’m getting ready to interview a man I hope will have sex with me. He’s sweet, or so I’m told, and sweet would help.
This isn’t for a one-time encounter but for seven: seven little videos of me tangled up prettily in flagrante. I’ll be paying him, of course, just as I pay my part-time sexters, those who play me to my paid subscribers.
Welcome to the world of the (for now) small-time porn entrepreneur: very female, deeply ambitious, and actually not doing too badly so far, considering that London and most of the rest of the world seems to have come to half-a-halt over a pandemic that isn’t going away any time soon.
My little business is the business of selling me, Katrina Kiss, which means trying to find a financially viable web platform that (like Instagram) can potentially create an income stream. It worked big-time for tourism, now in a zombie state, so why shouldn’t it work on a similarly large scale for erotica?
Meeting someone is now as dangerous-sounding as daily tea is quaint.
I had thought when I came back to England there might be a slight chance of resuming direct contact. It turns out that was more than naïve. Meeting someone is now as dangerous-sounding as daily tea is quaint.
The idea of meeting someone for an overnight date is comedy skit material. Cue laughter, or gasps. Direct contact (whose mask comes off first?) sounds about as appealing to most as having unprotected sex at the height of the AIDS-HIV epidemic 30 years ago.
That’s where my (I hope) sweet male friend comes in. If we get along, I play actor and director in the seven online videos intended to heat up the whole of my package. Add them to the lesbian ones I made last summer with my escort friends on the Costa Brava and I come fully equipped, so to speak. If you want to “talk” to me, I have my assistant and my sexters at the ready to do all the necessary pretending (and yes, they have a script). In fact, I’m so pre-packed I can step out of the flesh entirely, and, with luck, still watch my earnings grow.
That, naturally, is the dream scenario, a newborn ideal that for now I can only continue to work toward. Meantime, I have to find and keep mini-me’s who are actually up to being me. That me is provocative and teasing but stops well short of anything hard core, which I’ve honestly never liked, either in exchanges or in person.
My Chilean photographer, Oscar (by now a cross between a best friend and an uncle), says I tread on the lighter side of the dark, a phrase I rather like. You could easily find personal sites and porn tapes that go to places I won’t touch and never will.
I feel like a mainstream gallery owner attracted to the idea of doing something different, like creating a space focused only on rose buds and nipples, to put buds and breasts on equal and eccentric footing.
A question that cuts deeper is whether there’s any way back to the old-school escort industry. Once you leave your physical clientele is there any way back, or any desire to go back?
I have my doubts, at least in my case. There’s too little I’ll miss, though I rather think the industry itself will probably bounce back once COVID is actually and credibly banished. But only a fool would wager on a timetable, and most such decisions will be personal.
So making a virtual nest now, while nests are in vogue, seems to me not only a faddish choice but a necessary one.
But when I think about the co-star I have yet to meet, let alone hire, I’m both nervous and excited, like a kid looking forward to her first bicycle and worrying about just how the balancing act works. I never, ever would have imagined myself hiring a man for sex sessions intended for all the world to see. I was a discreet companion for hire, and yes, let’s travel. But the world changes, and I can’t quite imagine changes and it’s hard to imagine change more dramatic than the ones this year.
At which point you fall back on Darwin and grow a tail, sharp teeth, even wings, because something inside you says without them you’ll not be foraging either far or wide.
My Chilean photographer says I tread on the lighter side of the dark.
Who have I become over this COVID year? I’m not sure even I know. Maybe a new breed of digital nomad as at home in Spain or Bali as at the manor house, once the focus of all my hopes and dreams. My airbrushed and semi-fictitious web personality is all well and good when it comes to income, but making yourself up constantly – you as the sum of cyber-tricks – raises real questions about your real identity. The web is sometimes a dodgy kaleidoscope, just as an escort is a fantasy to please the eye of the beholder.
And as I near my 36th birthday those are the questions I’d most like to begin answering, or at the very least feel more at home with answering. When the escort part turns entirely digital, Katrina Potter, playing at magic, just who is the woman behind the curtain, the one who is no longer even on speaking terms with her parents? Where does she look for strength, solace, candor, and hope? So it is I keep turning the pages.
