Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to One Good Thing Media, your official podcast review channel. We search the vast digital landscape on a daily basis to discover the best shows that podcasters have to offer. Are you ready to discover new favorites to add to your playbook? Stay tuned and listen to host Gerald listeners under the age of 18.

Speaker 1: 0:59

If you're under 18 years old or you're in the company of children or sensitive adults, please click out now. Hi, lovelies, welcome to Season 3, Episode 6 of One Good Thing Media. This week, we're reaching back into our archives, to a time when we were new to the podcast game and shared our show with a much smaller well, to be honest, tea-tiny audience. This week, we are playing an interview with Annie Temple, who opens up her career in the sex work industry, the many different hats she has worn during her working career and how she's turned her job into a bona fide business. Annie is also an activist, a mother, a wife and a business author who is teaching other sex workers how to treat their livelihood as a business, including identifying and marketing their personal brand, safety tips and, equally important, how to better manage their money. And through it all, she gives us a revealing look at her brand of services, the organizations that focus on different types of sex work and the connectivity sex workers have with each other on a national and global basis. Ready for a few confirmations and a lot of surprises, let's dive into Annie's world.

Speaker 1: 2:27

The interview that you are about to hear dropped on April 4th 2024. It is part of a show that we called Scandalous Sexcapades. You should check out the entire episode, by the way. It's a great one. It's a great one. As promised, I am here with Annie Temple.

Speaker 3: 2:50

Hi Annie, Hi Daryl, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Annie wrote a book and she calls it Annie Temple's Business Bible. If you don't mind, I want to read you about the author. It's very short, but I love the way it's written and I'm assuming you wrote it correct.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Yes, Okay you're a good writer. So this is about Annie Temple's Business Bible and a little bit about Annie. With 20 plus years in and around the adult entertainment industry, annie Temple has done it all. She started as a stripper in 1997 and she left adult entertainment and returned to it time and time again. Her exploits include stripping, nude modeling, being a content creator and more. Annie is a tree-hugging lover of all things natural and also a gun-owning gardener. She is passionate about writing and bringing pleasure, erotic power and prosperity to her readers. Bravo, annie, I love that, thank you. So why don't you tell me a little bit about your background? I understand that you've had several adventures in your life as far as careers go, and we want to hear all about you. Okay, sure.

Speaker 3: 4:11

I grew up quite poor and my family were kind of like outcasts in my community. My father's side of the family had a reputation, so I would actually have friends that weren't allowed to sleep over at my house or come over to my house after school and that kind of thing. And my mom was very stable and my dad even though, yeah, his family had a bit of a rough reputation he was also just wonderful person when he was around. So it always made me feel very, I don't know, outraged maybe or defensive of my family when people judge them without knowing them. So from a young age I had a bit of a defiant attitude and desire to stand up for the causes that I believed in. So that that kind of was my background.

Speaker 3: 5:05

And then when I, when I got out of high school, my mom really wanted me to go to college. She she saw me as someone who could really make something of myself and had a lot of hope for me. So I went to college and I took I didn't know what I wanted to take, so I took general arts courses, but I was particularly interested in women's studies. Interestingly enough, it taught me was that sex industry and sex industry workers are part of the problem in our society that they they play into a patriarchal society and perpetuate abuse towards women and that kind of thing so I actually, yeah, I'd actually believed that and was even raised to believe that in some ways by a very feminist mother, although we never really discussed that directly.

Speaker 3: 6:11

So when I moved to the big city of Vancouver BC I live in Canada when I moved to the big city of Vancouver BC, I quickly found out how hard it was to get by financially on my own as a young woman. I was 22 years old, going on 23. And just after my 23rd birthday I decided to try exotic dancing. I'd been desperately looking for other work, but I wasn't getting hired at any jobs that could offer me an income, a livable wage basically.

