’”
Inch, meanwhile, leapt to Petras’ defense. “She’s creating some kind of duality with what looks like a religious garment over the top of a latex bodysuit which suggests an erotic energy,” she said. But she did concede that, in common with Kim Kardashian, the talented German — who sported a more demure “cowgirl” look at the Met Gala — must have been overheated. “Latex isn’t breathable so she probably sweated off 20 pounds over the course of the evening.”
USA – I’m originally from a small town in North Carolina and I have a very close knit family who very much encouraged me to express myself. My first love was fashion and I first moved to New York in 2017 for a graduate school course in fashion marketing. Afterwards, I had jobs in fashion retail and temporary marketing roles, but nothing permanent.
One day, I was on Craigslist and I saw a listing for a hostess at a swingers club. I applied, went in and got the job. I had a background in sex work as I had done some stripping in North Carolina while I was in college but that club opened my eyes to the sex industry in general. For the most part, the clientele were 50 and above and the whole club was white. Coming in as a younger Black woman and seeing older white people having sex was a little strange at the beginning. But I’m very open-minded.
At the time, there was a dominatrix who worked at the coat check in the club. She was the first dominatrix I had met in person, and she was amazing. She told me so much about her work.
Eventually I came to a point where although I was working that side job, I lost my retail role and I was having to call my parents each week to pay for groceries. Even trying to pay rent was almost impossible. But I’m a determined person and I refused to move back to North Carolina; I’d told my parents I was going to make it.
I went online and typed in: “How to make money online as a woman, being sexy.” I knew about webcam sex work, but then I saw the term “financial domination.” I researched and saw that financial domination—or findom as it’s known—is a psychological kink where submissive men give their money to dominant women, but get nothing in return. They are basically paying women to exist.
I had the same initial reaction that everyone has now when I tell them what I do: I thought it couldn’t be real.
But I went onto Twitter, typed in “#findom” and saw so many financial dominatrixes. One thing that stood out to me was that I didn’t really see that many Black women in the space. At first, that discouraged me a little, but I’m also someone who doesn’t believe in being held back by anything, so I made my own Twitter page.
When I started, I would occasionally reach out to other dommes asking for advice and offering to tip them for their time. Most of the time, other white dommes would either block me or be super rude. No-one really talks about the trauma that Black women often have to go through to even get into these spaces.
Still, within my first week I made $50 from an anonymous sub—I still don’t know who it was. In findom, we don’t ask, we demand. We say: “Hey. I just went out and spent $50 on dinner. Reimburse me.” That’s what I did. I posted my receipt on Twitter and said that someone needed to reimburse me. And I received $50.
The money started increasing, from $50 to $100 to $200. Sometimes these submissive men send you something called a tribute; it’s a tip or token of appreciation. They’re saying they love your page or they’re grateful for you. I’ve gotten so far in my career that the standard now is that you have to send a tribute to even have a conversation with me. Tributes can range from $5 to $500.
I also do wallet draining sessions, which is when you’re on a video call or talking on the phone and you’re draining a sub’s digital wallet as you’re talking to them. It could be a 30 minute session where they start by sending $10 and then two minutes later they send $20, and so on. You’re literally draining their wallet.
In the Spring of 2018, I had my first in-person “cash meet.” That’s where you meet with a sub in a public place. For safety reasons, I always select somewhere public. I go up to the sub and humiliate them by saying something like, “loser, give me your money.” They give you the money, you might slap them if that has been agreed, and then you walk away.
It’s humiliation. The men get sexual satisfaction from the loss of control. They know they’re giving their money to someone they’re not going to meet and who doesn’t truly care about them. Something about that makes them sexually aroused.
But this all happens between two consenting adults and usually, a responsible domme will make sure that they are checking in with their subs to ensure they can still afford it. You’re never forcing anyone to send you money. At the end of the day, the subs have to log into whatever app they are using and send you the money themselves.
