CamWoman 101

This article originally appeared in Pull Out, a print magazine exploring the relationship between sex and technology. 

 

Camming is like stripping, but you don’t have to make eye contact. You’re still physical, but you only touch yourself. You’re aware people are watching you, but all you see is a reversed-moving-image-selfie. Senses are stimulated yet the entire experience is lacking flesh. It’s stripping — but cheating.  

When I began to consume pornography as a pre-teen, the content was based on what was easily accessible and available. First, it was a Playboy magazine, followed by a VHS tape, but then the Internet happened. Garden-variety adult sites like YouPorn and XVideos mainly featured videos of heterosexual couples, wherein an aggressive man dominates a submissive woman.

As sex digitizes in various ways, Cam Porn has offered a platform to those who seek to challenge the conditions of patriarchal pornography. Camming permits self-identifying women the autonomy and control over production, set design, casting, where content becomes available, and how they market it.  

I masturbate, I twerk, and I sit on homemade hand-frosted cakes as a paid performer. I’m an independent contractor, and I’m able to stream at any time. I operate under an ever-mutating pseudonym on one of the most well known live-streaming sites. Premium members tip webcam models with tokens. They click to initiate the heavy twinkle sound of change dropping in another dimension, highlighting the screen #FFFF00. What models do in their chat rooms is up to them. Members pay for a model’s time either in pay-per-minute private shows or by chipping in with tips during a public chat.  

My cam set is my studio is my bedroom. The equipment I need to work has been collected over the years: webcam and studio lights sent to me anonymously from my Amazon Wishlist, a 27-inch iMac from my father, many folding mattresses that are both a bed and a stage for clients like ollie_2113. The money I make camming buys me high-speed internet service, the cake mix from Pioneer Supermarket, and also inflatable Donkey Hoppers from the bodega on Broadway in Bushwick for my signature Donkey Twerks (basically I hump rubber toys). Additionally, my camming money buys the watercolors I use to paint portraits of the men I C2C (communicate cam to cam) with, the fabric I use to print screenshots of women on, and the rent for the apartment that I stream from. Both the job and the capital, make the artwork.  

Offering off-site content like Snapchat videos, picture sets, and Skype are crucial to maximize income and build a consistent fan base. The work of a CamWoman is dominated by filtering out spam in an attempt to connect with like-minded people. I view the regulars who frequent my chatroom as patrons, individuals who are purchasing availability and friendship. Camming is all about building a community, which takes constant emotional, mental, and physical effort. I’ve thought about quitting if I could find another job that feeds my art career the way camming does, but that would mean abandoning a community that I’ve spent years building: members have become sugar daddies, and also  — friends. 

A man on a Tinder date once told me, “A woman with her own sexual agenda is intimidating.” Both my date’s discomfort with my sexual empowerment and the broader stigma attached to pornography come from the confused sexual shame our “moralistic” society places on women. I don’t subscribe to that shame. A woman making decisions that have to do with her sexuality shouldn’t be seen as anything but smart. 

Women are told that porn isn’t made for us. We are presumed perverse for watching it, being in it or exhibiting our sexuality. Our society’s stance on sex is harmful because it’s uneducated, catering to archaic patriarchal values which gender sex and porn as something for ‘boys only.’ As a pornographer, I can confirm that women willingly participate in porn.

We appreciate it, and we capitalize on it. If we are performing, if we are the “stars,” how is porn not also ours? 

 

 

All photos provided by Lindsay Dye, who you can follow on Instagram here.Â