Speaker 3: 6:49

Yes, exactly. So I was paying my rent but I was finding it very difficult to eat and I would steal some of my food and it was a very desperate time for me. I was very depressed and it was just a very difficult time. But I'm the kind of person that I'm impulsive and also I don't settle. If I don't like how something is in my life, I'll do something to change it. So the idea to become an exotic dancer came from a girlfriend of mine who was already dancing and she had had suggested maybe I do it part time just to supplement my retail income, because I was working for minimum wage at the time in retail and this was 1997. So it was like seven dollars an hour, and so she had suggested that and she'd given me phone numbers to reach out to if I decided to do it. But when I decided to call an agent to look into becoming an exotic dancer, I didn't tell my friend, I didn't tell anyone. I just showed up at the agent or phoned the agent and then was invited into the office the same day and I went into the office and he told me what I would need to do to start dancing and I was able to actually start stripping that evening at the Marble Arch.

Speaker 3: 8:18

It's a very well-known strip club that's in Vancouver. That isn't there anymore, but it used to be just one of the most hopping places in town. It was really really fun, fun place and I went down there that night my very, very first night dancing. I was doing what was called VIP dancing, where I'd walk around and I would offer a one song dance on a little stage for $15 to the customer and he would be able to sit right at the stage and talk to me. And it was. It was like a full, a full strip down to nothing. But it was not the distance where you're up way up high on a stage. It was kind of like a unique thing at that time for the customers get up, close and personal. So that was what I did that night. I sold a number of dances my very first night and made more in three hours that night than I had than I made in two weeks at my retail.

Speaker 1: 9:15

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 3: 9:16

Yes. So I needless to say, I quit my job the next morning my regular job and I started dancing. That became my full-time thing and I really, really loved it. But my mother really didn't love it, so there was some friction there, but it ended up being something that I continued to do on and off over the course of my life, because I went on to go back to university, have babies. I tried a bunch of different other square jobs over the years. I was a marketing manager for a non-profit that helped foster kids. I was also a marketing manager for a motorcycle dealership. Those were two positions I really enjoyed, and I worked in transition houses and frontline support. So I have I have actually a lot of different experience in what we call square jobs.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Okay.

Speaker 3: 10:13

Yeah, but but I kept returning to the adult entertainment industry because I loved entertaining and because the money was good and the scheduling. Scheduling was flexible and you have the opportunity, like you were talking about earlier, to work for yourself and express yourself freely. It's a very I mean performing. You get to come up with your own music, your own theme, design your costume. It's so fun Like it's a very creative work environment too, because all of your co workers and colleagues are also people who are creating their own shows and love performing. So it's, it's. It was an awesome job. I loved it. I loved it.

Speaker 3: 10:58

How long did you do that? I did that on and off for, let me think, 1997 till about 2010. So I guess that's 13 years. But I continued to work in the strip clubs. Later I became a strip club massage goddess I called myself a massage goddess because I felt like I was too old to be called a massage girl and and then later on, went on to do in-person intimacy work, doing sensual massages. So through all throughout all of that, I also had to deal with health issues that I went through over the years and a very like rapidly changing body.

Speaker 3: 11:40

So my body changed so much just having babies. Then it changed a lot when I had my large intestine, 75% of my large intestine removed, and then just last year in September I actually had the rest of my large intestine removed and sex industry with a rapidly changing body and it's been very interesting, to say the least.

Speaker 1: 12:11

Honestly, it sounds like you're able to overcome whatever comes your way. So how old were you when you finally found your community, where you felt like you belong, that you weren't being judged and that sincerely part of?

Speaker 3: 12:24

It didn't happen until I was in the exotic dance industry. That was really the first time I started to feel like I belonged to a community. I think we all have a longing to belong to a community, and that's why people go to church and people join clubs and people join gangs, and so when you find a group of people that accept you the way you are and that can relate to you and understand you, then that really creates bonds that other people can't understand. And I think that happens too with people who, like, end up on the streets. You know, the street people become their family, and so it's harder to get out of that situation, because that's where your community, the people you love yeah, so that's that's for sure too. Like, I started a website in 2000, which was 2001-ish. It was for exotic dancers and it was to bring us all together onto one platform so that we could share information, and part of that goal, for me as well, was to encourage them to embrace their work and not internalize the oppression that was all around us.

