Fuck You, Pay Me #18: 2024 Year in Review

This is part 18 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

For the final Fuck You, Pay Me of 2024, I thought I’d round up some highlights from this year’s FYPM posts.

From Fuck You, Pay Me #17: How to Write a Short Story:

“And so it went. Some days I wrote a single 100-word paragraph. Some days I wrote several. At one point, I didn’t work on the story for several weeks. Eventually, though, I got back to it. I started falling in love with my main character, who I thought was hilarious. The premise amused me to no end, what this guy living this relatively normal life would do when he found himself encountering something rather remarkable. I envisioned the house. The yard. The wife. Her departure. How he came to discover that a porn movie was being shot in the house behind his. What his personal history in relationship to porn was. How he justified his curiosity, and what he found when he got there. I was Stewart, and Stewart was me.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #16: An Excerpt From My Memoir:

“As I understood it, my life in a psychological experiment began on the day I was born. At 1:38 a.m., on April 10, 1968, I was delivered in the maternity ward of an Oakland, California, hospital. According to my mother, I was a hideous baby. Instead of having two distinct eyebrows, my eyebrows met in the middle to form one long horizontal brow, otherwise known as a mono-brow, which, while flattering on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo or the basketball player Anthony Davis, was unsettling on a newborn. Due to a severe case of jaundice, my skin and the whites of my eyes were a curious shade of yellow, giving me a radioactive glow. And my skull was grossly misshapen, the result of the compression my cranium had undergone as I journeyed down my mother’s vaginal canal. Unsure what to do (as if there was anything to be done) or say (as if there was anything to say) about my unfortunate countenance, the obstetrician cut the umbilical cord and thrust me in the direction of my mother.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter:

“As someone who has been writing forever, I’ve had a lot of editors over the years. Some are great and have improved my writing. Some are so-so and don’t have much of an impact. Some are terrible and shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own shopping lists. With my newsletter, I have no editor. No gatekeeper who gets to green flag or red flag what I want to write about. No person meddling with my prose. No point-of-view I have to take into consideration when trying to decide if I should or shouldn’t write about something of interest to me. If you’re a weak or inexperienced writer, not having an editor may be a downside, but for me, it’s all good when the editor is not only not in my head but doesn’t exist.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #14: Cranking the Flywheel:

“What am I working on these days? A good question. When you’re a writer, you tend to have a lot of pots on the stove. Here are a few things I’m doing, may be doing, am going to be doing, should be doing, want to be doing. The point is to generate momentum and get the proverbial word-based flywheel turning.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #13: How to Be a Consultant:

“When I got divorced, I took my consulting savvy with me. Almost immediately, I started doing consulting work. I only work with a retainer, because that’s the best way to form a relationship with a client. Years ago a former boss of mine compared me to a Swiss Army Knife, which was a way of saying I did a lot of things. This is true for consulting. I advise on branding, communications, social media, PR, marketing, and strategy. Oftentimes, my role is prophylactic. That is, I am advising the client to not do something that wouldn’t be to their advantage. At other times, I help them shape their image. Most of my clients come through word of mouth. I have a reputation for being good at crisis communications. I like the proximity to power, to big-number deals, to real movers and shakers. I have learned how general counsels think; what makes millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires tick; that if you get exposed to enough high-level operators you will find yourself referring to companies with $3 billion valuations as ‘small.’ My clients are almost exclusively men. As a consultant, I am an invisible member of the big boy’s club.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies:

“To be honest, at the beginning I didn’t do a lot of research on what I was ‘supposed’ to do while applying because I kind of wanted to just figure out for myself. Over time, I did think more and do more research about what does and doesn’t work when applying for a writing residency. The big realization I had which is super obvious but wasn’t at the time was that as the writer applying for the thing you hope to get, you’re very me focused. Is my writing sample good enough? Is my bio impressive enough? Will these people think I suck as a writer and / or human being? Why am I doing this? But at some point I read something written by someone who, you know, reviews these types of applications, and I saw it more from their end. In a way, it’s a lot like applying for a job. It’s not just your skills or your resume, it’s also about whether or not you’re a fit — for their cohort, or their ideology, or their brand. So I tried to be a bit more me and a bit less saying what I thought they wanted me to say. Instead of trying to be perfect and impressive, I tried to show that I was creative and inventive and curious. You are going to be around other writers; I mean, they want to know who you are. Not just how you write.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #11: How to Be More Creative:

“How long did it take me to write each approximately 150 to 250 micro-fiction? Not long. I’m pretty sure it was maybe 15 minutes at the most. I mean, it was probably more like 10 minutes maximum. I wrote the story directly on the webpage I had dedicated to the project. I drafted it straight through without stopping or thinking. Then I published it. After that, I went back into the CMS and lightly revised the story, not really changing it so much as cleaning it up. If the story wasn’t perfect or not up to some standard in my head, oh, well! It was done. Finally, I added a photo to accompany the story (each story is paired with one of my photographs). Mission accomplished. With every story, I was one step closer to my goal. This uncensoring-the-self aspect of the project was the most important component and the most additive to what I was doing at the same time: working on my novel. I wasn’t so much exercising my fiction muscle, I was starting to realize, as I was shutting off the critical part of my brain and giving the creative part of my brain room to run around and kick up its heels and get a little wild. Stories 11 through 20 are about an avatar, a robot, a cougar (I was watching the second season of ‘MILF Manor,’ which is totally insane, and which apparently deeply affected me or at least gave me a rabbit hole to go down), that cougar’s cub, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend’s father, that cougar cub’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, that cougar’s son, a vagina, and a penis. Here is a line that I like from #19: The Vagina (After Frank Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’): ‘One morning, when the unidentified woman who may or may not have been a writer of stories about sex woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a vagina.’”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #10: The Pornification of My Life:

“I’ve spent a long time waffling around this subject matter. Let’s face it; it’s a little weird for a woman to write about sex and porn, to do it for so long, to be so seemingly obsessed with it. It’s a little embarrassing, a little dirty, a little wrong. Or is it? Well, on the one hand, sometimes I encounter people who think just that. But on the other hand, then I’ll remind myself that three of the most visited websites in the world are porn sites, and those numbers testify to the fact that there is a significant interest in it.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy:

“That same month, my memoir was selected to be the December pick for actress Emma Roberts’ Belletrist book club. This opportunity came through my agent at CAA, who is amazing. Belletrist is a celebrity book club, they promote your book throughout the month, and they have you do various things on their platform, like create a video of your personal library and write about your favorite literary things for their newsletter and also do an Instagram Live interview. It was such a cool experience. I got the chance to connect with readers who had spent a lot of their developing years online and since my book is about, among other things, not having a private life, it was very relatable for them. By this point in the promoting one’s own book process, I was getting a bit more in the flow of things, and I had reached a certain point of resetting the bar, which is to say not everything you do to promote your book may be up to your perfectionist standards, but at least you are out there doing it, dammit.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #8: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Fiction Edition):

“Of course, there were freaks of nature that worked the adult business like sideshow acts, men preternaturally gifted with eye-popping appendages who had carved out a niche for themselves by starring in movies with titles that trumpeted their larger-than-life anatomies, but those guys were outliers.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #7: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Journalism Edition):

“Because if you're going to talk about how far we've come when it comes to porn, if you're going to posit Paul ‘Max Hardcore’ Little as the latest victim of the Bush administration, if you're going to lament one more strike against your First Amendment rights, you should bear witness as to what a porn star drenched in vomit looks like.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #6: Letters From Johns Revisited:

“In August of 2013, as The Letters Project was winding down, I published an essay about the project: ‘You Were My Studs.’ I wrote about how the whole project had started with a shot in the dark: I had put out a call on my blog, asking readers why they had paid for sex. Within a few hours, I had my first answer: ‘The Night I Drove a Call Girl to Her Next Stop’; it begins: ‘I am writing because I can’t tell this story to anyone I know and retain my dignity, but since your soliciting I figured I can get it off my chest.’ There were more letters to come. As I wrote in my essay: ‘Over the following year, I heard from over 50 johns. Their letters came at all hours of the day and night. They were from young guys and old guys, white guys and black guys, military grunts and corporate drones. The letters were poignant, exhilarated, nostalgic, terrifying, revelatory. They were all confessions.”

