Camgirls for Kids

When I first started as a camgirl, it was well before the explosion of Onlyfans and the subsequent discourse around its normalization. Truthfully, I just wanted some money, was in between jobs, and hadn't fully realized that I had a disability that was making it hard to actually keep jobs.

Originally I thought it was just performing sexual acts for money, but as I went through forums and guides written by well-worn and successful camgirls, I realized that what we were selling wasn't sex, but relationships. For many clients (of which I did also have female ones too!) sex wasn't the point, it was sex from you specifically. There's a misconception that people who engage with camgirls are primarily engaging for sexual content and while that's partially the case, the existence and proliferation of erotica, pornography of all types, and sex toys of which the likes I've never seen camgirls are still fairly popular.

In a foreshadowing episode for later developments in labor disputes, I remember when the first major virtual camgirl, Project Melody, started making her way onto chaturbate. It was incredibly controversial as camgirls clamored about having to compete with a 3D anime girl and that this could spell doom for the entire industry of real girls who had put their images on the line (quite literally) at great risk to themselves. And yet, things eventually evened out and the girls learned to live with their new anime co-workers, and surprisingly, Melody didn't inspire the leagues of animated 3D models that others had feared completely conquering the site. The discourse about melody was strong and divisive amongst the camworkers of the site, many of whom felt that she should be banned, and those who were unthreatened. The argument from those who were unthreatened was that what they were selling simply wasn't just sex, but a chance to connect to an authentically human person, they weren't even selling the same product.

As I amassed a small following of regulars, besides being naked, it was far more like acting like a naked variety show host, an erotic performer who riled up her crowd and played games with them, attracting applause (and hopefully tips) night after night. While I did run into quite a few people with niche and sometimes outright disgusting kinks, the ones that tended to stick in my mind were actually the folks who truly stuck around because they wanted people to talk to, they were often the most polite and the more generous clients. People who asked to play video games with me, or asked me to read them leftist literature and talk about space. There's a reason one of the most expensive and popular services in the community is the "girlfriend experience" a block of time where you can essentially rent a worker and they will act as your romantic partner with text messages, phone calls, and the like. Ironically it taught me more about psychology and user experience than any bootcamp or college class.

The vitriol to sex workers and sex work specifically is something that I need not go into, it's legislative, it's pervasive, it's a historical fixture. We are the whore, but we are also the Madonna soiled.

We're either the penultimate symbols of exploitation, coerced damsels, predators, gold-diggers, or if you ask those who are on the other side, we're the most empowered, powerful, brave, and virtuous of all women out there. The truth for most of us, is somewhere in the middle.

When Sex work went online the online understanding of camgirls specifically was less that we were brainwashed, and for many misogysts was that we were now the exploiters, taking advantage of sad and lonely men and draining them of their money. That we pretend to like men, provide them with a sense of safety, friendship, and connection with the explicit purpose of using them financially and that, that is somehow an especially novel and violating act that makes us especially evil. We need either white knights or to be burned at the stake.

It might surprise you to know that despite my recollection of sex work as mostly neutral, I did actually hate it. And the part that I liked least was having to feign closeness to people or ask them for money explicitly. It is also the reason I hated sales, and why I don't think I could be a therapist. I felt the same sense of existential dread in enforcing my tips structure in my chat or trying to get someone into private paid chat as I did having to go door to door to ask for donations for the non-profit I had once worked for, or asking trying to cajole passing folks to my sales table so that I could meet my quota and not get fired, stumbling around with an ipad as a poor family on food stamps told me they couldn't afford the installation fee for internet.

Taking off my clothes was actually the easy part.

Yet, the SWERFs and redpill podcast bros would have you believe that I and my fellow workers were the spawn of satan incarnate, disparaging the cause of women everywhere by simply doing my job and having the absolute audacity to ask for compensation for it. Don't you know giving men sex in exchange for shelter and protection should only be done under the banner of the church and state? Put on a wedding dress and save the lingerie for your honeymoon slut!

The dawn of a new era

At the end of high school was the dawn of what I dubbed ‘the playthrough era’. Suddenly people started watching playthroughs of other people playing video games and it was seemingly a big deal. I didn't really understand it. I still mostly don't on an emotional level. I always preferred watching edited silent clip compilations of funny moments in video games, or silent playthroughs, skipped through to the exact part where I had gotten stuck in a video game if I needed to. Other than that, YouTube was mostly a place I watched funny animated clips and downloaded music from. I found the timbre of the popular voices of the time,"WHAT'S UP GUYS WELCOME BACK TO MY CHANNEL" quite literally overstimulating and irritating. (And I still do. Who would've guessed years later that I had an autism diagnosis waiting for me?)