In the past four years, I’ve made more than $100,000 from dominatrix work, and had everything from people putting me onto their life insurance policies, to people paying my rent. I just moved into a fabulous new three-bedroom apartment in New York City and I don’t have to pay a dime for it. People pay for my furniture and my bills and I can go to any of my subs and say that I’m going out for drinks with my girls, tell them to send me money, and they send it. The most expensive single item a sub has paid for was when I went to Tulum for my 27th birthday. The vacation cost more than $5,000 and a sub sent me all the money for it. The money I make separately is barely spent, it’s in savings and I’ve paid off loans. I’m just spending money from subs.
I went from someone who had to text their parents every week for help to buy groceries, to now buying so much for my parents. It’s truly changed my life.
Besides being a financial dominatrix I am also a professional dominatrix. I do impact play and foot worship and I go to dungeons in New York City. In findom I have 10 regular subs who send me money every morning, or we are on a weekly schedule and in my pro domination work, I have five dedicated subs, or slaves, who I work with.
The demographic for my subs is 99 percent white men. I have had Black subs, but for the most part they are into things like foot worship. BDSM is not something that is widely accepted in the Black community. I can do an event now and have a sub on a leash and a Black person will look at me, as if to say, “wow.” I love having white subs. To me, they are paying me reparations. And, a lot of white subs love to serve only Black dommes. They get a thrill from it.
But I’m also trying to do away with the idea of Black women being seen as a fetish. There are subs who will contact me specifically saying why they want a Black woman. I had one sub say that they knew Black women are mean and rude so they wanted me to be their domme. I had to block him. But I am very privileged to have never been in a position where a sub has made me uncomfortable.
In November 2019, I took sub on a leash to my college homecoming at North Carolina Central University, a historically Black university. To me it was the imagery: I was a Black woman walking an old white man on a leash in a Black school. That in itself was powerful. But I treated it as a professional session with a sub, he paid me for my services and I checked in on him throughout to make sure he wasn’t in pain. It’s not like I disregarded him because I was in a public space.
People were definitely shocked. A video of that moment went viral, although I didn’t realize it was being filmed. Overnight I went from 1,000 followers on Twitter to around 13,000. My DMs were flooded with Black women asking me to teach them. I knew I had to teach so I created my Sexcademy in early 2020, and now I also earn money from teaching domination.
Because I felt like I didn’t have a safe space as a Black dominatrix, I created the Black Domme Sorority. I didn’t want other Black women to experience what I had been through. We now have 90 members across the U.S. and internationally, and are hoping to bring in 60 new members this fall. It’s the most cherished space I have ever created in my life. Along with two other members, I’m also planning to open a dungeon in New York.
The best lesson I have learned is to be able to separate work from my personal life. I’m not Mistress Marley 24/7. There are times when I have “vanilla” weeks where I want to go to museums, parks and or go shopping.
I’m also dating someone now who knows all about my work and is very supportive. In my personal relationships, I’m actually submissive. I definitely go for alpha males, but I don’t expect them to be dominating and tell me what to do. It’s still all about me, but I’m definitely attracted to confident, secure alpha men.
I always want to be part of the dominatrix community; I’ll always have a place here. I want to be taking money from men and whooping a** until I’m 100 years old.
Mistress Marley is a financial dominatrix and professional dominatrix based in New York. You can find out more about her at thechocolatedomme.com or follow her on Instagram @__mistressmarley. Mistress Marley’s identity has been protected in this piece due to safety concerns.
USA – Financial domination, an erotic form of humiliation that involves a subordinate losing control of their wallet to the dominant, has been getting a lot of airtime in the past few years. However, despite findom’s empowered rhetoric and glamorous reputation, it can also be a somewhat difficult subset of sex work to break into — and that’s what Mistress Marley is trying to fix.
An NYC-based dominatrix with a client roster that includes “a 19-year-old kid in college who can only tribute $50 a month to a wealthy guy on Wall Street who can contribute a $1000,” Marley has subs across the board that do everything from pay her bills to send her gifts — which, on paper, can only be described as a dream job. That said, as a Black woman who started off without any guidance, she says getting to this point was a trying journey in and of itself.