From Fuck you, Pay Me #5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer:

“As I have written on this blog, I got paid $100 an hour pretending to be the personality of Pepto-Bismol on social media. This was a fun job. Sometimes I wish that I could do it again. According to my notes: ‘social media engagement [increased] by 500% and market share [grew] by 11%’ during the time period in which I was pretending to be Pepto.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway):

“My general feeling about memoirs is that I do not like them. The memoirs of which I am thinking are written by women for women, are not concerned with the world at large but with the world of the interior (as if women have nothing to say about the world and must relegate themselves to writing about their interiors), are books of feelings that occupy a literary pink ghetto created by the publishing business that limits women to a silo of what is acceptable to write about and does so in order to mass produce books, regardless of what these books do or do not say or how they say it.”

From Fuck You, Pay Me #3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel:

“Last year, I went to an estate sale at a Hollywood art gallery. Some of what was being sold was vintage adult movie posters. I bought a poster for a porn movie called ‘She Did It Her Way.’ In case you can’t read between the lines, I did not feel while writing a memoir while under contract to a major publisher that I was doing it my way, so in a way the writing of this novel is an effort to go back to what I used to do, which is to write what I want to write how I want to write it, not write what I think someone else wants me to write because that is what I feel I am contractually obligated to do. This novel is all about doing it my way. The other way is bullshit.”

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No, I Will Not Give You a Topless Haircut

Some years ago, I posted here and on Instagram about some vans parked around Burbank with signage on the side advertising a TOPLESS HAIRDRESSER. Ever since then, “topless hairdresser” is one of the more popular search terms that brings people to this site. In any case, in response to the above message that I received recently, no, I will not give you a topless haircut. Sorry to break hearts for topless haircut fans.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter

This is part 15 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

I’ve been writing on the internet for a very long time. Since the ‘90s. First, I co-created and co-edited an online literary magazine. Then I had a popular blog. Along the way, I wrote for various publications, digital and print. Today I have my own website with its own blog, and I have various social media channels. Throughout it all, there have been many trends for sharing content online. At one point, you had to have a blog. Then there was that whole pivot to video thing. Somewhere on the route, it was decided that if you weren’t an influencer with clout, you didn’t count. These days, newsletters are the current supposed must-have, and there’s a competitive frenzy over who has the most subscribers, and whether they’re paying subscribers or not, and what said newsletter’s open rate for its emails, and wait how are you monetizing your newsletter in other ways, by the way? In my opinion, newsletters are just one more fad that will boom and bust, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one. In this edition of Fuck You, Pay Me, I share 10 reasons why you should have a newsletter.

1. It’s an experiment. Should you have a newsletter? Should you not have a newsletter? If you have one, will anyone read it? If you do it, should you monetize it? If you start it, what should you write about? Who cares? Who knows? Everything is an experiment in the beginning, and things only become successful (or not) in hindsight. My first newsletter was called Valleywood, but when that didn’t feel like a fit for me, I started a new one called The Reverse Cowgirl. The latter feels like a better fit. It took some experimenting to figure that out. But the experimenting, the not-knowing, was required to reach the solution.

2. It’s creative. Before I landed on my current newsletter format, which is kind of written like a personal and professional diary, I tried writing my newsletter in various formats. A listicle. A bunch of photos. An essay. More personal and less professional. More professional and less personal. I even used AI to write one (a fact that I disclosed). More recently, I landed on a format I seem to like the best, which is both personal and professional, which incorporates, among other things, a mini-listicle and what I’m doing writing-wise, and which combines a set of different things that appeal to me. This means I have a basic structure that makes the newsletter easier to do and more consistent, but it also means that I can do a bunch of different things within that format, which basically sums up my entire career.

3. It’s multimedia. If you’re posting on social media, you’re probably posting content in one or two mediums. On X, that may be text. On Instagram, that may be an image. On TikTok, that may be video. On Substack, which is the newsletter platform I use, you can do all of those things: write, post images, share video. You can embed social media posts. You can use Substack’s stock photos or its AI image generator. You can share live video. This multimedia approach appeals to me, someone who writes and takes photos and spends too much time on social media. I want to do all the things, not just the one thing. This multimedia approach may also be more appealing to your subscribers, some of whom may be more text-oriented and some of whom may be more visually-oriented.

4. It’s free. On Substack, as long as your newsletter is free to subscribers, there are no costs. You don’t need any special equipment, it’s easy to set up and get started, and there’s no charge for you to send your newsletter to your subscribers. If you enable paid subscriptions—start charging your subscribers to read some or all of your newsletter content—there are fees, which are outlined here. But otherwise, Substack is a free tool, one that you can use to experiment with, create multimedia content with, and share with, and that makes it an attractive option. Of course, Substack isn’t the only newsletter platform, and there are others, which have their own pricing.

5. It has no editor. As someone who has been writing forever, I’ve had a lot of editors over the years. Some are great and have improved my writing. Some are so-so and don’t have much of an impact. Some are terrible and shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own shopping lists. With my newsletter, I have no editor. No gatekeeper who gets to green flag or red flag what I want to write about. No person meddling with my prose. No point-of-view I have to take into consideration when trying to decide if I should or shouldn’t write about something of interest to me. If you’re a weak or inexperienced writer, not having an editor may be a downside, but for me, it’s all good when the editor is not only not in my head but doesn’t exist.

6. It’s uncensored-ish. This isn’t exactly true and not without complications, but I would argue that Substack takes a mostly hands-off approach to content moderation, within reason. (You can find Substack’s Terms of Use here and Content Guidelines here.) This aspect of Substack is not without complications, but for someone like me, whose newsletter’s subject matter is sex, it makes a difference that I not be creating on a platform that has a hair-trigger approach to content moderation, like, say, Instagram. Substack allows “depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature, however, we have a strict no nudity policy for profile images.” And that’s good enough for me.

7. It’s personal. There’s something intimate about email, isn’t there? Set aside the spam, the generic newsletters from Big Companies, the annoying notes from your boss wanting to know when that thing you’re supposed to do will be done. When the email is from the right person or strikes the right tone, an email can generate a kind of intimacy that random shit posted across the internet can’t. It seems personal. It seems like it’s for you. It allows the subscriber to feel like they have an intimate relationship with the newsletter writer. And that’s valuable. Because that sense of intimacy, even if it’s an illusion, even if, as in the case of pornography, it’s a known illusion, is what will keep subscribers subscribed.

