Musings

Sex Sells, Part 2: Camming

Kate Sloan

I log onto Skype. I send a quick “I’m ready when you are!” message to the stranger who paid me a few minutes ago. They call me up, and I put on my best Flirty Face. Maybe my clothes come off; maybe not. Maybe I have an orgasm; maybe not. By the end of the 15- or 30-minute show, my face is flushed – from nerves or pleasure or both – and I’m marginally richer than I was before.

When I partnered with Bubbles London Escorts to create this blog series on my experiences with sex work, I knew I’d have to touch on camming. And truth be told, I was reluctant. I don’t think of myself as a camgirl, not really; I don’t put in the hours upon hours of self-promotion and primping and flirting with silent time-wasters that people who cam for a living have to do. Folks occasionally ask me for advice on “getting into” camming, and I always bashfully tell them: I don’t use cam sites or seek out customers. They come to me, via DM or email, because they’ve enjoyed something I tweeted or read something I wrote or fixated on a selfie I Instagrammed, and they – inexplicably, to my mind – want to see me get lascivious just for them. I like money, and I like feeling desired, so when the opportunity arises, I often say yes.

I don’t cam very often – usually just a handful of times a year. It’s not something I seek out or advertise all that much, because honestly, it makes me anxious as hell. The process of scheduling a show, attiring myself appealingly, and then performing on camera directly conflicts with my insecurities and awkwardness and shyness. It requires a certain brassy confidence that I can convincingly fake for the duration of a show, maybe, on a good day. It’s for these reasons that I decided late last year to stop taking on new cam clients unless they seemed really great and made me feel really comfortable. The money I got from putting on these shows just wasn’t enough to justify how nervous and drained they made me feel.

But while I was doing it more actively, I had some regular customers I adored. There was the breezily confident guy who would tell me to “just do whatever feels good,” and would sit back in his chair, smoking a cigar and not jerking off at all, while I held a vibe on my clit and writhed. There was the sweet dork who only ever wanted to watch me give head to a realistic dildo, and then would chat with me about social justice in comic book universes once he’d come. There was the woman in her first queer relationship who wanted to learn more about how vulvas work from watching me touch mine. (Secretly, she was my fave.)

Camming wasn’t all smooth ‘n’ sexy; there were hijinks and misadventures, too. A client once requested a show while I was staying in a hotel in Italy with my mom, so I had to stake out a corner of our marble bathroom during a lull in the day and center my laptop between my splayed legs. Another client once reached out to schedule an impromptu show just as I was stumbling home drunk from a night out with friends, so the show he eventually got was probably more raucous than mine typically are. Adorably, someone once bought a camshow from me as a gift for her boyfriend, who she said would’ve been too shy to set one up himself.

My favorite cam clients were always the ones who treated me respectfully and gently, knowing I’m a human, not an object. They’d politely inquire mid-show, “Is it okay if I…?” or “Would you mind showing me…?” and I’d usually be happy to oblige. Sometimes I’d even get a reverent thank-you message from them the next day. “I learned so much from talking with you and watching you,” one such message read. “It opened up something in me.” I cried a little, finding it hard to wrap my mind around the idea that someone found the sight of me jerking off to be not only sexy but revelatory.

I haven’t cammed in quite a while. These days, I’d mostly rather lie in bed in my pajamas, talking to my partner on the phone or reading a book or watching Netflix, not caring what I look like. But I’m still grateful to the clients I had, and those I might have in the future. Though camming makes me incredibly nervous, it also – like many other daunting activities – leaves me flushed and grinning with the knowledge that I “felt the fear and did it anyway.”

 

Thanks to Bubbles London Escorts for sponsoring this post! The owner of this agency is very friendly and makes sure all client requests are dealt with promptly.

Sex Sells, Part 1: Selling Nudes

Kate Sloan

I’ve always loved good-lookin’ nudes. When I was a young(er) pervy little thing, I would creep to the family computer in the dead of night and surf SuicideGirls, GodsGirls, and archives of old Bettie Page prints – always taking care to clear my browser history afterward, of course. These women, with their lush curves and hard-femme aesthetics, had something I thought I could achieve someday, once I came of age: the confidence to pose nude on the internet.

