Hollywood is not a fairy tale. But they’d all like you to believe that it is in order to keep your attention focused on jamming a foot into that elusive glass slipper.
The only way forward was to bury whatever I had been and hold my own funeral.
I covered my vagina with a panda emoji on New Year’s Eve, and that’s really what started it all. I wore a black-and-white faux-fur jacket at midnight, with nothing under it, for a live Snapchat party and I covered all the good stuff with the little bear emojis on my phone. I figured they matched the ensemble, and the way I placed their faces, it looked as if they were getting a taste of something good. When the new year struck, I popped champagne all over myself and cried out, “Free the panda!” from my balcony. That became a battle cry for my Wardiors, as they called themselves—those soldier fans of mine that were championing my cause. We all dreamed of a world where one day I wouldn’t be censored or relegated because I’m a woman who loves sex and showing her own body. I was doubly inspired when my neighbor shouted out from the opposing balcony, “I’m on the other end of freedom! And what a view!” “You should sell your content,” a fan wrote to me on Twitter, and
others chimed in after I tweeted out how frustrated I was that all my photos and videos kept getting taken down. I didn’t know exactly what that entailed, but from research, I saw creators making money while being able to post basically whatever they wanted. I saw one girl made $10,000 a month, but that seemed like a lofty goal. I was only planning to do cosplay nudes and lingerie shots. How much could anyone be willing to pay for the possibility of seeing my nipples?
On a whim late one night, I started a Patreon account. Patreon is a platform where artists and entertainers—and even naked bakers—go so their fans can subscribe and be patrons to their art. I didn’t know if what I was doing was art, or if the naked bakers were being hygienic, but I went with it and signed up to be an adult creator. I laughed after I made the page. I couldn’t imagine people actually subscribing just to see me nude. I closed my laptop and went to sleep, thinking that I’d probably erase the whole thing when I got up. But when I woke up the next morning, I had twenty subscribers and hadn’t yet mentioned it to a single soul.
I had 2,800 patrons by the end of the week, zooming to the num- ber one spot for adult creators pretty much literally overnight. What I’d thought might earn me $500 or even $1,000 a month, was sitting at almost $40,000 in less than three days. I kept texting Dave the new numbers as they climbed, and he said, “Maitland, you’re going where no one has ever gone before.”
And this was true. In the blink of an eye, I had shot up to become Patreon’s number one adult star. An account manager wrote to congratulate me. She mentioned how impressive my demographics were and how ardent my base was. My fan base that started growing when I was seventeen had now blossomed into an all-out army that was happily willing to throw down big bucks for my content. Money was never the motivation to try this out—I was just yearning for free speech—but the dollars that came in were so eye-popping I had to keep pinching myself. There was no press announcement that made this a reality, no big moment to pull from. It was, like many of my other great moments, something that just went viral. Was it the Boy fans, the cosplay audience, the appetite for provocative content, or me having such a strong social media presence? The truth was that it was all of it. And all of them were ready to embrace me in my new frontier.
Dax was officially wrong: people did want to see me be sexy.
Copyright © 2022 by Maitland Ward. From RATED X by Maitland Ward. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Rated X is available from Amazon and Bookshop.