8. It’s not content calendar driven. Those who have toiled in the content mines of social media copywriting, as I have, know that content calendars are ravenous beasts. Your words and images become content. Your posts become empty spaces on a digital calendar that must be filled. You start googling the holidays for the month you’re working on in hopes that will inspire you to create something really high performing in honor of National Hot Dog Day. Unless you want it to, newsletters don’t have any of that. And for free newsletters, you can feel free to write whatever you want to write whenever you want to write it. Deadlines? Fuhgeddaboudit. Maybe you like deadlines—in which case, go for it. Maybe you want to have a content calendar. By all means, don’t let me stop you. But the strategic plan for your newsletter is for you to devise and execute as you see fit.

9. It’s a revenue generator. Your newsletter may make you money, or it may not. It may generate revenue for you directly, through, say, paid subscriptions. Or it may generate revenue for you indirectly, by, for example, getting your name and work in front of someone who likes it, who reaches out to you, and who pays you to do something for them because they saw you do something similar in your newsletter. Or by selling some other product you’re selling, like, say, a book. But one thing is for sure: You will never make money from a newsletter that you never create, that you never publish, that you never write. The only way to find out if your newsletter is a revenue generator is by starting to write it with no guarantee that it will deliver a return on your time and effort investment.

10. It’s fun. For those who are tired of hustle culture and monetizable stoicism and the self as brand, a newsletter can be a place to return to one’s original state: a state of play. When you can do whatever you want, you start to do interesting things. When you realize there is no fence around the field, you start running beyond the old perimeter. When you allow yourself to not be right, to not care, to forget what you’re doing and just start doing, you begin to change what you’re doing, how you’re doing, and who you are. And that’s worth it, not matter who you are or what you do, how much you have or how much you don’t, whether anyone reads a word of it or if it’s just a thing for the only person that matters: you.

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Meet the Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.

Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.

Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.

I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.

It's the gig economy

For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."

From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.

The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.

Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.

Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.

The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.

As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?

Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."

Cam girls are the new porn stars

"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."

That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."

One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."

Online, the heart is a lonely hunter

When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.

"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."

Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."

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Sex Sales

Today on Forbes.com, I wrote about Etsy banning adult toy sales, among a host of other new constraints imposed on people who hawk mature wares on the e-commerce platform. You can read it right here.

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Porn Star 3.0: This X-Rated Social Media Influencer Makes Seven Figures A Year

This story was written by me and originally published on Forbes.com in May 2020.

She goes by the moniker Lena the Plug. Never heard of her? Well, you’re in the minority. She has 3.5 million Instagram followers, nearly 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, and 1.1 million Twitter followers. And she’s built this empire herself.

At 29, Lena is a new kind of adult performer. Once upon a time, adult actresses signed exclusive contracts with adult production companies. Today, influencers like Lena create their own adult content and use their social media platforms to promote their content and score paying subscribers.

Lena didn’t set out to disrupt the porn business. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Her family is Armenian, and she grew up in Glendale, California.

Think she’s an amateur?

She earned seven figures last year.

Susannah Breslin: You have millions of followers across your social media platforms. What do you think is your appeal?

Lena the Plug: My YouTube fan base has transformed a lot. I think my appeal at first was purely sexual on YouTube. People showed up to subscribe to my content because they wanted to see me make a sex tape when I reached a million subscribers. Mostly men were watching, but some women showed up as well to see the train wreck they thought I would be. I ended up just sharing the most real and raw, most honest parts of myself on my channel. I sort of treated my videos like they were diary entries for a while. It was an outlet for me. I cried on camera. Yes, I shared the exciting party life I was living with my boyfriend, but I also talked about my eating disorder, losing a good friend to suicide, and how I struggled with the hate that comes with sex work. I went from a 5% female demographic to a 45% female audience, which really stood out to me. I think my YouTube channel has done a lot to really flush me out as a “whole” person, if that makes sense. People see a sex worker, and to them, she is purely a sexual object. It is hard for the consumer to see past that, but when you open up and show “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” you’re humanizing yourself to an audience. They can relate to you in a way that they couldn’t have imagined before. I think that’s my appeal. Getting a person to say: “Okay, she has a totally different type of occupation than the one I do, but I can relate to her. I can see myself befriending her. We are not so different, in a way.”

Breslin: Some people might be surprised to learn that you're bringing in seven figures annually. What are your revenue sources?

Lena: I have a big YouTube and Instagram following, but 95% of my revenue stream comes from selling access to my premium Snapchat and OnlyFans subscriptions. The other 5% is a combination of YouTube revenue, Instagram and YouTube brand deals, adult tube sites, and merchandise. It’s hard to get brand deals when you do 18+ work, or earn a high amount of revenue on Youtube when you are a sex worker—videos get demonetized even if they abide by YouTube community guidelines—so I have always relied on creating and selling quality adult content. It is the bread and butter of my business. 

Breslin: Was being an entrepreneur something you planned or did you more fall into it?

Lena: I’ll be honest. I didn’t think I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body until I started doing this work. I began selling access to my premium Snapchat back in 2016 when it became very apparent that because of my high follower count on Instagram and Snapchat, I would have guaranteed financial success with it. A few different people who ran sites that girls could sell access to their Snapchat on had reached out to me to join their sites. They wanted 50% of the revenue for me showing my entire body online, while they just hosted the site that processed the credit cards. It struck a nerve with me, and I couldn’t get myself to take any of those deals. I decided to have a site built for myself, where I could keep a majority of my earnings. I’ve since moved to larger, more mainstream sites—like OnlyFans—because they offer a reasonable revenue split, but I think that experience with creating my own website is what started me out as the entrepreneur I didn’t know I could be. 

Breslin: Even though adult content is ubiquitous on the internet, there's still stigma attached to sex work. How do you navigate that?

Lena: It used to be really hard, at first. I was overwhelmed with negativity when I first gained notoriety online. I felt I had truly made a mistake in choosing this work and should have never entered this space. I wasn’t used to the repeated name-callings back then. I’ve since gotten used to it and grown thicker skin. If someone calls you a whore thousands of times, it just doesn’t hurt anymore, you know? I see the same negative comments all the time. They lose their meaning after a while. The commenters of these words don’t feel like real people anymore. I basically just block and ignore now. Internally, I acknowledge that whoever is commenting is coming from a very different world than the one I know. They haven’t been exposed to the same things that have allowed me to be open-minded about sex. I try to be forgiving about their hatred and remind myself that there was probably a time where I was more close-minded and would have probably thought poorly of sex workers too. It doesn’t make it right, but it helps me to put it into perspective and try to understand them better. 

Breslin: Years ago, adult performers had exclusive contracts with production studios. What role has the internet and social media played in your career?

Lena: Without the internet and social media, I would have no career. Without Instagram and Snapchat, I would have never known that selling adult content online was even an option. I would have no clue that you can make an entire career off of it. I only got into this business because so many of my followers kept asking me if I had “premium” content. Now I use my social media platforms as marketing tools for my business and [as a way] to meet other creators to work with. I owe everything to the internet and these platforms. 

