A cam girl is a woman who broadcasts herself on a webcam in a room in a studio, usually for cash tips from online viewers. She can perform any number of acts — stripping, masturbating and chatting with the audience are common, but there are many other options, too. In the US, performers can make thousands of dollars a week. Those who make a living solely as cam girls often work grueling schedules and can be subject to intense emotional stress.
Despite these disadvantages, camming has become an important part of the lives of some women. Whether they work from home or in a live porn studio, most models are paid via virtual tokens (online currency that helps cam sites get around financial institution rules against purchasing adult content) for their shows, and some of them earn even more by selling teddy bears or sex toys to their viewers. In the US, models can also be paid a minimum wage for their work.
For some models, like Katlyn Carter, who makes a living as an american camgirl, the work is extremely rewarding. She explains that she got her first camgirl job after responding to an ad on Craigslist by a fetish modeling studio. The studio billed her as an “exotic dancer” but Carter was more interested in sex, so she offered to strip for the audience in return for tokens.
Her performance was a huge success and she started getting regulars, which helped her keep her schedule full. But she soon discovered that her work had darker undertones. She craved the boundaries and safety of performance behind the camera because she was pushing away a painful trauma from her childhood.
It was a long journey back to health, but she managed and in doing so found that her work as a cam girl had saved her life at its lowest point. Now she looks back at her time as a cam girl with fondness, seeing it as labor that assured her independence and set her on a path toward transformation.
The author of this article, Isa Mazzei, is the author of Camgirl, a memoir about her life as a live sex cam model. Her book comes out in November from Rare Bird Books. This article originally appeared in our Utopia Issue, which you can buy here.
To read more about the cam girl subculture and how you can support these hardworking women, click here.
Cam girls are the hardest workers in porn. Their commitment to their work and their ability to establish a connection with each viewer is what keeps them coming back for more. They deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, and they can with a little help from you.