Speaker 3: 13:34

Because I had done that, I had felt ashamed of being a dancer and also felt some I don't know what contempt towards my customers, because I felt like that was how I was supposed to think. I thought that I was should be ashamed of myself and my job and my work, and I also thought I should be disgusted by my customers. And when I was able to recognize that most of these ideas around the sex industry feminist ideas around the sex industry come from people who've never worked in the industry or, if they did, they actually were sexually exploited and had terrible experiences. And you know, I differentiate between a sex worker and someone who is sexually exploited. It's not the same thing. The difference is huge.

Speaker 3: 14:25

It's called consent, and so when people who have been sexually exploited try to speak on behalf of sex workers or read a message that we're all exploited, that they're doing us a disservice because the majority of us actually want to do the work. That's why we do it. We choose that work. It is a situation of adults, consenting adults, you know so. So that was some a huge kind of revelation for me, when I realized that these were just theories, they weren't facts, and that I could feel empowered by my work and that I could love my customers and I could be empowered by it and embrace it and not feel ashamed of what I was doing so. That was such an amazing liberating feeling that I wanted to give that to other dancers and make sure that they all knew that we can actually be happy with who we are and what we do and not have to feel bad about ourselves.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Got it when we were talking in our pre-interview. You mentioned that you had joined organizations sex worker organizations, I might add and I have to be honest, I had no idea that erotic entrepreneurs or entertainers had organizations. Can you explain that to us please?

Speaker 3: 15:44

Yes, for sure, you know. It's so funny because the vast majority of society wouldn't have any reason to know that the sex worker community is actually massive and it is globally connected. We have multiple organizations that work for the health and safety of sex workers. We have them in every single country. We have them across each country, so we're connected. For instance, in Canada, we're connected with every province across Canada, and then we're also connected with all of the sex worker organizations that are in the United States and India and everywhere UK, like you name it. We're all connected. But even before the internet, they were holding huge conferences for sex workers. It's fascinating and most people don't know.

Speaker 3: 16:38

But yeah, we've been doing this work probably for as long as sex work has been around, which is the oldest profession. Some provide in-person frontline support work. So there are organizations that help people on the street, for instance, who work on the street as sex workers. Some of them provide resources for people who want to get out of the industry. Some of them are more about activism. Like, we've had multiple charter challenges in Canada and we even had all of the sex work laws struck down, but then another government came in and replaced them with worse laws. So this has been an ongoing fight, an ongoing struggle to try and get the health and safety and the labor rights that we deserve. Because they don't listen to us and silence us most of the politicians. There's so much political pressure, and because sex is such a taboo subject and people don't even like to talk about it, we just keep being pushed into the margins.

Speaker 1: 17:44

I have to tell you that as I read your book, I was really surprised at the commonalities not only between your industry and the beauty industry, but also really any independent service industry.

Speaker 3: 17:59

When I was exotic dancing, I was quite young and I only really saw it as a job. I hadn't really considered my sex industry work as my career at that time, and that's why I went in and out of it, in and out of it, but when I returned to it in my 40s I decided that this is it. I'm not going to leave again Like I want to make this my business and I want to do it the right way, and so I reached out to a lot of people I know who do that kind of work and I got some advice. But I did. I really just wanted a book of how other sex workers started and ran their businesses and what worked for them, and so, about five years into running my own massage business, I felt that I was in a position that I could actually write that book, and so I put it together chapter by chapter, and then I thought what's missing and I added a few things that I thought were missing, and my favorite chapter is the one on on the mindset money. Mindset, manifest money. But yeah, so it's. It's really about wanting to empower sex workers to consider their work a business, treat it like a business and make good money and enjoy their work. So it's about, of course, being safe and screening customers and that kind of thing and having a safety plan and all of that. But it's also about how can I position myself as a businesswoman to maximize my income for the target audience that I want to reach.

