Ivan
Ivan
Occupation: Pornographer
Location: Marseille, France
The Sex in My Business: I write gay BDSM pornography for a gay fetish website, do BDSM sex work, write articles about the history of sex, and am developing a history of sex in Marseille walking tour for next spring. So, I’d say that my working life pretty much revolves around sex.
A Typical Day: I am usually the first person to wake up in my household. Once everyone is at work or school, I get some work done online (social media, news, research, sex work administration, networking, searching for paid places to publish my writing, etc.), followed by yoga, and maybe a hook up or sex in the afternoon with my partner. Later, I’ll cook dinner, get the kids to bed, spend time with my partner, and maybe finish something I'm writing. I keep a paper notebook for ideas, but also use my phone a lot for starting documents and developing them until they are ready to work on properly. Paid work isn't a big part of my life at the moment. In the future, I'll also show tourists the history of Marseille's sexual underbelly, so I am doing a fair bit of research for that while also learning French.
The Best Part: I enjoy reading about sex in all forms, ranging from fiction to scientific studies, and then communicating my thoughts in ways that help people understand the sexual aspects of both the culture and themselves. This can happen with students, clients, or tourists (and of course, readers). I also like that writing queer BDSM porn for a living lets me conceptualise sexual pleasure very differently than when I was just a history professor. I love it when someone writes to express how much they have enjoyed my writing, especially when they tell me it helped them understand something new.
The Worst Part: The pay is definitely the worst part. Being a history professor was a lucrative and solid middle-class career; being a pornographer and occasional BDSM Dominant isn't. But I am living the life that I want, one that affords ample time for my family, friends, community, and myself. It gives me satisfaction beyond monetary value.
How I Got Here: I love sex and have always been intellectually curious about it. As a history professor, I focused on the medical and psychiatric construction of homosexuality, BDSM, and other sexual fetishes for 20 years, but eventually got sick of corporate university life and the social system I was reproducing, even though the intellectual parts of the job were interesting. One day, I decided to submit a piece I wrote about a fisting party that I attended at a Berlin sex club to a gay fetish website and was offered a regular column on the basis of it. So, I decided to give up reading and writing about historical sex workers, pornographers, and others in the business of sex to experience these things for myself.
What Society Thinks: Most people would probably think that I was more respectable back when I was a history professor, even though I still wrote about various aspects of gay sex back then; however, not everyone in my life knows that I do BDSM work or perform in queer porn. To be fair, not everyone knows I have a Ph.D. and a great academic record either — I keep different things from different people to make my life easy, even though I am ashamed of neither the sex work and porn, nor the academic posturing. I don’t care much what most other people think of me — although I do worry that anti-LGBT forces seem to be gaining power even as queers win milestones of social and personal freedom for themselves. The support I get from my inner circle is enough to keep me going.
When I’m Not at Work: In my free time you might find me in Berghain, exploring Marseille, reading Foucault, or working in my garden.
For more about Ivan, follow him on Twitter.
Published Oct 17, 2019
Updated Nov 10, 2022
Published in Issue III: Language