/What I Write for Money, Honey
Anaïs Nin makes it look easy
By Chelsea G. Summers
Anaïs Nin makes it look easy. (Or maybe she doesn’t because to be honest I haven’t read much of her beyond the sexytime stories, and they kind of make me want to cock-punch her. I’d like to see Anaïs Nin in a cage-fight with Dr. Maya Angelou.) I’m sure there are parts in Nin’s voluminous diaries wherein she describes in satin prose how difficult it is to write erotica. I just haven’t read them, nor will I.
I know first hand the trials and tribulations of making with the big wordy naughty. I began writing my blog in March of 2005, and starting about six months after its inception, I have been paid fairly consistently to write about sex, usually in straightforwardly sexified terms: my rhetorical aim has been largely to enlarge and to make wet. This writing hasn’t been the mainstay of my livelihood, but it has certainly comprised the heaving lioness’s share of my writer identity and it certainly has lined my pockets regularly. It also hasn’t come without a cost.
Penthouse paid me the most to write for them, four articles in all, if memory serves. I hear it’s bad taste to divulge how much a magazine pays you to write an article, but suffice to say that I could have paid off all of my credit cards a couple times over with the before-tax proceeds of those articles. Which either says that I don’t owe much in credit card debt or that I got paid a lot. You get to interpret as you wish.
The piece I got paid most often for was a story that a private collector paid me to write. He gave me the first line: The secretary was bent over the desk with her skirt bunched up over her back and her panties pooled by her feet. The rest of the story borrowed equally from a game we used to play in grad school and an indie movie. The indie movie was Secretary, that mossy-dark film of S/m salvation and the healing power of bugs, and the game was “How would you kill?”, a time-idling pastime of figuring out how to murder someone with common office products. The fuck-you ending of the story, which included the hapless secretary being gently sodomized with the handle of a nine-iron, was that her boss and happy torturer was also herself a woman.
The story, first sold to this anonymous private collector, was then sold to He’s On Top, a collection edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, and then to Best Lesbian Erotica, a collection edited by Tristan Taormino. Both of these women make their money from sexytime enterprises far more shamelessly than myself, and I say that with great respect.
All told, I’ve been paid to write erotica for three magazines, five websites, six books (one audio), two sex-toy manufacturers and four private collectors—and this total doesn’t include my own website, from which I’ve made money through advertising and donations. I’ve written a lot of sex for cash, maybe not as much as some people, but it’s probably more than your mom, unless your mom is Susie Bright, who has both published and interviewed me.
So when I say that there is a cost to writing about sex for cash, I know of what I speak.
It’s no secret that my name is not chelsea g. summers. I took the nom de plume because when I started my blog I was teaching college, and it seemed a prudent thing to do. I didn’t, however, foresee the downside of writing under a name other than my own, which is that to do so is to give power to other people, namely people who left to their own nefarious devices would use their power for evil, not good, and out my real, quotidian identity. I also didn’t foresee that chelsea would become a lot more famous than I would; I’m jealous of my own second identity.
Moreover, I didn’t foresee the eldritch interweaving of my double identity, which having spent six years as a stripper, I really should have.
Being a stripper is a lot like being a writer, a point that I’m not alone in making—legendary French literary critique Roland Barthes says much the same in his aptly titled essay, “Striptease.” Barthes suggests that the literary venture is not unlike the strippery dance in the decisions strippers and writers have on when to uncover and when to reveal, how quickly and how much. However, he avers that the strippers who look new make the most money because it is they who look most naïve, most available, and least jaded. Which suggests that the honorable Barthes didn’t spend a whole lot of time in a strip club.
Being a stripper is a lot like being a writer
I know first hand the trials and tribulations of making with the big wordy naughty. I began writing my blog in March of 2005, and starting about six months after its inception, I have been paid fairly consistently to write about sex, usually in straightforwardly sexified terms: my rhetorical aim has been largely to enlarge and to make wet. This writing hasn’t been the mainstay of my livelihood, but it has certainly comprised the heaving lioness’s share of my writer identity and it certainly has lined my pockets regularly. It also hasn’t come without a cost.
Penthouse paid me the most to write for them, four articles in all, if memory serves. I hear it’s bad taste to divulge how much a magazine pays you to write an article, but suffice to say that I could have paid off all of my credit cards a couple times over with the before-tax proceeds of those articles. Which either says that I don’t owe much in credit card debt or that I got paid a lot. You get to interpret as you wish.
