Making Money Off Myself Without Appeasing The Male-Gaze.

Commercialised sexuality is a complicated market. When I was a sex-worker, it was something I genuinely wanted to be, but there were parts of it that made me uncomfortable. For one, the agency for which I worked advertised us a certain way—young, fair, college girls, need money—and I really didn’t like that, I was twenty and still made to lie about my age and say I was nineteen because *men* prefer to feel like they are with “barely legal” girls and being *twenty* meant I was too old to feel barely-legal. Over the years, there has been a shift towards more agency and autonomy for *some* sex-workers and a lot of women have been able to take charge of their own monetization (instead of working *through* someone else, though now a lot work through tech-industry enabled platforms which is its own kind of exploitative) but little has changed in the *environment* which still serves the same kind of gaze.

Allow me to demonstrate.

A former friend of mine is a *professional* girlfriend, transactional relationships (aka sugaring) are what she does for a living, and she is very good at it, but a part of being good also means that she has to make a constant demonstration of her femininity, she has to play dumb around her paramours (and *let them teach her*) and she has to make a tonne of effort to appease their ego constantly, in no small part by never arguing with them or showing them down. There is another woman who runs a pretty sizable sex-toy company, she is bright and enterprising, and she sells toys for everyone because she genuinely believes in the mission to make self-pleasure more accessible to all people, but when she advertises her products, she makes videos of herself sucking on a watermelon or smearing her mouth with lube. I have a hard time with this. On the one hand, I think we should be able to use our bodies to our advantage in a market that insists on objectifying them in line with a particular gaze and on the other hand, I feel like acquiescing to the demands of that market feels more disempowering than empowering. This person talks frequently, in public appearances, about the male gaze, the patriarchy and the commodification of ideal female behaviours and image, so when I see her sucking on a watermelon or lightly flirting with a customer who makes a lewd comment about thinking of her when using her products, I feel the same kind of discomfort I felt when I was being advertised as a broke, desperate college-girl.

Please don’t get me wrong, it’s not the display of sexuality to which I object, far from it, displaying and performing (in the sense of art or for my pleasure) my sexuality is one of the greatest delights of my life and there is nothing I love more than seeing another person revel in (and make money from) the same, but there is a fine distinction between owning my sexuality and catering or packaging my sexuality to a particular gaze. For instance, whenever someone tells me they do something because that is what the *market* demands, I feel the need to dig deeper, and sometimes it is benign, and sometimes, like me, they are also uncomfortable with the nature of the demands of the market. Whenever it looks like the creation (whether that is sexual service, art or imagery) is built solely to appease someone else, it doesn’t feel like it came authentically from the desire of the person creating it (and again, I have no moral judgement for playing by the rules of a market for your own benefit, I’d even go so far as to see it as reparations but it is something with which I struggle). A part of the struggle is also about the fact that, in my experience, when women genuinely take control of their sexuality, pleasure and express our image on our own terms, we tend to face a lot more resistance than if we put ourselves into neat little boxes of conditioning.

For instance, when I write erotica (and erotic non-fiction) in which the pleasure of the protagonist (which is usually me) is inextricably linked to the “disturbing” things she wants and unabashedly owned by her, I get a lot more backlash, accusations of being abused and comments about being mentally-sick than erotica in which *daddy* breeds the little-girl and teaches her about sex. I swear my ESM and CNC pieces get more shit than people generally have to say about Justine and really, the only difference I can see is that my desecration is very clearly my own creation and hers, not so much. We can more easily fetishize the victimhood of women than our choices. When I post pictures of myself in states of disarray, many commenters immediately explain my state as what I made to do *for my daddy/master/whatever*, tell me I am a good girl and get turned on by that, but when I assert that this is me acting for my pleasure (and expressing my sexuality with creativity), then I am labelled sick, abused or in need of god. There are so many larger trends in the sexual script that draw from the same place. A passionate woman is a prize when in the hands of a man and she is *psycho* when she is by herself and owning her pleasure.

