Porn, toilet flushes, and the global economy: Adventures of a third world, underpaid freelance writer

It’s not really about the morality, the reason why I’m now adamant in turning down any porn-related writing jobs. I did try to write a sample article so that the client in question could determine if I fit the bill, if I can write blogs that were ‘dirty’ enough. It turned out that I had a limited vocabulary in that area and that I was too “literary” for their taste. I didn’t get the job. At first I thought it would be interesting to penetrate (excuse the pun) the underbelly of the internet world and witness the deviance and perversion of humanity in all its uncensored reality (or unreality), but then I thought it was just as well that I didn’t have to spend my time thinking about a hundred ways to describe how the male fluid shoots out of the male reproductive organ. I mean there can only be so many ways, right? Or maybe I’m risking exposing my lack of imagination in such things.

Working as a freelance writer, it’s interesting what you have to think about on a daily basis, depending on what project you’re working on. You could spend hours thinking about vacuum cleaners and researching about specs, types, makes, maintenance, models, and so on, and be an expert in it for a day, then discard all that to concentrate on climate change or the global economy, the next. In my three years writing for the web, I’ve written about everything from the inane to the insane: 400-word articles on what happens when you place a hot pan on top of marble countertop surfaces, articles on different toilet flushes and their ranking based on efficiency, keyword articles on billet fuel car doors and how flashy they can make your car look, and articles on mind-blowing orgasms through erotic hypnosis, to name a quirky few. (Ok, that last one is not considered porn, it’s erotica, for those who can’t spell the difference). Writing about every topic in the virtual collective conscious and unconscious that is the internet, can enhance your knowledge and wisdom, making you a modern-day renaissance man or woman. Then again, it could just plague your brain with useless information. I suspect it’s more of the latter.

Sometimes garbage is just garbage. A good rule-of-thumb that I should apply next time (but could potentially render me bankrupt) is, if it’s not worth my time and brain space, then I should just decline the project. After all, whatever I feed my mind is always a longterm investment. In the long run, what I think about, becomes who I am.