The piece I got paid most often for was a story that a private collector paid me to write. He gave me the first line: The secretary was bent over the desk with her skirt bunched up over her back and her panties pooled by her feet. The rest of the story borrowed equally from a game we used to play in grad school and an indie movie. The indie movie was Secretary, that mossy-dark film of S/m salvation and the healing power of bugs, and the game was “How would you kill?”, a time-idling pastime of figuring out how to murder someone with common office products. The fuck-you ending of the story, which included the hapless secretary being gently sodomized with the handle of a nine-iron, was that her boss and happy torturer was also herself a woman.
The story, first sold to this anonymous private collector, was then sold to He’s On Top, a collection edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, and then to Best Lesbian Erotica, a collection edited by Tristan Taormino. Both of these women make their money from sexytime enterprises far more shamelessly than myself, and I say that with great respect.
All told, I’ve been paid to write erotica for three magazines, five websites, six books (one audio), two sex-toy manufacturers and four private collectors—and this total doesn’t include my own website, from which I’ve made money through advertising and donations. I’ve written a lot of sex for cash, maybe not as much as some people, but it’s probably more than your mom, unless your mom is Susie Bright, who has both published and interviewed me.
So when I say that there is a cost to writing about sex for cash, I know of what I speak.
It’s no secret that my name is not chelsea g. summers. I took the nom de plume because when I started my blog I was teaching college, and it seemed a prudent thing to do. I didn’t, however, foresee the downside of writing under a name other than my own, which is that to do so is to give power to other people, namely people who left to their own nefarious devices would use their power for evil, not good, and out my real, quotidian identity. I also didn’t foresee that chelsea would become a lot more famous than I would; I’m jealous of my own second identity.
Moreover, I didn’t foresee the eldritch interweaving of my double identity, which having spent six years as a stripper, I really should have.
Being a stripper is a lot like being a writer, a point that I’m not alone in making—legendary French literary critique Roland Barthes says much the same in his aptly titled essay, “Striptease.” Barthes suggests that the literary venture is not unlike the strippery dance in the decisions strippers and writers have on when to uncover and when to reveal, how quickly and how much. However, he avers that the strippers who look new make the most money because it is they who look most naïve, most available, and least jaded. Which suggests that the honorable Barthes didn’t spend a whole lot of time in a strip club.
Helmut Newton, Arielle Portfolio I-X (1982-1999)
The weird thing about creating an alternate identity is that sooner or later it grows the bumpy texture of the real. The I on the page is not the I in real life, but write enough and it becomes hard to glean the difference. Put into social situations with people who knew me as chelsea, and I became chelsea. It was odd.
Odder still was this sense that as a sex writer, I measured up to those people as a pretty dull thing. I was vanilla to their tutti-frutti, a schnook to their wiseguys, a rank amateur to their pro-dommes. I’ve only ever had three threesomes, and none of them were really very good. And yet I hobnobbed and rubbed elbows with polyamorists, porn-makers, orgy-goers and people who knew how to do that thing with the hat. It raised a sense of extreme insecurity.
Which was weird because my friends outside of that set saw me as the adventuresome one. I wasn’t, not really, not outside of sheer numbers and a dumb sense of luck. And yet I was writing about it, writing more and more and regularly getting paid four-figure checks.
All these numbers, the four-figure checks, the four-to-five figure visitor counts on my blog, the swirl of word counts, took a toll on my sex life. I would be having sex, in-fucking-flagrante delicto, and I’d begin narrating the act in my head. “Make your tongue soft, I tell him,” penning a mental play-by-play, “It’s too hard. His tongue gets tumescent in his deep-dark obligations to my pussy.” My boyfriend fucking me, I’d have half a mind out searching for ways to describe the hardness of his cock (a reader had already admonished me for using “adamantine” too many times, but, really, how many ways can you say “hard”?).
Add to this strange cognitive dissonance where fucking was no longer just fucking (and writing was never just writing) the demise of my relationship with my lover, my boyfriend, and my muse. Suddenly I had nothing to write about. I didn’t want to have sex; I didn’t want to write about it. I was nothing, and I was nobody. It was horrible. These days I’m past that ache, but it’s not easy to date as a sex-writer, probably because it’s not easy to date a sex-writer. Not many men want to see their dicks blown up ten feet wide and luminous, and the ones who do are not so much my cup of tea. I like unassuming men.
