I’m tired of hearing from CEOs/founders wanting to discuss opportunities for working together. You can book me for an hour here, and my monthly retainer packages start in the low five figures. I don’t have time to talk with you for free. If I said yes to everyone, I’d be talking all the time to non-clients, instead of my clients.
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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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This fictional short story was written by me and originally published on Bending Genres in February 2020.
Tripp Towers, male porn star, sat on the bench, his penis in his hand. It was late afternoon, and his dick had been hard since that morning, when he’d injected it with the drug so he could get it up and get through the performance that he was about to do in the next room. They were supposed to start shooting hours ago, but things had gotten delayed, and now there was this problem with his equipment. It wasn’t supposed to stay this hard for this long. There was a word for it: priapism. If his boner didn’t go down soon, he would have to go to the hospital, and he didn’t want to think about what the doctor would do to him. Where the hell is Tripp? the director shouted. On the other side of the cinder block wall, there was a soundstage with a set that looked like a suburban living room: a shit-brown leather sofa, a glass-topped table upon which someone had placed a vase of plastic flowers, a worn rug of muddied colors. Tripp’s job was to stand up, go into that room, and have sex with the girl who was waiting for him. He couldn’t remember her name. Alisha. Amber. Ashley. At this point, they were all the same. Expressionless girls with flat eyes that scanned him and moved on to something more interesting: the paycheck that was coming, the tattooed boyfriend that was sulking, the life that they thought working here would buy them, which involved a condo and a couple of kids, a dream that, in all likelihood, would never happen, or at least not in the way that they hoped. A dozen years ago, Tripp Towers had entered the porn business. He had dropped out of a crappy state school in flyover country and boarded a Greyhound bus headed for Los Angeles, his suitcase packed with little more than his big plans of becoming a star. In Hollywood, he’d flashed his winning grin, showed the casting directors his six-pack of steel, and demonstrated his deep desire to please everyone he met. But he hadn’t been able to get a single acting job. 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. The first time, he was afraid. It was just the three of them in the guest bedroom of a ranch-style house in Sunland, the girl was nice but a little bit older, and he had done what he was supposed to do while the guy with the grey ponytail had filmed them. As it had turned out, Tripp could pop on command. He was the money man. He could deliver. He was respectful to the girls, the work became steady, and over time it had seemed perfectly normal to be screwing girls to pay the rent as a camera that never blinked recorded everything you did. Now that version of himself seemed very far away, and the eye at the end of his member was staring up at him in what looked like judgment. Over time, the job had gotten harder to do with the entire crew watching, the budgets had gotten bigger, and the pressure had gotten greater. At the same time, he had gotten older, the girls had gotten colder, and the competition had gotten younger. So, he had done what every other guy in this business was doing: Recognizing themselves as the racehorses they were, they’d drugged themselves. They called guys like him spikers. That morning, he had sat on the edge of the toilet in his apartment and winced as he’d watched the tip of the needle penetrate his dick. This would keep him hard. This would keep the money coming. This would keep his life afloat. But the erection had stayed and did not want to go away, it had been many hours, and this was not a good thing. Had Tripp made the right life choices? his penis seemed to want to know. Tripp had no idea. He tugged at the throbbing gristle of himself. It was possible that if he did his job, the erection would stop. It was possible that if the boner refused to abate, he would have to go to the emergency room, where they would use a scalpel to let out the blood, possibly permanently damaging him. It was possible that this problem would never end, and he would spend the rest of his life following his erection around like an old man pulled down the sidewalk by a panting dog on a leather leash. Tripp! the director yelled. “Help me,” Tripp whispered to his penis in the chilly room. His dick said nothing. It was show time. He rose to step out of this place, to go into the other world, to transport himself to where the warm glow of the klieg lights would shine on him to see if he could man up while the whole world watched.
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This is part 15 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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This is part 14 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.
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.
“A flywheel is a mechanical device that uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy, a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed.”
In early October, I’ll be attending the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s 2024 Reporting Safely in Crisis Zones Course for Freelance Journalists in New York. From the course description: “While most hostile environment training for journalists deals with ducking crossfire and kidnappers, this course will teach you how to avoid unnecessary peril through preparation and planning before, during and after assignments.” I’m really looking forward to doing this, and I’ll share how it went afterwards.
In late November, I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. From KHN’s website: “The mission of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts is to support established and emerging writers, visual artists and composers by providing working and living environments that allow uninterrupted time for work, reflection and creative growth.” I can’t wait to do this and will report back on the experience when I return.
I’m continuing to post on Forbes.com, where I cover the business of sex. So far this month, I’ve written about the return of Playboy magazine as an annual print publication and what happened when Etsy banned the sale of adult toys on its website. I’ve got stories in the pipeline about strippers, AI smut, and escorts, to name a few.
“In recent decades, Playboy has struggled to find its footing in a changing media landscape. When Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, who died in 2017, launched the first issue of Playboy in December 1953 with a nude spread featuring Marilyn Monroe, the competition was limited to other adult magazines.”
