Music is deeply important to me. I’m blessed to have grown up with great music all around me, as well as a killer sound system in my childhood home: a vinyl record player and a six-CD disc player, both of which were connected to tall, quality cloth-covered speakers. While I could recognize and knew good music, it took me until my early 20s to figure out how to make a playlist. As a teenager with my first ever iPod — a 4th generation pink Nano — I fumbled with making playlists, and came up with sets of loosely-related songs which left me feeling wanting and unfinished. A playlist is a form of art; more than a mood, it is a transportation into an altered state of being — reliving a memory, creating a nervous system setting, or even a persona we have to put on.
For my sex work, music is crucial, not only during the act itself but even more so while getting ready. Before I had playlists, I just knew I needed to listen to Hustle Hard (Remix) by Ace Hood, Lil Wayne, and Rick Ross while I was taking my pre-booking shower to get myself in the right headspace — especially if I wasn’t feeling like going to work. My ability to put together an excellent playlist came during my Soundcloud-era, where I created playlists that, due to Soundcloud’s enjoyment-focused listening features, play more like DJ sets. Around the same time, I picked up an interest in learning to DJ, which is a goal on which I am still working.
It wasn’t until my switch over to Spotify that I began making playlists officially dedicated to sex work. The first one solely for work purposes was inspired by a friend of mine, who was a sugar baby. She sent me a text, as she often did, letting me know she was on the way to her sugar daddy’s house: “SighhHH on the way to my SD’s house… doing my best you rn hollowing myself out inside so I can be empty and feel nothing 😊” It made me laugh, but I also thought, ‘Wow, that is depressing that this is how we are readying ourselves for work. Is there a different way?’ So I made a playlist specifically meant to be listened to in the car on the way to see a sugar daddy to motivate me and my friend to be our best sugar baby selves and have some enthusiasm for it — to remember why we were there. I used a screenshot of my friend’s text as the playlist photo cover/mood board.
This was also an incredibly important step in my journey as a playlist master — the playlist must have a mood board or other accompanying visual to complete it. Some of my public playlists still don’t have one, and that is because I am scouring Tumblr for the perfect photo! This takes the listening experience to a higher level; having the little four-album automatic icons that Spotify puts up is simply unsatisfying for me as a listener. There are workers who inspired my ability to connect playlists with sex work: first, my ‘Splitsability’ instructor for the brief period of time I lived in Vancouver. During class, she would play the most amazing playlist for our warm-up before we began our splits, and eventually I screwed up the courage to ask for her Spotify – which opened me up her playlists.
What I appreciate about her playlists is that she finds the erotic in music which isn’t necessarily played in the club. Additionally, part of the magic of playlists is that because you are here for an entire vibe, there are songs by artists that you can end up enjoying that you normally wouldn’t otherwise. Take, for example, Post Malone — if I heard White Iverson on the radio, or any Post Malone song for that matter, I would change the station and roll my eyes; yet somehow, while stretching out my hip flexors in her class, Post Malone became tolerable — even enjoyable.
Once I began sharing my playlists with my friends who are fellow workers, I started to get feedback on how good people thought my music taste was. That is a compliment which means a lot to me, much more than, “You’re so pretty.” My ability to create a story, or a vibe, with a playlist is self-affirming.
I started stripping in Berlin in 2023, and I needed new vibes for making it through the special stripper-circadian-rhythm. My playlist, ‘Black Str!pclub Night,’ was born out of my frustration about the dull vibe of the white strip club I worked in. It was a completely different environment from the clubs I was used to frequenting as a customer in the United States, where going to the strip club is a normal night out for us. I found myself drained by just sitting around on couches with customers and coworkers alike who preferred to sit quietly with their hands folded in their lap while sipping drinks instead of having fun. Listening to Black Str!pclub night on the way to my shift at the club helped me remember who I was, and what I was; if I was going to be one of only three Black strippers out of approximately sixty or seventy dancers at this club, and the only American one, then I was going to do it proper – even if it meant getting chastised for taking shots with the customers and twerking on them.
Another inspiration for my expansion into playlists for work was reading this article on the Tryst blog’s A Tryst With series with Empress Wu. Empress Wu mentioned that they like to be creative by, “…playing the same song on repeat for multiple hours as a form of psychological torment,” in their work as a dominatrix, which I find wonderful, thrilling, and a stroke of genius. In 2024, I began entering into the world of sensual domination, and I look forward to seeing how my affinity for music and playlists can become a more integrated part of my domination. I’ve tentatively started the playlist domina diaries to cultivate my specific mood for sensual domination. Domina diaries came about when I heard a single song — in this case, Dark Feminine by Peachkka and Maijah — that was so immaculate and fitting to what I needed, that I used this song as the basis for building the rest of the playlist.
I feature my Spotify on my linktree and my Fetlife profile so subs and fans can feel my vibes. I credit that flexibility instructor from Canada for the idea to have that unique personal touch on my sex work profiles, since she was the first sex worker I ever saw with a publicly available Spotify on their work social media. In worker chat groups, people began asking directly, “Does anyone have any good playlists for getting ready for work/getting in the mood?” I was always ready, and dropped my playlists for them.
p*$$y fairy is a playlist designed to warm up for a GFE experience, although these days I use it for doing online admin work or while writing my erotica; the vibe is slow, hyper-feminine, and gives a “my-cum-is-glitter” energy — a still of Megan Fox from the movie Jennifer’s Body is the cover. I also include a small descriptor with each playlist to further set the scene or explain the backstory. A sex worker friend of mine laughs at me for how specific some of my playlists can be—particularly, rock bar pole dance, because the description I came up for it is, “the year is 1980 and you are a skinny, white stripper dancing at a club called Jugs.” My playlists are also a way of me living my fantasies; I am a great nostalgic for bygone eras and a curator of vintage aesthetics. A playlist is a portal for me to time travel back to the 1970’s or 1980’s and live, for about thirty minutes to one hour, another life.
SHE GOT THEM THAAANGS! is by the numbers, the most popular one of my playlists among sex workers (maybe because my own luscious ass is the cover photo?) It’s a general fssw/performance warm-up playlist that I always come back to; this playlist is my bottom bitch, my old faithful.
My playlist poledance triste latina is more niche; it’s extremely sad (if you can understand Spanish) with classic mournful Latin ballads that go beautifully with a slow, sensual pole routine. Only other Latinxs seem to understand why I would choose these songs! I think this is actually one of my favorites, because it highlights the erotic in sorrow (very Latinx), and this is a reason why I love music as a sex worker. Twerk jams make me feel sexy, and trap music makes me feel motivated to go hustle, but so can 1970’s rock, so do certain folk ballads, and so does La Lupe’s La Tirana…
In my experience, sex workers — particularly those who do performance — tend to have amazing music taste. I take music so seriously that I judge the character of a person based on their music taste; I feel that your music matches your vibration. I can spend hours of sweet enjoyment in the act of just listening to music, which is an activity in its own right that I feel needs to be brought back. I can spend even hours more working on a playlist, the act of which involves listening to songs, searching for a mood board image, adding and then deleting tracks. It is a highly involved process for me. I’ve spent — with no regrets — an inordinate amount of money on high-quality over-the-ear headphones and a bamboo-wood Bluetooth speaker for their enhancement of my music experience. I’ve actually taken a break from Spotify since they began integrating video into the platform because it slows the loading of the music and detracts from my listening. Sometimes I’ll hear a song while working on one playlist that spawns a new separate playlist, and the process continues. I keep many playlists private, and some are hidden from my public profile but privately shared with other friends and workers.
Music is incredibly powerful — let’s start adding playlists to our ‘go bags’ along with sponges, lube, masks, toys, costumes, etc…
All My SW Playlists (find me on Spotify: abeautifulmirage):
domina diaries: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0iKplyhAMJyzv3sXM3GBx5?si=srSgn9T1RQmTvqENWh9kbw
black Str!pclub night: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Ey3hHVI5STe1KlY8rK8XY
rock bar pole dance: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6lWKBqYh2nazfh7SE99Mmj
p*$$y fairy: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/395zoJuXbghACGfUOAXBys
poledance triste latina: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0tf76HoIS57O7W5ZftCLqm
SHE GOT THEM THAAANGS: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5mjXEuon7gI20CsFS0sdkY
miss mirage, also known online as thepasteldomina, is a writer of essays, opinions, poems, and cultural commentary as well as the author of erotic semi-fiction stories such as 'reggaeton strap-on: a latina lesbian adventure' and 'his first escort: f*cking my favorite comedian.' a s*x worker for over a decade, she currently writes and records audioerotica for her devoted worshippers online, while working occasionally as a str!pper. you can take a peek into her beautiful world on fetlife with her username: thepasteldomina. when she isn’t being shadowbanned, you can find her on x: https://x.com/pasteldomina
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