Sometimes this optimization of self to suit the market does not reflect in what we offer, do or create as part of the industry of sex, but how we react to the environment. It’s all about the numbers, right? So, I will loudly complain about these entitled cis-het men who drop messages into my inbox and make outlandish demands out of me, but quietly, I’ll let them follow me, love my content and comment on it because how else will I get the visibility I need? I don’t mean to disparage anyone, I get exactly how this happens and it is much more complicated than a single sentence can represent, and it’s pervasive too. Yes, I thought it was uncomfortable when men came to me specifically because they could *feel* like I was underage, but if I questioned them about it, they wouldn’t come back, so I played into it. Yes, the sex-toy businesswoman doesn’t like that men feel entitled to commenting on her body, but if she’s rude to her customers, they will not come back. Yes, the sex-artist does love that making pornographic/erotic art means that men feel comfortable asking them questions that indulge their fantasies of them, but if they don’t play-along, who will consume their work? Hell, as an educator of sex, I have been told I shouldn’t be rude to men who ask questions clearly designed to facilitate the coercion of their partners because they will stop attending my classes. Even when you don’t create to serve a male-gaze, it has an influence on the industry and its conventions as a whole.

I don’t mean for this to sound bleak, in fact, I wrote this because something wonderful has happened. When I first started writing erotica, I had no intention of selling it, I just wanted to write my sexuality on my terms—gritty, real and honest—and it garnered a small and specific type of following. A lot of women, GNC, queer and feminist people. As I continued to do it and interest increased, I made an unconscious decision, I started removing the *men* who were interested in a particular form of my image. If I posted 900-writings, 30-pictures of my creatively tortured self and two nudes, and you only liked the nudes, I got rid of you. If you continued to imply my sexuality was *created* and *controlled* by a man, you went bye-bye. If I noticed you making entitled comments on the pictures of other women, you were removed. I was only creating what felt true to me so the only people I enjoyed consuming it were people who wanted to and were able to see me for that. I did this for a while and eventually that unconscious decision bled into my conscious choices about monetizing my sexuality. I wrote books that are true to me and I refuse to advertise them as the manuals of making a helpless, curated slave. I could. I could post my tits, my helplessness and my starry-eyed devotion, I could play-up my *hotness* (lol), my big-eyes and pout all the time, and double the *views*, and people have told me to stop being naïve and just do that, but I cannot, and I won’t.

When I launched my Patreon for my writing, some men signed up because they thought it meant I would be obligated to respond to their messages and have conversations with them and I won’t lie, for a second, I actually wondered whether I should just do it because these people were supporting my work but ultimately, the idea made me uncomfortable. I am explicit about what I am selling and it does not include *access* to me in this way so when they subscribe for such reasons, I remove them and their money from my world. Some wanted to pay me to make specific porn for them (and, very infrequently, I do this, but not for them, I make it for people with whom I have that type of relationship where we are both *into* the idea of paying someone to be abused on camera for your specific tastes) and I don’t want to do that so I don’t. Over the years, I have become very mindful about these things when it comes to my decisions and I finally feel comfortable with what I do and *how* I do it, I feel no need to have to succumb to an environment where I have to lie about my age in order to be appealing to the *market*.

This is not supposed to work. That is what I am frequently told. I am naïve and idealistic. If I want to be an erotic artist, I have to sexualise my image, if I want to be a sexual educator, I have to sell the persona and if I want to be a pornographer, I have to show people what they want to see but you know what? Yesterday, I received a huge payment for what I do. For years, the money has been okay, and then stable, and then successively growing but now, it’s *good* money, it’s as much money as I make from a job for which I have three-degrees and twelve-years of experience, and there is nothing in the world more empowering than the fact that I made this money off my sexuality without appeasing the male-gaze or the market. I made this money by writing what *I love* and not altering it to anyone’s demands. I made it with my own creativity, refusing to bend it to the conventions of an exploitative market (except for Amazon, they still exploit me). I made it with honest exploration of my sexuality, on my terms, for my pleasure and without curating a *persona* for myself. All of the accusations of naivety and idealism are okay because now, I can say that it pays to be true to yourself. This is the best kind of money I have ever made because I made it from being entirely myself.

…

Shout Out: Around me there are lots of other people who inspire me by going down their own path of empowerment with regard to their sexuality and its monetisation. Pro-dommes who reject ideals of image and do what feels true, filmmakers who focus on pleasure and not gaze, artists who relish their process to the point of madness, writers who refuse to cower to watered-down demands, artists who explore themselves through unprecedented media and toy-makers who create with creative artistry for themselves before all else.