My name is Sara, but by now you might better know me as "the Mozart boob twerk girl" from sites all over the internet, including this one. A week ago exactly, I was sitting where I am now, editing a video I had no idea would garner over 21 million views worldwide in seven days. I was a semi-well-known-in-certain-circles freelance tattooed model, former stripper, and freelance writer of SEO and clickbait pieces for the types of websites that don't allow you to talk about who you work for. I was bored and uninspired.
So I decided to try something. I'm not a stranger to putting myself out there. Though I had an incredibly conservative upbringing, I began my modeling career at the tender age of barely legal by getting onto the most well-known alternative girl site with the intention of getting back at a bully who wouldn't quit (although I cringe a little to admit that now). Shortly after that I became a dancer, not of the ballerina variety. Most of my seven-year "career" in that field was spent working in bikini bars where stripping and lap dancing were illegal, but I got called a stripper enough to embrace the term rather than let it be used against me as a pejorative. I had been a strange, awkward, gawky, bookish child, and my adult persona wasn't too much different. I was still a ham. I never exactly felt like some sort of sex goddess onstage, but I did develop a love for performing using my body as a means of expression. I relied on physical comedy, interacting with the people who sat at my stage and making them feel like we shared an inside joke. I never took myself seriously.
It never occurred to me to be ashamed of my body or what I was doing with it. Of course it's safe to say that any parent would probably rather see their child become a doctor than a stripper (or even sort-of-stripper) but mine were surprisingly supportive of my decision. Whenever I visited them I would work in the local club, and my mother, bless her heart, would make me the same brown bag lunch to go to work at 9 pm that she did my entire school career. My parents have been married since 1968, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, and even with their daughter's chest suddenly being shared by all of their senior citizen friends on Facebook.
About that chest: getting breast implants was a conscious financial decision. Night after night I watched girls with implants have money literally thrown in their faces just for being onstage with those boobs. Naturally, I wanted in on the action. Who wouldn't be willing to go under the knife for such a magnificent ROI? (Okay: a lot of people. But I had zero qualms.) Post-recovery, I was delighted to realize that I could do the crazy boob bouncing trick I had seen some of my coworkers do since day one. Just as with what we now know as "twerking," which I added to my repertoire before Hannah Montana hit the air, I enjoyed the trick as one that's far more silly than sexual. I felt wildly bemused by the people who considered it to be the latter. Customers would get all excited about boob bouncing, and I'd think: submuscular implant displacement, mmmm, yea baby.
Entertaining for me was always about having fun, and about six years in, working in a club environment stopped being fun. I quit and left the atmosphere that had started to feel stifling, setting out on a quarter-life crisis that took me across the country and at one point involved getting my real estate license. I settled into a new, comfortable life with my boyfriend and our two dogs. But I found that I missed performing. For a brief stint I tried my hand at being a webcam girl, and my sainted boyfriend even helped me to install a pole in our spare room so that I could attempt to recreate the fun of performing while also making us some extra cash. I continued to make silly booty clap videos to put on social media, taking in increasing amounts of both positive and negative feedback.
At the same time, I was freelancing for clickbait sites, and I became well-acquainted with trending videos and news stories. I realized that, though tri-boobed women and twerking teachers quitting their day jobs dominated the viral news world, I hadn't seen anyone perform my particular favorite boob trick. So I figured: why not give it a shot? Music was the only thing I had to figure out; I wanted to monetize this video in case it got some views, so I searched for public domain songs. Classical is the rare corner of public domain that's not terrible, and Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" had been familiar to me as long as I can remember. From there, the idea began to develop in my head.
As my boyfriend set up the lights in my former webcam room to record, I went and dug out a suit jacket from my stint as a real estate agent. "So the idea is," I explained to him, "I want people to think I'm going to come out and sing a song. Then while I do the boob bounce… you know how musicians look in an orchestra while they're playing? I'm going to do that face." We filmed three takes and settled on the second one. I did the face. I also made sure not to allude to boobs in the title, trying to keep up the ruse that I might be about to sing until the last possible second.
Feeling quite pleased with my work, I published the video on Youtube, hoping for maybe 150,000 views total and a few good laughs. Then friends of mine who run the Inked & Sexy community on Facebook reposted it (they ruined the surprise element but also coined the term "boob twerking" and got me a ton of shares, so thanks guys). Within an hour, their post of my video had been shared over 1,000 times. I stayed up until 5:30 a.m. watching the shares climb, and then fell asleep.
Hardly three hours later I was awoken by a barrage of texts saying that my video was beginning to show up on websites that my friends followed. Then it landed on the front page of Reddit. By noon, the count was in the tens of thousands. Emails began to roll in, from people wanting to air my video, to sign me to representation. By the end of the day the views surpassed a million, and the next day was even crazier: the calls and emails included a TMZ interview and a reporter from a very large UK tabloid calling to make an offer for my exclusive story. Since then it's settled down, but the views continue to climb. Messages pour in from all over the world from people telling me how they saw me on their local news, in places as far-flung as Croatia and Russia.
I stopped reading the comments section of the video after reading some of the more horrible ones the first afternoon, but I know I've definitely been called a whore and a slut and an attention whore far more times than I ever was when I was actually in an adult industry. Mostly the people who have negative things to say about my character, or my presumed profession, past profession, and life decisions don't get that the video is meant to be humorous, and operate under the assumption that I just wanted to show the world my boobs.
I've also learned that many men seem to equate their genitals with boobs, and use the comments section to bemoan the unfairness of their inability to monetize a video of their balls the way that I can with my breasts in a bikini top. But the reactions that really floored me were the incredibly detailed conspiracy theories from the naysayers claiming it was fake. Fake? My boobs are fake, sure, but strings or wires or electrical devices? Hardly.
I won't be too sad when my 15 minutes passes: it's a little disconcerting to have the clerk at the grocery store recognize me as "the Mozart boob twerk girl." A friend pointed out that this was at least a viral video of me doing something I didn't mind people knowing me for, unlike some of the viral videos of the past that have been more like blooper reels. Only a few people have messaged me death threats; overwhelmingly, the response is positive, and I've raised money for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and I am always pleased to hear from people who message me saying that they too are trying to flex their boobs.
Sara X Mills used to just go by Sara X until Google+ connected to her Youtube channel, revealing to the world her real (and completely unglamorous) last name. Originally hailing from the East Coast, she is a freelance model & writer currently residing in Las Vegas with her boyfriend and two canine fur children.
Illustration by Jim Cooke.