Lessons from Mistress Marley
Plus: What you're NOT going to find in this newsletter.
Circling Back
When your website could’ve just been an email.
Welcome (back) to nofilter. We used to be a website. Now we’re a newsletter. We’ll tell you the whole story sometime. In the meantime, you can find our archive on nofilterpub.com, but to get our new stories, please sign up. You'll get two emails a week, free.
nofilter is (still) writer-editor Kate Lindsay and me, founding editor Nick Catucci. Today, we have the honor of welcoming longtime nofilter contributor Sesali Bowen, who interviews the fantastic Mistress Marley.
But before we hand it over to Sesali, a few words on what to expect from nofilter “going forward.” We're doubling down on the stories that writers we admire have shared with their followers and cited in publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic—which also happen to be the pieces we like working on best: interviews with creators we love and deep dives into the trends we can’t stop thinking about.
Here’s what you’re not going to find in this newsletter: Exhortations to hustle harder, rise and grind, or get that bread. Excuses for shady influencers abusing their privilege. Eager predictions about the rise of a “passion”-based gig economy with zero concern for the necessity of steady work and health insurance. Anything about Ethereum.
Creator culture is the defining culture of our generation—this is just our little corner of it. Thank you so much for joining us. —Nick Catucci
Q&A: Mistress Marley
The 'Chocolate Domme' on life at the intersection of sex work, education, and Blackness.
By Sesali Bowen
It’s been two years since Mistress Marley went viral on Twitter for doing her job: walking a white man on a leash as a form of public humiliation during her crowded HBCU homecoming celebration. This moment boosted her profile as a dominatrix in a major way. Suddenly, she was more than a BDSM practitioner: She became a kink educator and an alternative motivational figure for Black women. The pandemic only helped her grow her online business. She now makes the majority of her income coaching other Black women on how navigate sex work, whether its OnlyFans videos or online BDSM. And it’s serving her well. When we spoke via Zoom, Marley, also known as the Chocolate Domme, was recovering from a fresh boob job, a procedure that was paid for by one of her subs.
Her job certainly isn’t all butt plugs and bankrolls, though. She is trying to scale her adult business in an environment that is brimming with censorship and anti-sex work rhetoric. In fact, in the time between our conversation and this article being published, her main Instagram account was shut down and she had to immediately revert to a backup. Indeed, during our conversation she had mentioned her fear of her account being shut down randomly. Read on for more about life at the intersection of influencer and sex worker and what it’s like to be professionally kinky on the internet.
I have been wanting to talk to you for so long, and I thought this forum was actually perfect, because rather than dig into the nitty-gritty of your experience as a sex worker, I'm particularly interested in your experiences as an influencer at the intersection of sexuality on the internet, because that comes with its own set of hurdles.
Yes, it's ridiculous. It's something new every day. It's to the point where I wake up and I'm scared to click Instagram. If my page is going to be gone.
Before we get into that, let's talk about the moment that you went viral. That's such an important part of how you went from just being a sex worker to also operating in the influencer space.
When I went viral, it was definitely not expected. I went on FetLife, which is like kinky Facebook, and said I was looking for a sub to do public humiliation for a session. At that time I was really into public humiliation and having subs on leashes out in public. There was one sub who reached out to me and said he would love to do public humiliation on this specific date. And I was thinking: On this day, I'll be at my homecoming and we'll be on the yard [HBCU students refer to outdoor campus areas where they congregate and tailgate as being “on the yard”]. That's a very busy time. But he was really adamant about being publicly humiliated during that time.
So I'm going back and forth with myself: Okay Marley, do you do this at this time or not? You know you go to an all Black school. You know how people are going to perceive it, you know how Black people talk. You know how we kiki. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to do it. This sub was so excited that he literally waited on campus from 10:00 a.m. and the session wasn't until 5:00 p.m.
What?!
Yes. Maybe he was mentally getting himself together, because he knew it was going to be a lot. So I had my friends with me, and they already knew I was a dominatrix. So when I told them what was going on, they weren't really shocked or anything. They were just excited to see what was going to happen and offered to be bodyguards. So I get on campus, we meet up with the guy and I take out my leash. When we started walking towards the section where everyone was tailgating, you could just see everybody turn their heads. But I'm still in session. The sub and his consent were still there. His hard limits were still there. His safe word was still there, so I still needed to be focusing on him. I think a lot of people that do public humiliation sometimes get caught up in everybody watching them. They forget that the sub is actually still in session.
In the video that went viral, I didn't even know the person that posted it had been recording me. I was posing for my best friend's phone because I wanted content. Some people were just laughing. Some people were just confused. I was just hoping campus police wouldn't arrest us. The session ended and I did aftercare. I gave him a hug, talked to him, made sure he was okay and then he left.
After he left, my friends and I went right back into homecoming mode, started drinking and turning up. We were supposed to go out at night but didn't because we got so drunk. I woke up the next morning, checked my Twitter and saw that I had jumped from 1,000 followers to 13,000.
The person that initially posted the video on their Snapchat added a caption that said: Sis brought her sugar daddy to homecoming. I retweeted that video to clarify that it wasn’t my sugar daddy. He was a sub that paid me to control him. That's the tweet that went viral. And it just started blowing up to the point where my Twitter started crashing. I was getting so many messages from Black women saying, please teach me. I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is crazy. And then, from that point on my life has just changed. And that was November 2019.
This notion of sugar daddies or beneficial relationships between older men and younger Black women has become such a popular mythos on the internet. I'm just curious as to how you've built your brand within that discourse. How does your brand and business benefit from that and/or also fight against it?
