Bodybuilder Blane navigates a unique online relationship with his dominatrix, Lexi. He “gets off” purely on giving her money and gifts. No sex, just self-inflicted bankruptcy.

With this group of filmmakers that keep bringing us these fantastic shorts (think ‘Sundays‘ & ‘F*ck Bunny‘), it’s no surprise we were excited to see this new film come in. In this film, Blane is a bodybuilder who happens to get turned on when his dominatrix empties his wallet and loves to be called a little bitch; he’s a pay pig. ‘Pay Pig’ hits a new generation of weird fetishes, where director by Hunt Beaty certainly had to dig the depths of the internet to retrieve the information.

For “Pay Pig,” I was initially inspired by a conversation I had over a dinner with a good friend’s brother who happens to be an amateur bodybuilder. He was telling me various stories about how he gets hit up online, particularly on Instagram, from people asking to buy his work out shorts. Not kidding. Despite the inherent humor in all of this, my curiosity was piqued and I wanted to see how common the scenario he described was. After an enlightening dive down the online rabbit hole of fetishes (that has probably forever tainted my search history) I was pretty floored by the amount of new and unique sexual fetishes that apparently flourish by relying on the power and connectivity of the internet. I found numerous market places where people buy and sell used underwear online, and it seemed that folks had an infinite number of specific reasons for doing so. What stood out to me was thinking about how a lot of these so-called fetishes have likely existed in various forms for a while, without a mechanism to grow and become what they are now until the maturation of the internet. That’s when -amidst sifting through online marketplaces of used underwear- I stumbled across something new, “financial domination.”

Several hours of watching Youtube and sifting through forums on this newfound subculture and I had an idea for a short. The whole thing seemed inherently modern, dystopian, kind of wild to me. It posed a lot of interesting questions about what technology can and will continue to do to our relationships and the ways we express ourselves sexually. A whole cornucopia of new sexual relationships have taken root, for good or ill.

In terms of what we were looking to achieve…simply put, we were looking to get another film in the can and maintain momentum in our process, hopefully with an idea that was about something we thought hadn’t quite been tackled before. I hoped to make something modern and thought-provoking. It was important to me to be able to wade into the waters of this fetish of “financial domination” a little bit and explore it without casting judgement.

Another aspect of this whole concept that interested me was the power dynamic at play in these relationships, particularly how it relates to gender and some evolved, bizarre, idea of modern masculinity or femininity. Is Lexi truly all powerful and “breaking down walls,” by somewhat subverting traditional power dynamics or is she some kind of victim of this whole modern form of earning a living in her own way? Meanwhile, Blane is literally building up his own body into a “masculine ideal,” while simultaneously trying to fund his own desire for somewhat of a “relationship role reversal,” or just a unique kind of subordination, with Lexi.

Again, we’re definitely not trying to provide any answer to this-not that we even could- it’s just all to say we felt there were a lot of interesting ideas bubbling around in this whole world and it provokes infinite philosophical questions related to both potential problems and unpredictable benefits of our evolution and notions about overall human progress. Everything surrounding the wedding of money to sex is multifaceted and taken several different shapes over the course of our history. It’s amusing to be able to stare a brand new and unexpected version of that online via our payment networks and social media tools.

To top it off, it provides a window to look at how new technological tools (communication and payment) that will inevitably impact our relationships and sexuality in new, challenging ways. My brain starts to explode when thinking about everything this fetish can provoke, but that’s what we found worthwhile about trying to tell a story built around it.