But as the years went by the phenomenon only seemed to get more and more ubiquitous. Once upon a pandemic, my roommate at the time who was a fairly well-known music producer who had befriended a few of these popular letsplayers came to me in tears about one of these video game players, a fairly large one at that with millions of subscriptions that had been accused of soliciting minors. They came to me in tears assuming that I would clearly know who this person was -- I didn't. Eventually years later I'd watched an hour long "documentary" about this sordid episode, one of an entire cottage industry of "Dramatubers" who specialized in recounting the lives and downfalls of these entertainers. Every single day, one of these "letsplayers" and "streamers" turned out to be grooming minors for sex, sometimes even flying out to see them, sending child pornography, scamming their fans (who were mostly children), introducing them to gambling, getting them into white supremacist far-right ideologies. A shooting in New Zealand where the shooter triumphantly screamed "subscribe to PewdiePie" before opening fire on a cadre of innocent people.

Entire communities associated with specific games like Smash or Minecraft became in-community jokes for their explicit association with pedophilia. And yet, all of this seemingly normalized? I was a bit confused, truthfully.

When you go to the average twitch streamer's livestream and compare it to the average camgirl's chaturbate or myfreecam's stream, if you were to strip the pages of all their colors and logos, they'd look very similar. Almost the exact same functionality in fact: a video livestream next to a running chat filled with bots that list menus of things for the performers to do for a certain price, such as shouting out the users, changing the music. The both can message the users directly and direct them out of the website to another platform where they can purchase goodies or sign up for a monthly subscription. Sometimes you even get the subscriptions free with a connection to another account - the first hit is always free, of course.

In the 1980s, as Tv saturated American life nearly completely after Reagan deregulated children's advertising laws, a cottage industry of children's media soon consumed the landscape: transformers, Jem and the holograms, GI Joe, countless others. These often low-quality animated TV shows (sorry y'all, Jem's music was fantastic but the show had like, 4 frames of animation an episode) served as little more than walking advertisements for children's toys. Parents of course, were up in arms about the lengths that capitalism sought to not-so-subtly brainwash their children via storytelling. Toys were created and stories became vehicle of which they could be sold, ethics be damned.

Of course, this changed after laws in the 90s pushed for children's programming to be more educational and banned the promotion of toys during the actual episodes, leading to a second animation golden age in the 90s. (As many millennials can attest to).

Still though, the streaming & social media era has yet to see a palpable legal pushback that has ended in any meaningful legislation despite far more dangerous social trends emerging, such as Meta's knowing induction of Eating disorders in young girls or youtube's algorithm radicalizing youth into mass shootings. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Christopher Hitchens morphed into Alex Jones, youtube "social experiments" and "pranks" and Ben Shapiro, who morphed into Andrew Tate, Asmongold, and Jubilee debates. None of the core ideas have really changed - minorities are too sensitive, women are whiny bitches, and we all love a good troll, although it is little bit interesting that the faces have gotten a little more diverse. Now the middle aged man telling us women are dumb bitches on the conservative platform is a Muslim mixed black man! Progress! That's identity politics baby.

As the internet moved into American households via dial-up or through mobile connections and as new media created new types of stars in the constellation of pop culture, things got a lot more personal. The most common future 'dream job' for children stopped being sports star or astronaut and became "streamer' or "influencer". That's not entirely surprising or noteworthy in itself, culture changes often.

What is noteworthy is how these people monetize themselves, advertising dollars, lucrative brand deals, and of course, direct donations. In the age of livestreaming specifically, livestreamers unlike their actor and model ancestors before them far more reliant on the direct donations and audiences buying their merchandise. And unlike their cartoon televsion counterparts, they have direct access to the children in their chatrooms and comment sections, and no laws or even industry standards governing how they should interact with their often child audiences.

It's not uncommon for these personalities to build entire careers off of sharing intimate details about their lives, building relationships with their audiences that blur the lines between personal and professional, with much of their content simply being that of watching media or video games together. The "parasocial relationship."

The parasocial relationship as defined by Psychology today:

"Parasocial relationships refer to one-sided relationships in which a person develops a strong sense of connection, intimacy, or familiarity with someone they don’t know, most often celebrities or media personalities."