Speaker 3: 19:38

If you're a sex worker and you read a marketing book, it might be a little more difficult to identify how you can apply it to your own work. So, having been in the industry of being a marketing manager and then now being a sex worker, I thought that was an opportunity to put it into words that would reflect how you could apply it specifically to the sex industry. That's fascinating because you have to be safe. You know a lot of people try to focus on how unsafe it is to be a sex worker and be meeting clients one on one. But realtors do it, hairstylists do it. Lots of people are doing that and, yeah, it can be dangerous if you're not careful and if you don't screen people. So yeah. So there's lots of advice in the business Bible for working safely alone.

Speaker 3: 20:28

So for me, because I'm a disabled mother, I have certain limitations and that is part of how I determine my brand. So my limitations are things like I wouldn't want to be a sex worker who goes on trips with clients. I don't want to have overnights with clients. I I like to have no longer than three hours at the most with one client, because I find that I get too tired and exhausted. So those are some of the considerations.

Speaker 3: 21:00

My workspace is in an older building with no elevator, so people who are in wheelchairs or people who struggle with stairs they are not going to be my target audience, and I also prefer to work during the day and avoid seeing clients who might be partaking in substances, alcohol or drugs. So I look for clients who are available during the day. They either run their own business or they're managers or owners of their companies, and they can get away during the day to get a massage companies and they can get away during the day to get a massage. So when I took everything into consideration, I did my SWOT analysis, which is I identified my strengths, my weaknesses, my opportunities and my threats, and then I determined, based on that, who would be my niche, my best target client, and for me that would be a middle to a higher, higher end of the middle class men who own or run their own companies and have, you know, flexibility in their schedule. They're looking for an environment that's clean and a service provider who's professional, and they basically look at their, their interactions with sex workers as part of their health. You know just their manner, like like they, they see sex workers like they go to see a massage therapist or they go to get, you know, a pedicure or whatever, like it's just to meet their needs in a professional way and it doesn't have to interfere with their life in any way or cause any problems. And so those, those are my, my favorites.

Speaker 3: 22:49

I like those guys and so I'm going to expect those guys to send me a polite message when they want a book, to be completely willing to send me a picture of their face if I ask for it, which I do, yeah, I do it. I do it for two reasons One, because I feel safer if the client feels comfortable sending me their face photo and so that I can share it with one person who, when I see that client for the first time, person who, when I see that client for the first time, if anything was to happen to me, then that client's face picture would be given to someone who could give it to the police or whatever, but I've never had a violent experience myself personally. So I and I think a large part of that reason is because I'm very picky like I won't even respond to someone unless they they come across in a kind way through their, their messages and they're extremely respectful. If they try to negotiate with me or push my boundaries in a text message before I've even ever met them, then I just stop engaging and I don't take them as a client.

Speaker 3: 23:55

So there are so many different ways that you can figure out who your niche is based on, what you're willing to do, what your gifts are. For instance, like there are so many different kinds of sex workers. There's dominatrixes, there's adult film entertainers, there's content creators, like on OnlyFans, there's so many different kinds, right? So you need to choose what, what is the industry that you want to do and what kind of client do you want to attract, and then you have to build your own business around that.

Speaker 3: 24:27

So for me, my, my place was always meticulously clean. I have high quality, unscented products, and you know you just get a very perfect. I'm on time, always on time. There's mood, music, there's atmosphere. It's just a beautiful, calming, professional experience. And so, then, the next thing which I wanted to teach through the book was, once you figure out who you want to attract, every time you get a really good client, you give them the absolute best service you possibly can and remind them that you would like them to keep coming back, and then build your regulars. Then you have a stable of regulars who you know are safe to see, and then they keep coming, and that's how you build your business In all service industries and probably other corporate jobs as well, but we're focusing on service industries.

