Porn Rules The World In This Provocative New Art Installation

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on August 7, 2018.

It's a pity that I can't share photos here of the best part of Pornhub Nation, an art installation created by artists Maggie West and Ryder Ripps and underwritten by Pornhub, a massive adult video streaming site. The immersive experience sprawls across a series of dark rooms in Union, a nightclub in central Los Angeles, but the most interesting portion can be found in a small and intimate room at the top of a flight of stairs. There, a visitor can wander around and peer through the glass at a series of what look like plants from some oversexed nature of the future. From the leaves grow large adult toys in the shapes of phalluses. The effect is terrarium like, and the mood, to use West's word, is "ethereal." The pieces are artfully painted and luminous in the blacklight. Who knew that something so lovely could be found on a Wednesday morning in a near-empty club where the art has been funded not by the National Endowment for the Arts, but by a company devoted to profits and which delivers graphic content to the masses?

The 3,000-square-foot, tongue-in-cheek conceit of the art show is that you have been transported to the year 2069. Apparently, a group has fled the ... country? the planet? for somewhere else, maybe an island, maybe something that looks like the moon, in order to live a more sexually free existence, one that is controlled by an adult company. In the press materials for the show, Pornhub claims "90 million daily visitors," and its vice president, Corey Price, ventures: "Considering the exponential rate at which we are growing, maybe it wouldn't be totally out of the question to see a Pornhub-themed utopian society formed by the year 2069." I am dubious. But I'm not in the porn business. So maybe he has a point.

In total, Pornhub Nation is a clever send up of what a pornified utopia might look like and a gentle smack to the face of our joyless bureaucracies of the present. The first room — the "National Gallery” — features West's photos of this X-rated nation's presidents, and they're all porn stars: Asa Akira, Riley Reid, and Abella Danger among them. In the next room, the "Domination Masochistic Vroomvroom," which is lit red with neon and boasts a stage upon which stand mannequins clad in fetish garb, we are greeted with a challenging proposition: What would a sexy Department of Motor Vehicles look like? Whips and paddles are affixed to the walls, and one driver safety sign reminds: "Don't whip your whip or you'll be whipped." Apparently, when the club is open, visitors have been trying to remove the fetish tools from the walls, despite the fact that they're firmly anchored there. After all, this is art, not a sex dungeon.

My favorite part of the show was the ball pit — or the "National Silicon [sic?] Reserve." It was filled with flesh-colored balls that reminded one of breast implants. A sign on the wall cautioned against diving or removing one's pants. West instructed me to remove my shoes. Once in the pit, I found myself sinking into the balls. Momentarily, I lost my balance and wondered if I would drown in the porn pit. After extracting myself, I realized that in my disorientation I had put my shoes on the wrong feet.

The next room — "This is our space program," West said — offered a send up of NASA, and while their new acronym is not suitable for publication here, it's not difficult to guess. Overhead, two astronaut suits copulated in space. Their nearby spaceship was phallic in shape. From there, we went upstairs to the dildo plants room, which West described as a "sanctuary." It connoted the surreal beauty of Matthew Barney's work and the wacky futurism of the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's 1973 movie, "Sleeper."

The show's conclusion was an homage to money and a sexual redux of the Internal Revenue Service. Large neon dollar signs glowed against one wall. In a far corner, visitors could don virtual reality glasses and throw virtual sex toys at a virtual Harvey Weinstein. Outside, there was a place where minglers could sit amidst more plants blooming sex toys, but there was a problem. "People just like stealing them out of the garden," West shared. In this porn world, you can look, but you can't take it home with you.

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Meet The Strip Club CEO Who Wants To Get Guys Off Their Phones And Into The Clubs

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on May 9, 2022.

“Everybody wants to party.” That’s how Eric Langan, the CEO, president, and chairman of the board of RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., the only publicly traded company that owns gentleman’s clubs, describes the state of his business today. Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant. After an initial dip early on in the pandemic, the company has come roaring back and is doing better than ever. According to Langan, its suite of businesses are on track to generate between $260 million and $280 million in revenue in 2022.

You might not have heard of RCI Hospitality Holdings, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK, but you may have heard of its establishments, which include over forty strip clubs and restaurants. Among its gentleman’s clubs are Rick’s Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City; Club Onyx, which has outposts in Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Indianapolis; and Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami. (“The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances,” this reporter discovered during a 2015 visit.) There’s also Bombshells, a military-themed chain of restaurants and bars (think: Hooters, but the servers wear fake ammunition belts instead of orange shorts) with multiple locations across Texas. The company brand is a mix of food, booze, and attractive women. The company went public, as Rick’s Cabaret International, in 1995 and hasn’t looked back since.

