money

What Are Your Professional Boundaries?

Kate Sloan

Some spiritual traditions posit that souls are reincarnated, and that some souls spend entire lifetimes trying to make amends for, or improve upon, things they did in previous lifetimes. If this is true, it seems clear to me that I must have been sent to this earth to work on my boundary-setting. It is a theme that has haunted my life.

For one thing, I’m a woman, and that’s a gender group our society explicitly encourages to be bad at boundary-setting. Women are supposed to juggle a career, housework, caretaking of their partner and/or children, and their own self-care, all while somehow being “chill” about the amount of physical, emotional, and logistical work thrust upon them. Women are also routinely encouraged to ignore or suspend our own boundaries in the realm of the romantic and sexual, chiefly because it often benefits shitty men when we do so. (Yuck.)

I’m also a freelancer and a person who works from home, two oft-overlapping identities that make a person even more vulnerable to having their boundaries bent or overstepped. Freelancers may experience bosses and editors expecting quick responses to any and all communiqué, work overflowing past the hours allotted for it (often without additional pay), and friends and family assuming we’re available at all times simply because we set our own schedules. It’s a nightmarish career for anyone who struggles with boundary-setting!

…Except that it doesn’t have to be. Whether you see it as a spiritual lesson or a purely practical one, there is much to be learned from having your boundaries repeatedly steamrolled in settings both personal and professional. The better I get at protecting my own energy and time through ruthless boundary-setting, the stronger and happier I feel overall. It’s a fantastic skillset to develop, for so many reasons. I’m not always as good at it as I’d like to be, but it feels great when I am.

One of the reasons I’ve been obsessed with boundary-setting in recent years is that my chronic illness has gotten worse and worse. My flare-ups are triggered by stress, among other things, so stress reduction is a top-level priority for me at this point. One of my new year’s resolutions for 2021 was to eliminate as many unnecessary stressors as humanly possible from my life this year, and setting better boundaries in my work life is a key way I’ve been doing that.

 

Here are some of my current professional boundaries:

  • I only work between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and only on weekdays. This includes work-related writing, answering business emails/DMs/etc., doing research for articles, and so on. Past 5 p.m., and on weekends, I am unavailable for business interactions. There are 2 exceptions to this rule: 1) If I’m genuinely excited to work on something – such as if inspiration for a fun blog post suddenly strikes on a Saturday – then it’s okay to work on it at any time, so long as I’m not pushing myself too hard. 2) I sometimes have to do podcast recordings outside of work hours due to guests’ scheduling needs, which is fine. I’ll just try to rest for an equivalent amount of time during the next work day to make up for it.
  • I do not accept writing assignments that pay less than $0.20 per word. (If the assignment in question offers a flat rate or an hourly rate instead of a per-word rate, I’ll try to convert it to per-word to figure out whether it meets this standard.) In the early days of my career, it made some sense to take on low-paying (and even unpaid) assignments much more often, to build my portfolio, skillset, brand, and professional network – but with two book deals and countless bylines under my belt, I deserve and expect better payment these days. I sometimes consider lower-paying gigs if they offer some combination of creative freedom, a topic I find fascinating, a prestigious byline, fun perks (e.g. free travel), and/or cool collaborators, but for the most part, I’d rather have fewer projects (even if that means making less money overall) than feel resentful of the low-paying work I’ve allowed into my life.
  • I don’t generally accept feedback on my writing from people who have not actually read the piece(s) they are criticizing. I used to think theirs was a valid form of critique in some ways, but there have just been too many baffling instances of people becoming angry or upset because of what they assume I’ve written, having not even read what I’ve actually written. Almost all of the time, the points they’re making are already addressed in the piece, and sometimes we even agree with each other. You cannot reason with someone who is arguing from a place of presumption and bad faith. Reading someone’s work is the lowest possible bar you have to clear before you’re able to critique it in a coherent, accurate, and good-faith manner.
  • I don’t write things I don’t really believe, ever. That means, among other things, that I don’t accept sponsored post assignments from clients who demand fraudulently positive reviews of their products/services. Everything on this blog (except for a handful of guest posts written by people I personally invited to contribute) is written by me and reflects an opinion I actually hold (or, at least, an opinion I held at the time that I wrote it).