After losing her job in 2017, Marley began looking into ways to “make money as a woman online using your sexuality.” Because while she had been a stripper before, this time around she was looking to control her work hours from the comfort of her own home — something that eventually led her to Twitter’s findom community.
“The biggest difference between findomming and other forms of sex work is that you don’t have to really be in physical contact with anyone,” she says. “Doing that in the safety of your home, branding and marketing it, being able to do your safety screening on your own. This form of sex work gives you more control.”
However, Marley adds that breaking into this particular line of work proved to be somewhat of a challenge. Starting without a mentor, Marley researched and studied what others were doing for almost half a year before even deciding to make a Twitter for herself — though the initial pushback she received from other findommes was, at times, discouraging.
“There were times when I’d go into other dommes’ inboxes, and they’d give me the cold shoulder, ignore me, or be rude,” she says. “They were like, I had to figure it out myself, because they figured it out themselves.”
Partially inspired by her own experience, Marley decided to create the Black Domme Sorority this past July. A “safe space for Black and Afro-Latina women to come together,” the 1,000 member strong organization allows newbies and veterans alike the ability to chat with each other and attend classes taught by Marley across the country. After all, as Marley says, within a space where many of the most visible players are white women, the importance of helping other women of color — who often “have to work harder, especially in terms of content and marketing and branding ourselves” — can’t be understated.
“There are a lot of Black women out there that can find complete financial freedom doing kinks like this, and there’s a market for it,” Marley says. She emphasizes the benefits of visibility, especially when talking about introducing other women to the subset of findom that revolves around reparations, Black female supremacy, and power-reversal play that sees white subs “living to serve us.” However, as she points out, given that even “talking about kink and fetish is still very taboo within the Black community,” she wanted the Black Domme Sorority to exist as a way of educating aspiring Black and Afro-Latina dommes.
“We don’t have that help,” she says. “But once people see someone who looks like them doing it, they’re more motivated to try.”
Above all though, she says the organization is meant to act as a support network for its members, whether that comes in the form of providing job opportunities for each other, creating emergency funds for sisters in need, or sharing essential industry-specific information — especially in a post-FOSTA/SESTA landscape. From teaching women about protecting their social media accounts from deletion to tips about dealing with banking institutions, the educational scope of the sorority is far-reaching, especially as findom has become much more visible.
While there’s something to be said about its increasing pop cultural presence, Marley admits that there are a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about findom still floating around. Reiterating that findommes don’t necessarily need to meet up or ever touch a client, she goes on to detail her annoyance with the idea that findomming as a concept is exploitative — even though pro findommes will never ask their subs for money.
“With the findom community, it is a bragging game,” she says, explaining that many findommes post their tributes as it encourages other subs to donate. “But when some people see all these big tributes coming in, they’re like, ‘Oh, you guys are just taking someone’s money. They’re not going to have any money for themselves.’ That’s not true.”
As Marley points out, most of the subs coming into the scene know that they won’t get anything, even something as small as a picture, in return. “But that’s part of their kink and why they like it,” she says, calling it a power-reversal “fantasy.” But it’s up to the sub themselves to know their financial limits when it comes to their tributes.
“If you have a sub that’s like, ‘Oh my God, Goddess, I don’t have any money, you’re taking all my money, that’s just part of the fantasy,” she continues. “The misconception that we are taking people’s money and being completely selfish and not caring if they have anything to spend is just wrong.”
Despite the negativity, Marley is still enamored with her job, as it allows her to “connect with so many different people and help them fulfill a fantasy, all while getting paid and feeling safe.” In fact, she sees findomming — as well as her advocation and education of other Black findommes — as a long-lasting career move.
“My goal is to open up a BDSM dungeon for Black and Afro-Latina women,” Marley says. “We do have dungeons [in NYC], but they’re very white-centric, so my goal is to have a safe space for us. And if that safe space can be funded by my findomming, well, that would just be amazing.”
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