“They’re having fun,” he notes of the twenty-something to forty-something customers who are frequenting his establishments. “They’re way more into experiences than things. They want human interaction. They want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to flex in front of their friends. It’s about being out and feeling like you’re somebody.” The pandemic isolated people, restricted their freedom, kept them apart. “This is just a retaliation against that lack of freedom,” he observes. “Now they’re expressing their freedom in every way they can. I think it’s great.”

So, how do you pry the young men whom comprise his customer base off their sofas, away from their Netflix shows, out of their homes and into his clubs and restaurants to spend their money? Thanks in part to Langan’s son Colby, the company’s director of administrative operations, who introduced his father to NFTs, “the crypto world,” and web3, RCI Hospitality Holdings is strategically employing a series of tech-focused initiatives. There’s AdmireMe, a kind of OnlyFans for dancers—or “entertainers,” as Langan refers to them—that connects dancers to customers; Tip-N-Strip, an NFT-based points-program with VIP benefits; and the company’s next earnings call, on Monday, May 9, 2022, at 4:30 p.m. ET, will be held on Twitter Spaces.

“We’ve become a mainstream company,” Langan asserts. “Yes, we have strip clubs, but really we’re in the cash flow business.” Of course, his job isn’t like every other CEO’s job. (“I’m the head janitor,” he says.) Active on Twitter, he’s not one for holding back. “Diamond Cabaret Denver has so many beautiful entertainers tonight,” he tweeted not long ago. “I can’t decide if it should be a blonde or brunette kinda night. What do you think ?” In another tweet, he advised his followers: “Just remember you can take the stripper out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the stripper !!!” No matter. In the end, this is the strip club (and restaurant) business. After the Twitter Spaces earnings call, he’ll be mingling with investors at Tootsie’s, along with a few dancers.

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How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money On OnlyFans

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on January 22, 2023.

Iggy Azalea is the latest celebrity to join OnlyFans. Once dominated by sex workers seeking to boost their brands and monetize their relationships to their fans, the subscription-based content service has seen a rise in mainstream stars joining its ranks, including Bella Thorne, Denise Richards, and DJ Khaled. Amber Rose, another celebrity on OnlyFans and a former stripper, has described the platform as “a digital strip club.” So it only makes sense that Azalea, an Australian rapper who has proclaimed that she is, in fact, the strip club, would sign up, too.

But Azalea’s OnlyFans isn’t just any old OnlyFans. It is a year-long, collaborative multimedia project entitled Hotter Than Hell that will feature music, photography, video, art, and, according to a press release, content from “her upcoming fourth studio album.” For $25 a month, subscribers will get a front-row seat to the project as it drops, before the rest of the world sees it. The concept was inspired by Pamela Anderson, 90s supermodels, and Madonna’s controversial book Sex and culminates with a coffee table book to be released in December 2023.

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

The first post was the aforementioned cherry-licking photo and the words: “The sweetest angel”; below that, it noted how many likes the post had and the dollar amount of tips it had garnered from her fans. (Tips are another way OnlyFans creators can generate revenue.) At the time of this writing, that post had 2,501 likes and $233.20 in tips. There were more images to come: Azalea in green lingerie, Azalea getting her makeup done, Azalea posing seemingly nude next to a swimming pool while eating a cherry with her nipple discreetly hidden from view. One post featured a nine-second audio clip of Azalea — “Hey, babe,” she purred to me? us? her anonymous fans? — offering an enticement to be “a part of my VIP for a year by tipping $250 and receive a one-year link subscription and a free photo that’s just for my VIPS.” That post had 685 likes and a staggering $15,690 in tips. (OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of its creators’ revenues.) Maybe I should be on OnlyFans, I mused.

So it went over the days that followed. There were more images. There were more audio clips. There was a video clip of a scantily-clad Azalea that had been filmed through a window as if the viewer (me) was spying on her; the text with it read: “Working my angles [butterfly emoji, fire emoji].” When I didn’t check Azalea’s content stream, I got emails from OnlyFans telling me that I had unread messages from her, as if I had left her on read. When I logged back into OnlyFans, I discovered those messages contained locked content, another way the site’s creators can make money. With the Pay Per View feature, members must pay more to access locked content. One was $40. Another was $28. Yet another was $35. Each message had a come-hither note, but the visual content was behind an image of a padlock.

