Camgirlair is a website and community that provides an online space for women who perform on webcams for entertainment, erotic, or sexual purposes. The site combines elements of a live chat room and a social media network, and it allows viewers to interact with the performers in real time by chatting, sending requests, and paying for services like anal sex or private shows. The site’s community also includes a number of support sections for users who have technical issues with their accounts.
Unlike many modern webcam models, the woman who founded Camgirl was not trained for the job. Instead, she stumbled into the industry by accident when she bought a webcam at a tech store and began recording herself online in 1998. Her initial experiment, Jennicam, was not a sex site but a personal project meant to test the limits of the new technology and her ability to create a blog-like site that could upload still images every 15 minutes.
The popularity of her early videos brought her attention from local newspapers, which soon led to a job offer from a pornographic website. Mazzei took it and never looked back, spending the next few years in a sexy and lucrative career as a “cam girl.”
Today’s cam girls work from home or in small, intimate spaces. They can make anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars per show, depending on their skills, appearance, and the number of recurring viewers they have. In addition to tips, they receive gifts from their fans and often get asked to model in certain types of lingerie. Some even have their own line of lingerie, which they sell on their websites.
They also have the ability to choose their own schedules and have the freedom to be as creative as they want with their content. A few of them, such as the edgy KittyKiss, have a following of millions of fans on Instagram who follow them for updates on their lifestyles and fetishes.
The authors of the article argue that despite the often negative connotations of the term camgirl, these women are in fact active participants in a feminist and anti-colonialist counterrevolution against the patriarchal structures that impede equality for females. The authors use a tele-ethical perspective to analyze how the camgirl destabilizes traditional relationships and redefines what it means to be an empowered, sexually autonomous woman.
The authors’ prescriptions are cautious and not overly theorized, but they do demonstrate that activism can arise from spaces that were not designed for political action—such as Web communities based on the ostensibly personal practice of camming. They suggest that future studies of tele-ethical strategies should be conducted to better understand the role of these microcelebrities in a world where the boundaries between public and private are constantly being redefined. The article is available at the journal Gender, Place & Culture. This article is a part of the special issue, “The Internet of Things and Feminism.” For more information or to subscribe to the journal, please click here.