From Shame to Enlightenment: What Kink Can Teach Us About Money

Something remarkable happened in Sunday's Love Boat.

Something remarkable happened in Sunday's Love Boat.

Twenty men showed up to explore Findom — financial domination — arguably one of the most provocative kinks in the lexicon. Now, not every one of them raised their hand and said "yes, this turns me on." But they showed up. And in this community, we know what showing up means. It means curiosity. It means trust. It means a willingness to sit with something uncomfortable and see what it has to teach you.
That takes courage.
And it got me thinking — because Findom sits at a fascinating intersection of two things we don't talk about enough: sex and money. We've gotten pretty good, as a community, at talking about the first one. Men here will openly say "chastity does it for me," or "I'm into fuck machines," or "ball-busting is my thing" — and the room doesn't flinch. We've normalized that. We've replaced shame with curiosity, and curiosity with conversation, and conversation with connection.
So why can't we do the same thing with our bank accounts?

The Shame We Carry
Almost nobody talks openly about money. Not real money — not debt, not bankruptcy, not the quiet panic of watching your credit card balance creep up while the minimum payment barely covers the interest.
I know this territory personally. I spent six years as a bill collector. I sat with people drowning in medical debt, people who'd lost jobs, people who'd charged everyday groceries on credit cards just to survive. I even handled fraud cases — families waiting for a loved one to die so they could run up charges on their credit before the account was closed.
I knew all of it. And I still found myself in financial freefall.
A job that screwed me out of $13,000. Everything else spiraling. Eventually — bankruptcy. That was over thirty years ago, and for a long time afterward, I carried it like a secret, like something that defined me. It took me until roughly the last decade to genuinely understand money — not just to manage it, but to respect it, to see it as a tool, to stop being afraid of it.
I wish someone had talked to me about this when I was twenty.

The Numbers Behind the Silence
Right now, the average American carries somewhere between $6,500 and $7,000 in credit card debt. But that number includes everyone — including people with zero balance. Among those actually carrying debt, the average climbs closer to $7,800. At 22% interest, that's not a slow leak. That's a flood.
Most of us in this community are over fifty. Many of us are still confused about money — about retirement accounts, about debt management, about how to stop robbing Peter to pay Paul every month. And we're confused in silence, because the shame around financial struggle runs even deeper than the shame around unconventional desire.

What Findom Taught Me Without Meaning To
Here's the thing about Sunday's session: there was no shame in that room. Twenty men explored something edgy, something personal, something that carries enormous social stigma, and they did it without apology.
Why? Because there was education in the room. There was context. People came to understand something, not to be judged for it. When you come to learn, you come as equals. The shame dissolves because everyone is on the same side — the side of curiosity.
That's exactly the energy we need to bring to money.
Not lectures. Not judgment. Not the quiet assumption that financial struggle means personal failure. Just honest, loving, peer-to-peer conversation, the same kind we already have about our bodies, our desires, and our health.

An Invitation
I don't have all the answers here. I'll be honest with you: this is one of those places where I'm still learning too. I pay my bills every Friday — every week, not once a month — I review every charge, I cancel the subscriptions I've forgotten about, I keep a zero balance. And then Saturday rolls around and there's a new product I absolutely cannot live without for $20 a month.
We're all works in progress.
But I believe this community has something special: we've already proven that we can take a topic wrapped in shame and transform it through trust, through education, and through showing up — into something we can actually talk about.
Let's do that with money.
Let's bring it into the light. Let's share what's worked, what hasn't, what we wish we'd known at thirty. Let's stop letting silence and shame make our financial decisions for us.
Because the opposite of shame isn't pride. It's understanding.
And that's always worth showing up for.