I thought about unlocking the rest of Azalea’s content, but I didn’t. By that point I had read that she had “sold her master recording and publishing catalog to Domain Capital for an eight-figure sum” late last year. She didn’t need the money, I figured.

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Death of a Pimp

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on October 18, 2018.

Dennis Hof was a pimp. Perhaps he would've preferred the term "brothel owner," for that he was, too, at the time of his death earlier this week at 72. He was found dead in bed at his Love Ranch Vegas brothel in Crystal, Nevada, on Tuesday morning by adult performer Ron Jeremy. An autopsy will be conducted to identify the cause of his death, but foul play wasn't suspected.

It was a busy time for Hof, who was in the midst of a campaign to get himself elected to the Nevada State Assembly. Ironically, he may well be elected, despite the fact that he's dead, because, according to the New York Times, in the 36th District in which he's running, 45% of those registered to vote are registered as Republicans, compared to 28% who are registered to vote as Democrats. His Trumpian political platform included lowering taxes and defending gun owners' rights.

In June of 2017, I interviewed Hof for an article I wrote for this website in the wake of a news report that former FBI director James Comey had used the term "hookers" in a Statement for the Record released one day prior to testifying in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Hookers" appears in Comey's summary of a March 30, 2017, call he received from Trump. "[Trump] said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia," Comey wrote. Was "hookers" Comey's word choice or Trump's? Interested to hear what sex workers and their minders thought of the high-profile disparagement, I reached out to Hof and his employees.

As it turned out, Hof had a Trump story of his own. "I met him 27 years ago," he told me. "I was in the timeshare business. He wanted to timeshare the [Trump] Taj Mahal, and he wanted me to come aboard to do that. I didn't do that. I said there's not enough money in the world to make me live in Atlantic City." It was hard to know whether or not to take Hof's claim seriously. Instead, Hof recounted, he became "the pimp master general of America," anointed as such by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. He'd voted for Trump and liked the guy—"We need a businessman," he said—but he preferred the term "working girls." Either way, Trump was good for business. "Business is humping," he told me. "We feel the difference with Trump in office."

It wasn't the first time I'd connected with Hof. Over the prior two decades, I'd encountered him at various events, from adult movie sets to X-rated conventions. The first time I'd met him was on the set of an adult movie being shot in the San Fernando Valley, the content of which was so outré that I won't detail it here. On another occasion, I talked with him at the Hustler Store in Hollywood. And he was a regular presence at the AVN Awards—the so-called "Oscars of porn"—in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He wasn't the first pimp that I met, and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he was like many pimps that I've encountered over the years. He was charismatic, likeable, friendly, a consummate showman, and the sort of person who could make you feel comfortable about anything, including, one presumed, showing up at one of his brothels in hopes of paying one of the women who worked for him a few hundred dollars, or more, to share some intimate time, in the parts of Nevada where that's legal.

In a way, he wasn't that different from sex workers I've known. For providing a service in demand across the country, they'd been publicly vilified and systematically ostracized. Hof was a larger-than-life character—a pimp, you bet—but he was also a businessman who knew well that if someone will pay for something, there's money to be made, and that's the American dream.

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I, A Middle-Aged Woman, Went On A Sugar Daddy Dating Website

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on June 2, 2022.

I, a middle-aged single woman, have spent the last several years looking for love, a connection, something on dating websites and apps. You name them, I’ve been on them: Bumble, Tinder, Hinge. Over that period I’ve gone on 30 or so blind dates, with pilots and attorneys and one carpenter, most of them somewhere between mildly boring and temporarily entertaining, but nothing has really stuck. So the other night, after I’d deleted another dating app in frustration—Bumble, probably—I wondered what would happen if I signed up for Seeking Arrangement, a so-called “sugar daddy” dating website that earlier this year rebranded itself as Seeking and announced itself “the largest dating website for successful and attractive people.” (The unsuccessful and unattractive need not apply, one imagines.)

Seeking Arrangement had long been the dating site of choice for young women and older men hoping to find a connection that involved the exchange of money; what that money was exchanged for was up to its users. Now Seeking, which claims it has over 36 million users worldwide, was trying to sell itself as one more dating site. Was Seeking comprised of mostly forty-something sugar daddies searching for twenty-something sugar babies? Or could I, a middle-aged women, find something more romantic than transactional on the site? There was only one way to find out: gonzo journalism. “Start Dating Up,” which Seeking has trademarked, the website beckoned. I paid $19.99 for a 30-day subscription and created a profile.

