The latest edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl, is out. In this week’s newsletter: a porn star zine featuring Asa Akira, erotic art tapestries, lusting for Luigi “The Adjuster” Mangione, and more. (Subscribe)
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I reread Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer. Full disclosure: Lydia is my dear friend. Other full disclosure: This book is an absolute marvel. I love everything about this book: its lyrical prose, its daring and fearless tackling of Big Things (Life, Death, Reproduction), its insistence on what could be called optimism in the face of the chaos that is the universe. Sunny is bald! Maxon is going to the Moon! Bubber is hitting his head! And let’s not forget about the baby that’s coming or the double-life of Les Weathers. I highly, highly recommend.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight at Sherman Oaks Antique Mall. For more photos, follow me on Instagram.
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In this week’s edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, I’ve got a pole dancing mom, a substance that makes you hotter, a male porn star monologue, and more! Hit the button at the bottom of the newsletter to subscribe and get all the sex news that’s fit to print in your email inbox every week.
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In the early 2000s, I was working on a project I called The Fetish Alphabet. It was a series of flash fictions, all named for the letters of the alphabet, each letter representing a fetish. Over time, I had various of those stories published on various literary platforms. In 2003, Born Magazine published one: “C Is for Conjoined Twins.” I don’t quite recall how it worked, but the idea was the site was coupling texts by writers with multimedia creators, and the text and multimedia were combined into one cool result. My story was turned into a Flash-based (I believe) … I don’t know what to call it but artwork sounds about right … by the French artist Rolito. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can see the interactive, animated original story here. (This interactive work is also cited in Donna Leishman’s “The Flash Community: Implications for Post-Conceptualism.”)
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I took this photo today at Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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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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Machines in the Head: Selected Stories by Anna Kavan is weird as hell. If you’re extremely dumb, allergic to unconventional modes of storytelling, or enjoy Colleen Hoover, this book is not for you. These stories are very dark, concerned with insanity, and unrelenting in their refusal to deliver the happy endings so many readers are obsessed with getting from books these days. If you’re awesome and smart, you’ll love it.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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This story was written by me and published by Topic Magazine in December 2017.
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.
“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.
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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This short story was originally published by A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction in May 2010.
She had been waiting forever, it seemed, for a boy like this one, who wore his heart on his sleeve. Now, here he was, sitting across from her in this dimly lit restaurant, his arm on the table. The exposed, bloody organ was attached to his sleeve with what appeared to be a safety pin. Across the table, he was looking at her expectantly, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a dog listening for a sound only he could hear, the right side of his mouth pulling up slightly, as if he was unsure what she was thinking. Judging by the tangle of threads unraveling around the gaping hole in his blue sweater where his heart should have been, he had carved himself open to retrieve it. On his sleeve, the heart was shaking and shuddering, straining against the pin’s grasp. They had found each other on an online dating site three days previous and met for the first time 17 minutes ago. Now, here he was, looking eager and hopeful, and it was up to her to figure out what was she supposed to do next. She looked at the boy uncertainly and tried to hurry up and decide what she was going to do about this boy and his still-beating heart before the angry waitress returned and demanded to take their order. Is it too late? she said. The boy’s face dropped. Late? he said. Too late to put it back? She nodded her head at the heart. Oh, the boy said, looking down at it. Slowly, the blood was seeping into his napkin. Soon, it would spill off the table and pool on the floor, making a mess. I don’t know, he said. 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. It was too late to pull his arm off the table and put it in his lap. She would know what he was doing, and he would bleed all over his trousers. From somewhere behind him, he could hear the hard clanging of pots in the kitchen, the frantic barking of the chef, the buzz of other couples in love cooing at one another in the candlelight. Shit, he said, under his breath but loud enough that the girl would hear it. All of a sudden, he decided he had had enough. He reached over with his left hand and unfastened the safety pin holding his heart to his sleeve. Here, he said, taking his heart in his right hand. Standing up slightly, he leaned across the table and deposited the heart on the plate in front of the girl sitting across from him. The girl poked at the heart with her fork. Interesting, she said, sounding like a forensic pathologist. He had no idea what she meant by that, but he knew at that moment that if she would continue saying things like this while stabbing at his heart with the tiny tines of the silver fork in her hand, he could be with her and stay happy forever. In that moment, it seemed anything was possible.
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A shot from an estate sale in Encino, CA. Follow me on Instagram for more of my life in L.A. photographs.
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I took this photo at a porn convention in, I believe, Las Vegas, although it’s possible it was Chicago, but I’m pretty sure it was Vegas, in, say, 2013, or 2014, or something like that. I can’t remember if I spoke to the woman, although maybe I did, or maybe I didn’t. In any case, it’s one of my favorite shots I’ve taken.
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A parking lot mural at Circus Liquor in North Hollywood. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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An Asian mannequin on Hollywood Boulevard. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.
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A couple billboards on Sunset Boulevard. Follow me on Instagram for more photographs from my life in L.A.
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The Death of Jezebel by Gustav Doré | Wikipedia
Anna Holmes has an interesting piece at The New Yorker: “Jezebel and the Question of Women’s Anger.” Holmes was the founding editor of Jezebel in its heyday, and she explores how the website was groundbreaking in its articulations of the things women are not supposed to discuss and the ways in which they are not supposed to discuss them. I am briefly mentioned in the essay, as someone who complained Jezebel’s writers were doing little more than “‘caterwauling about the patriarchy.’” In any case, the story is a good read and a thoughtful consideration of whether or not the feminist blogosphere laid the groundwork for today’s online fracturosphere. I do wish, though, that she had talked more about the current state of Jezebel and what she thinks of it now. Was Jezebel subsumed … or a feminist-rage machine not built to last?
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