 

Despite how clearly necessary these boundaries are, it can be surprisingly hard sometimes to hold firm when they are pushed. This is why I have certain stock phrases/messages I can send to firmly but kindly express my boundaries, such as:

  • “That rate is too low for me, but best of luck!”
  • “For your future reference, I work Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET and am otherwise out of office.”
  • “From your suggested rate, it sounds like you’re looking for an entry-level writer. As you know from my portfolio, that isn’t me, so it sounds like we’re not a fit at this time.”

 

Some such sentences sound embarrassingly self-aggrandizing (particularly when you have impostor syndrome!), such that I sometimes have to give myself a little pep talk before I can hit “send.” I often have to remind myself to avoid language that softens my boundary (e.g. “Just a reminder that I mostly only work on weekdays…” or “Usually my rate is at least double that, but…”) and to remain firm in my tone. Sometimes I’ll have an assertive, communication-savvy friend or partner read over my message before I send it, to make sure I’m expressing myself clearly and kindly. Or sometimes I just trust myself and click “send” easily, knowing I’m doing the right thing for myself and that any client worth having will respect my boundaries wholeheartedly.

Standing up for myself is simultaneously one of the scariest things I ever do and one of the most empowering. It doesn’t always feel comfortable – or even possible – but whenever I manage to do it, my life gets easier, calmer, and happier. My achy body appreciates the reduction in stress immensely – and my nervous brain appreciates the reminder that my needs and wants are just as important as everybody else’s.

5 Ways I Make Money As a Blogger

Kate Sloan

This is one of the questions I get asked most often about blogging, so I figured it was time to address it in more detail!

While I don’t know that I’d consider blogging my full-time job, for the past few years years it’s brought in about 45-65% of my total income. Here are the main avenues through which I make money from running this blog…

 

Sponsored content

This is the biggest aspect of what I do here, income generation-wise; sponsored posts brought in 44% of my total blog income in 2020. For the first couple years that I blogged here, I was very resistant to taking on sponsored post assignments – but then I started learning from the lovely ladies of the Blogcademy about what a good sponsored post can be. The best ones, IMO, are entertaining, valuable for readers, and written in your blog’s usual style/voice. After all, that’s what your readers are there for!

Usually, I get a fair amount of freedom to pick the topics and details of my sponsored posts – in part because I basically require this when negotiating deals with potential clients – so all I have to do that’s out of the ordinary is find a way to incorporate 1-3 specific links, with specific keywords, as per the client’s request. I love doing sponsored posts because they allow me to get paid for doing what I like best: writing for my audience, about (mostly) whatever the hell I feel like writing about!

(By the way, a lot of companies seem to think “sponsored post” and “guest post” are synonymous. I get many requests per week to repost someone else’s writing here, in exchange for a fee – but I started this blog because I love to write, not because I love to get paid to post other people’s content! So if someone refuses to let me write the post myself, I tell them we’re not a good fit and bid them adieu.)

 

Advertising

You might notice that there are some banner ads over there in my sidebar, and some text links toward the bottom. These aren’t huge moneymakers – mine made up about 20% of my total blog income last year – but that’s still nothing to sneeze at.

I have similar policies for ads as I do for sponsored content: they have to be relevant to my readership and in line with my ethics. I reserve the right to refuse ads that I consider sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., which thankfully hasn’t been much of a problem in the time that I’ve been blogging.

 

Affiliate commissions

Affiliate commissions made up about 35% of my total blog income last year. When I write about sex toys, I often (though not always) use affiliate links. That way, if a reader ends up buying a product through my link, I get a small kickback from that purchase (usually 15-20%) at no added cost to the customer. It’s essentially a way that toy-makers and retailers can incentivize writers to mention their products, and can reward them for doing so.

However, contrary to what some people think, this doesn’t necessarily mean that writers are lying about products when they use affiliate links! See, if I told you a product was great when it actually sucked, or if I wrote something I obviously didn’t actually believe, my readers would figure that out pretty quick and would stop trusting me – which, of course, would not be great for my continued ability to make a living in this field! I also have several affiliates who carry approximately a zillion different products, so there’s very little reason for me to link to a product I don’t like when I could just link to one I do like instead.

 

Consulting

While there are hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts’ worth of information on this site, I can’t answer every single specific question my readers may have. In some cases, they write to me to book a consulting session, so I can advise them (usually via email, sometimes via Skype/Zoom/etc.) on a specific problem they’re having in their life, related to sex, kink, relationships, or something else that I know a thing or two about.

I don’t take on too many of these clients these days because frankly I’m usually too overrun with other projects, but it is nice to be able to help folks from time to time.