Breslin: How has the pandemic impacted your business?

Lena: The pandemic has affected a majority of businesses in a very negative way, but my business has been growing steadily during the past couple of months, in terms of selling memberships to my OnlyFans. Also, I always worked from home, so the pandemic hasn’t changed that for me. The one difference in my business is that the type of content I create is a little different. I can’t meet with other performers to shoot content, so I mostly film solo content or shoot videos with my partner, who I’m quarantined with. I have shot a couple of Zoom orgies, which are fun, but I look forward to when I can physically work with other beautiful women in person again. 

Breslin: You announced not long ago that you're pregnant. What was the reaction like from your followers? How has being pregnant impacted work?

Lena: Yes, I am currently 17 weeks pregnant! I made my announcement on social media a few weeks ago, and as with most things, it was good and bad. I was overwhelmed with beautiful messages from many of my followers who are excited for this new chapter in my life. However, many people felt the need to vocalize their opinions about the mistake they seem to think I am making. The number one concern is that my child will be bullied because of my career choice, and that it is selfish for me to bring kids into this world. Others believe that if I’m choosing motherhood, I should leave sex work behind. It’s apparent that these people subscribe to the idea that women cannot be both maternal and sexual, they must choose one or the other. I’m ignoring everyone and continuing to do my job and live my life. I shouldn’t have to leave my career, especially while my success is constantly growing at a steady rate, just because I am having a child. I’m a business woman, just like any other business woman, and I’m in the very fortunate position where I don’t have to give anything up. So far, my pregnancy hasn’t affected my work. People still love my content, even with the extra weight. As I grow and look undeniably pregnant, I am sure I will lose some amount of subscribers who miss my smaller frame, but I will surely gain some new ones who prefer a big-bellied body. 

Breslin: Who's your role model? Kim Kardashian? Steve Jobs?

Lena: I wouldn’t really say I had any role models when I came into this business because I sort of fell into it without even realizing what was happening or how big I was getting.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #13: How to Be a Consultant

This is part 13 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

Far and away the best money I make is in consulting. That said, when people ask me what I do as a consultant, it’s hard to say. I’ve described it as I do strategic communications and I tell CEOs and founders what to do and I’m a corporate dominatrix. In any case, I’ve certainly learned a lot as a consultant, so in this post I’ll be sharing a bit about what I do and what I’ve discovered as a professional consigliere.

My background If you look at my personal history, I’m not someone who should be good at advising heads of business on what do. My parents were English professors, and they had little interest in and a general disdain for anything corporate. For them, money was a source of anxiety, and there was never enough of it. A fair amount of their psychic energies was spent figuring out how not to work or get in a position where they didn’t have to work: obtain a grant that gave them an excuse to not have to teach, go on sabbatical, make it to the summer months when school was out. Maybe because my parents were so anxious about money, I started working at a young age. My first business was a pet-sitting business. To drum up clients, I made signs and put them around the neighborhood. I took care of dogs and cats and parakeets. I think I was 11. After that, I did babysitting. When I was thirteen, I worked at a flower stand. My first real job was at Baskin-Robbins. As I got older, I was an au pair, and I did various retail jobs (making sandwiches, selling pasta, working in a cake shop). Basically, I saw money as something that you earned but was elusive.

My education First I got a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Then I got an M.A. from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago. I don’t have any recollection of learning anything about business during these years. As part of my graduate program, I taught English to UIC freshman. After I got my degree, I moved back to the Bay Area, where I taught English at community colleges. I taught because it was what my parents had done. Then my father died. I stopped teaching. It was right around this time that the Internet started really ramping up (it was the mid-Nineties). I got a job as a publicist for a book imprint; after a while, I started wondering why I was promoting other people’s work when I could be promoting my own. A couple girlfriends and I created an online magazine. I started writing freelance articles for local weeklies. Then I wrote for national glossy magazines. I was making money from writing. Eventually, I did TV, too. My first TV appearance was on “Politically Incorrect.” I moved to Los Angeles. I carved out a pretty good living freelance writing. I got a gig on Playboy TV.

My internet In 2002, I launched The Reverse Cowgirl. I believe it was the second sex-related blog to ever exist. People really liked it. I liked that it was hosted on Salon’s website, and their back end allowed me to see my blog’s traffic. I got hooked on the numbers. I combined my writing skills with my PR savvy and got very good at driving traffic. It was like the internet was a ball of energy, and people were the thing that you could move through the space. Within a few years, I had gotten so good that big media companies were hiring me to help them increase traffic to their platforms. I kept writing, of course. But my work got a little more commercial, and I started learning how the sausage gets made in corporate America. I wrote for Forbes.com. I became an editor for a media company. I did creative projects on the side. The internet was where I really thrived. I launched various projects that got media attention. Things were flowing.

My faux-MBA Eventually, I got married. Later, after I got divorced, I would refer to my marriage as “my Harvard MBA.” (To be clear, I do not have an MBA from Harvard or any other institution. My use of that terminology is a metaphor. If you think I have an MBA or went to Harvard, you are wrong.) The person to whom I was married worked in the corporate space. I learned about how companies work, how they think, what CEOs want, how strategy works, and what the difference is between companies and executives that thrive and companies and executives that fail. As it turned out, I had an uncanny knack for predicting how things would move strategically in the corporate realm. It seemed odd that I was good at this, since I had been raised by intellectuals and had no business education. Yet, there it was. It was like waking up one day and discovering that you are very good at chess, even though you had never played chess. One thing I liked about the corporate world was that it was easier to quantify success than in the writing world. The corporate world was all about profit margins and revenues and market shares. Writing is all about chasing good writing and subjective interpretations and creative expression.

My consultancy When I got divorced, I took my consulting savvy with me. Almost immediately, I started doing consulting work. I only work with a retainer, because that’s the best way to form a relationship with a client. Years ago a former boss of mine compared me to a Swiss Army Knife, which was a way of saying I did a lot of things. This is true for consulting. I advise on branding, communications, social media, PR, marketing, and strategy. Oftentimes, my role is prophylactic. That is, I am advising the client to not do something that wouldn’t be to their advantage. At other times, I help them shape their image. Most of my clients come through word of mouth. I have a reputation for being good at crisis communications. I like the proximity to power, to big-number deals, to real movers and shakers. I have learned how general counsels think; what makes millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires tick; that if you get exposed to enough high-level operators you will find yourself referring to companies with $3 billion-dollar valuations as “small.” My clients are almost exclusively men. As a consultant, I am an invisible member of the big boy’s club.

Today, consulting is some of the most interesting work I do. I like helping people, working closely with my clients, and shaping something into something better than it was before. The kind of work I do isn’t easy, and it requires both strategic and intuitive talents, but the payoff is, well, pretty remarkable.

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An Excerpt from Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment

This is an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. You can order a copy here.

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I thought it would be interesting to write about the strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I was curious about these enigmatic clubs on Broadway that I had seen but into which I had never entered. As a kid in the back seat of my parents’ Dart, I had been driven through San Francisco and spotted The Condor (which, in 1964, had become the country’s first fully topless nightclub). Out front, a towering sign featured a supersized blonde, impossibly busty. Her name, I would find out later, was Carol Doda. She wore a black bikini with blinking red lights for nipples.

