Okay so you want to be a writer? Let me tell you the God’s honest truth. You need to write porn.
Might sound harsh but it is what it is. You want to make a living pounding out text into a word processor? Well alright but there better be something in there somebody can masturbate to. “But Yoshi!” I hear you protest. “That’s too broad a brush! Surely there are other options!” Yeah, I mean, I suppose you don’t necessarily have to write sexual porn. Fear porn also sells pretty well. Self righteous porn does too. So, okay, look, you can either be a romance/fetish novelist or a journalist yelling at their followers that the world is going to end in a nuclear explosion of transsexual fascism. I’ll concede that much but that’s it. Those are the only people getting paid.
Are there exceptions? Sure. J.K. Rowling struck gold. That’s nice. And she was able to milk a little more out of her series by turning Hermoine black and Dumbledore gay. Good for her. George R.R Martin made bank too. Although, does he really count? Lot of porn in his fantasy yeah? Incest and stuff, so, maybe not. So you’ve got those two. Other than that though, other than your once in a blue moon fantasy series that just happens to go viral somehow, nobody makes nothing as a writer. Supply and demand. Everybody’s literate but nobody reads. Absolutely terrible market conditions. It was better in the old days when only a handful of monks knew what letters were. A niche market, but high paying. Nowadays? Well we made the mistake of educating everybody and it turns out almost nobody actually needed it. Or, for that matter, wanted it. Today most of the population could read Shakespeare or Milton or Dante but, most of them never will. Why would they? Nobody reads. It’s boring and you could play Minecraft instead. So listen if you want people to download your eBook in needs to be something steamy. Something like The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby for example. Porn. You need to be making porn.
But, maybe you’re not a writer. Maybe you’re an artist instead. You know, a painter, or somebody that draws. That’s different. In that case your strategy for making a living is going to be making porn.
Seriously. It’s the one of the few ways you can make money as an artist that’s semi-guaranteed. Hentai, the art of making hypersexualized cartoons, is a multi-million dollar industry. Loads of talented artists sell their services in this genre on a multitude of online platforms. Fiverr, Deviant Art, Etsy, and so on. So, if you’re handy with a pencil you need to focus mostly on getting really really good at breasts and seductive mouth poses. Landscapes and portraits are out. You’re gonna have about as much luck with that as Hitler or Van Gogh did. Stick to porn. Play your cards right and one day you might even end up at Disney drawing Pixar moms, or making completely unnecessary children’s movies about girls getting their periods.
Okay but maybe you’re neither a writer nor an artist. Maybe you’re a videographer instead. Maybe your passion is to make movies. Well in this case I’ve got great news for you. If you’re an aspiring videographer the number one way to make a living is to make porn.
It’s true. Depending on who you ask, video porn searches make up somewhere between ten to thirty percent of all web searches on the planet. At least on mobile, which is where all the consumer, non-work related stuff happens. So think about how many times a day you google something. Okay, now extrapolate that to the entire world. At minimum, one in every ten of those searches is for porn. BIG MARKET. Yuge, as Trump would say. Best of all there are already dozens of companies set up to help out the aspiring young videographer in his or her career. Companies like OnlyFans and PornHub, just to name a few. PornHub, by the by, gets around one thousand visits per second. You couldn’t ask for a better audience. CNN gets a paltry 1.2 million viewers every night. About what PornHub gets ever 1200 seconds, aka, every 20 minutes. What other platform is going to give you access to that many potential customers? YouTube? Maybe. Difficult though. It’s not 2007 anymore. Almost none of the huge channels are single person ventures these days. They may have one star, one talking head, but they have a small army of editors, script writers, and developers working behind the scenes. Tough business to break into but maybe worth taking a stab at. If you want a sure thing though, again, I must insist on the pornography.
Alright so what if you’re more of a physical person. What if your medium is your body? What if you’re an actress? Okay, so you might be surprised to hear this but if you’re an actress there are actually numerous ways to…
No.
No wait.
No, the answer’s just porn again. Sorry.
Model? Nope. You need to be slutting it up on Instagram.
Dancer? Well, professional ballerinas make around fifteen thousand a year. Strippers, on the other hand, may make as much as lawyers by some estimates, if you account for all the undeclared cash they bring home in tips.
Yeah.
So, I’m not bitter.
