*gasp* Slut?!

By now, we sex workers have reclaimed this slur instead of letting it hurt us. But where did it start?

“Slut” finally made it into a dictionary in the 1400s. At the time, it had come to mean “a woman of dirty slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance; a foul slattern”. Just an unkempt lady, essentially.

Allow me to elaborate. Before I became a cam model/clip maker, I was HORRIBLY disorganized. As long as I have a bed to sleep on, the rest of my room (and my life in general) doesn’t really matter. I’m not the type to make cleaning a priority. As long as everything is hygienic, no dirty dishes, that kind of thing, being unkempt is of no consequence to me. I was a little over-analytical when it came to to-do lists and things like that, but beyond that my life was pretty cluster-fuck-y, I just knew how to navigate it.

I don’t think I fully understood the gravity of what I was taking on when I chose to become a member of this industry. I was one of “those” people; under the impression that, if I just cammed for ‘x’ amount of time a night, I’d make $75k a year with little effort on my part beyond simply logging in and flashing my parts at people on the Internet.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong about anything.

Being a sex worker is honestly my first REAL job (funny considering most don’t think of it as such). I waited tables in high school, yes, and after that I traveled around a bit, becoming quite the vagabond. But honestly being a sex worker is something I wanted to do for quite some time and once I became an adult, not just in age but in maturity and stability, I decided it was time to finally take this crazy thing I had heard all about out for a spin.

I started making custom clips. From the first day I started ACTUALLY putting forth the effort, it became readily apparent that it was NOT as easy as I pictured. Now, this may have been the over-analyst in me, but it started with a custom clip that came with a script and a certain video length. I broke this down into increments of literal seconds between motions, speaking, etc.

Then I started getting more and more requests. So many they were hard to keep up with. This is what started my erratic schedule making. “Clip for joeblow at 4:00, clip for johndoe at 5:00, clip for billybob at 6:00, editing until 9:00”, and it just got more complex from there, further evolving into an entire week to month long schedules.

The more requests I got, the more organized I had to become, especially with my working space (my bedroom). It just wasn’t an option for my room to be so hectic anymore. Who would have thought the slovenly unkempt person I was before would disappear when I became an actual slut?

As I began offering more products and services, working for more companies, promoting myself more, learning that I have to pay taxes being self-employed, the workload and responsibilities became almost overbearing. Almost.

This is when I really began learning a lot about how to organize my life (or, at least, my work life) a little bit better. I have a binder for work expense receipts, scheduling, and itemizing my taxes. I have a small notebook that stays right by my side at all times, full of necessary tasks to improve my job. This ranges from simplistic things like filming and camming, to more abstract tasks like improving the coding on my cam site’s bio or rearranging the order of my store so that it’s more appealing to the eye, and even more complex ideas such as researching methods of advertising or business approaches.

From there it just gets bigger. I’ve never been so passionate about something to be perfectly honest. I’ve never been a part of something where there is CONSTANT room for improvement. Be it in my personal life, in self-care, or in my work ethic. Because of this, there’s always something I can be doing. I spend anywhere from 48-66 hours a week either researching, improving, camming, filming, editing, promoting, speaking with clients, or any other array of responsibilities, which I’m sure any other sex worker would attest to.

When reading the hours, I’m sure it almost sounds like a bad thing, but it really isn’t to me! The way I approach life has improved so vastly that I wouldn’t have it any other way. Not only am I able to handle my work life more effectively, such as prioritizing customer service, paying jobs, social media networking and advertising, etc, but my home/personal life has improved as well! I remember to keep my house neat, tidy, and organized more often, I’m more careful about responding and interacting when it comes to interpersonal relationship, a feat for a hermit like me, and I’m more focused when it comes to my own self-care -- because, let’s face it, in this industry it is VITAL.

Who knew that immersing myself in sex work, feeding into my desires and serving others like never before would help me find motivation and discipline to change my life, not just as a professional, but as a person?

MxPraxisPhanes