Speaker 1: 25:23

How do you balance your work life with your home life? I mean, you're a mother, you're a wife, you're a writer, you're an activist. You have so many things going on. How do you juggle all of this?

Speaker 3: 25:38

I mean when I'm going through my health struggles, and they're really hard. There isn't a lot of balance, to be honest. But what I have found, and why I prefer the adult entertainment industry and why I've returned to it over and over again, is because it does give me more flexibility, Because I can make the same in a few hours that I would make in a week at another job. More time and energy to spend with my family, to actually, you know, put my children in after school activities things that I wasn't able to do before and just, you know, be able to be present and be there for the people that I love. That that's so meaningful for me. And another thing is it allows me to write, which I love writing.

Speaker 1: 26:29

I have one more question for you and it's an important one, because everybody, but especially creatives, eventually will have burnout and it is paralyzing and unproductive and frustrating and all of those things. You mentioned in your book that burnout is also a challenge for sex workers and you gave some advice and I think really it is universal advice. Could you please tell our listeners how you deal with burnout and to not dread going to work?

Speaker 3: 26:59

Sure. So for me, burnout is, it's the devil, and it comes very easily, especially for, you know, people with disabilities or health challenges like I have. So I have to be very careful about where I put my energy. Some of the things that I do is I just completely ignore people that I get a bad feeling off of, or that don't message me in a way that I would like them to message me, because I don't want to waste my time and energy on people that are probably not going to be a good client. As soon as I start noticing that I don't want to see any clients or that I'm dreading an appointment or anything like that, then I know I'm exhausted.

Speaker 3: 27:48

It's emotional labor when you work in the adult entertainment industry, because you're constantly trying to provide an experience that an emotional experience for the other person. So so you have to be so you know careful of everything you say and do, how you respond, how you react to everything they say and do. And, depending on the person, it can be very exhausting emotionally. And so that can happen really easily if you're burnt out, if you've been working too much, if your health isn't at its best or for whatever reason, if you're just feeling like you just hate your job. That's when you know that you're burnt out and the best thing at that time, of course, is to take a break. But sometimes, for financial reasons, people aren't able to take a break. So in those situations, I would, you know, encourage you to reach out to your favorite clients that don't drain your energy and just say hi and see if they'd be interested in booking an appointment, and do it very respectfully and kindly, with no expectations, or only take clients that you know don't drain you and just say you're busy to the rest of them.

Speaker 3: 29:04

You know there's so many different ways to manage burnout, but really the best if you can is to get away and, honestly, to have like holidays holidays away from work all weekend. I think that that's the best thing to do. I think the best thing is to really take actual holidays and take time away from work to spend with people you love. And I love how Grant Cardone puts it. He says don't don be obsessed with your work and the things that make you money and the things that excite you and your creativity. Be obsessed with your spouse, be obsessed with your children, be obsessed with the people that you care about and the causes that you care about, and it's not just balance, it's actually you want to have success in all the areas of your life, not just balance. You know so when you do need to take time off because you're burning out, definitely invest in yourself and invest in those relationships and and use that as an excuse to spend time doing other things that you know feed you and make you feel good.

Speaker 1: 30:10

Annie Temple's book, which is Annie Temple's Business Bible, is available on Amazon, but you can also order it through her website, AnnieTemplecom. She also has another book out which I have just ordered, and it is called Healing in Stilettos a Memoir. So that should be really good. I'm going to dive into it very soon, and that's another wrap for One Good Thing Media. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you haven't already, please give us a follow, hit the notification button and, if your heart is so moved, leave us a five rating. It's an easy thing for you to do and it means the world to us. We'll return next week with our regular programming. Until then, you know we love you. Bye loves, Bye loves.

Speaker 2: 31:37

One Good Thing Media is brought to you by our host and creator, gerald Spear. All things technical are by David Dodd and our announcer is Robert Spear.

Speaker 1: 32:41

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