Especially in light of the recent SESTA/FOSTA laws which are jeopardizing many sex workers’ livelihoods, I was excited when the folks at Dior London Escorts agreed to sponsor a blog series here on my experiences with sex work (the mild forms of it that I have done), so I would have an opportunity to do some destigmatizing through storytelling. I thought immediately of those formative late nights, scrolling through elegant porn. At one point, my desire to join these naked women’s ranks was so great that I shot some provocative (non-nude) photos of myself on my little digital camera and carefully photoshopped the SuicideGirls logo into the corner of one, just to see what it would look like. My mom later found that illicit jpeg on our computer and told me she hoped I was being careful with my images. I still don’t know whether she thought I’d actually somehow been accepted to model for the site despite being underage.

Those early signs of exhibitionism didn’t really bear out in my adult life. I’ve performed in porn from time to time, with friends behind the camera or on camera with me or both, but it was always more for the goofy fun of the experience than for a sexual desire to show off. When I’ve shared lascivious photos online, it’s typically been out of boredom or the need for an ego boost. Even sending nudes to partners doesn’t really get my rocks off in and of itself; I typically don’t do it unless asked to, because it doesn’t often occur to me, and it’s the other person’s desirous reactions that thrill me and make me feel hot.

And yet… I like selling nudes. There is something powerful and sexy about it. Maybe I have a bit of a money kink; maybe it’s just that strangers buying photos of my body makes me feel somehow more “legitimately” hot than when partners enjoy those same photos, because the strangers don’t even know about my charming personality and still want to jerk off to me. Weird but true.

I don’t recall the first time I sold a nude, but I would imagine the interaction originated in a Twitter DM. Maintaining an active Twitter presence full of sex jokes and snazzy selfies, I attract a fair amount of sexually motivated looky-loos. Sometimes random men slide into my DMs with a simple “Hey” and it turns out they want to see me naked; other times they’re upfront about wanting to buy pictures (guess which approach I prefer?!). On the advice of my friend Bex, a gifted salesman, I’ve started answering every vague DM from a stranger with a concise “What can I help you with?” This sets a businessy tone for our conversation and helps me quickly filter out flirty time-wasters so only actual customers remain.

I always ask interested buyers if there’s anything in particular they want to see. If it’s something fairly basic (say, tits or ass – the classics), typically I already have some great shots on tap that I can send along. If they want something more niche or involved, I set aside some time to shoot what they’re looking for. I don’t even necessarily have to be at home to pull this off; I have fond memories of snapping impromptu nudes for clients in bar bathrooms and a boyfriend’s bed (the boyfriend knew what was up!). I feel like a badass every time I make quick cash just taking pictures of my body, a body that feels utterly ordinary to me because I walk around in it all day every day. What a revelation and a joy that some people like this chubby, flawed body enough to pay for digital glimpses of it, even without knowing anything about me.

The only times selling my nudes has gotten awkward were when the buyer was someone I knew. Either I felt guilty about charging them money (even though they were proactively trying to pay me) or the interaction added a sexual element to a relationship that previously lacked that dimension. But in every case, these people have been cordial and respectful throughout the process. I’ve even said “no” to a few of them and gotten nothing but sweet understanding in return.

I’m always happy to sell nudes, so slide into my Twitter DMs or send me an email if you want to buy some. I love that this exchange is a total win-win: my buyer walks away happy (and hopefully jerkin’ it), and in return I get a fistful of cash and the knowledge that someone, somewhere, thinks my body is beautiful.

 

Thanks to Dior London Escorts for sponsoring this post! They’re one of the most popular escort agencies in London, known for their high-quality service and employing a wide range of women.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 5 Sex-Savvy Superheroes

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end wrap-up series! Today I’m talking about 5 people who’ve influenced and inspired me massively this year in the arenas of sex, kink, and love…

Nadine Thornhill

There is a sex education crisis happening here in Ontario. As I detailed in a column for Herizons this year, our Premier, Doug Ford, has rolled back our schools’ sex ed curriculum to the one from 1998 – so naturally, it leaves out key information about consent, LGBTQ identities, and the modern sexual risks we face in the age of revenge porn and Snapchat. To say the least, Ontarians who care about sexual freedom are not happy with this development. There’s even a court appeal in the works.

Toronto-based sex educator Nadine Thornhill took things into her own hands in an even more direct way: she started a YouTube series called #SaveSexEd, in which she teaches every module of the scrapped 2015 curriculum, one by one. She’s creating a resource for kids and parents alike, which covers anatomy, consent, healthy relationships, sexual orientation, gender, and much more. She is the hero we need right now and I’m honestly amazed by her.