In a way, Seeking isn’t that different from other dating websites. In fact, I recognized some of the men’s profiles from regular dating websites and apps I’d been on. Many of the men were younger than I’d expected. I’d thought the male users would be middle-aged, moneyed types on the prowl for young woman that appreciated the simplicity of a tit-for-tat exchange. Instead, I found a mix of tech nerds who’d struck it rich and whose screen names occasionally underscored their love of the blockchain and bitcoin, average Joe types hunting for something quick who figured it was easier to find it on Seeking than at a bar, and successful executives who seemed to be interested in a relationship they believed they could control through money.

But were these guys as wealthy as they claimed? On their profiles, they could share their net worth and quite a few claimed to have a net worth of $100 million or more, which seemed unlikely, given that a 2015 report from the Boston Consulting Group found that there were over 5,000 households in the U.S. worth $100 million or more. Some of the men wanted a sugar baby and said so. Some wanted something that might start out transactional but would turn into something more, even marriage, down the line. One, who was married, was looking for a woman who would move in with him and his wife. Another, a handsome young man who related he’d done well when he’d sold his last company, no longer had to work and wanted to find a girl who would travel the world with him on his dime.

I got a few messages, but only a handful. While the site had been rebranded, it was clear that most of the guys were looking for women who were far younger than me. Then I came across the profile of an older man who was looking for tall women with big feet. I’m 6’1” and wear a size 11 shoe. He was looking for The One, he wrote. Was I it? I tried to picture how it might work, me with my tall body and my big feet, and him, far away, with his interests and his self-proclaimed successes.

It was easy to get sucked into thinking about romance as transactional on Seeking, a place where it was normal to calculate one’s worth and then try to sell it. But something stopped me. Seeking was one more dating website, but one where sex and love were commodities. I began to feel grim and a bit cynical, which wasn’t how I wanted to feel. So I deleted my profile.

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The Hardest Thing About Being a Male Porn Star

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on April 23, 2012.

You might think being a male porn star is easy. Have sex for a living? That's a piece of cake.

So, what can some of the biggest woodsmen in the porn business teach us about work?

As it turns out, guys who get it up for a paycheck have something to offer when it comes to career advice.

I heard from seven of Porn Valley's biggest studs via email and got the secrets to becoming a successful working stiff.

TIP #1: Get your coworkers to like you.

In the porn business, it's doubly important your coworkers like you.

According to Brandon Iron, star of "Perverted Planet 7" and director of "Sex Crazed," getting along with your costars is the key to getting ahead in porn.

"The hardest thing about being a male porn star is convincing your female co-workers that you are an interesting, well-rounded, fun guy who they might consider dating in a parallel universe after a few drinks," Iron says.

TIP #2: Don't confuse the professional with the personal.

For male porn stars, the line between professional and personal can get blurry. If you think keeping the professional professional and the personal personal is tricky in your line of work, you should talk to a male porn star, who may have a wife waiting at home for him to finish his latest scene with another woman. 

Jeremy Steele, star of "Naughty Neighbors" and "M.I.L.F. Money," says the hardest thing is what happens when he's not working.

"[The hardest thing is] having a relationship with a significant other," Steele says. "The first time I told a girl I was in porn she disconnected her phone number the same night, and I never saw or heard from her again."

Not only that, changing career tracks can be tricky, especially if you leave the adult business and try to reinvent yourself.

"The second hardest thing is having a post-porn career that doesn't make you 'infamous' if or when it is discovered that you were a sex worker on film/video," Steele reports. "You can lose a job or not find one if you're too well known for having been a whore on camera, in spite of it being legal."

TIP #3: Be cognizant of how others perceive you.

Whether you're a twentysomething or fiftysomething, your age can impact how management perceives your abilities. Are you too young to be getting the salary you're negotiating for? Or are you perceived as too old to be promotable?

Dave Cummings may be the oldest working porn star on the planet. At 72, he's appeared in "The Sopornos 2" and directs his own series, "Sugar Daddy."

On the one hand, Cummings owns a niche market. On the other hand, his age can be an impediment.

Sometimes, Cumming says, he worries his coworkers would "prefer working with a younger guy than me."

TIP #4: Rise to the occasion.