Yet men assume. My most recent boyfriend took one quick read of a piece I wrote here called “Choke.” He said, “I read this and I can’t imagine what you’re doing with me. How could the writer of this be interested in me?” I reassured him, but then I dumped him. A man who is threatened by my writing isn’t the man for me.
The great irony about it all is that I hold great ambivalence about my sex writing—the only writing that I have complete confidence in. While it’s true that in the kingdom of ambivalence I wear the royal skort and eat with the royal spork, I remain unwaveringly ambivalent about the sex-writing. So often it has felt as if I’ve cranked open my vagina to let a tourist bus gape at my cervix, and emotionally it has felt as if I’ve done open-heart surgery and cracked my thorax for the thrills of others. Today it’s hard for me to write the sex. It’s harder than I can tell, and I have told much. In two weeks I’ll be reading a story about buttfucking and weeping. I quail inwardly at the idea, and yet I’ll do it. I was paid to write the story, and I’ll do it again.)
To be honest, the money helps. I may be an occasional literary whore, but it’s not a bad way to line my pockets. And yet, even when the check has lots of zeros at the end, there is still a cost. I don’t know that I’d find it worthwhile if it didn’t. I dwell in ambiguities and I write to make sense of the thinky, the kinky and the moist flesh that resides between.
Odder still was this sense that as a sex writer, I measured up to those people as a pretty dull thing. I was vanilla to their tutti-frutti, a schnook to their wiseguys, a rank amateur to their pro-dommes. I’ve only ever had three threesomes, and none of them were really very good. And yet I hobnobbed and rubbed elbows with polyamorists, porn-makers, orgy-goers and people who knew how to do that thing with the hat. It raised a sense of extreme insecurity.
Which was weird because my friends outside of that set saw me as the adventuresome one. I wasn’t, not really, not outside of sheer numbers and a dumb sense of luck. And yet I was writing about it, writing more and more and regularly getting paid four-figure checks.
All these numbers, the four-figure checks, the four-to-five figure visitor counts on my blog, the swirl of word counts, took a toll on my sex life. I would be having sex, in-fucking-flagrante delicto, and I’d begin narrating the act in my head. “Make your tongue soft, I tell him,” penning a mental play-by-play, “It’s too hard. His tongue gets tumescent in his deep-dark obligations to my pussy.” My boyfriend fucking me, I’d have half a mind out searching for ways to describe the hardness of his cock (a reader had already admonished me for using “adamantine” too many times, but, really, how many ways can you say “hard”?).
Add to this strange cognitive dissonance where fucking was no longer just fucking (and writing was never just writing) the demise of my relationship with my lover, my boyfriend, and my muse. Suddenly I had nothing to write about. I didn’t want to have sex; I didn’t want to write about it. I was nothing, and I was nobody. It was horrible. These days I’m past that ache, but it’s not easy to date as a sex-writer, probably because it’s not easy to date a sex-writer. Not many men want to see their dicks blown up ten feet wide and luminous, and the ones who do are not so much my cup of tea. I like unassuming men.
Yet men assume. My most recent boyfriend took one quick read of a piece I wrote here called “Choke.” He said, “I read this and I can’t imagine what you’re doing with me. How could the writer of this be interested in me?” I reassured him, but then I dumped him. A man who is threatened by my writing isn’t the man for me.
The great irony about it all is that I hold great ambivalence about my sex writing—the only writing that I have complete confidence in. While it’s true that in the kingdom of ambivalence I wear the royal skort and eat with the royal spork, I remain unwaveringly ambivalent about the sex-writing. So often it has felt as if I’ve cranked open my vagina to let a tourist bus gape at my cervix, and emotionally it has felt as if I’ve done open-heart surgery and cracked my thorax for the thrills of others. Today it’s hard for me to write the sex. It’s harder than I can tell, and I have told much. In two weeks I’ll be reading a story about buttfucking and weeping. I quail inwardly at the idea, and yet I’ll do it. I was paid to write the story, and I’ll do it again.)
To be honest, the money helps. I may be an occasional literary whore, but it’s not a bad way to line my pockets. And yet, even when the check has lots of zeros at the end, there is still a cost. I don’t know that I’d find it worthwhile if it didn’t. I dwell in ambiguities and I write to make sense of the thinky, the kinky and the moist flesh that resides between.
- 04/01/2010