Sinclair Sexsmith

I’ve loved Sinclair’s writing for years, but this was the year when their work had the biggest effect on my actual life, so I knew I needed to put them on this list. I still keenly remember the day when, about a month into my relationship with my Sir, he texted me that he’d been reading a bunch of Sinclair Sexsmith articles – and I knew that our D/s dynamic was about to get an upgrade as a result.

Sinclair has written in detail about protocol – an aspect of my relationship that gives me great joy now but that I wouldn’t have even known I’d like if not for Sinclair’s writing on the subject. They’ve also written a lot about topping, dominance, and daddy identity – all of which has helped me better understand my partners’ headspace so I can be more empathetic and a better submissive. Their writing is often beautiful, or instructive, or both at once, and I find it inspiring as both a kinky person and a writer. If you haven’t explored their work, you owe it to yourself to check it out!

Eva

Eva is the brilliant mind behind the What’s My Body Doing? sex ed series on YouTube, where she takes a compassionate and research-backed approach to explaining concepts like sexual desire, threesomes, and Tinder. She’s also currently a Masters student, doing research on women’s sexting habits. Fascinating stuff!

When I was younger, I used to be intimidated by people like Eva – people who are close to me in age but have achieved so much already and are dazzlingly smart. But these days I’m more often able to be lifted up by their successes. Eva is so full of fascinating ideas and is so much fun to talk to (not to mention, she has the cutest laugh in the entire world) so every time we chat, I feel inspired and propelled forward anew in my own work in the sex field. What a lovely, clever person!

Dirty Lola

Lola does so much wonderful stuff in the world of sex and kink. Most notably, she founded Sex Ed A Go Go, an event which combines education and entertainment into an exciting night out that’ll leave you better informed about sex and kink. She also does a lot of storytelling, speaking, and tweeting about sex, polyamory, race, kink, and being a “picky slut.” I was lucky enough to share a stage with her this year at both the Playground Conference and the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, where we spoke on a panel together (along with Bex and Kevin) about personal storytelling as activism.

Something I admire about Lola is her dedication to what she calls “edutainment”: that balanced blend between imparting important facts and entertaining the viewer in the process. I think it’s a remarkably smart approach to teaching people about sex, a subject many folks want to learn about but are scared of or intimidated by. Lola extends this approach even into her personal life, writing tweets or telling stories about times she’s been sad or angry or hurt, in order to illustrate points everyone can learn from and feel comforted by. She is a powerhouse and I’m honored to know her.

Mark Wiseman

Mark entered my life through a series of happy coincidences this year. I started dating a hypnokinkster, who urged me to read Mind Play, the best existing primer on erotic hypnosis. Later, I told my friend Dick I wanted to interview a hypnokink expert on the radio, and he immediately called up the hypno expert who’d recently guested on his show to see if he’d do it. It was only then that I put the pieces together and realized that this affable hypnosis nerd was the author of Mind Play!

Mark’s book is still the first thing I recommend any curious hypnokinksters read on the subject, because it lays out everything you need to know in order to start hypnotizing people for sexy purposes in a conscientious and ethical way. He’s done a lot to make an oft-stigmatized kink more comprehensible and clear for those who want to explore it, and that’s worth celebrating.

 

Who were your major heroes in the world of sex/kink/love this year?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 8 Classic Tweets

Kate Sloan

I hit 9,000 followers on Twitter recently! Hoping to get to 10K in 2019. My crew on there is such a beloved part of my day and I enjoy sharing my weird thoughts with them. Here are 8 of my favorite things I tweeted this year…

I still cry with laughter whenever I think about this exchange, honestly. Bless my FWB.

My Sir really knows what I like to hear.

This was one of my most popular tweets of the year. Lots of replies mentioned that this multi-cake feast would involve a lot of Google Calendar scheduling. #polyjokes

Some of my favorite tweets this year were conversations between me and my Sir, or just hilarious things he’s said – see, for example, these classics about bottoming skills, lube in butts, wax play, sext grammar, stand-up comedy, and croissants. This Johnson/Dodson joke really cracks me up, though, because it is exactly the kind of joke that only someone I adored would make: a silly pun necessitating nerdy niche knowledge. I love this boy.

I am probably as cynical about casual sex these days as I have ever been in my life, and this joke really captures that.

“My boyfriend trash-talking shitty men” is one of my favorite genres of comedy.

I want this printed on a T-shirt and I want to wear that T-shirt all of the time.

This is what I aim for with most of my writing. It’s what I hope to continue to aim for in 2019. Auld wang syne, am I right?