Seymore Butts has had in his own Showtime reality series, "Family Business," and he's directed and starred in adult movies for years.

According to Butts, it's not the porn starlet, the director, the producer, the cameraman, or the production assistant who has the toughest job in porn. It's the guy who has to get wood -- or else.

Butts opines:

The most difficult part about being a male porn star is the hard-on. They have to get it up and off on cue essentially and all the while in between maintain [it] for two to three hours. This must be done under the most difficult of circumstances, including not being attracted to their female co-star, having sex in the most uncomfortable settings, i.e. on hard surfaces, cold/hot weather, etc., and/or having to stop frequently for direction or shot setups. They have to be in great shape in order to perform. It all adds up to being the most difficult job in porn, in my opinion.

TIP #5: Successful negotiations are key.

You may have seen Richard Mann in "Freaknic 2" and "Big Mann on Campus," but Mann says he and his brethren are getting stiffed when it comes to getting paid what they should.

"I'd say dealing with the fact that you don't get any royalties" is the hardest thing about his job, Mann says. "When you shoot, they pay you once, and that's it."

Will male porn stars unionize? Unlikely.

TIP #6: It's all about confidence.

Zak Smith is an artist, author, and male porn star. With his unique resume, he's found porn is a tricky industry because it breeds insecurity.

"Everything that happens [on a porn set] affects whether people will want to sleep with you," Smith says. "The stakes could not possibly be higher. Every other thing -- including things that might lead to losing the job -- are just subthings of that thing."

TIP #7: Perspective, perspective, perspective.

Arguably the most famous male porn star of the moment, James Deen's work can be seen in "This Ain't Ghostbusters XXX," "Simpsons: The XXX Parody," and "Batman XXX: A Porn Parody."

Deen's secret to success: a positive attitude.

"I guess the hardest thing about being a male performer is ... um ... I don't know," Deen says. "My job is pretty easy."

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How HBO’s "The Idol," With A Little Help From Valentino, Rewrote The "Pretty Woman" Playbook

In the third episode of the controversial HBO series “The Idol,” Jocelyn, a pop star played by Lily-Rose Depp, and Tedros, a slimy wannabe Svengali played by Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, head off for a shopping spree at the Valentino boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. After bypassing a gaggle of adoring Jocelyn fans out front, the duo undertake some retail therapy. “You see that young lady over there?” Tedros asks a store employee. “Got anything in this store as beautiful as she is?” Jocelyn tries on a series of Valentino outfits as Tedros eggs her on, threatens to “curb stomp” an employee he believes his ogling his girl, and dismisses one top as “trash.”

Eventually, the pair end up having sex in a dressing room. When Jocelyn exits before Tedros can finish, he finishes himself off alone in the dressing room while holding onto a rack of Valentino clothes. Afterwards, he looks at his soiled hands. Then his gaze turns to the very expensive Valentino red dresses hanging nearby. The camera cuts away, but the implication is clear: he wipes his hands off on the dresses.

Did Valentino sign off on this? I wondered as I watched the scene. After all, Valentino is a venerated luxury fashion brand. Founded in 1959 by Valentino Garavani, its designs have been worn by Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, and Oprah Winfrey. Had Valentino cosigned on what appeared to be the bespoiling of its brand—or was this was what product placement looked like in 2023? In search of an answer, I reached out to Valentino for comment. I didn’t get a response back.

For an expert’s take, I sent an email to Stacy Jones, the CEO of Hollywood Branded, a pop culture marketing agency. She didn’t know if there was any brand partnership between Valentino and “The Idol,” but she did offer her take on the provocative Valentino scene, which had generated some debate on Twitter.

“While the scene in the Valentino store was certainly explicit, there isn’t damage to the brand,” Jones opined. “Even the derogatory mentions made by Tedros about some of the styles and the store’s stylist had no lasting negative impact. Tedros is shown to be the not-so-nice character he is, and it was in fact Tedros who came off looking poorly, not Valentino. The growing spotlight on Valentino dressing Lily-Rose's character and having her model their clothing on screen feels like a win regardless. The saying that you can’t pay for media worth that is true. This particular product placement is over delivering on brand awareness big time. There is not a lot of risk in offending older Valentino consumers as they simply won’t be watching the series. They are not the target audience.” These days, Valentino may be more interested in targeting millennials and Gen Z as potential customers. According to Bain & Co.: “These generations are expected to account for as much as 70% of the global luxury market by 2025.”

