How a Sweet Midwestern Girl Got Into Adult Entertainment

DIARY. MAY 2026

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How did I get into adult entertainment? I get asked this question all the time.

People who watch me, people who buy my content, men who meet me at events back when I did those, the occasional curious stranger who finds my work and writes me a long earnest letter, they all want to know the same thing. How did a sweet little Midwestern gal like me end up in adult entertainment? I look too innocent. I remind them of a girl they went to high school with. I remind them of someone’s sweetheart. I remind them of the girl next door.

So let me tell you.

Innocent Was Never the Word

I want to start by pushing back on the premise a little. I’m sweet. I’m down to earth. I laugh easily and smile easily and I do have the small-town Midwestern energy that the people writing me letters are picking up on. All of that is real. But innocent? No.

I was the girl who tied her boyfriend to the steering wheel of his car with her stockings and kissed him until our lips were numb.

I had a boyfriend back then who was quiet and a little submissive, the kind who waited for me to initiate things. So I initiated. And then I got curious. And then I started wearing specific outfits because I’d realized stockings made excellent restraints if you took them off your legs at the right moment. I bought handcuffs. I experimented with positions and dynamics and things I didn’t have words for yet. I had no idea where I was getting these ideas from. I wasn’t watching bondage videos, I hadn’t read books about it, none of that was on my radar yet, but the impulses were there from the start and I just followed them. The “good girls don’t” voice that some women have to work through? I never had that. I never thought any of this was bad or naughty. I was just trying stuff out and seeing what I liked.

What I liked, it turned out, was being the one in control.

I didn’t fully understand that about myself yet. I thought I was a fairly normal girl with a more adventurous than average curiosity. The deeper realization, that my entire orientation was structured around being the one doing the tying, the directing, the choosing, would come later, layered in over years of experience. But it was already there in those parked-car nights, when I figured out that what got me excited wasn’t being kissed. It was deciding when the kissing happened.

And the magazines, of course. From the moment I found Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, I wanted to be on those pages. I’m not going to pretend I had high-minded reasons. I wanted the glamour. I wanted to be looked at. I wanted to know what it felt like to be one of those women, all lit and posed and impossible-looking. I can still remember the smell of magazine glue from a brand-new issue, the way it hit you when you first opened the centerfold. That smell is still a turn-on for me. There are men who have spent fortunes on me who don’t know that the thing that originally got me here was the scent of glossy paper.

The Office Job, and the Night That Changed Everything

I was in my early twenties when life decided to disassemble itself.

I was going through a breakup. A real one, the kind that takes apart your identity along with the relationship, the kind where you wake up every morning and have to remember who you are now. I was working a job I genuinely hated. B2B advertising sales, by phone. Anyone who has ever done business-to-business cold-call sales knows exactly what kind of soul-grinding that is. You sit in a cubicle. You read scripts. You get hung up on a hundred times a day. The work is meaningless. The hours are long. The pay is bad. The whole thing is a slow erosion of any sense that you matter to anyone.

I was looking for something. I didn’t know what. I just knew the version of my life that was happening was not going to work and I needed to find an exit ramp before the slow grind became permanent.

So one night I walked into a strip club.

I don’t fully remember how I made that decision. It was curiosity more than anything. I’d thought about it before, vaguely, the way women think about lots of things they don’t actually do. But that night I just went. I told myself it was an experiment. If I hated it, I’d leave and never come back and at least I’d know.

There was a contest that night. Amateur night, the kind where any woman in the club can sign up and dance and the audience votes. I signed up.

I was nervous. I was shaking, actually, in that specific way where your hands won’t quite stop. But underneath the nerves was something else, something I’d later come to recognize as the feeling I always get before I do something that turns out to define a chapter of my life. It was scared and exhilarated at the same time. The internal voice was saying I don’t know what I’m doing, and the deeper internal voice was saying fuck it, I’m going to have fun anyway.

I won.

I genuinely didn’t expect to. I figured I’d dance, the experience would be its own reward, and I’d go home with a story to tell. But I won. And two days later I went back and entered another contest and won that one too.

The club manager pulled me aside after the second win and offered me a job. He said it was obvious I was a hit with the crowd. I said yes.

Within a week of that first contest, I’d quit the B2B sales job.

I never went back to a cubicle again. That was almost twenty years ago now, and I have not had a boss who wasn’t me since the day I walked out of that office.

Telling My Family

The next part is the part that most people in adult entertainment don’t get to have.

I told my mom first. I didn’t do it by phone or in passing. I cooked a meal. I sat my family down at the table. I told them what I was about to do. That I was leaving the office job, that I was going to dance, that I was looking at this as a way to fund going back to college for multimedia and web design, that I had a plan and I wanted them to hear it from me.

They were shocked. Of course they were shocked. Their daughter just told them she was going to take her clothes off for strangers for a living, even if the strangers were paying and the work was legal and the goal was tuition money. Shock was the only reasonable reaction.

But they didn’t argue with me. They didn’t tell me I was making a mistake. They didn’t try to talk me out of it. They asked questions, but they were the right kind of questions. Questions about whether I’d be safe, what the schedule would look like, who I’d be working with. Not judgmental questions. Not “what will the neighbors think” questions. Not “you’re throwing your life away” questions. They wanted to know I had a plan, and once they understood I did, they let me go ahead.

I know how rare that is. I’ve talked to women in adult entertainment whose families cut them off, whose mothers cried for weeks, whose fathers refused to speak to them for years. I had a family who heard me out, asked the right questions, and trusted me to know my own life. That support has stayed consistent across the years. I have never had to navigate this work while also navigating a family that hated me for doing it. That’s a kind of luck I don’t take for granted.

