I think there’s some note of consistency that although I am much more likely to drop a less known work as a review on my blog, inversely precisely because a thing I have read is popular I assume that I have reviewed the things that people are more familiar with in the genre of femdom romance. I liked Preferential Treatment when I read it, enough so that I regularly list it in a top 5 recommendations when people ask for a femdom romance book. I am not the only one who makes this suggestion either.
In actuality it looks like I hit What Was Meant To Be, but not this one yet. This is a pity, because the book isn’t merely a great read, but also, in my opinion, the last word needed in the genre of Billionaire Romances. And by this I mean that it’s a beautifully constructed reply from a population that’s getting awfully sick of oligarchs and the power differences they represent.
For doing so the book gets some negative reviews as “preachy”, which I think says more about the reviewers than its protagonist driven rejection of what that kind of wealth represents. Most billionaire romance heroines aren’t comfortable with the sheer gravitational pull of the hero’s wealth, but this one at least can articulate the problems she has clearly.
And for all the lead is introduced as a more traditional meet cute through a chance encounter, it is remarkably realistic for the rest of it. The book gives you a happy ending, but it doesn’t flinch in how it constructs how people behave when massive amounts of money are on the table.
Specifically, a major theme running throughout it is the complicated relationship poverty gives you with money, but also the conflict inherent in ones aesthetic preferences towards symbols of opulence, versus your actual coping skills as you try to escape that state of deprivation. Growing up in what passes for poor in Canada, there was also more of this book that personally resonated with me for non-femdom reasons to boot. I don’t just recommend it because it’s entertaining, but because it’s an incredibly genre savvy response to a lot of the problems in both romance and how we imagine femdom works versus how it actually works.
This is despite the how the premise and the male lead’s attitude to the woman he is into are possibly as far from an ideal starting place for a healthy relationship as you can get. Russian Billionaire Mikhail Volkov decides that his low level worker has the makings of a good domme when, not knowing who he is, she responds to his entitled behavior with firm pushback. To get her interested he gives her access to his near limitless resources, an offer that the heroine, Kate Pasternak is desperate enough not to turn down. She’s in a rough place in her life right now with a bunch of lingering medical debt, but there’s really never been a point when she’s been able to enjoy any financial stability. This is a lifeline, a chance to finally clear a hurdle between a net worth in the negatives and maybe have an emergency fund or start saving for retirement. Kate’s ambitions are incredibly modest.
A typical billionaire romance would then have the kink be forced gifting, where the heroine dub-con whines and blushes her way through the hero’s largess, protected from ever having to confront being perceived as greedy by his forceful choice to shower her with his largesse. This fantasy is probably as old as dirt at this point, a tension produced by suppressing your appetite for material things that’s enforced by social norms almost as strict on women as the one around sexual purity. The act of being a dominant unavoidably evokes three vices women are not supposed to have on our own behalf: aggression, overt sexuality, and selfishness. Thus being a domme is not just the archetypical bad girl, she’s the worst girl. All dommes have to deal with this, one way or another.
Findom, as it is popularly understood, has sins two and three particularly emphasized under its umbrella automatically. I have said before that it exists because there’s few things women can do more transgressive than express ambitious ingratitude. We are supposed to permit men to be our social superiors and then be rewarded for loving their inner selves, not treat their sexual and romantic attraction to us as an overt vulnerability to extract from. Even sex work isn’t free from this, perpetually victim of the fictional construction of the woman who despite her job has a heart of gold, as if being someone’s paid worker was inherently implying blackmail of the client. Findom generally says fuck that, gimme. And people tend to feel at best ambiguous.
Yet, most women like stuff and money, as a symptom of being human. Everyone needs stuff and money to not die. And the stuff and money, historically and currently, is disproportionately gated in the hands of men. You can try to earn your own stuff and money, but the people who have the majority of it did not earn it through sheer hard work. And then of course there’s a severe social penalty for asking for stuff or money for being female even in wage negotiations.