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 10 Perfect Sex Songs

Kate Sloan

Welcome back to 12 Days of Girly Juice, my year-end celebration of all things sexy and beloved! Today I’m writing about 10 of the best songs I enjoyed for sensual (and adjacent) purposes this year… (As ever, you can listen to all these songs – and most of my picks from previous years – in my 12 Days of Girly Juice playlist!)

Cruisr – Kidnap Me

So, uh, as you might have intuited from the title of this song, it’s kinda kinky. I don’t know if that was the band’s intention – to write a love song that is at once adorably sweet and ruthlessly perverted – but that is what they have done. “Shackle me up and lock it; I can live in your pocket. When you gonna kidnap me?” the lead singer chirps. “Tie me up to a chair; I could live in your hair. When you gonna kidnap me?”

I’m sure a vanilla person would listen to this song and think it satirical, like montages in horror movies where a killer dismembers somebody to the stylings of ’80s pop. But when I listen to it, I just hear pure, deep, perverse romance.

Say Anything – Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too

Making playlists for each other (or perhaps mix tapes, depending on your era and your level of dedication to the analog arts) is sort of a millennial-romance rite of passage. It’s a way to show your beloved both how you feel about them and how brilliant you are. A double-whammy of confessional hotness.

My Sir and I engaged in this time-honored ritual way back in February. I remember I was running around the Playground Conference, ducking in and out of panels and workshops and podcast recordings, while receiving many a text from this new beau about the epic playlist he was making me. I listened to it on my way home from the conference and cried… a lot. It had Imogen Heap and Feist and the Beach Boys and the Beatles, musical theatre and bubblegum pop, classically millennial love anthems like “Such Great Heights” and “I Really Like You.” It made me feel cradled and appreciated and seen.

One of my faves in the playlist, though, was this Say Anything song, which is about phone sex – something my Sir and I had done a lot of at that point and would continue to do a lot of. “I called her on the phone and she touched herself,” the lead singer whines in the chorus, and maybe it doesn’t sound especially romantic, but to me, it was.

Hippo Campus – Warm Glow

After my first-ever knifeplay scene, Dick asked me what I wanted to listen to during aftercare, and I told him to play some Hippo Campus. They’re my favorite band, so I didn’t even really care which songs we listened to – I know all of them practically by heart. But when he hit shuffle on their discography, this song, “Warm Glow,” was the first one that played, and it was absolutely perfect.

Longer and slower than the Hippo boys’ usual fare, “Warm Glow” has been called “a perennial anthem of positivity,” and that’s part of why I love it as an aftercare song. But I also love that it’s comfortingly repetitive, full of beautifully soothing sounds, and takes its sweet time to build up to an emotional climax. It’s exactly what I need from an aftercare song. (Want more like this? Check out my Aftercare playlist.)

The Japanese House – Saw You in a Dream

This came up in one of my Spotify Discover Weekly playlists and I was immediately hooked. Dream-pop is my jam (thanks, Spotify, you know me all too well) and this song epitomizes my favorite qualities of that genre. It’s loopy and lazy and hauntingly beautiful and sweetly wistful.

I think most of us have had the experience described in this song, of seeing an ex-lover in a dream and feeling shaken up beyond reason by seeing them again, even just in unreality. People can seem so much lovelier in retrospect than they did when they were in your life, and sometimes it’s painful. “You were the sweetest apparition, such a pretty vision,” the Japanese House’s lead singer Amber Bain croons in verse 2. “There was no reason, no explanation: the perfect hallucination.” Sometimes reminiscing about an ex can be too agonizing to bear, but other times it can be a mollifying meander down Memory Lane. Maybe it can even turn you on.

P.S. If you can’t get enough of this song – and I can’t blame you – listen to this a cappella rendition. Ideally while blazed.

Ought – Beautiful Blue Sky

This song is sexy in the way that it’s sexy to fuck someone who is almost robotically dominant: “We do this my way, we do it efficiently, and we do it now.” The driving drums and mechanical guitars forge a rhythm that builds and builds, and then there’s Tim Darcy shouting erratically on top of it all. At times, he seems to be making fun of the whole concept of small talk – “How’s the family? How’s your health been? Fancy seeing you here! Beautiful weather today!” – and the effect is of someone who desperately wants to fuck you, and will do a good job if he does, but doesn’t quite know how to get there from here.

I want my G-spot pounded to the beat of this song. It just feels right.

Ben Rector – Paris

This song is the purest distillation I’ve found of what it feels like to be in New Relationship Energy – or to be in an established relationship that still lapses back into an NRE-esque mode, raw and fresh and sweet. “I haven’t seen her for a month or so,” Ben sings; “Young love feels like finding buried gold.”