I changed the format of my newsletter to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries. “From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies,” pretty much sums it up. It also includes weird pitches I get from publicists trying to get me to promote their sex products. And other things.
Lately, I’ve been writing a new short story. By the end of today, it’ll be two-thirds done, and it’ll likely be finished by Monday or not long after. The main character is a man, and suffice to say it has a pornographic element to it. The entire tale takes place in the San Fernando Valley, which is my Yoknapatawpha County.
“To the sympathetic critics Mr. Faulkner dealt with the dark journey and the final doom of man in terms that recalled the Greek tragedians. They found symbolism in the frequently unrelieved brutality of the yokels of Yoknapatawpha County, the imaginary Deep South region from which Mr. Faulkner drew the persons and scenes of his most characteristic novels and short stories.”
Speaking of porn, I’m working on two books: “a novel set in the adult movie industry and a nonfiction book about the pornography business.” The novel has a male main character, and the nonfiction novel has a female main character who is me. Both are set in the present day. The novel is funny, and the nonfiction book is more serious. The novel will be around 250 pages, and the nonfiction book will be around 400 pages.
This fall, there are a handful of sex-related books coming out, so I pitched a story about them and what it means that they’re all by women and in some ways about the female gaze. I sent that to the Los Angeles Review of Books and will probably pitch it a few other places, as well.
“Last month's New Yorker profile of Anderson revealed that the book is in part a modern-day version of Nancy Friday's 1973 best-selling anthology My Secret Garden. But Want's publisher has "placed off limits" any confessors' erotic fantasies that were too extreme. What happens when the outer limits of female sexual fantasies end up on the cutting room floor?”
Things I’m waiting to hear back on: if a panel I pitched to the 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair has been accepted, if any of the six other writing residencies I applied to earlier this year have accepted me, and if I got a writing grant I applied for.
Last year, I read exactly zero books, so this year I made it a point to read at least a book a month. Follow along at Books I Read. The books include fiction, nonfiction, memoir, photography, and graphic novels. So far my favorite has been Victory Parade.
“It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul.”
And, as usual, I’ll be taking lots of photos along the way.
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At my online shop, you can buy a consulting session with me; a signed copy of my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; or a digital short story I wrote: The Tumor. Got questions? Email me.
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In August, I’ll be posting more frequently on Forbes. Got a story suggestion or a tip? You can email me here.
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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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This is part 13 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.
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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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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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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It was nice to see that Naked Capitalism shared a link to my 2017 story about financial domination. Thank you!
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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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I’ve been getting a lot of queries lately about my consultancy. Here’s how to get started working with me.
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Since I have been writing about porn industry for nearly 30 years, I get emails from people who are trying to break into the porn business. The emails are always from men. Mostly these men aspire to be porn stars. (I would estimate I have received hundreds of those. [Scratch that. According to this 2016 post, at that time I had received approximately 700 emails from men wanting to be porn stars. That means by now that number must be over a thousand.]) Today’s query is from a guy who thinks I am a porn editor (like I edit porn movies) and wants to know how he, too, can become a porn editor. I am not, and I cannot help you with that, bro.
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Photo credit: Clayton Cubitt
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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"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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Now that my memoir is out in the world, I’m consulting again. What do I do as The Fixer? Well, it’s a little bit of everything. Strategy consulting is one way of putting it. Consigliere is a bit more accurate. As a consultant, my work ranges from crisis communications to M&A to executive coaching to PR. Book your (deeply discounted) introductory session with me today here. If you’ve got a problem, I can probably fix it.
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Recently, I did some revamping of my Gumroad store and added a new product. On Gumroad, you can book a strategic communications consulting session with me through my consultancy: The Fixer; order a signed hardcover copy of my new memoir, DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; or buy my digital short story, “The Tumor.” If there’s something else you’d like to see added to the store, let me know.
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I’ve been writing for the Forbes website for forever, it seems. Over the years, I have held several beats: self-employment, vices, and sex. Currently, my tagline is: “I cover the business of sex.” In January 2023, I started posting again after a hiatus, and I thought I would track my traffic numbers progress here.
Stories published: 4. My goal was to publish five stories, but various things led that to not happening. Next time, I will get more of the posts done earlier in the month.
Total page views: 42,956. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 22,353. That’s an increase of 91%. So, not bad.
Total visitors: 39,011. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 20,155. That’s an increase of 93%. So, not bad.
Most popular post, by views: How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money on Only Fans: 19,381 (as of this writing). If the question is what works, the answer is the intersection of celebrities and sex. Other reasons this post performed well: It was tweeted multiple times by Forbes and ForbesLife, the top image featured Iggy preparing to lick a cherry, I had read something recently that reminded me that headlines that explain “how” something is done are more likely to generate higher engagement and so I used that construct.
The month’s highlight: Iggy is #1: At one point, my story about Iggy was the number one trending story on Forbes.com, beating out stories about Tom Brady and Elon Musk.