Doda was the opposite of my mother and her friends—they were feminists who viewed makeup, heavily styled hair, and revealing clothes as tools the patriarchy used to subjugate and objectify women. But Doda wasn’t anyone’s tool; she was a legend. A San Francisco Art Institute dropout, she had become America’s first topless dancer of note, her surgically enhanced breasts billed as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” When I was in graduate school, I had seen an episode of HBO’s “Real Sex” about strippers, and I had been struck by the revelation that strip clubs were places where intimacy was for sale. Sure, it was transient, transactional, and most often conducted between a guy with a handful of dollar bills and a dancer in a G-string and not much else who twirled seductively around a pole on a stage, but there was something real about it, I sensed. Or was there? I wanted to find out. The strip club dancers reminded me of the girls I had hung out with in high school, whom everyone else had deemed slutty. These women were powerful, too, in control, the love object I aspired to be, or seemed like it. Intimacy, that for which I had craved as a little girl, was their hustle.

“Oh, my god, Susannah, make up your mind!” Anne laughed as we stood at the corner on a Saturday night. Broadway was teeming with drunk guys, sailors on leave, and couples on the prowl for something more interesting than what they had already. I scanned the glowing signs. Roaring 20’s. Big Al’s. The Hungry I.

“This one!”

We ducked inside.

As we moved down the black hallway toward a red velvet curtain, I worried what someone else in the club might think. I, a woman, was in a strip club. As I pulled back the curtain, it dawned on me that wasn’t going to be an issue. There was one thing to which the men scattered at the small dimly lit tables around the room were paying attention, and it wasn’t me. It was the half-naked girl on the stage.

Nonchalantly, we took a seat at a table near the back. We ordered a couple of overpriced drinks. I took a sip: it was straight orange juice. The cocktails were alcohol-free, thanks to a California law that prohibited the sale of alcohol in fully nude strip clubs. It didn’t matter, my head was buzzing from the drinks we’d had at the bar around the corner that we’d been to earlier.  

In the song that was blasting, Trent Reznor was expressing a desire to violate someone. The statuesque brunette teetering on the highest heels I had ever seen peeled off her dental-floss thin neon green thong. She tossed her thong to one side, grabbed the pole, climbed up it. High above the crowd, she wrapped her thighs around the pole and bent over backwards, throwing her arms open like an inverted angel. 

In that moment, everything that had happened seemed far away. The intellectual, cloistered, academic world in which I had grown up was right across the Bay, but it may as well have been a million miles from here. I looked at a solitary businessman sitting at the next table. His tie was untied. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair. His eyes were glassy. He had been hypnotized. In this alternative universe, women had all the power, and men were at their mercy. I didn’t want to be a stripper; I was too shy, too insecure, too inhibited to take off my clothes in front of strangers. But I wanted what she had: the stage, the men in awe, the audience worshipping her as a superhuman goddess. As a kid, I was starved for attention. This was an orgy of attention. As a pre-pubescent girl, I felt embarrassed by my own burgeoning sexuality, left to figure it out for myself because my mother was too depressed. Here, sex was on parade, for sale, everywhere I looked. In the Block Project, I was the object, the one on view, the child studied by researchers from across tables in Tolman Hall’s austere experiment rooms. Now I was the voyeur, the looker, the scopophiliac. It was intoxicating.

As we sped back to the East Bay in the early morning hours, I watched the city get smaller and smaller in the side view mirror. My father was dead, that was an incontrovertible fact, but for a few hours tonight I had forgotten all about that. I could write about this. I could become a gonzo journalist, like one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, and immerse myself in it. Sex would be my beat.

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So You Want to Be a Male Porn Star

As I’ve written previously, I regularly get emails from men who want to be porn stars because I wrote this story a dozen years ago. So far this week, I’ve gotten two — no, three. Oftentimes they are from India or Pakistan.

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Thanks, Naked Capitalism

It was nice to see that Naked Capitalism shared a link to my 2017 story about financial domination. Thank you!

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The Hustle of Financial Domination

This story was written by me and published by Topic Magazine in December 2017.

Part I—Haven the Great

You can call her Goddess Haven—although, on Twitter, her handle is @Haven_TheGreat—and if you’re what’s known in the curious world of financial domination as a “pay pig,” you’re going to have to offer her a “tribute,” if you want her to even acknowledge that you exist.

In “findom,” as it’s known, it’s all about the money. Or, as Haven puts it in her Twitter profile: “Pay first, learn about me later.”

Haven is 24, based out of Orlando, Florida, and supports herself by monetizing her talent for financial domination, a BDSM fetish-based relationship in which women financially dominate men for profit.

Haven, who got into financial domination at 19, is a natural.

“I guess I have a dominant bitch personality,” she says. “I’m naturally a pretty mean person. I don’t even really feel like it’s work.”

Financial domination takes many forms. Some men get turned on by giving a dominatrix money, some men want to be insulted while masturbating during a live web camming session with a dominatrix, and some men want to send gifts and be ignored. Many of these interactions are technology-based—phone, texting, emails, Skype. Fundamentally, the pleasure for the financial submissive is in offering a payment—known as a “tribute”—to the dominatrix.

Ask Haven if she likes her job, and she’ll tell you: “I love it.”

Once upon a time, Haven was a go-go dancer. Then she started camming—conducting live webcam sessions for paying clients. Along the way, she heard about “sugar babies,” young women “kept,” financially, by older men, “sugar daddies.” She was intrigued—except she didn’t want to have sex with the guys. When she heard about “findom,” she thought, “There’s no way this is real. There’s no way men can give you money for no reason.” She joined a fetish website, created a profile offering financial domination, and started making money.

As Haven sees it, findom is “a power exchange with financial transactions.” The men are surprisingly normal, she says. “A lot of these guys are, like, really stable people, but they really just want a switch up from their everyday routine.” Many, she says, are white collar professionals—CEOs, lawyers, real estate investors—in their 30s or older. Some men do financial domination—straight, gay, posting photos of their abs or dick pics to social media to attract willing pay pigs—but far more women are financially dominating men.

On video hosting platforms like iWantClips, which specializes in “The Best in Amateur Fetish Video Clips,” Haven sells original video clips. “I’ll do verbal humiliation, where I’m insulting them. ‘You’re such a fucking loser, you’ll never be with someone like me.’” On other sites, a client pays her a flat rate or by the minute to communicate with him. With live web camming, “Usually, it’s a guy waiting for instructions on whatever he paid for. If he paid for jack-off instructions, I have to be like, ‘Take off your pants, loser,’ and I have to tell him to go fast or to go slow, until his time is up. They‘ll keep paying for me to keep degrading them. Sometimes we have to sit there and watch them jack off, while we take their money.” Another client might “clear” her Amazon Wish List, buying her everything on it.

She’s only done a “cash meet” once, she says. “This guy literally drove down [to Orlando] from an hour away, handed me some money, took me and my friends to get our nails done, and took us shopping.” In “wallet rape,” she says, “You’re just taking whatever it is you want from” a submissive who “has no limit” to what he’ll spend, through whatever platform or mode of communication he prefers.