I listened to this a lot while falling in love with my Sir. Ben sings in the second verse, “I feel sixteen while we are making love,” and that’s how I felt, too: transported back to a youthful mood where everything was warm and hopeful, and nothing could touch me because I was in love! That’s not always an explicitly sexy feeling – I could write a whole essay about how NRE makes me feel a bit like a haggard zombie running on endorphin fumes – but sometimes it is, and that’s what this song feels like to me. Lust, love, and silly optimism.

John Mayer – Love on the Weekend

My brother showed me this one first. We share a long-standing love of John Mayer – his problematic qualities notwithstanding – and when this song dropped, Max said, “You’ve gotta listen to this one.” Max is usually right about such things, so I did, and damn, the boy knows me: this track is very up my alley.

Like “Paris,” “Love on the Weekend” is definitely an NRE anthem. John sings, “I’ll be dreaming of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow,” capturing the clinical reality of love’s early days without diminishing its effects. I found this song relatable as my Sir and I fell into a more-or-less monthly routine of one of us visiting the other for a long, luxurious weekend. “It’s a Friday; we finally made it. I can’t believe I get to see your face. You’ve been working, and I’ve been waiting to pick you up and take you from this place.” Oh, John. I’ve loved you for almost two decades and you still manage to sing what my heart is thinking.

Sufjan Stevens – Movement II: Sleeping Invader

This is a standout track on Stevens’ gorgeous instrumental album The BQE, which I’ve loved for years and listened to most memorably through noise-canceling headphones during a sensory deprivation scene with my Sir this year.

Sensory deprivation – like some drugs – can have the effect of amplifying the sensations you can feel. Listening to music while high or sensory-deprived (or both) can cause my brain to organize the input it’s receiving into a narrative that fits with the music I’m hearing. So as my Sir did painful/pleasurable things to my restrained, blindfolded, high little body, I found that those sensations mapped themselves onto the orchestral swells and pulses and pings of The BQE. The album wasn’t just background noise for the scene; to me, it guided the scene, echoed it, co-created it, fused with it.

This felt like a natural continuation of my relationship with this album, which I had once listened to while high and gotten so turned on from the beauty of it that I almost came, untouched. Music is strange like that.

Alina Baraz – Yours

Alina is on this list every year, and not just because it’s tradition at this point: she creates some of the sexiest music I’ve ever heard.

I got a little misty-eyed the first time I heard this song, because in the chorus, Alina sings: “Love me like I’m never gonna leave. Love me like I’m yours.” It reminded me so much of my Sir’s dependable assurances that he has no plans to break up with me, despite my anxious brain always fearing I’m about to lose him. There is something so sexy about simply feeling safe, especially when you go through your day-to-day life never being entirely convinced of your safety. I am skeptical of the whole concept of “lovemaking” – that ooey-gooey brand of hyper-vanilla sex that’s overrepresented in mainstream media and makes my skin crawl – but the arguably romantic act of my Sir murmuring “You’re safe” while he spanks me and steps on me and fucks me is nonetheless as hot and rejuvenating to me as a shot of cinnamon whiskey. It warms me from the inside out. So does this song.

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio – Eighty-Eight Days in My Veins

I can’t believe this song hasn’t made it onto this list before! I’ve loved it for at least ten years, since the days when I’d listen to JazzFM when I couldn’t sleep and take diligent notes on my favorite tracks if the announcers remembered to mention their names (this was pre-Shazam!). I remember hearing the intense, complex lead piano part on this track and feeling transported to another dimension, somewhere icy and angry and full of longing. (My love for this song, and this trio, deepened even further when I found out years later that Esbjörn Svensson had tragically died in a scuba-diving accident at age 44, with decades of beautiful piano-playing still left in him. Rest in power, you Swedish god.)

This song’s been in my aftercare playlist for a while, because it’s so familiar to me as to be soothing – I can sing along with the piano part as it skips erratically all over the musical map (what a nerd). But it’s a sexy song in its own right. One memorable evening this year, my Sir connected my phone to the Bluetooth speakers in the hotel we were staying at so I could pipe my aftercare playlist throughout our room after sex, but by the time we got to this song, we were already fucking again. He came in my throat sometime around the intense, syncopated climax of “Eighty-Eight Days.” It was for that reason that I texted him gleefully to announce when our relationship turned 88 days old. We are nerds and we are in love.

What sexy songs did you love this year?