If your family is supportive of you doing weird, brave, unconventional things with your life, thank them. A lot of us don’t get that.

The First Flight

A few months into dancing, I got an opportunity to fly to LA to shoot for men’s magazines.

I had never been on a plane. Not once. I’d grown up in a part of the country where most people drove everywhere their whole lives, and I had never had a reason to fly. Now I was about to fly across the country, by myself, to do something I’d dreamed about since I first opened those magazines as a kid.

I was so nervous I was shaking. The same shaking from the first night at the strip club, but more. This was bigger. This was no longer “I’ll just see what happens.” This was “I’m becoming the person I always pictured myself being.”

A man sitting near me on the plane noticed I was shaking and offered me a drink to calm my nerves. He wasn’t hitting on me. He was being kind, the way strangers sometimes are when they can see someone is having a moment. I declined the drink, but I’ve never forgotten that small kindness. There are people in the world who notice when you’re scared and try to make it easier. He was one of them.

I stepped off the plane in LA and everything looked different. The people looked different. The light was different. The air was different. I was a small-town girl who had just landed in a city that didn’t operate by any of the rules I’d grown up with, and I was about to start a career in an industry I knew almost nothing about, with people I’d never met.

It was the strangest, most exhilarating feeling. I was twenty-something, alone, in a city I’d never seen, about to be photographed in ways my high school classmates would not have believed if you’d told them. And underneath all the nerves was a quiet, deep feeling of yes, this is where I’m supposed to be.

That trip became the start of everything. I’ve been in more than fifty magazines now. I’ve worked in more than seventy-five films, not counting Playboy TV, Skinemax, the work I did for HBO and Showtime and Cinemax, and all the compilation work that got pulled from various scenes and resold. The first shoot of that first LA trip is its own story. I’ll tell you about it in another diary entry. The most important thing about that trip was simply that I went. I got on the plane. I made it through the shaking. I let myself become the person I’d been picturing since I was a kid.

What Adult Entertainment Taught Me

People assume that working in adult entertainment is the kind of thing that takes from you. And it can be. There are women who have been ground down by this work, and I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t happen. The industry is real. The risks are real.

But for me, this work gave me an education I could not have gotten any other way.

I learned my body. Not the kind of body knowledge you get from yoga or sports or sex with one partner. The kind you get when you have to know exactly what every angle of yourself looks like under every kind of light, when posing wrong for ten minutes will ruin a shoot, when your livelihood depends on understanding how you photograph. I learned what my body actually does versus what I thought it did, and that’s a kind of knowing most women never get to have.

I learned consent. Real consent. The negotiated, articulated, signed-paperwork kind of consent that the rest of the world is still catching up to. I learned how to ask for what I wanted, how to say no without apologizing, how to set up a scene so that everyone involved knew the rules before anyone touched anyone. The mainstream world acts like consent is some fragile new concept; adult entertainment has been doing it carefully for decades, because we had to.

I learned BDSM, properly. Rope rigging, impact play, sensation play, edge play, all of it. The kind of skill-set you can only learn in a culture where these things are practiced openly and taught by people who actually know what they’re doing. I learned photography from the inside out, watching the best photographers in the industry work for hours at a stretch, picking up everything I could about lighting and lens choice and how a frame composes itself. I learned Photoshop. I learned how to build websites. I learned the actual legal structure of adult entertainment. The contracts, the rights, the licensing, the way money flows and where it gets stuck. None of which has anything to do with what regular people imagine the industry to be.

And I learned my own sexuality. This is the one I want to spend a minute on.

When I started, I thought I was submissive. I thought my preference for being the one initiating things in those early parked-car nights was about being adventurous, not about being dominant. I thought my submissive side was the real me and the dominant impulses were just play.

It took years for me to figure out that the opposite was true.

I only play submissive on TV. Ha.

I can bottom. I have bottomed. I’m good at it when I do it. But my heart is in domination. My heart is in being the one giving the orders, setting the rules, being worshipped by someone who genuinely wants to give themselves to me. I range from strict to nurturing to sweet depending on my mood and the partner I’m playing with, and all of those modes are real. But the ground I’m standing on, the place I come back to when I’m being most myself, is the place where I’m in charge.

That self-knowledge took adult entertainment to give me. I don’t know if I would have found it otherwise. I might have spent my whole life thinking I was the quiet adventurous girl with a kinky streak, when actually I was a dominant who hadn’t met herself yet.

Where I Am Now in Adult Entertainment

I’m sitting at my desk as I write this, in my apartment, with my cats nearby. I’ve been doing this work in adult entertainment for over twenty years. The industry has changed dramatically since I started, and is changing again as I write this, and I’m building the infrastructure to weather whatever the next few years bring. I write my own projects now. I direct things. I sell to the audiences I built directly, instead of being just a hired performer. I run my own business, on my own schedule, with no boss but me. I’m still the strictest boss I’ve ever had.

The small-town girl who walked into that strip club for the first time still lives in here somewhere. She’s quieter now, and more sure of herself, but she’s the one who got me here. Every time I do something that scares me and exhilarates me at the same time, I remember that she’s still the one driving. The shaking I felt on that first flight to LA is the same feeling I get now when I’m about to launch something new, build something I haven’t built before, take a chance on a direction I haven’t tried yet.

She was a curious kitty who got more than she ever dreamed.

She still is.

If you want to keep reading the diary, more adult entertainment stories and personal entries land in your inbox on Thursdays through my email list. The kind of writing that doesn’t show up on the public site, the deeper stories that go further than this one. I write to the people who actually want to know me. Sign up at the bottom of any page on this site and I’ll send you the first one.

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xo, Sarah