Perhaps the most extreme version of financial domination requires TeamViewer, a software package that enables remote viewing of a computer. The client surrenders his passwords to the financial dominatrix, and she takes command of his computer. She drains his accounts as he watches. “I’m literally taking over their computer.”

This year, Haven estimates, she’ll make six figures.

One financial submissive bought video clips from her and exchanged messages with her online. On one occasion, he gave her $42,000, she says. On another occasion, it was $44,000. He was a vice president at a bank. “He’s into foot fetish, so he just wanted to talk about feet, really. He talked about his life and stuff. I like to act interested—because it makes more money, obviously.”

According to Haven, she deserves what she gets. “Women were meant to be happy and pampered, while men work.” Women who get into this, she says, “just want to take control over our lives.” (Some men have told her that a woman of color who does what she does should charge less than a white woman doing the same job.)

At first, her boyfriend of four years didn’t like her career. Now he doesn’t really care. “Sometimes he says he thinks I’m weird and that I don’t really have a conscience, for taking money from these people. I think I’m offering something in return. It’s therapeutic for most of my clients. It’s a sense of release.” She files taxes as an independent contractor. As for profits, “I save a lot of it, and I invest a lot of it into real estate with my dad.”

Still, it’s always a hustle, and financial dominants are hunting for a “white whale,” that rare financial submissive who isn’t a “time waster” and tributes thousands of dollars. It’s the equivalent of winning the lottery in the findom game.

But whales are few and far between.

Part II—The Pro-Dommes

“Financial domination is pretty much not what people imagine it to be,” says Tara Indiana, who’s been a dominatrix for 28 years. “You imagine they’re rich, powerful executives. That’s not always the case. They tend to have a very stable job. They work for the government, or they work in an office—a steady job with a steady paycheck.”

For someone like Indiana, financial dominatrix is but one more tool in a box of BDSM tricks. She’s done both real and virtual financial domination. “Very often, you don’t meet them or see them in person,” she says. “The idea is that the only way that they can be with a woman that’s beautiful like you is by giving up the money. That’s the only thing they have to offer.” For some men, it’s not so much sex, per se, but wanting a “trophy.” “So it’s all about lavishing and pampering and keeping you in the lifestyle that you’re accustomed to.”

Is financial domination about sex or money? “‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power,’” says Indiana, quoting Oscar Wilde. “It’s about surrendering your power to a dominant person. That power could be a whip or that power could be money.”

A long time ago, before financial domination was a thing, Indiana worked the phones at an escort business. One man liked to book appointments with escorts and negotiate a generous budget—$5,000, $10,000, $20,000. “He’d send the girl to him at his house,” Indiana recalls. “She would handcuff him to his radiator and take his credit card and go up and down Fifth Avenue—to Chanel, Dior—and go shopping, and she’d pick out an outfit.” The escort would call the man on the phone, telling him what she was doing. “‘Oh, I just got this olive green dress with matching alligator shoes.’ She’d describe [the clothes] in American Psycho detail. ‘And I just spent $7,000,’ and she’d laugh, and he’d scream at the top of his lungs and hang up on you.”

Justine Cross—owner and “Head Bitch in Charge” of two popular Los Angeles BDSM dungeons, Dungeon East and Dungeon West—has turned domination into a successful business. Her extensive repertoire includes financial domination.

“I have people [that I’ve never met] who will just send me money or gifts,” she says. “I had someone purchase me thousands of dollars of lingerie, and I said, ‘I’ll show it to you on cam,’ and he said, ‘No, I just wanted to give it to you.’ Other people want to go shopping with me and buy me gifts.”

As Cross sees it, what’s “sexual” is hard to define. “It’s always sexualized, but some people have a different definition of what that means,” she says. “Some people are really getting off and giving money, and some people are really getting off and giving money.”

Nowadays, competition is growing. On social media, more women are angling to get what seems like easy money. A newbie might set up an account on Twitter or Instagram, start posting sexy selfies, and hashtag away: #findom, #paypigs, #tribute, #walletrape. But findom is hard work. “I always say to people, ‘Do you know how hard I work to wake up one morning with a few extra thousand dollars and [Christian] Louboutins on my doorstep?’” Cross says.

Some financial dominatrixes are full-time, but not most. “They’re not just doing one thing. They’re doing things like NiteFlirt, and clips, and private webcam shows. So there’s a lot they’re doing. It’s not like there’s a lot of people doing that. There’s a handful of top earners in the world of BDSM.”

Not all pay pigs are committed or financially faithful. A friend of Cross’s landed a whale. He paid for her Central Park West apartment and gave her $60,000 two times a year. It turned out he was doing the same thing with five other women. “There’s a lot of money out there,” Cross notes.

Part III—A Sensual Sadist

Mistress Mara Julianne is 28. Based in Los Angeles, she’s a “sensual sadist” who employs financial domination as one of the many tools at her disposal. “I really like dishing out pain, but I’m one of the nicer dommes.” Currently, she’s a solo operator; in addition to paying clients, she has a “sub,” a man who is submissive to her but doesn’t pay her, and with whom she’s involved in a personal relationship. In 2013, she started working at a local dungeon. Right now, being a professional dominatrix is her career, but, she says, “I do play on my personal time when I can.”

In order to support herself as a full-time dominatrix, she meets a variety of fetishistic needs. She does bondage and is studying shibari, the art of Japanese rope bondage; she loves impact play: spanking, caning, and flogging; there’s body worship, in which a client caresses or massages whichever body part of hers that he fetishizes; using plastic wrap, she mummies clients; in role-playing, she might play the part of a mother or girlfriend; for pet play, she pretends her client is a puppy or pig and “the submissive doesn’t get to answer like a human, they have to roll over or bark, and I have to take them on walks.” Foot fetish is big, too. For “the longest time, my mother told me I had stinky feet.” Men pay her to let them massage, lick, and smell her feet. Of course, she does financial domination.

Depending on what a financial submissive wants, she issues orders. “I can instruct them to pretty much do anything, whether it’s giving me money or ignoring them. When they’re done with that, they hang up.” One regular gives her $100 three times a week. Recently, they met in person for the first time. He gets off on “the satisfaction of knowing he’s improving my life.” He’s married, retired, and lives in Orange County. On “Takeover Tuesdays,” she picks items on her online wish list, and he buys them for her. “He used to be some sort of software engineer,” she adds.

Before she became a dominatrix, she was a photographer and graphic designer, skills she’s using to brand herself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, in online financial domination. “A lot of these girls are young, and I don’t know if they want all this coming back to them later on in life. I’ve chosen to expose myself, and I know the risks that come with that. They think it’s really easy. Most of the girls that try it drop out within two weeks to two months. You have to market yourself.”

In financial domination, some women of color get low-balled by their mostly-white clientele and some leverage their race to increase their revenue. Mistress Mara targets a niche. “I’m a mix—Chinese, Filipino, Spanish.” She intentionally plays into a stereotype of cultural strictness or cruelty, one she believes comes naturally to her due to her “tiger mom.” “It’s been tailored into my play for corporal punishment, because that’s kind of what I went through.”