Not only that, it seemed I had missed the point entirely. As Jones pointed out in her email to me, the Valentino scene from “The Idol” was a redux of a scene from the 1990 film “Pretty Woman,” starring Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward, a Hollywood escort, and Richard Gere as Edward Lewis, a wealthy businessman, right down to the “Do you have anything in this shop as beautiful as she is?” line. “I googled to see where [the boutique shopping scene] in ‘Pretty Woman’ was filmed as I thought it had a high likelihood of being Valentino,” Jones added. “This article states ‘Pretty Woman’ filmed the Rodeo Drive scene specifically at Valentino. There are a lot of similarities in the scenes, just taken up many adult notches with an edgier, modern touch.”

Is “The Idol” “‘torture porn’”? Has it “set back the feminist movement by at least a decade”? Is it “anti-feminist spectacle”? Or is something more complex at work? At least in the case of the Valentino scene, the subtext is resolutely feminist. In “Pretty Woman,” Vivian says: “I want the fairy tale.”; she wants a man to rescue her. In Sam Levinson’s “The Idol,” the fairy tale is over. After all, it’s Jocelyn who denies Tedros his own pleasure, who is the star, and who, we presume, foots the bill for their shopping trip. In this retelling, the woman holds the power, not the man.

On a recent Friday afternoon, I made my way to the Valentino boutique. Since it was late June, the well-heeled shoppers making their way up and down the sidewalks had to share space with groups of tourists. In the Valentino store, I was met by a security guard. A salesperson followed me around as I admired a pair of $1,800 see-through platform pumps that reminded me of the strippers’ shoe brand of choice, Pleaser Shoes, and a red dress that looked like one Jocelyn had worn. On the second floor, the salesperson indicated the dressing room where the racy scene for “The Idol” had been shot, supposedly. I opened the door. No one, much less Tedros, was there.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

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Forbes by the Numbers: January 2023

I’ve been writing for the Forbes website for forever, it seems. Over the years, I have held several beats: self-employment, vices, and sex. Currently, my tagline is: “I cover the business of sex.” In January 2023, I started posting again after a hiatus, and I thought I would track my traffic numbers progress here.

Stories published: 4. My goal was to publish five stories, but various things led that to not happening. Next time, I will get more of the posts done earlier in the month.

Total page views: 42,956. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 22,353. That’s an increase of 91%. So, not bad.

Total visitors: 39,011. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 20,155. That’s an increase of 93%. So, not bad.

Most popular post, by views: How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money on Only Fans: 19,381 (as of this writing). If the question is what works, the answer is the intersection of celebrities and sex. Other reasons this post performed well: It was tweeted multiple times by Forbes and ForbesLife, the top image featured Iggy preparing to lick a cherry, I had read something recently that reminded me that headlines that explain “how” something is done are more likely to generate higher engagement and so I used that construct.

The month’s highlight: Iggy is #1: At one point, my story about Iggy was the number one trending story on Forbes.com, beating out stories about Tom Brady and Elon Musk.

My goals for February 2023: 5 posts, 50,000+ page views, 50,000+ visitors. Check back early next month to find out if I hit my targets.

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Me & Iggy

For my latest post on Forbes, I wrote about how rapper Iggy Azalea is making money on Only Fans.

An excerpt:

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

Read the rest here.

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Just Say No to Robot Strippers

After a break, I am back. Check out my Forbes blog for my deep dive into the world of strip club robot security guards, and while you’re at it, subscribe to my Substack newsletter: The Reverse Cowgirl. A good time, all.

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All the Smut That's Fit to Print

A couple new things:

I wrote a Forbes post about a strip club CEO:

“Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant.”

I wrote a newsletter about the story behind that story:

"I had forgotten about that fact, and several other details in the piece, like the dancer who made $800 to $1,000 a night who told me: ‘I have a lot of spunk.’”

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Blow Me

On my Forbes blog, I wrote about a woman who’s turning blowup dolls into fashion designs.

An excerpt:

Breslin: Why did you choose this model of blowup doll?

Friday: Judy's the one! Out of all the blowup dolls out in the world, she's the most iconic. She has a classic design that's been around for decades, so she has a warm nostalgic feeling about her. I like that she plays it classy with her closed mouth, but we all know what she's really got on her mind.

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The Hustler Diaries Part 8: How to Get 100,000 Unique Monthly Visitors

One of my goals for May was to reach 100,000 unique visitors a month on my Forbes blog. In fact, I surpassed that. My total unique monthly visitors for May was 114,867. Here’s how I got there.