 

Other writing assignments

I don’t count the income from non-blog writing when tallying up how much money my blog has made each year, because it is a separate thing – but in some cases, I wouldn’t have been offered an assignment if not for this blog!

Sometimes companies reach out wanting me to write for their on-site blog, or to do copywriting for their product pages. Sometimes editors at publications ask me to expand on a particular topic for their site, having seen me mention said topic here before. A couple times, commissioning editors at publishing houses have even reached out to ask me about writing books for them. “Exposure” isn’t good enough payment on its own, as any frustrated freelancer will tell you – but the exposure I get from this blog often gets me gigs that pay in actual money. Cool!

 

Fellow “pro bloggers,” where does the bulk of your income come from?

P.S. Want more posts like this? Check out the “writing” category of this site!

Why is Having a Sugar Daddy So Hot?

Kate Sloan

Regular readers of this site will recall that I am a former sugar baby. A handsome, charming man paid me in bimonthly instalments for the pleasure of my sparkling company. (That makes it sound more wholesome than it was. There was also phone sex. And devious sexting.)

I had a lot of Thoughts ‘n’ Feelings at the time about money fetishism, “financial domination,” sugar dating, and how it all fits together. I think a lot of sugar babies who seek their daddies on sites like Happymatches probably just think of these interactions as jobs of a sort – and they’re not wrong to do so; sugar dating is often considered a form of sex work. But seeing as I’m a kink nerd, I found myself delving deeper into the psychology of these transactions, seeking to understand why I felt a thrill of titillation whenever a beefy sum landed in my bank account after a late-night telephone tryst.

After thinking about it a lot, here are some of the factors I’ve come to identify in sugar dating’s hotness quotient…

When you have money, you can relax.

Emily Nagoski writes in her book Come As You Are about how stress puts a damper on sexual arousal. Not only are you mentally distracted when you’re stressed out – you’re actually physiologically less able to get turned on.

Nagoski differentiates between the sexual “brakes” and their counterpart, the sexual “accelerator.” If you’re a naturally libidinous person, having the pressure taken off your brakes can kick your accelerator into high gear. So, if stressing about money has been a regular part of your life and then suddenly isn’t anymore, it could affect your sexual desire levels in positive and surprising ways. That’s certainly what happened to me!

With more money also came more free time – some of which I spent on activities that made me feel beautiful, pampered, and sensually stimulated, like taking myself out for fancy meals, lying around getting high, and – yes – masturbating. All of this can kickstart your libido if it’s been stagnant!

Money is power.

This is the thinking upon which all “findom” play is predicated. In the typical dynamic, a male submissive showers a female dominant in cash, because the cash is the metaphor they have both chosen for their consensual power exchange.

Of course, money’s not just a metaphor: it makes you powerful in the real world, too. And for many people, feeling powerful – capable, strong, unfuckwithable – can boost their sex drive.

Interestingly, I was a submissive in my dynamic, as is relatively common in sugar relationships. My sugar daddy found power in his ability to take care of me by handling my expenses and treating me to things I wanted. But there is lots of power to be found in submission, when it’s something you want and have chosen. When someone else puts me in this role I love so much, I feel respected, seen, and understood – and those are definitely powerful feelings.

Payment is evidence of your desirability.

It’s not the only evidence, certainly. But it’s pretty hard to deny that someone finds you attractive if they are literally paying you for the privilege of spending time with you.

Despite knowing on a logical level that many people think I’m cute, I often find it difficult to believe. I have to look for evidence, cognitive-behavioral therapy-style, that I am indeed hot – and even then, I rarely quite believe it. The exchange of money was almost like a shortcut to understanding my own hotness, though. It just seemed so concrete and real to me; there was no way for me to rationalize it away. Clearly this man wanted me; otherwise he would not have gone to the trouble of seeking me out and lavishing cash on me.

With money, you can make yourself look – and feel – hotter.

Last but not least, when you’re cashed up, you can do things like get waxed, get your hair done, buy makeup, and update your wardrobe. These things may seem small, but they can affect your sexual self-confidence and thereby your libido.

In a perfect world, we would all be able to conjure confidence from within ourselves, without having to rely on external factors or extrinsic validation – but until that perfect world comes into being, I’ll take the opportunity to look hot on someone else’s dime if they’re offering. Why the hell not?