I realize maybe it sounds like I am but I’m truly not. I don’t write or podcast or philosophize for money (although every bit of your subscription money certainly helps and I appreciate you all!). I write because I feel like I’ve got something to say which might help people. I feel that maybe, just maybe, I might actually help people find God. So, truly, I’m not bitter. Truly, it’s okay.
I do however get irked when I hear people tell kids and young adults to pursue their dreams, or to follow their passions and so on. Setting up the next generation for failure, I tell you what. Bunch of good, passionate kids led to believe that somebody, someday, will care about their skill. Their art. The deepest productions and movements of their souls. Nobody will. Just not a market for it. One in ten thousand will do okay and then the rest will just end up doing the porn thing. Pornography by pen or paintbrush or lap dance. It’s all the same. There’s a reason artists and actors have traditionally been associated with prostitutes.
Besides, you don’t have to encourage a kid that’s truly creative to create. If it’s truly in them they won’t be able to not do it. Being creative is a curse in that way. Everybody else can go to work and come home and watch the ball game and eat a burger off the grill and be content. Creative people literally go insane if they can’t make things. The scientists would say that evolutionarily this must serve some sort of purpose but what that purpose could possibly be isn’t clear. The tribe needs the occasional visionary or prophet or madman maybe. Stir things up I guess. Keep everything from going too stale.
So that’s a problem. If adults aren’t going to buy art they shouldn’t encourage kids to go into it. Like telling them there’s a huge future in renewable energy since they were in grade school and then never ever buying one damned solar panel. Many such cases.
On another note though I guess I also care because of what the pornification of art says about us as a people. About why it’s happened. About where it’s taking us.
I’m not naive. I don’t believe the past was full of people so different from the present. Not in general. But that notwithstanding it does seem to me that we are, as a whole, particularly debased at the moment. Do you agree? That can’t be good for us, can it? I’ve noticed moreover that people don’t care to invest in beauty. Everything has to be “practical”. Function has dominated completely over form. The walls in everybody’s homes are beige. The cars are all earth tones. Fashion, as a thing, has largely ceased to exist. T-shirt. Yoga pants. Blue jeans. Once upon a time people went to the trouble of putting little gargoyles on their waterspouts. Their buildings had spires. Now everything is a box. Every building exactly the same. Box, box, slightly bigger box, box with three car garage instead of two, box. There’s no vision anymore. There’s no aiming for anything higher. There is no visible sign in the modern world that people have any hope for being anything more than animals. Oh well. We killed God, and with him all the poets. Shame.
I guess my point in writing this is that it’s no wonder the world is on fire when it’s so ugly. What reason have people given themselves to not burn it down? Literally all they can think about is porn. That’s not a sufficient lifestyle to offer a counterargument against starting World War 3.
Is it?
But, perhaps I am being too harsh? For example I can only imagine that all this demand for pornographic material is driven by a near total lack of actual human to human intimacy in our lives. Who knows why. Maybe it’s the pill. Maybe it’s condoms. Maybe when you have sex with a woman you’re supposed to be committed to her for life and she to you and you’re supposed to have lots of children together through a very fruitful and intimate sex life that produces a loving family.
Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe making the whole thing sterile with hormones and latex ain’t the best and maybe the sterility of our art is but a reflection of the sterility of our relationships. Maybe society can’t focus on higher things if the basic needs of human relations are not met. Needs like being cared for, having a confidant, smelling the head of a newborn baby.
I dunno.
Maybe.
Or, maybe it’s always been this way. As I alluded to earlier, Van Gogh died a pauper. Nobody cared about his stuff, not during his life at any rate. Tolkien, one of the most successful writers of the last hundred years, barely saw any solid financial success until the twilight hours of his life. Maybe that’s just the way of the world. Maybe art is just an accessory. I nice little bauble that can be trotted out when people get bored but otherwise unnecessary. Not sure.
I do know however that one of the few places on earth today where artists can make a living making something other than porn is Ethiopia, which has one of the highest birthrates in the world. 4.2 births per woman. Thriving religious icon industry.
Something to think about.
Maybe you don’t get to be creative in spirit and soul if you aren’t creative in body. Maybe a sterile society simply can’t paint in any color but beige. Maybe art, real art, can only come from a people who have a solid foundation in genuine human love. Something not sterile. Something not wrapped in plastic. Something from a time when people were real.
But yeah. If you want to be successful as an artist. Do porn. That’s my advice.
Excellent message! I love that you always get me to think, and look at things a new way.Thank you.