Catch a ride on a beast

The Forbes website is a digital traffic juggernaut. According to Forbes, the entire site’s monthly visitors for April 2020 was 115 million. That is what is referred to in the digital traffic business as an absolute fuckton of traffic. I actually didn’t realize the traffic was that high. Last time I checked, however long ago, the site’s traffic was something like 80 million monthly visitors. In any case, think of your blog’s platform as you, a person, trying to get across the desert to a fresh water lake with water fountains and a water park. What’s the fastest way to get there? By foot? Or by catching a ride on a chimera that moves as fast as a cheetah, has the size of a woolly mammoth, and is as comfortable as a flight on Singapore Airlines? I am climbing on the chimera, thanks.

Grow your long tail traffic

I have a lot of long tail traffic on my Forbes blog. For me, that means stuff I wrote a long time ago still gets a lot of traffic. I’ve written some very popular posts over the years, ranging from the hardships of male porn stars to how to sell yourself. I still get emails about those posts. It’s all well and good if you want to vomit out seven posts a day on whatever is ranking high on Google, but most of that crap isn’t going to get you much long trail traffic. While trends may change, people generally remain the same. They want to be not bored, they want to find out how to better themselves, and they want to see shit they haven’t seen that makes them feel some kind of way they want to feel. Whatever Jake Paul did recently probably doesn’t fall into that category a few years from now. How to sell yourself does.

Write interesting stuff that’s on brand

Currently, my beat on my Forbes blog is the business of sex. I’ve been writing about sex and the porn industry for over 20 years, so I have a lot of ideas and a lot of connections. But this is Forbes, so it’s not like I’m going to be doling out blowjob advice. In my mind, my content on my Forbes blog is like a Venn diagram. If, very broadly put, Forbes is about business (it’s also about other things, like the economy, work, women, entrepreneurship, and money), that’s one circle. If, very broadly put, my brand is about sex, that’s another circle. The content that appears on my Forbes blog is the intersection of those two, the place where business and sex overlap. That’s my brand. So when I wrote about Lena the Plug, who is an X-rated social media influencer making seven figures a year, that’s about her business. Or when I wrote about how the coronavirus is impacting strippers, that’s about how the pandemic is impacting their bottom line. In this way, I straddle two worlds: The world of sex, in which things are always interesting and engaging, and the world of business, which tends to be covered by boring people in boring ways. Imagine making something boring sexy! It works for me.

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Porn Star 3.0

Meet Lena the Plug. Never heard of her? She’s got millions of followers across social media, and she’s raking in seven figures a year disrupting the porn business.

Read my latest on Forbes here.

About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.

The Hustler Diaries Part 7: How to Make People Click on Your Content

For my latest on @forbes, I interviewed artist @5uperficial, who's making $950 used panty masks to raise awareness about restrictions on access to abortions during the COVID-19 pandemic 👙 Link in bio.

91 Likes, 6 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "For my latest on @forbes, I interviewed artist @5uperficial, who's making $950 used panty masks to..."

Some people call it clickbait. I call it creating content that people want to read. When it comes to getting people to click on content, I am something of an expert. I’ve been hired by billion-dollar global companies to get consumers to do just that. Here’s the thing: You are trying to accomplish a single goal. What is that goal, you may ask? You are trying to get someone to move their finger. To click. That’s it. This isn’t brain surgery, folks. In any case, the secret to getting people to click is getting them to feel something. Desire. Curiosity. Fear. People click because they want to engage, and emotions are what drive engagement.

So, let’s take a look at a recent post from my Forbes blog. I wrote about an artist who is turning her used panties into COVID-19 masks. Ah, yes, you might say, thinking you know why people clicked on this post. (And click they did! 10,000 times.) Because sex sells, you say. Well, sure, maybe the used panties had something to do with it. But I published two other posts on my Forbes blog last week that were about sex, and they did half as much traffic.

Let’s parse the details:

Don’t write boring crap

Most people are boring, and because they are boring, they produce boring content. It may be harsh, but it is also true. Don’t be boring! Because so many people are boring, and producing boring content, non-boring content really stands out. A woman making COVID-19 masks out of her used panties? Not boring. But you don’t have to write about used panty COVID-19 masks to get people to click. You do have to write stuff that isn’t boring. Ben Smith wrote this jealous screed against Ronan Farrow, and people are clicking the hell out of that. Matt Taibbi is always ranting about some political thing—I don’t read him so I don’t know what, but whatever—and people click the hell out of his content. I’m trying to think of someone else who writes non-boring content, but so much content is boring that I can’t think of anyone else right now. In any case, say what you will about used panty COVID-19 masks, but they are not boring.

