If you follow any indie pornographer blog, you'll find at least one rant about douchebaggy viewers demanding the world of them for a small subscription fee.  This is mine, in response to a post I deleted from the message board in the members area of FurryGirl.com.  (Because it's my house, folks- of course I'll eject you for urinating on my carpet.)

One of the frustrations of being a pornographer are the men (yes, it's always men) who think that in exchange for their subscription fee ($20 for my main site), they are entitled to getting tons of personal attention and for me to cater to all of their fantasies immediately.  Hell, some of them even assume that I will pay to fly to their city so they can have sex with me, for free.  (In almost 7 years of running my own site, no one has ever offered me money for sex.  I have, however, been told by countless men that they would be "willing" to have sex with me in exchange for some form of compensation.  I wonder if other types of sex workers ever get this, or is it just a porn chick thing?)

I often refer to this type of guys as "the projectors".  (Which is also a title I could use for anti-porn/sexuality activists, since the two groups are surprisingly identical.)  The projectors are looking at porn because they're lonely, frustrated, unattractive, and paying for it is the only way they can get any women to be polite to them.  Because they come to porn out of desperation, and often anger at women, they project onto me that I run a porn site because I am painfully lonely, insecure, miserable, and begging to find anyone to tolerate my existence.  I must be just like them!  (Note- these types only make up only a tiny minority of porn viewers, but they can certainly be an annoying minority.)

For $20, they expect you to basically be their internet mistress- and one who they can treat poorly.  Because, obviously, attractive women are so desperate for the chance to make a whole $20 that they would devote massive amounts of time and energy towards the privilege of being able to earn such a magnificent sum of riches.

I hate to break it to them, but $20 is not a lot of money in a country that has running water and electricity.  It's certainly less than one would spend at a strip club, and you couldn't take a girl on a date for that amount.  $20 will barely even buy you a low-end 90-minute porn movie.  For $20 spent with me, you get a month of access to independently-produced porno that will keep you busy masturbating for hours and hours.  (I happen to think that a membership to my site should cost more, but I want keep it competitive and so I continue to charge less than lots of similar amateur-run porn sites.)

Using recent comments from a customer I'll call Captain Dumbass, let's look at the sorts of things these guys have to whine about.

some of us do not have the luxury of being frivolous enough to throw money away on a $180 an hour cam show

People like Captain Dumbass love pointing to the price tag of my cam shows, as though I charge an absurd amount of money for my time, an amount no mere mortal could ever afford to spend on sexual entertainment.  They slot me into the "billionaire bimbo" role to further justify being upset with me.

I charge $3 a minute when I work on my cam network.  The network gets half of that.  Most of my time spent logged in is me waiting around for customers, catching up on blogs or important television shows.  There are plenty of nights where I've spent several hours sitting in front of the computer smiling at the camera and made zero dollars.  But, when people see $180 an hour, they do idiot-math and figure I'm clearing $30,000 a month if it's my full-time job.  Ha!  I have a "good night" on iFriends if I can keep my hourly average above $20 an hour.  That's not even a middle-class annual wage in America.  Hardly the sort of extravagant cash flow Captain Dumbass assumes is had by people like me.

Lots of people look at hourly rates for sex workers and immediately multiply that number by 160 hours to assume what they must make in a month working full-time.  If the escort charges $500 an hour, that's a million dollars tax-free a year(!!!), they figure.  And then they hate us all the more for not only being sexually desirable, but for making what they assume is an insane amount of money.  (Doing, what they consider, is not even "work", anyway.)  People tend to resent anyone who's prettier or more successful than them, and here, sex workers are slighted as both.

What these guys fail to take into account is that sex workers spend plenty of time doing "invisible" work.  That $500-an-hour escort might spend 10 hours in business-running and personal maintenance for every hour she sees clients, which puts her at a middle-class annual salary, not that of a Fortune 500 CEO.  The 3-minute $50 lapdance from a stripper might seem like pretty good money, too- unless you factor in all the time she spends in the gym, the tanning booth, the nail salon, getting her hair done, selecting music, and buying her own props and costumes.  Oh, and if accidents happen to us?  Almost all sex workers are independent contractors without health insurance.  If we're injured and have to take time off to recover, not only do we foot our own medical bills (or go into debt/collections for them), we can't work.

Ummm....ONE facial video in a 7 year span....are you kidding?? If your wondering why your cam show was such a small venue..well..maybe this post will give you some insight as to why this website is not a high traffic area.

Ummm... could it be because I run a softcore nudie site, not a hardcore porn site?  Captain Dumbass might as well fault me for having no centaur fetish content, seeing as how I promised him no centaur fetish content.  I've never understood this complaint.  It's like ordering pizza at a restaurant and then yelling at the waiter for not bringing you sushi.

I love how these guys usually include insults about how my business is be failing because I don't cater to their tastes.  (Even though, of course, I am filthy rich.)  And I have a good amount of traffic, actually - several hundred thousand unique visitors look at my site every month - which is more than many sites like mine.  But thanks for assuming that because you didn't get the facial videos that you weren't promised, my site isn't successful.

Despite this though,you seem to be doing very well for yourself,as you have the means to pick up & travel to Europe & Argentina whenever the urge strikes you.

Oh wait, I'm back in a billionaire bimbo role again.  I have so much extra money, I visit foreign countries "whenever the urge strikes me" - about once a year.  Wow, how fancy-pants-high-fallutin'-big-city-girl is that?  Goes on vacation every year!  Ain't never heard of no one who could afford to do that! (By the way: if you look at what your average American spends every year on their kids - which I don't have - I bet it's significantly more than what I spend on travel.  It's all about how we each choose to budget our money and live our lives.)

That being said,it would be nice if you gave back & shared the wealth a bit,by investing more into your website-as after all,it's people like me that help fund your lavish lifestyle.

"Shared the wealth"?  "Lavish lifestyle"?

Oh, you mean that vault I had built inside my mansion that's filled with shiny gold coins?  Sure, I'll let you have as many as you can grab in one hand.

What am I, some kind of cartoon villain?

I guarantee that if you make a substantial investment in your website and upgrade your videos,take special requests without charging $200,increase your photo sets and the overall content,you'll make a lot more folks happy and you'll have of the internet traffic you could ever want. Adding some more lady friends to your site couldn't hurt either. I suppose this post was a wasted effort on my part,but I thought I would give it a shot.

Oh, now you're offering me helpful business advice?  You want me to be more successful?  And here I thought I was a greedy person who lives in opulence?  These guys who bitch and moan about how $20 a month is too much to spend on my site often couch their anger at me in some kind of half-baked "business advice".  It's hilarious.

And, yes, I charge a minimum of $200 for custom work.  To fulfill your private pornographic fantasy, I'll consider doing it for the bargain price of only 5x what you pay for a generic mass-market porn DVD.  Know any movie-makers who will charge you only 5x the price of a DVD to make a special movie for you?  I'd love a custom Rolland Emmerich film for $75, please.

Speaking of business advice, here's my recommendation to sex workers, as someone who's stayed in my particular business for longer than most: don't ever try to please guys like Captain Dumbass.  Most of your customers and viewers are nice people.  Don't let the 1% of angry dimwits make you think they represent more of your customer base than they really do.  There is never any sense in bargaining or trying to please the cheapskates.  It's actually a good thing to alienate them.  They're not your (long-term) customers, or even capable of polite discussion.

Never try to please the people who have nothing to offer you.  That's what the delete function is for.