 

Have you ever been in a sugar-dating dynamic? Did you find it hot? What appealed to you about it?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Freelance Friday: Finances & Fears

Kate Sloan

Freelance Friday is my monthly feature where I answer questions about my life as a freelance writer, blogger, copywriter, and scribe-about-town. You can send in questions via email or in the comments!

Q. Is it necessary to have a dayjob as well?

A. I have one part-time dayjob at the moment: I work 8-10 hours a week writing tweets for an adult-industry marketing firm. (I had an additional part-time dayjob until recently, but am no longer working at ye olde sex shoppe – which, frankly, hallelujah, because retail is hard and really not well-suited to how my brain works.)

I make enough money from my more creative work that it isn’t necessary for me to have a dayjob – particularly since, if I didn’t have one, I’d have more time and energy for pitching, writing, and hustlin’ – but I still value my dayjob very much and would encourage writers and other freelance-y types to keep theirs or get one, for a few reasons.

First off: obviously having more money is better. My blogging and freelancing could cover my basic living expenses, but then I’d have very little extra cash for things like meals out, theatre tickets, travel, and gifts for friends – all of which are important to me. I don’t mind working harder to keep my lifestyle at a level where I’m happy with it and don’t feel deprived of anything vital.

Secondly, my dayjob acts as a safety net. Freelancing and blogging, as you may know, can be pretty feast-or-famine endeavors. There are months when I get a few fat freelance cheques and sell a handful of sponsored posts, and there are other months where my email inbox and bank account both remain comparatively barren. My dayjob offers me a flat, dependable monthly income, so that even if I earn absolutely no money elsewhere (which happens rarely but does happen), I will neither starve nor be kicked out of my apartment.

Finally, my dayjob gives me a peace of mind that is honestly crucial to my creativity. When I’m hard-up for cash, I tend to focus on crafting work I think will sell, rather than on what I genuinely want to write, which is more often the quirky, offbeat, original stuff that my readers like better anyway. If not for my dayjob, I’d feel paralyzed by the constant need to earn and earn and earn, and would have no spare energy or space for idle imagination. When the problem of money is more-or-less sorted, there’s more room to play. I am enormously privileged to be in a position where this is true for me.

Even if my career blew up tomorrow and I was suddenly making as much money from blogging and freelancing as I had previously been making in total, I think I would probably keep my dayjob. The security and freedom it gives me is a daily blessing. Plus, writin’ tweets is pretty fun sometimes.

Q. Did you have any fears when you were starting out, or even now that you’re established?

A. For a long time, I feared associating my real-life name and face with my sex blog identity. I worried future potential employers would find out I was a Sex Person and would bar me from their business, thereby denying me employment, money, and security. It was a scary thought, that some irresponsible internet dalliances in my youth could cost me financial stability way into my future.

But the farther I traveled into Sex Writing Land, the more I came to realize that a) making sex-related media is probably the big-picture destiny of my life, b) I can absolutely make a living doing this work (and even moreso if I attach my name and face to it), and c) anyone who would forgo hiring me because of my sex writing background is not someone I would want to work for anyway.

(Worth noting here: being able to be “out” about my identity is a privilege of my financial situation, social standing, geographic location, educational background, and other life circumstances – one that not everyone is afforded, nor should everyone who can be out about their work have to be. It was a personal choice I made for myself and I support folks in this industry who are both out of the closet and in it.)

I also feared I didn’t have anything real or important to say. This was especially true back when I started my blog, because I was in a steady, monogamous, sexually satisfying but unadventurous relationship with the first and only man I’d ever had sex with. I was vanilla back then (or at least, I thought I was), and had hardly any sexual experience to speak of, and feared that would hold me back as a sex writer. That became even more true when that relationship ended in 2014 and I went over a year without dating or having any sex at all.

What I learned about myself, during those monotonous periods, was that I still have eleventy-zillion thoughts and ideas and fantasies and hopes and dreams about sex even when I’m not having sex, or having boring sex. I don’t think someone’s sex life is necessarily a predictor of what kind of sex writer they can be. It’s more about how they approach the topic, the media they consume (or don’t consume) around it, their ideas and beliefs about sex, their kinks and fantasies, the things they allow themselves to want and the things they’re trying not to want.

I still don’t exactly know “what kind of sex writer I am,” what my “niche” is, what people look to me for. But I know that I’ve found my voice and my purpose by pursuing what organically fascinates me. Imitating writers you admire can only take you so far; at some point, you have to follow your heart and all its weird curiosities. It’s there that you’ll find the truest and most original core of what you can do.

