Girl on the Net

This week’s guest blogger is here to give you a peek behind the scenes into the life of a camgirl. I have loved camming (and particularly the details about how to market your own cam work) ever since I went to a talk by Chaturbate at Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit in the US, and later thanks to the exceptional movie Cam (and later the book Camgirl) by Isa Mazzei. Today, Catey is here to share her take on what it’s like to work as a camgirl: the pros, the cons, and most importantly the people.

Diary of a camgirl

Sex-work, they say, is easy money. Tabloids happily perpetuate this myth, running articles like, and I quote:

• ‘I was penniless… now I’m loaded thanks to camming!’
• ‘Digital Dosh: Webcam site pays me thousand a day to get naked online’
• ‘We make thousands of pounds selling our used socks and knickers to perverts online’

Having now worked as a ‘cam-girl’, I know this does a huge – no, monumental – disservice to cam models. The top-earning women are razor-sharp, dedicated business women who know how to build a brand. The extremely successful Ceara Lynch, femdom and ‘humiliatrix extraordinaire’, has talked about trying to start her own camming business. She hired the most beautiful women she could find and tried to get them to cater to the fetish market. It failed, she said, because it’s not about being beautiful, it’s about really understanding the fetish and knowing how to interact with the client.

The number of gorgeous, statuesque women with dead rooms (as in, no-one was watching their live-stream) truly shocked me. You need a slightly zany, resourceful, sociable personality that keeps people coming back. Some girls paint. Some sing and play guitar. Many hold raffles, do quizzes, play risqué games with members. The most popular women understand which audience they appeal to and capitalise on it, hard. Selling their own porn on-site as well as putting on shows.

Someone asked me how I felt before my first time streaming. Incredulous, is probably the most accurate word. Incredulous that I was going to do this. Weird. Exhilarated. I had no clear plan. The ‘members’ can see all the models who are online and if they hover a cursor over your thumb-nail, it shows a grainy preview- lagging slightly. It’s an odd thing. Tagging your own pictures with ‘red-head’, ‘small tits’, ‘nerdy’. Reducing yourself down to your body parts for punters to find you.

The cam-model can put up what the website likes to call ‘a whiteboard’. The members, however, call it what it is, a ‘tip menu’ – 66 tokens and I’ll flash my tits. 800 to strip completely. But people will also tip you to play a certain song on Youtube, blow a kiss, tie your hair up, a lot of seemingly innocuous stuff. If a guy particularly likes you he’ll take you ‘private’ where he pays per minute for your undivided attention. This is where the real money is. Sometimes he will just want a virtual ‘date’ of sorts, very PG. Other times he’ll have a very specific vision he wants you to fulfil. Every camming session is a fine balancing act. You’re trying to maintain the energy level in the room, keep members entertained whilst also lining up big spenders who might potentially take you ‘private’. Once in private, you draw out the strip-tease and give it your all in the hope they’ll be a repeat customer.

One of my most successful camming shifts was eating a Cornetto. Yup, really. I’d been searching for something more phallic, but this was all that was left. Turns out it doesn’t really matter how closely something resembles a penis: if you’re licking anything it’s innately hot. Immediately the tips flooded in. Lick it slowly. Show us your tongue. Moan. These kind of group shows acted as a preview for the more intimate stuff I would offer one-on-one. I ended up having great fun doing a food-play private, squirting whipped cream into my mouth, rubbing it over my tits… that descended into spit-play, drooling the white cum-type liquids all over myself. There was such a celebratory unbridled messiness to it that I loved.

Some of the more unusual requests I received included dumping green slime on my head, you know like on a 90s gameshow where you get gunged? Another guy wanted me to burp on command. A guy with a micropenis wanted me to laugh at him. Since I already knew that there’s a fetish for just about everything, I wasn’t surprised by any of these messages. What was astounding to me is that these guys followed me with their personal accounts, they told me their real names, they told me where they worked. And yes, it checked out, there’s their photo on the staff page. There they are with their wife and kids on Facebook. They had no fear. No shame. No stigma. It’s the women who carry all that.

Some cam-models try to obscure their identity, donning wigs and falsies. More often than not they assume an alter-ego, whether innocent girl next door or purring sex-kitten. I hadn’t fashioned a persona and I didn’t know what side of myself would come out. As it turned out, what came out… was me. A more high-octane, chatty version. But still me. My openness and my willingness to wax lyrical about my interests and hobbies hooked in my regulars. I was consciously offering a different level of intimacy, what they call ‘the girlfriend experience’.

I quickly established a group of regulars, about 20-30 men who had ‘bookmarked’ me so they got a notification whenever I went online. Contrary to headlines slamming members as ‘perverts’ and ‘creeps’, the ones in my room were polite and respectful. We would talk about Netflix, music, movies, travel and cooking. David, an older gentleman from South Africa, gave me a great lasagne recipe. It’s a safe space, for many the only place, where they can express their desires without shame. One of my regulars explained that he had no confidence with women, and he couldn’t bring himself to hire an escort, so this was a good compromise. Another had issues with premature ejaculation that caused him extreme embarrassment, to the point where he wouldn’t even pursue sexual relationships. Others are just looking for some company: men who worked from home offices and they’d log on daily, for hours at a time. They would leave me on in the background while they pottered away, muting me when they answer business calls. They wanted to watch me cleaning, cooking, gaming. Anything, just to hear a human voice. I didn’t feel judged by them. They clearly had a lot of admiration for the ‘models’ as they call them, most had been visiting the same website for years and were loyal to their ‘favourites’. That’s not to say there aren’t pushy men, as in all walks of life, that won’t take ‘no’ for an answer or try to ‘neg’ you into lowering your prices. But the majority are looking for some kind of relationship. Sure there will be guys who come for a quick wank, but let’s face it, they have a whole internet of porn to toss off to. They come to cam-girls for the human connection, or some semblance of it.