A creator who has spent more than a decade in the adult industry has revealed she deliberately tells people she is older than she really is – because being taken seriously matters more to her than looking young.
Banksie, who was formerly known as Lindsay Banks, has been working online since roughly 2012 and now runs a media brand built on interviews, panels and industry appearances.
In a business where age is usually shaved off rather than added on, she does the opposite.
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“I tell people I’m 38,” said Banksie, who is actually 35 and posts on Instagram as @BanksieTV.
“I think it means I’m taken a little more seriously.
“It’s a plus for me, especially with age verification and because there are some fans out there who are weirdos.
“I’m a woman. I’m a grown woman.”
Now firmly established in the industry, she says she no longer minds people knowing her real age.
Long before any of it, she was waiting tables.
She said: “I started having a career when I was 16 years old. I was a waitress at Pizza Hut and it was a dine-in Pizza Hut, so super old school, small town.”
After moving to the city she spent a few years at Victoria’s Secret, learning to measure customers for bras and working the Pink section.
She said: “I was definitely a Pink girly.
“But when you’re starting out, something retail, something in the restaurant industry, it’s really hard to make a living.”
The change came from an advert on Craigslist promising between £1,100 and £3,700 ($1,500 to $5,000 USD) a week.
She said: “Of course that piques my interest, right?
“It ended up being live camming. I didn’t know what I was getting into, to be honest.
“I thought, okay, so this is just a chat room and you go on and you talk to people.”
Convinced the whole thing was a con, she refused to commit until she had proof.
She said: “At first I thought it was so sketchy. I waited and I said, I’m just going to do one time frame and see if the payment even comes in.
“I got my first £73 and I thought, oh my god, this is real? I can make money?
“And it was quick money. Quick big money. That’s what started that engine.”
Within a couple of months she was treating it as a career, and the industry started opening doors. She was signed as one of the faces of a major adult brand’s camming line, a deal she describes as one of the proudest moments of her early years.
These days she works less as a performer and more as a professional. She has worked with some of the biggest platforms in the business and currently counts one of the major creator sites as her client, alongside speaking on panels and running education on personal branding and marketing.
The money has followed. She now clears six figures a year – something she says she never imagined for herself.
She said: “I never thought in my life I would be making anywhere near £73,300 ($100,000 USD) in a year.
“To surpass that and think, okay, this is really sustainable – that was something.”
For years she was too frightened to look at the numbers properly. She avoided doing her taxes for so long that she stopped using the word.
She said: “I wouldn’t even say the word taxes. I would call it the T word. I was so scared.
“When they finally went through my stuff and looked up my earnings, the accountant went, oh my god.
“And I thought, here it comes. Give me the bad news.
“But she told me the number I’d made and she was surprised. She said, wow, that’s really great, good job.
“It wasn’t bad news. It was actually good news.”
Asked what made the biggest difference to her growth, her answer is not about algorithms.
She said: “People believing in me, from the industry as well.
“It created that consistent stability. That’s my simple answer.”
Now based in Austin, Texas, US, where she was born and raised, she puts most of that down to turning up in person at industry events and talking to people properly.
She said: “It’s the dinners, the special events you can get invited to. You can literally go up to a booth and talk to them as a content creator.
“That’s why it’s really important to be respectful and have respect for everybody you talk to, because you never know who you’re talking to.
“Sometimes it’s the owners of the company.
“It might not happen quickly, but word does get around.”
Her biggest platform is now Instagram, having been Twitter for years, and she is firm that neither one is the point.
She said: “These are platforms. The brand is you.
“Because you’re on this platform for long periods of time, that’s part of the brand, but it shouldn’t be your whole brand.”
One thing she pushes back on is the pressure new creators face over what they produce.
She said: “Sometimes creators will talk about a kind of content they’re going to produce, maybe that they’re inviting you to produce.
“I’d hate to say the word pressuring, but it is more of a pressure than advice.
“There are people who will purposely give bad advice, and that’s unfortunate.”
She says it has happened to her more than once.
She said: “You have to learn how to stand your ground.
“If you’ve had a couple of experiences like that, you don’t want it happening again.
“Some people don’t learn and they dip right out. They say, this isn’t for me, I’m out.”
On artificial intelligence she is more resigned than angry, despite having had fans send her explicit images generated in her likeness.
She said: “A fan will send something and I think, that’s a little explicit for me on my end.
“There are all these platforms now where you can just input things and they’ll spit it right back out for free.
“I can definitely see the infringement on somebody’s persona, brand, just a person in general.
“But I also think it’s inevitable.”
The hardest part of the job, she says, is not the part anyone expects. It is not the comments and it never really was.
She said: “I don’t think the mental stress for me came from hate comments necessarily.
“There has been stress around stalkers and things like that for sure.
“But it came more from my personal life, and the stigmas around this industry do play a part in whether you even continue doing it.”
Reactions from the people closest to her varied wildly, and some relationships did not survive it.
She said: “There was one that was actually positive. They said, oh my god, what if you get famous?
“There were ones where it was just ignored, not a topic we’re going to talk about.
“And there were the ones who ignored me. It’s definitely ended relationships – friends, family.”
Dating, she says, brought its own version of the same problem.
She said: “I know a lot of girls deal with jealousy. I’m sure I’ve dealt with it in the past.
“I used to be a lover girl, boy crazy.
“But I love that I don’t feel that I’m made up by having a codependency. It’s made me more confident with relationships and with myself.
“If you can’t handle this lifestyle then it’s not going to work out.”
Asked what she wishes she had known at the start, she does not hesitate.
She said: “Not all of your peers are competition.
“The more you share and the better the people around you are doing, the better it is for the community.
“A lot of the time you end up working together anyway.
“There’s room for everybody.”
And after 13 years of it, the thing she most wants people to understand about anyone doing her job is the simplest thing of all.
She said: “We’re human.
“If somebody’s reading this, they’re human too.
“And that connects us all. It really connects us all.”
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