While the number of amateurs doing financial domination is rising and some pro dommes do it solely for the revenue, Mistress Mara prefers a sensitive approach to emptying a man’s wallet. “I see them as human beings, even if I treat them like crap, because they are willing to give themselves completely to me—emotionally, spiritually, financially,” she says. “That, to me, is the biggest gift a human being can do that for another person. It’s almost like an act of love, in a way. I know, it’s romanticizing it. I’m not going home with them. The session will end. It’s monetary-based. But I give 110 percent every single time.”

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Basquiat in L.A.

This morning I saw an amazing Jean-Michel Basquiat show at Gagosian Beverly Hills: “Made on Market Street.”

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I'm The Fixer

In addition to writing books and producing journalism, I’m a creative consultant. As The Fixer, I do a little bit of everything that has to do with words. From ghostwriting books to editing manuscripts to crafting website content, I help my clients with their word-based projects. Are you a busy CEO who needs a ghostwriter? I can do that. Are you a writer who needs someone to assist you in getting your writing where it should be? I can do that. Are you a marketing company in search of someone who can create compelling copy? I can do that. Book a one-hour introductory consultation here or email me to schedule your session here, and let’s get started.

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• Ghostwriting

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• Press releases

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• WarnerMedia

• Playboy Enterprises

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• “Conan” on TBS

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• "Susannah is utterly brilliant. She's a highly experienced strategic thinker who brings bold new ideas and perspectives to the table, from brand positioning and messaging to ambitious content initiatives. I look forward to working with her again." — executive producer / GM

• "There are few people I have come across in my 30 years of working with leaders all over the world with the level of intelligence and work ethic as Susannah. I am very picky who I choose to collaborate with; Susannah is exceptional." — change management consultant

• "Susannah is brilliant at cutting through the noise and locating what's needed with a laser focus. Her ability to help people see themselves more clearly, identify weaknesses and gaps, and provide a productive critique to course correct is extraordinary." — chief operating officer

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Fuck You, Pay Me #8: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Fiction Edition)

This is part 8 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

I thought I’d list some of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of fiction. Obviously, I’ve excluded my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. But I’ve included my short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, and my novel-in-progress, (which I’ll refer to here as) Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress.

1. You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In 2003, I published my short story collection through Future Tense Books. The collection is comprised of fourteen stories, among them: “Apartment,” “He Was Probably in Jail,” and “Hey Doll.” These stories were written when I was in graduate school, after I graduated, and during the course of my writing career. The subject matter is nuts and often about weird sex fetishes, dysfunctional relationships, and things that happen when you find yourself working in Porn Valley. You can buy it on Amazon for $80.

   Standout quote: “You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his own penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket.”

   Year published and publisher: 2003, Future Tense Books

2. Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress Currently, I’m working on a novel that’s set in the adult film industry. It focuses on a single character and is a real pleasure to write. As I have shared in interviews, writing my memoir was a slog, and I really wanted to undo that experience and create something that was amusing and exciting and fresh. I’ve written nearly 25% of this novel so far, and every time I re-read it I laugh out loud. It’s a delight.

   Standout quote: “Of course, there were freaks of nature that worked the adult business like sideshow acts, men preternaturally gifted with eye-popping appendages who had carved out a niche for themselves by starring in movies with titles that trumpeted their larger-than-life anatomies, but those guys were outliers.”

   Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD

3. “The Tumor“ In 2015, I self-published this short story. It’s about an anthropomorphic tumor, a troubled marriage, and a bad man. I had the cover designed, the layout designed, and the formats designed. I really enjoyed this process, as it gave me the ability to control the process from soup to nuts. You can buy it on Gumroad for $1. To date, I’ve earned a total of $884.50 selling this product through Gumroad, using the Pay What You Want option.

   Standout quote: “My original idea was that we take her out in the yard, and that I, an expert marksman, shoot her in the breast at the site to which she had pointed, thereby destroying the tumor.”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, self-published

4. “Spike” In 2020, Bending Genres published this short story of mine which is about a male porn star who is struggling with performance anxiety. I wrote this story some years earlier, and I submitted it many times to many literary journals, and no one wanted to publish it until Bending Genres came along. I love this story and think it’s hilarious.

   Standout quote: “Then he’d seen an ad for a cattle call in the San Fernando Valley, and when the guy in the wood paneled room in the second-story office asked him to drop his pants so they could take a Polaroid that would crop out his head entirely and feature his cock prominently, he did what the man said.”

   Year published and publisher: 2020, Bending Genres

5. “Necking Team Button” In 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker asked me to write a short story for their Significant Objects project, which was a literary experiment that involved pairing writers with found objects. The experiment prompted the interrogation of how narratives shape the perceived value of objects and culminated in an auction. (You can read how the project worked here.) The writers of these stories included Jonathan Lethem, Sheila Heti, and Colson Whitehead. Eventually, the project became an anthology, which you can buy on Amazon. My story combines fiction and nonfiction.

   Standout quote: “Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether—a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.”

   Year published and publisher: 2009, Significant Objects; 2012, Fantagraphics

6. “She Is a Girl” I wrote this story in 2005, when I was living in New Orleans. It was published in the very cool Maisonneuve. Like a lot of my fiction, this story interweaves fact and fiction, and in some ways it exists as a very early draft of my memoir. Also like a lot of my fiction, and some of my nonfiction, including my memoir, it has surrealist elements. The story is about what it’s like to be a girl and what it’s like to be a woman and the stuff that happens in between. I think this story is kind of sweet.

   Standout quote: “The tectonic plates of her ribs lying protectively over her heart can hardly contain whatever it is thumping inside her.”

   Year published and publisher: 2005, Maisonneuve

7. “The Flesh Eaters” This story was published in 2018 on Construction, which was a literary magazine, but maybe that publication no longer exists. Anyway, you can read the story by clicking the title, thanks to the Wayback Machine. This story is one of a series of short stories I’ve been doing over the years that take place in Porn Valley. In case you haven’t noticed, Porn Valley is my Yoknapatawpha County. The tale features Dolores, who works for a company in the San Fernando Valley that makes silicone vaginas. I think the idea came to me after I visited an adult toy manufacturer in North Hollywood and also because I used to own a silicone vagina, although I lost it.

   Standout quote: “Dolores didn’t expect to spend the last year sewing pubic hair into a disembodied silicone vagina, but that’s the way it happened.”

   Year published and publisher: 2018, Construction

8. “Hey Doll” If you’re looking for Susannah Breslin brand fiction, this is it. It was published by Nerve in 2002, if you’re old enough to remember that site. Thanks again to the Wayback Machine for providing a link to it in archived form. I don’t want to say too much about this story other than to say it was inspired by real events, and dating in Los Angeles is crazy, and in Hollywood truth and fiction are one and the same.

   Standout quote: “All of a sudden, before she knew it, he was naked down on the floor, and the bottom of her boot was across the back of his neck, and his tongue was on the top of her other boot, licking it, and she was shouting at him, You're licking my boot because that's the only thing that you're good enough to do!”

   Year published and publisher: 2002, Nerve

9. “The Boy Who Wore His Heart on His Sleeve“ This is a charming bit of flash fiction that appeared on A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction. It dates back to 2010. A Shaded View on Fashion is the brainchild of Diane Pernet, who is the coolest. I was really delighted to have anything of mine associated with anything of hers.