I’ve always wanted to control my narrative, no matter what. From the way I caption things, the way I write stuff, or talk to people, I always try to get ahead of my narrative. So, like you said, you see it a lot where [people] see a Black woman sex worker and the first assumption is that she's an escort. They never think that she's in control of somebody. Even escorts are in control. There's still power in that. You’re doing it consensually. That's why so many people get sex trafficking mixed up with sex work.
So I just have to tell people right off the bat that I work a lot in BDSM. Then I have to explain to people what BDSM is, why [someone might] want to be into BDSM, all the different kinks, and the different dynamics. I do a lot of my teaching specifically towards the Black community, because in the Black community, all of this is taboo. I really work on trying to educate as opposed to being offended because day in and day out, there's dickheads in my comments saying “you sell pussy” or “you're a lesbian.” I just let them know, this is what I do. If you want to learn more about it and actually want to understand, you can pay me, or you can pay these other educators. But what you're not going to do is misconstrue my narrative that I built for myself.
Tell me about your experience of navigating Instagram’s censorship.
Even before I went viral, I was having a lot of problems with Instagram. I had two pages that got deleted. My second page got deleted at 10,000 followers and I was just so devastated, because I'm making my money from Instagram. I'm getting clients from Instagram that want to pay for certain classes. And when you get deleted, there's nothing you can do. There's no way to get in touch with them. You can make a new page, but you're starting at zero. You've got to [ask people] to help you promote.
I have been getting some flags and warnings on certain things, but I try to find my way around it. When I signed up for this page, I put my gender as male.
Oh, that was smart.
Then I put an age restriction up. The only thing with putting the age restriction up is that people can't really search and find you. If a user [didn’t tell Instagram] their birthday and you have an age restriction up, they can't see your page. But, if I have got to do what I have got to do, to keep my page protected. Instagram doesn't realize that, when [they] delete our pages, they are opening us up to more dangerous ways to have to make money. We no longer have this space that we felt was safe for us to advertise. All these other websites make us pay fees just to be on them. It messes up our livelihood, our connections to customers, safety, community, everything. You can literally get deleted for anything. For writing the word “sex” you can be out of there.
That's particularly frustrating just because it makes everyone beholden to Instagram's moral compass. But what about people like you who are actually sexuality educators?
I think they pick and choose who they delete. Because you see a lot of Black sex educators and sex workers getting their pages deleted. But then you'll see these sex advice pages by white women and these sex toy companies by white women, that are clearly showing dildos and everything else. And they’re still up. I look at Playboy and they're still up. PornHub even has a page. It makes no sense.
Are you still in the top 9 percent of Only Fans?
Yes. I'm there. I'm really stagnant. A lot of people think the percentage is based on how many subscribers you have. It's more so based on how active you are on OnlyFans, and how much content you're uploading.
How has it been getting partnerships, actual brand partnerships? Has that been difficult for you?
I tried to get a PR agent and I don't think they work for me because most of them had never been in sex work. They didn't understand what I was trying to do. I don't really reach out to brands or companies to really collaborate because a lot of mainstream brands, for the most part, don't have that authentic or genuine voice of support for sex work.
I agree with that 100 percent.
Even some of these podcasts that reach out aren’t even sex-related. They just want something for shock factor. I'm somebody that people will come to their page to laugh at but don’t really don't care about the topic. Prime example: I did a collaboration last year with Complex magazine. Looking at those comments on YouTube, none of them were positive. It wasn’t even a collaboration that I should have done.
How has the pandemic and the shift from IRL to online impacted your business model overall?
When the pandemic started, I was very scared for my business. I couldn't really meet with subs. I was teaching a lot of classes and traveling. So I was making a lot of money off of meeting people in person. My last class was a week before the world shut down in DC. I was so sad. But then, that's when the idea came up of starting the Sexcademy on Patreon. That worked really well. Even at just $5 a month—my tiers range from $5 to $25—it has been very lucrative for me. And so many subs were so desperate to serve that they were paying those full session fees online, just for Skype or to talk to you on the phone. What people don't realize is that no matter what goes on in the world, recession or not, people need to have sex. People need to watch sex. People need to do something that involves sex. So my session bookings went up, my teaching went up. I found more creative ways to teach. I started linking up with more educators and doing Zoom courses. It worked out for me. I want to say though, I also realized my privilege in already having a following. I know there are a lot of sex workers out here that are struggling, but for me, the pandemic was a blessing in disguise for my business.
Bookmarked
Two (2) things you might want to check out.
In Case You Missed It. In this new Slate podcast, hosts Madison Malone Kircher and Rachelle D’nae will meet twice a week to break down the twist and turns of internet culture, drama, and nostalgia. They’re kicking things off Wednesday, March 24 with a deep dive into Clubhouse, the feud between Millennials and Gen Z, and a look back at the Tumblr Wars of the early 2010s.
Most Embarrassing Thing On The Internet. Kate Lindsay's podcast is back for a second season with a totally new format. (Full disclosure: I am Kate Lindsay.) Tech writer Maya Kosoff and Vogue culture writer Emma Specter join me as co-hosts to unearth early internet drama that even your browser history forgot about. Our latest episode looks back at Curvy Wife Guy, gives an update on the legal battle between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, and explains why everyone was mad about an app called *checks notes* Recipeasly.
The Fine Print
tysm Sesali Bowen, Mistress Marley, Taylor Lorenz, and everyone who has supported our pivot to newsletter and signed up. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Like and subscribe. And go get that bread!