Interview with a Paypig

In late November, just before lunch, I received a message on Twitter. ‘Hey. Im a paypig, can I please send money to a Goddess like you?’

I was in a meeting at the time and shouldn’t have been checking my phone of course, and certainly shouldn’t have been checking Twitter, due to politics and fashion and apocalypse and so on, but I did, and the message gave me the grim little thrill that the best worst Twitter interactions always do. It was partly due to the message appearing here, in the slimiest gutter of social media, that gave it that kind of nostalgic, erotic energy, and it was partly due to this energy that I replied.

But - not straight away. There was the fact of the meeting, of course, and the fact of me being a nice lady. First I sent it to four friends in my most active Whatsapp group, three of whom immediately started planning a syndicate into which we’d funnel our new fortune, the fourth requiring an explanation of the word. A paypig, I was pleased to tell her, quite primly, is a submissive man who gets off on giving women (‘findoms’ - financial dominants) money, expecting no sexual favours (great phrase, images of going home bags) in return.

Later at a party I discussed the ethics of the thing with an artist who, as her work has increased in value, has been forced suddenly to think about the darkness of money and the power dynamic in a transaction. She said, quite casually, that even if the paypig feels like they’re the submissive, you are doing what they want, collaborating on their pleasure, so, who’s in charge? And even if he wants nothing in return, he is buying a small piece of (and then she fluttered her hands) ‘your soul, or whatever. And only you know if you can spare it.’ I put down my drink. Can I? I mean, I might not have much left.

What kind of person would I become, if I said yes? If he Paypalled me money for my taxi home? What kind of person would I stop being? When I left the party around one, there was a thick layer of new snow on the ground, and a fox standing very still behind a car. Anyway, the next day I messaged the paypig to see if he would answer some questions, he replied immediately, and this is how it went: