Subscription to Desire

In my twenties I had time to court women on the Internet, and the fetish market felt like a small town. There was no Tinder, no OnlyFans—just message boards, forums, and late-night chats. It wasn’t easy, but it was viable, and being single meant I could show my face without a second thought.

From Message Boards to Monetized Feeds#

Two decades later everything feels commercial. Domination slid into the same category as Netflix or Photoshop: a subscription, a service, a product. Findom became a paradigm, and the places that used to feel communal—FetLife, Twitter—turned into billboards. Back then social networks were driven by friendship: add someone and they added you back. Now everything runs on one-way follows. I skim their personas; they never see mine.

Doing the Math on Desire#

So I did the math. If I want the intimacy and edge that keep me alive, I have to hire call-girls who build kink into their craft. The honesty of an explicit exchange feels cleaner than begging for scraps in a feed. I’m forty now, stable, comfortable. Spending money on these encounters barely dents my life—unless I indulge in the rare, extreme session that leaves me buzzing for days.

For a while I tried to leave BDSM companions behind. COVID-19 gutted the events I relied on, and what was left grew more “profes$ional,” polished to the point of sterility. Somewhere in that shift, I met my fiancée. She’s the person I want a future with, even though she doesn’t inhabit the sluttish archetype that still owns my fantasies.

Negotiating Love and Purchase#

That contradiction is why I’m confessing. I live between generations: one foot in the scrappy, mutual web of my youth and one foot in the slick economies of modern kink. I’m still figuring out how to tell the woman I love that I crave both—her stability and the transactional burn that first taught me who I was.