How to ask for a 'happy ending' when you have a massage

My most-viewed post this month was a sign telling people not to proposition me.

Bold black letters, a crossed-out silhouette that needs no further explanation, and a polite request underneath asking clients to please not sexually solicit or harass their treatment provider.

That's it.

That's the post.

No cleavage, no smoulder, no strategically cropped anything; if anything, the opposite of an invitation.

And it beat every single post I'd actually laboured over - the ones with research behind them, structure, a point I was trying to make.

Think about that for a second.

The thing that stopped the scroll was a picture of a penis with a red line through it, sitting next to the word "harass."

That's the image that earned the reach.

Not the breathwork guide.

Not the piece I spent three evenings getting right.

A cartoon dick, negated, on a sign meant to make an unwanted conversation stop happening in real life.

Meanwhile I go looking, out of professional curiosity (that's my story), at what's actually working for other people in this space. Wellness, coaching, self-development - the whole cluttered shelf of it. And a fair number of the top-performing channels, particularly the ones run by women, have thumbnails of barbies and boobs that has nothing to do with the content underneath.

Which raises a question I've been sitting with, only half as a joke:

Am I supposed to strip down to get people to listen?

Clickbait and the Cost of Being Heard

Let's take the question seriously for a second, because underneath the eye-roll there's something worth actually looking at.

Clickbait isn't new.

Tabloids have been doing this since before the internet existed to make it worse. But what's different now is the granularity of the feedback loop; you don't just publish and guess anymore, you watch it happen in real time. You see, to the decimal, exactly which version of you gets rewarded. And for women in particular, in the wellness and coaching space especially, the version that gets rewarded is very often the one wearing less.

It's not that sex doesn't sell.

It obviously does; that's not news, that's Tuesday.

What's less discussed is what it costs the person doing the selling.

Because once the thumbnail is doing the work, the content underneath becomes almost incidental. People aren't clicking for your insight into nervous system regulation. They're clicking for the thumbnail, and the insight is just what happens to be attached to it, like a toy in a cereal box.

So you end up with two options, neither of which feels great:

Perform the version of yourself that gets seen, and spend your actual expertise as a kind of bonus content nobody asked for.

Or refuse to perform it, and watch your genuinely useful thing get quietly outbid by someone else's cleavage.

I'm aware how that sounds.

I'm aware there's a version of this argument that curdles into "back in my day we earned our audience with substance," which is both untrue and insufferable. Attention has always been a currency, and people have always paid it however the market demanded. I'm not claiming some purer past where wisdom was rewarded on its own merits. I don't think that past exists.

What I am noticing is the specific shape of the trade, right now, for women doing this particular kind of work. A male fitness influencer can go shirtless and it reads as aspirational, look what's achievable. A woman does the equivalent and the read shifts; it becomes about whether she's serious, whether the work is real, whether the body is the point or the smokescreen.

Same tactic.

Different tax.

So, no. I'm not going to strip down.

Not because I'm above it, or because I think it's beneath me, or any of the other flattering stories a person could tell herself to avoid answering the actual question.

I'm not doing it because the entire premise of what I'm building runs on the opposite bet: that people can be reached by something true, said plainly, without needing to be lured in first.

That's a slower bet.

Possibly a worse one, financially. The algorithm does not care about my principles, and it has made that abundantly clear via the view count on this very observation.

But I'd rather build something a hundred people actually needed than something ten thousand people glanced at on their way to something else.

The sign can have the views.

I'll take the readers who stayed. 

Thank you for your support!