The lure of green: cash and envy and I WANNA ROLL IN IT
I’ll be honest with you: I don’t make a lot of money from phone sex. I’m good, but it has been a constant struggle to stay afloat.
I do know of other people doing phone work, and also other forms of sex work, who are making bank, though. (“Bank” in this context = “at least twice as much as I am making”, which isn’t saying much, but it’s all relative, this is my point.) I hear from friends and acquaintances in the biz, you better believe it. One girlfriend, the one who helped me put together my first pro-domme listing a few weeks ago, she does escort work, and she seems to be making a comfortable living doing five or six sessions per week, and then taking two months off to go on international trips paid for by her “sugar daddies”. One new friend on FB works the male side, doing high-end, online and phone cash domination on guys, and he recently mentioned to me in passing that someone—more than one person, it sounds like—bought one of his three-minute videos for 10k.
Grggh. I can feel the envy building up in the back of my throat. And you know what I do?
<gulp>
That’s right. I swallow it.
I don’t allow myself to spend a lot of time being envious of my colleagues’ financial success. Because the plain fact of the matter is that I am not working hard enough to get that much ahead in any field of sex work. My friends have been putting in the work, developing their marketing and loyal customers, and that shit takes more time than I have to give right now.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not constantly exploring other sexy-time ways to make money—pro-domme work! custom typewritten erotica with online ordering!—income streams that I think will fit well with the life I’m trying to create. Nor does it mean that I’m being casual about the job that I’ve got. After seven months of touring, I am working my way back to being on call between 14 to 18 hours a day, and when the calls come in, I give the best phone that I can. But I know the limitations I have to work with. This is a dispatch company, and I have nothing to do or say about the marketing, so really, my job is just to stay at home and wait for the phone to ring.
I’ve known from the beginning that phone sex wasn’t the career that I wanted to follow. Yes, it’s a good match for my skills and aptitudes but at the heart of it, phone sex is a job, like any other, the “day job” that so many performers hold down, the sort of thing that pays (barely) the bills and gives me (barely) enough room to try to make things work in performance and writing. The challenge about those situations is that you can’t really stay “in balance” for ever.
I’ve been straddling the divide for a few years, but the truth is, both phone sex and performance work are demanding professions, and I can’t do justice to my earning potential in either as long as I’m stretched out wide over that abyss, tippy-toes holding on to both sides, afraid to push off with one foot and just GO HARD.
So, as much as I want to roll in some money at some point soon, I don’t think it’s going to be money from phone sex. The grass always looks greener, right? I have gotten up close, and I see the work that’s involved, and I just… I want to put that work somewhere else.
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