If that wasn’t enough, of course, humans are preternaturally attached to the Cinderella myth. That’s the idea that it’s viable for women to do some sort of extreme cross class marrying into money if you are just that good, either through your virtues or strategic gold digging. The reality, of course is that marriage statistics do not show that happens at all. Marrying into money is not very common, and particularly not gender linked as a man is as likely to do so as a woman is.
Findom exists as a result of both the belief money can be easily finessed from men and a male anxiety that in a rigged system they will never truly be loved for themselves, only what they can offer.
And for its sins, the salt people hurl at it is legendary. In day to day interactions with the internet, more kinky people can be counted on to be critical of findom than pretty much anything else, even the stuff that plays with much more noxious taboos, like rape. Every bad stereotype people can make about women is dusted off: deceptive, seductive, addictive. Men, inversely, are cast as sweet naïfs, wistfully lured in by pure hearted loneliness.
Green And Gold, another exploration on Findom, dealt with that stigma by drowning the dominant in reassurance. Nothing she desired was capable of being outside of what her two eager male leads wanted to give, and her primary power was rooted in simply gatekeeping her ability to receive. To an extent this is true to real life power exchange. Florid fantasies not withstanding, it’s ultimately bordered by the limits of your submissive partner. In an ideal world that’s bordered by your limits too and you have a balanced dynamic. Nevertheless, that assumes a circumstance without conflict, which is great in practice but not ideal for a story.
I think Preferential Treatment is also about escaping the other, very real life problem of simply ending up being someone’s fantasy fulfillment version of power.
This is a problem for all dominants, but I think femdoms even more so. You learn pretty early on that the intersection between human nature and misogyny means a culture where men generally say they want women who are lively and assertive. The most macho cultures, be paradox, seldom actually prize total submission in their women, instead idealizing women who defer to them but also otherwise behave as if the symbols of masculinity they prize were also more valuable to them.
As a dominant this leads to a vexatious category of men who pursue you because they think you are actually some sort of extra complicated brat, or your inclinations are simply a defence mechanism that makes you extra choosy. But external to the fetish aspect, you still need to navigate an assumption on the part of many sub dudes that firecracker or ice queen, you are ultimately still his to channel or receive on his terms and not the other way around. Mikhail, the book’s Billionaire hero, is very much of that mold. He is certainly happy to have her dominate him in very closed circumstances, but his proposition comes with NDAs, a great deal of ambiguity and the real world power imbalance that even if she did object to anything he did or want other than what he wants she has no real ability to counter him.
Kate is otherwise sketched out as how dommes actually are, in really sharp contrast to how most men who fetishize us imagine us to be. This includes the limits of the common bitch-in-heels over achiever stereotype dominants are awarded. There’s this tendency to assume sheer gumption can overcome systemic issues, and that you are some sort of heroic, magnetic figure where assertiveness or confidence are the limitless scaffold you build around people so they cannot but help going in the direction you choose.
Kate is not unflappable at all. She’s all flap, barely held down, her appearance of cool-headed boundaries and absolute accident based on Mikhail reading way more into their first interaction than is there. By pure luck, his silly, fetishized stereotype actually leads him to find a lifestyle domme with a knack for improvising with his rather lousy material and enough cynical insight to notice the limits of how much he is actually willing to submit.
A blind read through left me angrily screeching at the book on her behalf while he continued to suck, while simultaneously deeply invested in her getting some sort of happy ending. It’s almost ironic most readers were prepared to overlook his consistent selfishness while calling out her critical and vocal socialism.
Which, side note, here is another place Guerre is being clever with her use of tropes. While most Russian male leads are chosen exoticism largely based on emphasizing social biases about people on the borderline of whiteness (about as yikes as you are thinking), Guerre has done two things here. Firstly, her female protagonist’s surname is also Russian, making it clear we aren’t going there. Secondly she’s put her timeline that her male lead grew up in the worst sort of deprivation during the transition of the fall of the Soviet Union. If you are going to have at least a semi serious discussion about socialism, someone familiar with the way authoritarianism poisoned things, and the additional complexity of the immigrant experience gives you much more interesting fodder here.
