High Maintenance is a comedy-drama series about a marijuana dealer, known only as “The Guy”, who encounters various people in the New York City area in the course of his business.
This episode, “Payday” (aired February 17, 2019), opens with a mock-kidnapping of a woman, Doc Lee (Margaret Cho), by a group of lesbians who drag her into a van and group-dominate her while a woman drives the van around town, all to celebrate her 50th birthday. Doc’s partner, Ayasha (Hye Yun Park), joins in. (I wonder if this was inspired by Patrick Califia’s short story “The Birthday Party”.) Later, Doc and her partner join the women at a bar for drinks. It’s all very fun and normalized for these people.
Later, we see Doc and Ayasha’s day-to-day relationship, notably the friction over the wealth discrepancy between middle-class academic Doc and working-class Ayasha. Doc decides to start sending money as “payment” to Ayasha for sex acts. This montage includes bondage, flogging, puppyplay, strap-on play, queening, a threesome, and other kinks. (They’re both switches.)
When the Guy drops by for their regular purchases, he refuses to take an e-transfer from Doc, so Ayasha pays him in cash. Later, Doc pays the same amount to Ayasha, which upsets her. Doc says she’s already transferred hundreds of dollars to Ayasha this month, so what’s some more? Ayasha says that she considers that their “play money” and she didn’t even transfer it into her bank.
This is kind of a version of findom, in which the exchange of money is itself the medium of power exchange. The problem comes when it becomes clear that Doc and Ayasha have different ideas about the role of money. Doc sees this as really paying Ayasha for services, something she can afford to do. Ayasha seems it as just a game, with no bearing on their non-scene life. (Presumably she expected to give the money back at some point.) Calling this exchange a real payment suddenly throws into stark relief who has money and who doesn’t. Doc refusing to let Ayasha pay for their marijuana purchases is a power play that Ayasha doesn’t like.
Ayasha: “I liked feeling like a hooker and not some charity case.”
Ayasha is upset for a while, but then she turns the situation around by using the e-transfer app to demand payments from Doc, and Doc agrees.
“Payday” treats the BDSM play between Doc and Ayasha as just an everyday thing. The real source of conflict is their differing relationships with money, which are only tangentially related to BDSM.
Margaret Cho has a background in BDSM, according to The Advocate: “Her parents owned a gay book store; Cho worked at a lesbian BDSM collective and had a brief stint as a dominatrix.”
