Ancilla L
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Why I regret posting a nude to try to popularize my brand.
🕑 Added 2024-12-23 08:41:04 +0000 UTCThe first time I posted an *actual* nude picture online I was *shocked* by the response. It was just a picture of me lying naked but it got hits faster than anything I had ever created—erotic writing, books, pictures of blood-stained clothing, news articles, broadcast segments—it was instantly more desirable than all of those things on which I had worked so hard. I couldn't make sense of it. I wasn't even *doing* anything in the picture, I was just *being* naked. Besides, I am truly not what you would call (conventionally) *hot* nor do I possess the kind of photographic/modelling skill or talent that turns a body into a story. There are great models and photographers who take boudoir and erotic shots that are gorgeous and clearly take a lot of work and skill, but that's not what I did, I just snapped a picture of my naked body and posted it online. I expected it to be my least popular post ever. It wasn't and I didn't like that.
Let me be clear about something, though. I have no moral judgement on people posting or sharing nudes. Naked is pretty normal to me. I have no value judgement for women who game the male-gaze to their advantage and are good at it. Turning a system that objectifies you on its head to benefit you makes sense to me. I also don't think the *only* reason people post naked pictures is to appease a male gaze for popularity, I think there are lots of people who like it, people who get off to it, people who are excellent at it as a craft/artform, people for whom it is a livelihood, people who enjoy the process, people who find it empowering and also, people who think they *have to* do it. I'm not here to denigrate anyone, I am here to discuss how (internet) *popularity* intersects with the established conventions of marketing (like *sex sells* which really means perfect tits and sculpted abs sell) to create a specific form of pressure for people trying to make a living off their (sexual) craft/art: **The Pressure To Be Shiny.**
I am not shiny.
Many years ago, I was a sex-worker who worked for a mid-range escort service. Most people in my life know that about me and recently, I was talking to one of them about how I am completely unable to determine what kind of outfit is *sexy* on me.
"When you worked as an escort, you did that right?" They asked, "You dressed in alluring ways for your clients?"
Actually, I didn't.
Sometimes they requested specific clothing and I wore it. Most of the time, I wore the same clothes to every single appointment. A black top, a black skirt, sneakers/crocs and pearls that my father bought me for my birthday one year (because my own psychosexual drama must not be denied within my escapades). I didn't even really wear *nice* lingerie. I didn't accentuate anything in my body. I didn't widen my lips with lipstick. None of that. You wouldn't see me and think I looked *sexy*. However, I was excellent at my job and if the way to measure that is by how many people *came back*, then I was golden. I actually *loved* sex-work, maybe it's a skill or maybe it's a function of curiosity, but I am able to get people to show me their desire in the most granular, explicit ways possible and I love celebrating desire. Maybe it makes people feel accepted. Maybe it makes the oft viewed shameful act of going to a sex-worker seem less so. Whatever it is, it worked for me and my clients. However, my tales of sex-work will never be the story of glitz, glamour or intrigue, you wouldn't read my stories about it as you'd expect, because they don't really deal with the *alluring* aspects of scandal, tragedy and secret lives. They deal with humanity and reality, which is much less shiny than anything else.
The need to be shinier than I am, in many different forms, has followed me around a lot of my professions. As a journalist, I do my job, and I don't care if anyone remembers my name, I cannot *brand* myself well nor am I interested. I love what I do and I am fairly decent at it. Still, in that profession, it matters much less that I be *appealing* than it did in sex-work or it does in my pursuit to be a kink/sex-educator and author who markets herself and her events over the internet.
There is a market around BDSM now that is much wider than ever before. It contains lots of factions. It contains fetish-pages on here and OnlyFans. It contains clubs and play-based events. There are authors and erotic writers. There are toy-manufacturers and designers. There are educators and performers. There are professional dominatrices. There are content creators and pornographers. There are fetish-inclined sex-workers. There are Instagram pages. There are also fun bazaars and pop-up events looking for kooky subcultures to include as booths in their many, many fests of the year. There are production houses and news sources looking for stories of *kink* to turn into the next ten-minute talk of the town to supplement the endless material being churned out by streaming services (which, by the way, turned out to be an excellent experiment in recreating cable). There's merch and there's videography. There's a million podcasts to be on. BDSM doesn't just have a community now, it has a *market* with a potential client-base that isn't *in* the subculture (yet or may not even want to be, ever).
I am not condemning the market, it would be quite hypocritical to do that when I am very much *a part of the market*. I'll be honest though, for a while, I wasn't actually *cognizant* of the market. I do make money off kink and have for about five years now, but I always thought of that as money I make for being a writer who also writes about kink and has a specific audience to do that for or an educator who teaches specific things, sometimes kink. I never really kept track of my *following* or its development on here and when I launched my Patreon page for anyone to support my writing, I was shocked so many people were willing to do that but I still didn't think of myself as part of *commercial* kink. I am, and I came to see how my blind-spot was about the connotation of commercial, and what I thought I had to do in order to be commercial. It's a lot of shiny stuff. You can't just target an extant audience, you have to *build a following*. The moment I first became aware that I was actually trying to run a kink-education and fetish-art based *business*, was the moment when I posted that *nude*.