But when an audience member has a direct line to a livestreamer, can they tell that it's one-sided? Are we to blame children who think that their favorite streamer really does like them when they directly reply to their questions in chat, @ them in their discord server, and they return day after day?

We live in an increasingly lonely society. Children are born to increasingly smaller families, often as only children, with extended family becoming more rare, farther away. Children are 62% less likely to go out to play a few times a week than they did years ago. Yet, American schools are increasingly eliminating recess from schools, with many towns and cities enacting anti-loitering laws that effectively eliminate children from public life unless they can somehow pay to be there. Even adults are feeling this effect, with loneliness rates through the roof. Those who seek to completely blame technology seem to ignore that even if every phone was seized tomorrow the children would still be thrust into a world that hardly has a place for them, less so if they are poor.

On the internet, netizens are even less kind to these wandering children who invade their spaces like invasive plants looking for a place to grow - crowding out more frail native fauna. They choke the ecosystem, suddenly NSFW creators are pushed out to make previously adult spaces “child [advertiser] friendly”. Marginalized adults and literal children are positioned as ideological enemies vying for the same space and people tell parents - the overworked parents who can barely afford childcare or the roofs over their head - to watch over their ‘crotchfruit’ better. Parents snap back to marginalized people who have no choice but to exist on these platforms to earn a fraction of living that they shouldn't have to cater to smut peddlers and queers. The government continues to defund after-school programs and parks. The children wander about all the same without a digital park having outgrown the snakepits of Roblox and baby games - no Habbo Hotel or IMVU to graduate to and no real park that they can't risk getting arrested or shot at for being 12 with a toy gun and happening to be the wrong color or existing and making too much noise.

In comes the streamer, who already likes what they like, the cool older adult who always is available to spend time with them and can exist in their headphones, lest they disturb their parents or the neighborhood with their laughter and screams. 5 bucks is enough for a twitch sub or a lunchly box, nearly four times less than tickets to the movie theaters with friends that will inevitably lead to coordinating schedules with busy, stressed out parents because there are no more buses in their neighborhood. They are misunderstood in school, where their classmates are all using chatgpt because they don't think they'll survive the climate wars anyways or get a job.

And puberty fucking sucks, despite what their nostalgia stricken elders tell them.

And so, the child watches, and learns, and chats. They beg their parents for hoodies of their favorite inside joke, and their parents fearmonger as they listen to podcasts from the NYT about trans youth and doctors, apparently 'grooming' them into identities they can't understand. Meanwhile, their child is learning that their favorite gamer guy says that Palestinians come from an inferior culture, or that PewdiePie is really sorry about paying people to hold signs saying,"death to all Jews" as a joke, he swears! They play around in twitch with custom emojis they've got, and suddenly at 15 their favorite streamer is messaging them and they speak exchange snapchats. They enthusiastically send over nudes and promise not to tell anyone. Another child in the discord starts listening to a guest who was on the stream a few months ago, who on their stream talked about how women are naturally submissive and science says that black people have naturally lower IQs. Soon enough the topic moves over to women with Onlyfans and camgirls. Lazy exploitative bitches, who take advantage of lonely men who are isolated and steal all their money. The child nods in agreement and tells the others at school.

In the ironic ouroboros of content, much is made about the camgirl, who sits on livestream enticing an audience with her tits out into buying time and content.

But hey, I mean at least our clients are adults.

Further reading & watching:

Recess Is Good For Kids. Why Don’t More States Require It?

Several years ago, a team of sociologists flew from California to an East Coast school to observe the kindergarteners’ recess for their research. The team waite…

Medical Minute: Children Spend 35% Less Time Playing Outside Than Their Parents Did

Kids today spend 35% less time outdoors than their parents. Experts say early exposure to nature boosts happiness, focus, and creativity.

'Anti-play culture' limits children's' time outside, report finds

Reading University chancellor Paul Lindley said "no ball games" signs were indicative of the problem.

YouTube loses advertisers over “wormhole into pedophilia ring”

Epic Games and Disney pull ads over pedophiles’ comments on videos of children.

Dr. Toon: When Reagan Met Optimus Prime

In the world of animated children's programming, free enterprise and Federal regulations were not always the best of friends. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was often called upon to

Kidscorp | Children's advertising: what are the rules, laws and controversies?

Explore the main rules, laws, and controversies in children’s advertising, and how brands can stay compliant while reaching young audiences.