Make the thumbnail image be of a person, preferably with a face, and ideally with eyes

Listen, I’m not the Margaret Mead of making content clickable, but I do know that when your thumbnail image—that image they see when they’re sitting around debating whether or not to click—is of a person, preferably with a face, and ideally with eyes, people are more likely to click it. Maybe it’s because people are lonely af. Maybe it’s because content is a proxy person with which they hope to engage. Maybe it’s due to some weird law of animal attraction of which I am not aware. In any case, people are a million more times likely to click on your content if there’s a person in the image. With this post, the thumbnail image is of the artist wearing one of her masks. You see her eye. She’s looking at YOU. Click!

Be of the moment

It wasn’t actually my idea to write that story. Someone else suggested it. Frankly, I thought it was a little absurd to write about, so I dragged my feet before I finally wrote it. Here’s the funny thing about content. It’s oftentimes the stuff you care about the least that performs the best. I wonder why that is the case? I have no idea. Why did this post generate over 10,000 views in a few days? Maybe it’s Google. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s the masks. Maybe it’s the used panties. Maybe sometimes there are things we just don’t understand about the universe, and this is one of them. May all your content be fruitful and multiply.

About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.

The Sex Work Pandemic

For my latest newsletter, I wrote about the sex work pandemic. I spent the week interviewing sex workers, and I learned the landscape is teetering on the verge of an apocalypse, due to the coronavirus crisis.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The first time I ever visited a peep show was in San Francisco. I went to The Lusty Lady by myself. Before I stepped into the booth, the guy working there told me to wait. Then he grabbed a mop and mopped the floor and the walls. Then I stepped inside.”

Read the rest here. Subscribe here.

About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.

Anonymous Was a Sex Worker

For my Forbes blog, I interviewed a sex worker about how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed sex work. A veteran escort, she spoke candidly about the emotional and economic hardships faced by her and others, why sex work matters and what we lose when we lose sex workers, and the sisterhood of sex workers.

An excerpt from “A Sex Worker Reveals How the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Changed Sex Work”:

“[Sex work is] a space focused on your personal, intimate needs and sometimes desire to connect to another person without the expectation for reciprocating that kind of care or navigating when your needs are not aligned. For a lot of people, seeing a sex worker is holding that space of vulnerability—plus escapism and fun. I have clients I've seen through hard times, many of whom carry a lot of responsibility in work and in their personal lives, and I got to be the one person where they could say: ‘I'm having a hard time, and all I want is to not think about that for a while.’ Who doesn't need that right now?”

About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.

The Pandemic Hustle

For my latest on my Forbes blog, I interviewed Chase Kelly, who runs Survive the Club and coaches strippers, about how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted the strip club business. Read it here.

An excerpt from “A Strippers’ Coach Reveals How Strippers Are Surviving the Coronavirus Pandemic”:

Dancer, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

“Clubs will close, but in their place new clubs will open. I’m not giving up my art form, anyway, so we will have to find a way to make it work. Maybe if we’re lucky, we will see the return of the peep show in the U.S.”

About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.

What's Coming Down the Pike

💋

10 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💋"

Having taken some time to work on other projects, I’m now back to refocusing my energies on my Forbes blog. Currently, I’ve got four new posts coming down the pike. One about a porn star 3.0. One about a woman who supports strippers. One about an escort navigating through the pandemic. And one about a performance artist making masks out of her used panties. Keep an eye out here and here.

About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.

What to Watch

Over on my Forbes blog, I wrote about nine movies that offer the opposite of social distancing: intimacy. From hustling strippers to star-crossed lovers, it’s a list that provides a refreshing alternative to the six-foot rule. I hadn’t posted on my Forbes blog in a while, but I’ll be doing so more regularly moving forward. If circumstances change, the best strategy is sometimes a shotgun approach: Just aim and fire.

The Operation (1995)

Arguably the best explicit film ever made, “The Operation” is truly unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Essentially, it’s a porn movie shot with an infrared camera. The effect is haunting and otherworldly. Starring Otto Wrek and Gina Velour and directed by Jacob Pander, this is just about the most interesting thing you’ll see while isolated.

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