“You need to have something called F**k You Money.”
I’ll never forget the first time I heard these words. I was in a classroom, away at boarding school, and 16 years old. My teacher, a middle-aged man who had spent his life as a working actor, was truly trying to teach us about the real world — how hard it is to be in charge of your own finances, to make ends meet when there is no full-time forever job in the theater. This message, while I tasted the poetic roughness of it, did not penetrate. As fate would have it, I needed to make my own mistakes. He could not protect me. It is only now that the blunt ugliness of this message reveals itself to me, acutely horrifying and relentless, hacking through barriers like Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ — “HERE’S JOHNNY!”
‘F**k You Money’ is money one has put away, just for them, in a safe place, so that they always have a way out. Traditionally, F You Money is there so you can flee in the middle of the night — flee a bad relationship, a bad marriage, a bad job, a bad life — you can always flee. You are not trapped and you are not beholden to anyone, because you have a cushion of money that is YOURS only. You have agency. You have ownership of your life.
I cannot overstate what this means to a woman. Since the invention of the nuclear family, the man has been the breadwinner and therefore in charge of the family’s finances. The woman does not work — or, the work she does as a homemaker and child-rearer is not recognized as separate from the home and therefore does not entitle her to a wage over which she has control. When women did start working outside of the home in surely some ridiculous capacity that earned her ‘pen money,’ you can surely bet on the fact that pen money went straight into the hands of her husband. The husband was smart, the husband was powerful. The husband was the King and the home was his castle. He made all decisions because, for all intents and purposes, his wife and his children numbered among his possessions.
It’s obvious to point out that within this structure, a woman has no agency. Not too long ago, it was believed that both women and animals DID NOT HAVE SOULS. (Founding Fathers believed this.) At best, within the nuclear family they were frivolous and silly — can’t be trusted with money because they only want to shop for hosiery and cold cream! If a woman was not married, she needed to be looked after, and was often hoisted upon a brother-in-law as a spinster burden because she certainly could not govern herself.
In the modern era, household finances are still a point of contention, discomfort, and massively differing opinions and practices. Since my parents divorced when I was 12, I have been intimately familiar with blood-stained monthly payments, phrases like ‘child support’ and ‘alimony’ that drip with stomach-churning contempt. After seeing my father through his second divorce and now being in charge of his finances after his stroke, my hands are stained with blood that will never come out. Lady MacBeth’s “Out, out damned spot!” is what I want to say every time my mother asks me for money.
My very first personal experience, however, occurred like a dream. I swear I was floating above the scene, watching, as my new husband took all the money we had received as gifts from our wedding and responded with hostile disbelief when I asked what he was going to do with it. Due to his conditioning and his background, it didn’t occur to him that it was a discussion, not a mandate; or, that I deserved an explanation delivered with respect, much less an actual say in the matter. I did not know what the right thing to do was, I didn’t have any answers — all I knew was that up until that moment I was a full-on independent woman living in New York City and Los Angeles and now that I had a husband, checks made out to my name from my godmother Cecy were bypassing me without a word. In all honesty, I needed someone to teach me about money and marriage. I needed a class to take, and my husband and I needed to decide on how we were going to handle money as partners BEFORE we got married. Everyone deserves that. Everyone deserves education, and everyone deserves to decide how they are going to live their lives — marriage or no.
Now, I am a married woman in my 30s, trying to have a career I want that pays me anywhere close to what it would pay my male counterpart, as well as taking care of my ill father, his finances, and his health. I feel anger, frustration, constant disappointment in people I’m supposed to trust — and you know what I wish I had? I wish I had f**k you money.
The problem with f**k you money is that you are supposed to keep it a secret. You deserve to be able to count on yourself as your own ally. You deserve immediate access to your own money without any of the red tape or red right hands that would get in your way.
The way that this is actually possible? Cryptocurrency.
Here is Bitcoin explained quite easily by Cash.App.
Here is a Medium article called Explain Bitcoin Like I’m Five.
Naysayers have been vocal about its volatility, but as F. Cary Snyder of Open Node points out, Bloomberg cites a 9,000,000% rise in the last decade.
Open Node, in fact, has just partnered with Apple Pay so that merchants can accept Bitcoin payments from consumers.
The case which inspires me the most about the potential of Bitcoin as an ally for women is the case of Roya Mahboob and the Afghan Citadel Company, which she founded. Due to the predominance of female employees in the firm, the Afghan Citadel Company began to not be paid by their clients. Then came the death threats. Then came the realization that the majority of women she worked with did not own bank accounts (their husbands, brothers, fathers did). One woman told Mahboob that her “husband always hit her and took [all of] her money from her.”
Mahboob, with her new company The Woman’s Annex, saw Bitcoin as a way to bypass the financial and social institutions in place which were blocking female workers’ access to their own money. This has allowed many women financial independence, including one woman who was later able to procure a lawyer “to get her divorce,” said Mahboob.
Women don’t need F-You Money — women need access to their own money. Women need full control of their own money.
Maybe, rather than being F-You Money, Bitcoin can eradicate the need for F-You Money in the first place.