   Standout quote: “The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen.”

   Year published and publisher: 2010, A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction

10. “Revenge of the Cum Dumpster” It’s hard to believe that a story I wrote with this title has struggled to find a publisher. The story itself focuses on a pornographer who is not a very nice guy, who says something mean about the young woman who finds herself the subject of his current film project, and the swift consequences of karma on a porn movie set. I think it has yet to find a publisher because it has cum dumpster in the title and because people are so afraid of being cancelled these days for who knows what reason. Anyway, if you’re interested in publishing this seminal work, let me know.

    Standout quote: “The men had surrounded her in a half-circle, their penises a forest of trees in which she was lost.”

    Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD

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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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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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Fuck you, pay me #5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer

This is part 5 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of journalism. Reporters are being laid off. Journalists are out of work. I’ve been a writer for over 20 years. Throughout, I’ve been able to sustain my writing career by diversifying my talents. Here are some of the ways that I’ve made money by using my writer skills.

1. Copywriter. As I have written on this blog, I got paid $100 an hour pretending to be the personality of Pepto-Bismol on social media. This was a fun job. Sometimes I wish that I could do it again. According to my notes: “social media engagement [increased] by 500% and market share [grew] by 11%” during the time period in which I was pretending to be Pepto.

2. Journalist. Reporter. Journalist. Investigative whatever you want to call it. I’ve done pretty much every type of journalism there is. People say journalism dying. Maybe they’re right, but I doubt it. I’m probably best known for “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?,” an investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult film industry. My reporting has been described as “unflinching and devastating.”

3. Author. Last year, I published a memoir: Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Twenty years earlier, I published a short story collection: You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? I got an advance for the former; I didn’t get an advance for the latter. Books are a long game hustle. They may pay more money, but they may cost you a great deal of time.

4. Editor. I’ve been an editor for from Forbes.com, where I was the founding editor of the Vices section, and The Frisky, a site for women that was owned by Turner. These roles involved interfacing with other writers and editing their work, so if you’re incapable of those things, don’t be an editor. These days, sometimes someone who has an “editor” title is really just a writer; why this is, I have no idea.

5. Publicist. One of my first jobs after graduate school was doing PR for a book publisher. Being a publicist is a tough job because you do a lot of pitching, and oftentimes your pitches are ignored or declined. But being a publicist is one of the most important jobs I’ve ever had because I learned how to publicize myself. That skill came in handy when my memoir came out, and I worked hard to promote it.

6. Traffic driver. I’m not sure what to call this gig, even though I’ve done it for big companies. Organizations hire me to drive traffic to their digital platforms. I’ve found I obtain the best results when I function as both an editor and / or content creator in addition to driving traffic. For example, when I was at The Frisky, I grew the site from startup to 4M+ unique visitors and 22M+ page views a month.

7. Consultant. My consulting work as The Fixer is my highest-paid work. Typically my client is a CEO / founder / venture capitalist. They have a problem, and they hire me to fix it. This covers a range of issues, from getting media coverage to assisting in business development to strategic growth. Truth be told, I am better at this than anything else and have added millions of dollars to clients’ portfolios.

8. Essayist. I wrote “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” — on spec. I avoid writing on spec, because it sucks, but I knew the essay would help me promote my memoir. Once I was done, I shopped the essay around to a dozen outlets. Two were interested. I went back and forth on contract terms with the first, and we were unable to resolve them. The essay ended up at Slate, where I had a great editor, it got an excellent title, and I was happy.

9. Fiction writer. I write short stories, and I have had many of them published. I was paid for some of the short stories that were published, and I was not paid for others. Currently, I’m writing a novel that is set in the San Fernando Valley’s adult film industry, and I’m really excited about that.

10. Screenwriter / Producer. I’ve done some writing and producing for TV. This includes developing documentary and scripted TV series, including true crime, outdoor adventure, and miniseries. I was also a consultant for a movie directed by an Oscar-winning director. The TV business is not for the faint of heart. If you’re writing your own TV or movie project, please register it with the WGA.

11. Fellow. From 2018 to 2019, I was the Lawrence Grauman Jr. Post-graduate Fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley. This was a salaried role with benefits. At the time, the IRP’s leadership was in flux, but that has since changed for the better. I used my time as a fellow there to work on my memoir, which includes investigative reporting.

12. Teacher. When I was in grad school, I had a fellowship. My tuition was waived, I received a stipend, and I taught one undergraduate course per semester. I taught freshman composition and writing the research paper. After I graduated, I taught at various community colleges around the Bay Area (aka a gypsy scholar). Sometimes I think about getting my doctorate but haven’t decided yet.

13. Photographer. Over the course of my career, I have had some of my photos published in media outlets. These include Men’s Health, Forbes.com, Le Journale de la Photographie, mashKULTURE, Nerve, and Arthur. I can’t recall if I was paid for any of these photos, but I do enjoy taking pictures.

14. Ghost. I’ve been a ghostwriter in various incarnations, from ghostwriting tweets for celebrities to ghostwriting speeches for CEOs. I haven’t ghostwritten a book, although I imagine at some point I will. Everyone wants to be an author nowadays. They just don’t want to write the book. Recently, I enjoyed reading a story about a ghostwriter conference: “Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows.”

15. Blogger. I started blogging in 2002. I had a very popular blog called The Reverse Cowgirl. It was one of the internet’s first sex blogs. In 2008, Time.com named it one of the best blogs of the year. These days The Reverse Cowgirl is the name of my Substack newsletter, which I plan to monetize.

16. Project-er. I create independent projects. The Letters Project series was conducted over five years. I shared anonymous letters sent to me from johns, working girls, strip club patrons, cheaters, and porn-watchers. These projects were covered by Salon, Newsweek, and CBC Radio, among other outlets.

17. Talker. I’ve been a speaker on various panels, presented my work at conferences, and read my writing at literary events. Some of these events have been paid; some of them have not. Quite a few of them have connected me with other writers, and that experience has been invaluable.

18. Seller. This is a sector to which I hope to devote more attention moving forward. I have a Gumroad store where I sell a short story that I self-published, signed copies of my memoir, and my consulting services. Gumroad is a very simple, easy platform to use, and I highly recommend it.

19. On camera reporter. Years ago, I was an on camera reporter for Playboy TV’s “Sexcetera.” I did this gig for five years, I got paid well for my time, and I traveled the world. I saw very wild things, and I wrote some of my own scripts, and I got to visit the Playboy Mansion three times. Being on camera taught me a lot about myself. It also boosted my confidence. And for that I have Hef to thank.

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IWMF Instagram Stories Data Baby Takeover

Recently, the International Women’s Media Foundation allowed me to takeover their Instagram Stories to post about my new memoir, DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. The IWMF’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists provided grant support for my book. I really enjoyed doing this, as Stories is one of my favorite mediums. You can’t see it here, but the layering enables you to combine images and text and music and little cartoons of people doing things. In other words, the stories come alive.

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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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The Hidden Pervert

My latest newsletter is out. It features the perversions of dead people’s houses. Read it here. Subscribe here.

I’d assumed the place had belonged to an older gay man who had spent his final years contentedly rendering artistic homages to the penis, but when I got to the bedroom, I realized the deceased resident had been an older woman.

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