honey The flexibility of taking my sex work on the road isn’t without its struggles
In planning our travels, having the flexibility of my job meant that I could take my sex work on the road in our RV. I’ve taken in a lot of advice from other folks who live and travel in RVs, trailers and vans and I’ve noticed people are vague about how they actually afford to travel.
So far I’ve met retirees, traveling nurses, accountants, truckers, teachers working remotely because of the pandemic and festival vendors among many others. A lot of people who make blogs and produce YouTube videos, though, have already built businesses and are supported through Google AdSense and affiliate marketing. I don’t currently use either of those for my income but I’ll eventually get around to it.
The majority of my income comes from phone sex, and I also sell clips and pictures, make custom content, and use subscription sites like OnlyFans. I can say without a doubt that I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this if I were brand new to sex work. After nearly five years in this career, I have a modest but loyal client base that gives me a relatively consistent income.
Taking my job with me meant that I needed to consider quite a few changes from working at home. Even with the best of intentions and planning, I still ended up learning on the go. Some of my bigger obstacles included:
- Connection. Easily the first issue to tackle was accessibility and I put way too much confidence in my phone provider. I found I rarely had service at rural campgrounds and many don’t have an internet connection, either. The many nights we spent in parking lots Bud made sure to position us so we could reach a store’s free wi-fi service.
- Pending Transactions. I don’t have a consistent payday and very rarely is money I make instantly available. Although I’m already practiced at planning my bills around funds becoming available, there was a learning curve on planning our travel around them. Fortunately we didn’t have to rely entirely on my income to travel around at first, but it did get tight here and there and we became big fans of Wal-Mart’s discount racks.
- Set. Something I know about myself is that I need a dedicated space to film content. Having to put up and take down lighting, bedding, backdrops, and camera equipment is a huge deterrent for me and this remains an issue. Another performer who lives on the road mentioned she rents an Airbnb and bulk films content over a night and I’m very seriously considering this. While I’ve done what I can to make converting the bedroom into a set easy, it’s still an obstacle and I’ve relied heavily on selling and re-purposing things I filmed before leaving.
- Safety. I had to make a very careful decision on whether or not I’d tell my clients I’d be mobile and potentially near them. I made a very strict rule for myself when I first started that I’d never meet any of my clients in person and I didn’t want to be put in a position where I’d have to reject them. I ended up telling my subscription site clients what I was doing to get them hyped about my adventure and largely kept quiet about it to my phone sex clients. My phone sex clients tend to care less about my personal life anyway since I guide them away from questions regarding me and refocus our conversations on their fantasies.
- Power. This ended up being something I didn’t anticipate being a problem. Our generator stopped working and we had a massive house battery issue that meant we could only have the power on for an hour or so at a time. Fortunately this was resolved when Bud spent a grueling 12+ hours in the hot and sticky Gulf Coast heat replacing the entire thing.
- Noise. Since a portion of my job requires some over-the-top moaning, we had to stay vigilant about where we parked. I tried to book spots without neighbors in campgrounds and when we overnighted in parking lots, we parked towards the back to make sure nobody heard me. Some nights folks were just too close and I worked on other things rather than taking calls.
Even with all of these obstacles, 2020 ended up being my best financial year, which was wild. Besides the difficulty of becoming mobile, I also had to contend with huge changes in my industry including a severely oversaturated market as people lost traditional jobs and turned to sex work. The predicted loss of disposable income amidst the economic crisis didn’t manifest as expected since those still employed couldn’t go out and do anything else with their dollars so they turned to lewd and explicit performers for content and companionship.
I also was helped immensely by Bud giving me the space and support to be able to work freely and all of my prior years of work and knowledge came together in the most perfect way despite the absolute shitshow of 2020.
If you’re interested in working while traveling, consider any of the above points as barriers. Take your skills and make them mobile and have some savings before heading out! You want to have a little bit of a buffer as you adjust.
Also, be careful if you get an assistant. Mine was free but ultimately ended up being more of a hassle than useful:
