Well hi, new followers! For reasons slightly mysterious to me I received an unprecedented spike in followers here over the last couple of weeks (who says good things can’t happen during eclipse season??), so it feels like time to reintroduce myself and this substack. I’ve talked elsewhere about my journey into kink and submission, including all over the list of articles you received when you signed up, so rather than rehash the personal details to introduce myself, I want to share the untold story of not just being a sub, but my apotheosis into fairy submother. I think this is important to share because I know so many of you have untold stories that could help people, so maybe this is the kismet you need to start sharing your vulnerability with the world :)
On New Year’s day of 2019 I decided once and for all to start writing about the biggest change I’d ever experienced in my life to that point — the decision to finally embrace my urge towards kink and submission. It was a new year, and as such I was determined to put a little creative juice out in the world just to see what happened. I’d been in a 24/7 Dom/sub dynamic for two years at the time and had experienced massive changes to my self esteem and every detail of how I ordered my life. Before beginning this journey I’d thought kink would destroy me. To my great surprise, it kicked off a healing journey that brought me into alignment with what I really wanted in life and, most importantly, how I wanted to be treated by those around me. I wanted others to know about this, but remained deeply concerned about my grandmother finding out, so I cast my eyes around my bedroom for pen name ideas. I took Anais Nin’s Little Birds off the shelf and pulled the names of two of my favorite chapters, Lina and Woman On The Dune, and thus Lina Dune was born.
I snagged the Tumblr URL and Instagram handle “askasub” and began posting aesthetic photos of women from French New Wave cinema and Indie Sleaze-era Nylon mag along with links to advice columns I’d written in response to questions I also wrote myself. Dan Savage says all advice professionals start out this way, asking themselves questions until real people start to write in. If I could have gone back in time then to tell myself I’d be on his podcast as a guest twice, I would have fainted.
I’d been too afraid to really dive into the kink hashtag on Instagram on my regular account, so now that I had this finsta I finally started exploring what else was out there. I found a meme on my explore page that featured two characters from Zootopia and reposted it without a second thought. In a matter of days I received 900 likes on the post, which with my follower count of less than 100, was unbelievable. Well what the fuck, I thought, I can make memes too.
This tracked alongside something pivotal in my offline life as well. I’d been working in Hollywood since graduating from college, and had finally scratched and clawed my way out of being an assistant and was now an associate producer on a (terrible) comedy show that you have never heard of. But the victory was pyrrhic. What I really wanted was to be a writer, and had paid my dues as an assistant in hopes of being promoted into the writer’s room on this very show. As the show was starting up, nobody asked me if I expected to move up. Taking the kind of initiative I’d been told was essential to ever getting what you wanted in the TV business, I submitted my resume to the head writer for consideration. He sat me down for an interview, opening it by making a homophobic joke about my upbringing in San Francisco. He then scanned my resume, openly bored, before finally saying “And you…. want to be a writer?”
The meeting concluded abruptly when he asked me to go get sandwiches for himself and the Executive Producers. By the time I returned with their lunch order, they’d hired a less qualified man none of them had ever worked with. I’d put in three years working for these producers waiting for this moment and, as the story has gone a hundred times, a generic white man with a baseball hat and a mustache took it from me. When pressed, my boss and a co-creator of the show said, “well, it’s hard to hire a woman writer’s assistant, because they just aren’t funny.” My jaw was on the floor as he continued, “that’s why women make such good assistants. They’re just better at supporting the dreams of other people than they are at pursuing their own dreams.” The dark part was that he was right in a way. I had trusted that putting in hard work and waiting my turn would pan out for me, rather than taking the initiative to cut the line at any cost.
So when I began making memes at my desk and began to really rack up the followers, it began to feel like the escape hatch from my dead-end career path into a life of actually fulfilling work. And this work, unlike anonymously assisting behind the scenes and crying in the bathroom every day, was helping people. The catharsis of laughter people found on my page was helping them see themselves in a new light. I think often of the theater teacher I had in college who told us there were two types of laughter — the laugh when something is funny, and the laugh of recognizing oneself in the work. I think I do get the former, but the latter is what keeps me feeling the memes are important.
The memes really helped a community form as time went on. By August 2019, I had 1400 followers. By January of 2020, I had 15,000. I don’t bring up these metrics to tout the meme quality, but to paint a picture of how much people needed a compassionate and holistic view of kink delivered in this way at this time. Anybody could have done it, but I’m very lucky I got to be one of the creators making a difference for people.
My Friday Q&As, which have been another hallmark of my online presence, began when I took a day off work to go to Jury Duty. I whiled away the day swiping away angry texts from my supervisor and marveling at the open portal to so many people telling me intimate details of their sex lives (shout out to the person who asked me if it was ‘normal’ to want to be tied up and messily fed hot oatmeal. Still don’t know if that was real, but if it is… rock on). The sense of connection buoyed me even through the lecture I got when I returned back to the office about how anybody truly dedicated to working in production just threw away jury summons. My boss’s threats had deflated in the face of the many, many people blowing up my notifications with words of thanks and bids to be seen.
I became increasingly despondent at my job and could no longer stop myself from calling out the homophobic, racist, and sexist jokes that were making it into the show, and by late February of 2020 had officially been “rubber roomed” (which is what they call it on toxic sets where someone is structurally fired by having many of their privileges and job expectations stripped away. They couldn’t actually fire me but they were doing everything they could do make me quit.) When COVID hit, and we all went home to wait out the “two weeks” of quarantine, I had very luckily just run a special offer on my Patreon where if new people joined, they’d get the below sticker. Over the course of a few weeks I went from 150 to around 350 patrons. Before the first month of quarantine was over, the network canceled the show and I was unemployed for the first time in my adult life.
The pandemic was a very rough time for me personally — I had an extremely toxic meltdown with my family that caused me to go no contact with them for the first time in my life. The subsequent intense depression I experienced galvanized my Dom and then-fiance to push me to get evaluated by a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with Bipolar 2, which, as anyone with bipolar will tell you, was simultaneously crushing and unsurprising. I learned that many of my ‘flaws’ — long periods of feeling unmotivated, waking up angry multiple days in a row, feeling terrified of making future plans in case I wouldn’t have the energy to see them through — were manageable with medication. When my mood stabilizers started to take effect, it felt like taking off an extremely heavy backpack I’d been carrying my whole life. I’d subconsciously gotten used to making my world smaller and smaller to guard against the depression whose undertow was relentless and swift in pulling me beneath the waves. For the first time, I could catch my breath.
Getting on mood stabilizers (I’m a Lamictal girlie) also gave me the energy and stability to create my Conscious Kink course. Every day for weeks I’d hop in the cramped closet of our studio apartment and start recording chapters of the course where I’d weave together the best ideas I’d heard around couple’s happiness and kink to help people like me who wanted their power exchange to do more for them than just let off sexual steam. By September 2020 I did my first appearance on the Savage LoveCast. Later that month I hit 50,000 Instagram followers. On the other hand I was starting to attend family therapy with my parents in addition to dealing with the horrors of shifting a wedding out a year to account for the pandemic. LA was a wreck. I was really only seeing friends on FaceTime. And yet — these parasocial relationships through ask a sub were blowing up. We all really needed them then.
By Christmas of 2020, I had my first brush with the insecure attachment of the internet when Instagram deleted my account for the first time. I logged in one morning, as usual since I was posting a meme every day back then, and everything was just gone. My husband and I (we had eloped in a secret ceremony in October our families still don’t know about) had just taken a harrowing journey across the country to spend Christmas with his elderly parents. His father had cancer, and his increasing memory problems meant he was leaving the house sometimes without a mask. We were worried this would be our last chance to spend the holidays together. On the plane we wore N-95 masks covered with surgical masks and face shields. After hours in our PPE, our nose bridges were chafed and our spirits were dampened. We then quarantined for as long as it took for our drive-through COVID tests to come back negative. During that time, I frantically searched for any emails addresses I had for anybody who might have a contact that could reverse Instagram’s decision on my account. After two weeks, just as suddenly as it had disappeared, it was back.
I spent the next three years obsessively censoring my words and becoming increasingly disillusioned with the app, until Instagram finally deleted my account permanently in March of 2023 (at 115,000 followers no less! The indignity!). But in a way, this was the biggest godsend I could have gotten. I was exhausted from posting daily memes for four years in a row. I was starting to doubt whether I had anything to offer the scores of people asking increasingly complex questions in my question box. But once the Instagram was gone, I doubled down on the podcast I’d begun in 2021 and finally recorded a second season. I also started this substack, because all along I’d wanted to be a writer and connect with people in longform.
I’m not going to lie to you, it was traumatic to lose everything I built and start completely from scratch. My income was unexpectedly halved. I still can’t remember or find all the accounts I followed there and loved. But the deletion put into stark relief that I’d been essentially working around the clock as an unpaid instagram employee, doing everything I could to make their increasingly terrible app better for its users. At my core, I’m not a content creator. I’m a writer. I need to be in a place where a soundbite doesn’t cut it. And so substack has become a new home.
Here, I’ve gotten a chance to deeply explore issues that are very personal to me. The story of the girls who broke my bisexual heart. The grief that preceded my journey into kink education. The longing I had to become a mother and my subsequent surgical miscarriage a year later. This is a space where I’ve gotten to expand beyond the content abattoir and actually become authentic with you all. And you’ve been so gracious with me as I’ve done so.
Going forward here I want to continue to share the realities of living the kink lifestyle over the longterm (math stans may have noticed that the aforementioned D/s dynamic has now been going on for over 7 years), but more importantly I want to leverage the volume at which I’m encountering kinky people and their challenges and joys into help for the whole collective. I’m doing this in a few ways that you might be interested in…
Together with my team of incredible moderators, I run a Discord community (a benefit of my Patreon) where kinksters from all over the world can connect, compare notes on experiences, inspire each other, and share pet photos. People have made irl friends there, had meetups in cities all over the world, and we even have a couple that met there and got married!! It’s the best place on the internet. You can gain access by subscribing to my Patreon here.
I’m always taking questions for the podcast. Submit yours here.
This year I started a new offering I’m calling Office Hours where I meet with folks one on one via Zoom. You can get a $50 off coupon by joining Patreon or becoming a paid member to this substack. Here’s a testimonial:
“Office hours with Lina was really lovely and helpful for me beyond what I had anticipated. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but in my conversation with Lina, she offered invaluable insights for me on my journey into kink and was extremely kind, funny, and supportive. Especially when we touched on topics like shame or insecurity, Lina had a real talent for reframing the things I was worried about and finding the positive in them. I came away thinking that if Lina represents the kind of community kink offers, I must be doing something right.”
Speaking of the paid side of this substack, if you become a supporting member at $8/month you’ll get:
The aforementioned discount code
An archive of special paid written posts: we’ve got fun cosmo-style quizzes, deep stories of transformation, and my journey to a Tokyo strip club among other hits.
Access to the Deep Dive series, which is the podcast within a podcast where I interview luminaries in the kink & alternative sexuality communities about topics ranging from how to find play parties and kink friendly therapists, to planning elaborate orgies or a blood play scene in a Portuguese castle. The paywall is very earned on these, trust me.
Wherever you support, even if it’s just by liking and commenting on these posts or referring others to this publication (there’s a whole thing where you get a free membership when you refer people, get info here), I’m so excited you found your way to this cozy, filthy corner of the internet. Let’s grow together <3
xo Lina