Likewise on the subject of poverty, Guerre gets across not just the foundational parts being systemic, familial and long lasting, but also the cultural alienation when you are confronted by wealth. Wealth is a foreign country.
I occupy an awkward place, a rich man’s unexpected, youthfully created bastard, born to a bohemian mother from the sort of gnarly intergenerational situation that layers queerness, neurodiversity, intellectual brilliance and an interlude with, I am not making this up, MKULTRA. This means that I have this odd experience of growing up in what passes for poverty in Canada but occasionally getting dunked into the world of people who live sublimely comfortably. And you wouldn’t believe the guilt and sense of constant anomie that produces.
Likewise there’s something in Kate I could vividly feel, the way her curated vintage aesthetic was a bridge, as all alt fashion is, outside of easily code readable class markers. Which works until you hit exposure to something actually expensive that has hidden infrastructure. Or something that was, for you, unthinkable. I cannot review this without talking about how this book ended up being deeply personal in this sense.
I married a nice, upper middle class software engineer from the Midwest, who is not, as far as humans go, at all extravagant, particularly not for his social class. But there’s always little moments where the sort of diagonalization of our overlapping cultural pieces, the creativity, the kink, the nerdery do not entirely obscure the nice straight lines of his world compared with the turbulent ripples of mine.
There’s a point in the story where Kate starts coming unglued, revolving around a piece of luxury cookware. The overt language of her meltdown is that she has determined that despite coveting it, she has no idea how one even integrates such a thing into one’s actual cooking. The underlying issue is that this temporary exposure to wealth isn’t helping her actual problem of living with lifelong instability, and the debt that’s put on her, in knowledge but also an ability to trust. Mikhail, for his part, is mystified. He is doing nice things, getting to give as an act of service and all it is doing is making his dominant cry.
Their way through is a fundamental truth about making BDSM work for the long haul, you both have to be who you actually are with each other in a way that is immensely vulnerable. For this couple, it is about dismantling the wall his money has put between them. It is also about transitioning from serving his idealized Kate, a person he needs to be implicitly impressed by and endorsing of his status to feel safe with, to offering himself to real Kate. The person who he wanted at the start of the book, who when confronted by an entitled peer doesn’t back down.
Because this is entirely told through Kate’s perspective, Mikhail’s transformation is a bit of a cypher, and he never really gets a scene where he articulates to her why he is able to go along with the change in direction she wants. But, I think Guerre has given us enough ground work we can take this as a matter of show don’t tell. What carving away his real billions is about is acknowledging that these are actually getting in the way.
If you judged by the cover and blurb Preferential Treatment sounds like it will be yet another silly escapist bit of Cinderella fantasy fluff. Yet, what you get is something so solid it stands distinct in its own genre. It manages to understand and respect the tropes it is working with (romance land Russians, wealthy male leads, femdom), but in combining them, comes through with something wholly unique. And I think it speaks to something else as well, that the femdom part is probably what most made this possible.
While all billionaire romances see their heroines eventually find some sort of comfortable equilibrium with the menace their lover’s wealth presents, the taboo breaking aspects of femdom becomes, through its inherent potential for iconoclasm, a way to pass through one of Romance’s more tricky barriers. A cardinal rule is that all stories must have a happy ending, but more often than not, books where the male lead has a huge advantage over the female lead require us to leave him that way and count on the strength of his love to abrogate it. She will always be more exposed than him, by class, by sexism, by being the one who married into the money, but trust me bro, he loves her, so that’s fine.
Sometimes that can be enough, but sometimes it is nice for the heroine to say all the quiet parts out loud, and to strip the hero truly naked in the process.
Where to buy: Barnes & Noble
Author website: HeatherGuerre.com
Liked this review? Check out more titles in my 2026 Femdom Book Review Project!