On Taking Men’s Money

Kate Sloan

Wednesday night, I get on a Skype call with a man who’s paid me for my time tonight. A few minutes in, he confesses, “I looked at your tweets earlier to see what kind of mood you were in, and I saw you’re not too pleased with men today, so I was worried.”

I laugh out loud. “Oh, no. Those tweets were about men who weren’t paying me to put up with them. That’s completely different,” I tell him, and I mean it.

See, the thing is, cis men are frequently exhausting. They’re not socialized to notice and take care of others’ feelings in the way that folks raised as women are, and what results is – not in all men, but in most of them, from my experience – a habitual trampling on others’ emotional boundaries, talking too much and not listening enough, prioritizing their own opinions and experiences over others’, and lacking appropriate empathy for others’ struggles. These qualities often exist even in men I would otherwise consider good people, so even my deep, fond friendships with cis men usually take more out of me than my connections to women, femmes, and anyone who was raised as female.

There’s been a lot of discourse around “emotional labor” these past few years, and it’s well-known that men tend to demand more of it and be comparatively unskilled at providing it in return. I’ve seen this over and over again: on Tinder dates with dudes who monologued at me about their career ambitions without asking me one thing about myself; in long conversations with male friends who unpacked their latest romantic drama until providing support exhausted me so much that I had to leave early; even while fielding endless questions from male customers while working retail (who usually didn’t end up buying anything, mind you). I’m sometimes willing to put in this type of work – that’s what intimate connections require, after all – but only for certain people, only some of the time, and ideally in exchange for something in return.

That “something in return” might be reciprocal friendship and support. It might be a favor done for me, like bringing me coffee, helping me with web design, or (in the case of some of my tiresome Tinder dates and loquacious FWBs) giving me a killer orgasm. Or it might be money. And that’s fine.

In her essay “The Monetized Man,” culture writer Alana Massey explains that she’s titled her checking account “Male Tears” because so much of her income comes from writing about “how the unrestrained, unaccountable emotional lives of men wreak havoc on women.” In a similar spirit, I have never really felt guilty about accepting money from men, because I regard it as reparations of a sort. They still earn substantially more than women and are taken more seriously in professional environments. Why shouldn’t I accept money from the men who want to give it to me, as a way of levelling the playing field so my life more closely resembles what it would look like in a gender-egalitarian world? (This is also why you should give your money to people of color, queers and trans folks, disabled folks, and other marginalized people when and if you can.)

Every day, I receive at least a handful of DMs on Twitter and Instagram from men I don’t know. Most of them lack any creativity or charm whatsoever: “Hey,” they might say, or, “Hi sexy lady.” On a tip from my friend Bex, I’ve started replying to these messages thusly: “What can I help you with?”

This immediately sets a tone for our conversation. I am not willing to idly small-talk with random men, especially those who lack even the basic courtesy to introduce themselves or explain why they are messaging me. What with my blog, podcast, freelance writing, and two “dayjobs,” plus a social life, I literally do not have the time to engage in the banal banter these men are hoping for – unless they pay me.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – these interactions parlay into an actual financial transaction. They might buy nudes, a cam show, or a few minutes of sexting. Some of these guys have even become regular customers of mine, paying for my media or services every few weeks. The “sex work” column of my finance spreadsheet makes up 7% of my total income this year: not a lot, but nothing to sneeze at, certainly.

What’s better, still, is the men who reach out to me already knowing full well that money will be exchanged if we are to interact. These classy customers do not attempt to haggle my prices down, wrangle free nudes out of me, or waste my time with endless chatter; they just want my PayPal address and a list of upcoming evenings when I might be available to chat. Bless their hearts.

When I publicly express my opinion that Random Men of the Internet should pay me if they want to interact with me, I’m often met with accusations that I make men pay for everything in my life and that I’m a spoiled, entitled princess. While I am definitely a princess, the rest of it is false: I always insist on paying my fair share on dates, I’m not conventionally attractive enough to get offered free drinks at bars the way some women do, and at this point my living expenses are all covered by money I earn by working for it.

I don’t believe these men should pay me just because I exist and I’m great (although I am), but because what they are asking me for is labor and labor deserves payment. Titillating random men, supporting them emotionally, entertaining them – these forms of emotional labor are skilled, valuable labor, worthy of compensation.