For six colorful months, I was an online stripper. A webcam model, if you will. To earn money, I was in my bedroom, visible, nearly naked, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
When the webcam came on, my profile showed up in the menu with hundreds of other available models. Men selected my name to enter “my room” for the opportunity to view me in my personal environment. From there, they could send messages. Ideally, members were supposed to tip if they liked what they saw. Sometimes, this meant I just talked while in lingerie; other times, I stripped or used sex toys. I considered myself a cyber stripper, and less often a cyber peepshow performer.
And like any questionable venture, you never forget your first time.
“Hey Baby,” wrote someone by the screen name BurdeningDesire.
“How are you?” I replied. “What do you like?”
He wasted no time getting to the point. “Do you do humiliations, Baby?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I wrote back. My knowledge of the sex industry was limited to catching boyfriends viewing porn.
“I’ll turn on my cam, and then I want you to point, laugh, and insult me about the size of my penis,” he wrote.
Even though I was the model, my viewers were always frantic for me to watch them. With few exceptions, a click to their cam icon resulted in a close-up grainy image of a cock getting worked over like a cylinder of dough in preparation for baking. I considered myself to be 85 percent heterosexual, yet the image of an erect penis, particularly one on cam, does nothing to stir my lady loins. Penises are like people from another distant planet: too similar to really tell apart. In addition, I hate the oozing that accompanies the aroused male genitalia. If ejaculate were rainbow-colored or flecked with sparkles, there might be something worthy to look at. To me, it looks like a runny nose.
My immediate suspicion was that he was joking. Perhaps his real turn-on was gullible camgirls.
“Really?” I wrote, as a stalling tactic while thinking how difficult it could possibly be. I could think of a couple boyfriends who had been worthy of such an exchange from my past, yet I refrained from doing so out of politeness. To me, the idea that this insult could be a turn-on was mind-blowing.
“Yes,” BurdeningDesire wrote. “Come on, please.”
—–
Around the time I decided to become a camgirl, I was working in real estate. Despite all the office hoopla, image-board scrapbooks, six-figure business plans and hitting up every neighbor, friend and relative for business, I was earning an income at the poverty level. To further exacerbate my financial situation, I had acquired a couple rentals during the boom years. Unable to unload either property or charge enough rent, I was always just a couple clogged pipes or an insolvent tenant away from serious financial problems.
I had fervently scanned Craigslist for jobs, applied for even the most basic office work, never receiving a phone call through it all. In addition, the few jobs even willing to list an hourly wage averaged 10 dollars per hour, no benefits, with a strict 40-hour week. I decided on the temporary gig of sorts, even if it meant stepping outside my comfort level.
—–
“Is it really that small?” I asked BurdeningDesire. I had imagined a slender, hairless hand gripping an oozing maggot when he asked initially.
Without waiting for an answer, I wrote, “For tips, I’ll do it.” And with that last message, BurdeningDesire evaporated from cyberspace. As I'd come to find out experiencing other interactions, men like him (i.e., cheapskates) had no intention of tipping. Exposing their fetish to a camgirl was enough to get them aroused and off.
He was the first of many visitors to my room who had an erotic fetish. I found later on that BurdeningDesire was apparently a “bottom,” where psychological humiliation incited sexual arousal, whereas I, as the abuser, would be the “top.” Through my time, I wondered if these individuals exposed their fetishes to the lovers in their life, or did they aim for a “normal” public persona and only expose their freaky side to us camgirls?
Although BurdeningDesire essentially stiffed me, more lucrative and equally educational days were forthcoming. An architect, homebound for months with mono, became one of my best tippers, giving me an additional $300 in Amazon gift cards. Another one of my outstanding tippers was a married man whose biggest turn-on was calling him on the phone and saying “I love you” repeatedly while he furiously whacked off. I received a marriage proposal from a wealthy (and unbalanced) engineer from Sydney, Australia. And there were the less extravagant but equally adoring men who paid $20 to receive a 0.99 cent Valentine’s Day card signed by me.
One of the more extravagant offers I received was an invitation from a Boston café owner to travel to Italy with him in the summer.
But it was important not to get distracted. My role was to get the cash to pay my bills in hopes the recession would eventually recede (it did), at which point I could go back to using my brains to garner my income rather than my boobs (I did).
My intention from the beginning was to tell no one, not even the most open-minded of friends. The website I worked for enabled camgirls to block a specific state or country. I blocked the actual state in which I lived and the states where I had family. One of my regulars later told me that it’s easy to get past these blocks, however, by using proxy sites such as www.hidemyass.com. I didn’t suspect that my parents would even know what an IP address was, let alone how to hide it to go on adult websites. Parental discovery was my biggest fear, but the longer I was online, the less I gave it much thought. And the more I focused to strategically peddle my nudity.
Although I’m no longer a camgirl, I don’t regret my foray into online stripping. The experience opened my mind and resolved my money crunch.
I’m grateful, however, that no paramour of mine has ever asked, “Do you know what humiliations are?”
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