♡ curious & kinky ♡

Dreaming of Summer…

By society, I mean a mix of many cultures- mostly western- but in the age of the internet there are really so many different countries contributing to these ideas.

Sex has always been present and prevalent in many different cultures throughout history. The Kama Sutra, an ancient Hindu text, for example. Contrary to popular opinion, The Kamasutra covers many different topics such as the art of living well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, and taking care of your love life, but the content most familiar to western culture are the parts about sexual positions and lovemaking, itself. Isn’t it telling that, by the end of the 19th century, a British explorer adapted the texts into the version most familiar in Western culture? Although, his adaption is now widely considered an inaccurate & misleading translation, the sexual positions described in his version are what caught people’s attention. All of the other wisdom in these ancient texts can so easily be pushed aside because, in western culture, the goal is not really in finding a good life partner and learning how to nurture & tender your love with them. The main goal is the primal conquest, the raw supremacy of physical domination.

With the mainstream introduction & popularity of pornography, this mindset of sexual conquest has reached even more insidious heights. Many times, I have heard the idea that men don’t even know how to truly please a woman because they learned everything they do know from porn- which is generally a very inaccurate depiction of what people in general, but often women, actually enjoy. The uprising in popularity of content creation and porn being directed & filmed by the actors themselves, in their own chosen settings, rather than in a studio by a production company with their own agenda and profits to make, has definitely been going a long way to change that, but still much of this toxic mindset towards sex - and the conquest for it- remains.

While I do believe this renaissance of sorts, towards sexual freedom & learning to embrace our human desires in healthy ways, is ultimately positive- necessary even- for human advancement, so do I believe it become even more integral to teach when it is healthy to want to express our sexual desires versus when it may be turning into an unhealthy habit.

If you rely on sex to make yourself feel good-or worse, if you believe you can’t truly feel good without it, then it becomes no different than abusing drugs or alcohol, or having an unhealthy relationship with shopping or religion; just another form of escapism. If you lead yourself to believe you can’t be happy without something, it’s easy to become dependent on it and spend your entire life searching for it. We should be teaching that, if anything, getting to have good sex should only add to your life, but never subtract from it when it’s not available.

Same goes for subcultures rooted in sex, such as the BDSM community. The realization of our desires and safe & consensual expression of them is certainly important to living a healthy life for a lot of people. Introduction to kinks and finding others to engage in them with can lead to some truly healing, empowering experiences. However, the line between expression & escapism can be thin and hard for many to discern between. Unfortunately, a lot of people will blur these lines without even realizing, and simply prefer to live in some sort of fantasy because they are unhappy with their real life. Perhaps if we were taught that putting energy into becoming the best version of ourselves was as desirable as having sexual prowess, things would be different.

Sure, it did help me embrace a more sensual, as well as artistic, side of myself, it helped me get a little better at doing my makeup and costume planning, and definitely sharpened my photography skills a bit, but I could have done all of that on my own…

The point of having a side hustle is generally to make money. Unfortunately, when taken from purely a financial perspective, I do hate to admit but must force myself, it really wasn’t worth it.

Reflecting on the number of hours a week I would put into the job makes it hard to justify now in the end. It did take a lot of time to plan new photoshoots or videos, time to set my room up, get the tripod out, adjust the lighting, then shoot, plus edit & post multiple times a week, not to mention all of the time spent responding to messages & promoting my page on social media as much as possible, organizing sales and creating price menus so that I could acquire new subscribers and make all the other effort I was putting in worth it.

At times, it did feel like an ongoing cycle I had to keep up with, and perhaps some of my current reflections comes from the fact that I really do not miss it at all. After the holidays, I thought I would take a little hiatus to clear my mind and figure out how I wanted to proceed, but I just never went back, and am realizing I may only even be sad about it at all to know how much less stressed I feel now and that I could have quit much sooner.

People say it’s easy money, and I guess it can be if you already have a large social media following and give most of your free time to engaging with the social media world. Since I’m not, and have never been, the type of person to go viral on the internet, this made it much harder for me to find my footing in the industry and garner the success I felt was deserved. It honestly might have broken me had I let it.

I guess in the moment, the amount of money I was making felt satisfying compared to the amount of time I was putting in. However, as time & distance from the work grew, and especially upon filing my taxes for the year, I was forced to confront the actual numbers and realized they were not so satisfying after all; especially when accounting for the items I had invested in like new outfits & photography equipment. Sure, if I add everything up as best I can and reasonably divide for the amount of hours I put in, I made a decent amount of money. That said, and truthfully, for the specialty service I provided, I know now I should have been making much more to make it actually worth my while.

The fact that I have to pay taxes on these earnings now, too, only adds insult to injury.

I want to be as transparent as possible while respecting my own privacy so that it adds more context for what I am saying here:

On the average week, between shooting, editing, posting & promoting, I probably spent 15-20+ hours. Let’s just say 15. That’s 780 hours a year. If I was paying myself what I believe the job is worth, at least $15 an hour, and accounting for the 20% that the platform I was using took, I should have been making at least $12,000 a year.

I thought I was making good money, but I honestly wasn’t making that.

Now, I know some girls that do and some that make much more than that. Of course, that only led me to constantly wonder why I wasn’t. What did they have that I didn’t? What was I not doing that they were? This work definitely put me in a position of constantly comparing myself against others and always keeping my mind on the hustle to try to be more like them.

“We have similar body styles…”

“Well maybe if I start working out…”

“Should I invest in some wigs for different looks?”

“Should I just start dyeing my hair again?”

“If only I had better lighting in my house….”

“What if I start using TikTok?”

“Maybe I should try doing __________ ?”

Truthfully, I realize now how much of my thoughts & time was consumed by trying to become more successful on this platform;

And for what?

I have been much more successful & happy selling my jewelry, especially since my focus is not so split and I actually have more time to put into it.

None of this even accounts for the steep damage done to my social media pages, by affecting my ability to advertise my jewelry business- and all just for trying to promote my content creation on the side.

I was severely punished across various other platforms, from Instagram to Facebook to TikTok, for promoting things that were often flagged for violating community guidelines- despite my best attempts to be careful with my edits & my word choices to avoid that happening.

Not to mention, I feel like this set of circumstances has now followed me even in the months since I quit posting or promoting this type of work.

I could certainly be wrong, but I feel like all my time spent in this industry has since resulted in all of my pages being added to some sort of blacklist, within the algorithm, so that even now I am not able to advertise & promote my jewelry business as well.

Even when my account is not actively restricted, I notice an insane difference in the amount of engagement I used to get since before I started creating content. It’s been months and I don’t see it going back to normal anytime soon. In fact, sometimes my page will still become randomly restricted for old posts I made over a year ago. Just dealt with that a month ago.

The damage done to this facet of my life alone has not been worth it. Who knows if I will ever fully recover from these subtle but real effects I have suffered?

I am happy for the type of therapy & healing I was able to provide for others during such trying and uncertain times as living through a major pandemic, but I also know that I could go for a more specialized profession if I really wanted to help others in that way.

Personally, for the time investment, I enjoy dancing in clubs, getting to be more physically active & working in person, much more than online-based work, but I also had to try something else to know that. My respect goes out to all the folks effectively & efficiently making a killing doing the online thing. I learned the hard way, it definitely ain’t easy.