With a good plan, you can reap the benefits of sex work with few of the offsets. Mitigating the negatives is absolutely possible, to an extent. How you feel about your work is most important. Be comfortable and confident, that tends to weigh more than everything else. You’ll want to develop the deepest understanding towards the people who oppose your choices.
Online sex work comes in many forms. There are camgirls, voice actors, erotica writers, artists, eroge developers, sexdoll sellers, couples posting videos, etc. And then there’s people like me who didn’t get laid in their teens nor twenties, now endlessly talking about porn and themselves and their perpetually conflicted relationship with modern women.
The impetus for this post was this video by the conservative commentator Paul Joseph Watson.
I’ve followed PJW for many years. His commentary on online sex work isn’t surprising, given his Christian value system. He is right that this line of work can take dark turns, because you’re dealing with people’s depth. You’re consciously blurring the line between personal and private. You develop connections that are emotional, sexual and non-exclusive.
The balance is not easy to maintain when such deep emotions are involved. You want to let people close to you, give them the experience they desire and pay for, but maintain boundaries and distance. Not an easy balance.
I’ve flirted with some of my customers and freelancers and had sexual shenanigans occasionally, and I tell you, shit goes wrong most of the time. The more your work deals directly with people, the more you have to be comfortable with the risks. You cannot be afraid, because shit happening goes with the territory.
The better you get at navigating people’s deepest personal feelings and complexities, the easier time you’ll have as a sex worker – unless your empathy leads you to letting them too close emotionally.
Related: Read my industry-insider thoughts on the ethics of pornographic work.
Now, let’s address the supposedly exploitative nature of porn. Porn is no more exploitative than oil and mineral companies, or social media, or our governments that tax us for the privilege of carrying national debt. Yes, there are porn businesses only doing content for the sake of money. But when money is the sole motivation, the company usually mistreats their employees and customers and suffers a high turnover. Some cynical companies calculate the expected turnover into their operational model. But that’s a very short and unhappy road that will trigger a painful existential crisis down the road.
If you’re doing sex work for money only, you’re in the wrong business. Do something else.
Here’s why this matters. This anecdote should illustrate things. Early in my career, I worked with two of the most famous (at the time) western porn artists. Both of them imploded at the height of their careers. The existential crises they went through was not a pretty sight. Few years from those clusterfucks, I went through a similar crisis myself.
Only do porn if you’re motivated by a genuine desire to make people smarter, stronger, more confident and comfortable with themselves. Aim at making your customers’ lives less lonely. The actual successful porn businesses seek genuine customer connections. Real success is not solely measured in yearly revenue. Real success is consistent year after year, working with the same people, having relationships deepen naturally over time. You should not do hentai for profit alone.
Now, let’s talk about the most pressing issue: The age you start and the age you stop.
I have read several news articles about popular online sex workers ending their own lives. I’ve also known suicidal erodevs. This is completely unnecessary dumbassery, and only if you got into porn without any plan will this happen.
While the money and the excitement can be exactly what you need now, how long is that? And once you decide to settle down, how do you deal with the aftermath? Unless you’ll homeschool your kids, they will be going to public schools to get traumatized by bullies. Your reputation can go around and affect how other kids treat yours. So what’s the plan?
Doing porn doesn’t automatically mean you won’t have chances at long-lasting love. I personally know socially successful people who do hentai and even live porn, they have families and friends. So much depends on how you carry yourself. But if you get so deep with this, that you neglect self-development and especially social skills, then you’ll have trouble.
Sex work can be incredibly rewarding. It’s stimulating anarchic fun with a potentially lucrative payout. Some things about the work are easy, the money tends to be easy, but there are significant hurdles and challenges too. There are times when you need to leave the money on the table, because taking it would impede long-term goals. Those are not easy choices, and you won’t learn to make these choices without staking something and losing a few hands.
Now, let’s discuss content strategy a little bit. You’ll want to gather as much information as you can. You’ll want to study psychology, seduction, sociology, history, politics, business, philosophy, economics. You will need online resources that help you determine what kind of content has a high chance of success. Research, research, research.
You can, for example, look at the viewer counts of video content, download counts and subscriber numbers, etc. Cross-reference such data with popular forums dedicated to sexual topics. Have direct conversations with people. All that information widens your perspective and feeds your intuition, which is what you’ll mostly use to make decisions. Then you can make good decisions, because you’re able to look at every person and situation from multiple angles.
Next you will read how to handle hard consumers of porn.