It felt like that made sense. I saw the currency of *allure* all around the market. I saw pro-dommes hashtagging Louboutins and education/awareness pages posting corsets-and-tits. I saw reels of glamorous events with drinks and heels and whips, but my classes look like mismatched chairs pulled together and pointed towards a PowerPoint presentation taught by a person in an unironed black t-shirt, no eyeliner and no photography skills. My books read well but they aren't marketed well, I don't have sexy covers and I don't know how to sell them as steamy romance. I am comfortable branding myself as a good writer, but not so much as an institution of kink (you know like some dominant men do, in the way of being super hot and trope-y). If you heard and saw me talk about the hottest bits of my books, you'd probably be *less* likely to think they were actually erotic. If you asked me to picture myself as my character, as my brand, I'd be the same unironed power-point girl who just wants to be left alone to drink her tea. There's no allure to the visual of what I do, so I figured, maybe there is an allure to the visual of how I look—the body parts I have—and maybe I could use that to substantiate the eyes on my business? People kept telling me to do that too, it was the *only* way, you gotta build a brand and put your *persona* out there. Someone asked me why I wasn't vying to the *queen of kink in India* after having spent so many years working on it when no one else was. I had no idea this was something one could even try to be. Still, as I saw all of this happen around me, I wondered, should I be doing this too?
So I posted a sexy nude.
It kinda broke me. Please know that it wasn't an act of empowerment for me, I don't find anything degrading about being seen naked, but I don't find it empowering either. It's *whatever*. I have been naked online many times before but the nudity is usually incidental to what I'm actually trying to picture. It's never the tits, it could be the welts/needles/bruises on the tits. But most importantly, I didn't put *work* into this picture I created, and still, it was *so easy* to get attention this way. For a second, it genuinely made me wonder if I had just been wrong all this while and I should have gone down the shiny path of sexy and alluring instead. Maybe they were all right and my business would be way better if I played the game too. Fortunately for me, I'm not even capable of it because I don't even know how to be visually sexy or what alluring content would be. Moreover, I felt so sick about that picture, I felt like I had compromised my integrity. I *know* who I am and that's not who I am, I knew that when I did it, and maybe it worked to get more eyes on me but i didn't pay attention to *whose* eyes they were and whether those eyes were ever going to turn into *clients*.
It matters very much what you are trying to sell and that is not what I am trying to sell. I am very proud of certain things I have done. In the last three years, I have written seven fucking fetish books that are erotic or educational. In the past fourteen years of writing for a living in various different ways I have managed to build an *audience* of people like me, who are women, queer or genuinely engaged with the world. You know how *easy* it is to get eyes on the internet? Be hot, free, cute or hold a kitten, but those eyes also shift from one bit of content to the next without internalising anything. We're all those eyes in some ways. We all do it. Which also means it's extremely hard to *keep* an audience, especially one that genuinely engages with what you do, and financially supports it. Clicking like is nothing in terms of currency, clicking *pay* is everything. I know lots of fetish models/influencers/businesses who make large splashes and no money, and they *hate* having to play the games of the algorithm as much as I do, but they play them, and it doesn't always lead to monetary success. Yet, I have managed to make money at what I do without compromising my essence at any point (except the nude). It's fucking hard to make money at self-publishing books (and *most* writers make almost none), I bought a whole-ass car with money I made off mine. I didn't write stuff that *sells*, I wrote what I want to write and it worked. I make money off every kink-class or event I host and I know how hard it is to do that because it is a constant complaint in the industry, and I never taught what would be alluring. One of the proudest moments of my life was turning down a pretty lucrative offer from a fairly renowned organisation to teach pop-kink at a festival, because I don't *need* to do things in which I don't believe to keep my business afloat.
It's hard not to be tempted by the evolving norms of the space in which you are trying to carve out a niche. It's hard not to feel like you are missing opportunities and not hustling enough but it is much harder to respect yourself if you breach your own integrity. I have to be who I am. I am not shiny. I cannot lean into hot. I don't know how to sexualise my femininity and I feel uncomfortable with male-attention (in particular) for my nudity or body. I don't want to do any of that even if it means I would be more popular if I did. Popular can fuck itself because you know what I do have? I have a life where I *only* do work i absolutely love and I make money for doing it. Beat that. I struggled with it, with accepting opportunity cost and myself, and while I regret posting that nude, I am also glad I did it. It taught me an important thing about myself. I care about my principles a lot more than I care about queens of kink. I'm not a queen, I'm much more likely to be a forgotten bureaucrat who got shit done and that's fine. I have to be who I am. I am the person who will post fetishistic pictures of herself but you probably won't see a tit and if you, it may inspire you to look away unless you are a specific type of person. I am comfortable with only being a specific cup of tea.
