Cam Girls
Yahoo Internet Life
June 2002
They're online and underage. And they'll trade you a peek if
you fulfill their Wish Lists
Like many 17-year-olds, Millie* has her own Web site, where
she keeps an online diary and scrapbook. There's an artistic photo of
ice-covered trees she shot after a snowstorm hit her Mississippi town in
February, there's a section dedicated to the band 'N Sync, and, of course,
there's the obligatory list of her favorite links (backstreetboys.com,
nellyfurtado.com, rickymartin.com). She says she built the site in part to show
off her Web- designing skills, which are pretty good. But that doesn't explain
why she gets about 6,000 hits a month. That popularity makes more sense once
you follow the link to her fan club on Yahoo!, where some 1,000 registered
members log on to gawk at the photographs she's taken of herself.
They don't just look, they also post their deep opinions:
"MILLIE IS A HONEY AND DAMN SEXXIE." "You're really pretty,
Millie. Ever thought about being a model?" "Has anyone ever told u u
kinda look like leelee sobieski?" Apparently someone has.
Most of Millie's gallery photos are tame by anyone's
standards. Unless you happen to stumble upon the shots in the folder labeled
"Sexy." You don't have to be a prude to notice that the images of
Millie with her pants hiked dangerously low, or the close-up of her thinly
clothed torso, are pretty dicey for a minor.
Why would a young girl with so much going for her want to
show off her body to the Net's swarming hordes? Because Millie is what's known
on the Net as a cam girl. That is, she's a young girl who, with the aid of a
Web cam, a computer, and a high-speed connection, beams her (often scantily
clad) image out to people (okay, men) around the Net. You can't exactly call it
soft porn, but you can't exactly call it something else, either. On the one
hand, she doesn't collect money from her "friends." On the other, the
best way to become her friend is to buy her something she wants.
And what does a high school junior in Mississippi want? No
need to guess -- it's all there in
black and white on her Wish List, the fantasy shopping tool popularized by
Amazon and other online retailers. Think of it as a wedding registry, but
without the wedding. If you're kind enough to send her a little something -- be
it the lip balm, the CD-burning software, or the novel about a stripper who
becomes a junkie -- she might publish a photo of herself posing with the swag
along with a personal thank-you note. In one picture, Millie is holding up a
belly dancing video a fan bought her. Across the photo she scribbles, "Now
I can be Shakira and Britney Spears. Haha."
Ahhh, Shakira and Britney. And Christina. And let's not
forget Madonna, the grande dame of the liberation- through-sexy-underwear
movement. Are these familiar targets of the Christian Right's ire also to blame
for this latest corruption of our innocent young? Yes and no, at least
according to Millie: "I do think pop culture has an effect on teens,"
she says in a telephone interview. "Britney and Christina are doing their
own thing, and I think that's great. If they feel the need to show off their
body to get somewhere, then so be it."
"Then so be it" may very well be the mantra of
Millie and the growing legion of cam girls. Eighteen-year-old Leslie has a link
to a $350 camera and writes on her site: "Who's going to be my forever
sweetheart and get this for me? I need it a lot, I'll even snail mail you
piccies or something lame like that. Come on. PLEASE?!" So far, nobody has
taken Leslie up on her offer, but she did get a copy of the Lords of Acid album
Farstuckers from a fan. "I love it, thank you so much," she posts.
"You made my day!" She was even happier when another fan sent her a
live pet tarantula in the mail.
Who are these "fans," these patrons of online teen
sirens? They're men who are attracted by the idea that the girls are the real
deal -- that they can't fake who they are. The old adage "On the Internet,
nobody knows you're a dog" is just dead wrong here. "The Web cam
makes me more realistic, I think," says Pamela, a 17-year-old cam girl.
"It's obvious I'm not some crazy 50-year-old guy getting his jollies off
pretending to be a cute little girl."
For obvious reasons, few men are inclined to chat with a
reporter about their gifts to teen girls. So I decided to fulfill a few Wish
List requests myself. Posing as a fan, I bought a My Little Pony T-shirt for
one cam girl and a video of Big for another. Neither girl replied to my e-mails
asking if they liked their gifts, but the Big recipient did post a picture of
herself holding up the video. In sum: a nice clean transaction.
Now meet Natalie. Or better yet, don't meet her, just buy
her an RCA CC9370 AutoShot compact digital camcorder ($450). If you do, this
14-year-old girl from a small Kentucky town "will love you forever."
Or so she says on the link from her site to her Amazon Wish List. (Hint: She'd
probably settle for the book Girl Director: A How-To Guide for the First-Time,
Flat-Broke Film & Video Maker.) But do it quick, because Natalie hasn't
been having the best luck of late, judging from the nasty messages posted to
her guestbook: "Did I mention that you're the 2nd ugliest girl I've seen
in my life?" and "Your site SUCKS ass because of your f---ing brutal
WISH list, you ain't even good-looking and yet you think people are just going
to ship you that stuff?" Natalie isn't shy about how she feels about these
tirades: "WAAAAAAAAAHHH people don't like me because I'm 14 and I don't
know anything and I'm ugly and I have a huge Wish List and other people are
stupid and I'm honest about wanting to whore my site!!! I'm a whore and you've
hurt my feelings!"
The brutal truth of the attention economy is that it's one
in which only the most beautiful (or outrageous) cam girls can hope to win fans
and fill their virtual shopping carts. If they want to have any chance on the
cam portals (Web sites that display dozens of live cam girl images
simultaneously, ranked by popularity), cam girls need to put on their very best
show. One of the most successful cam portals, Cam Whores, is so swamped with
applicants that the site's owner, Jonathan Biderman, added a "Cam Whores
Wannabe" portal. The requirements for being a wannabe are less stringent.
To be considered, all you need to do is "weigh under 150 pounds and have
breasts that are at least a B cup." To date, Biderman's site has 78 Cam
Whores and 128 wannabe whores. Access costs $11.95 a month; Biderman would not
confirm how many paying customers the site attracts.
Are girls really so desperate for a bar of Burt's Bees
peppermint soap that they're willing to be pegged Cam Whores? The truth is most
cam girls are as interested in garnering attention as they are in gathering
Wish List merchandise or PayPal "donations." Leslie says having fans
"makes me feel good about myself. Whether it's someone who says how pretty
they think I am, or even just someone who says, 'You're cool, Leslie,' it means
a lot to me."
Whether these young ladies are online whores, teen hustlers,
or savvy young businesswomen remains to be seen. What's clear is that Natalie,
Leslie, Millie, and thousands of other teenage girls are using technology to
take girl power to a wild and scary new place. They are arguably the spawn of a
Web designer and programmer named Jennifer Ringley, who launched JenniCam in
1996 and remains one of the few purely online celebrities. Ringley's site,
which is still running (though she's reached the positively geriatric age of
25), provides paying viewers an open window into nearly every aspect of her
personal life. If Ringley's technology- fortified exhibitionism was regarded as
an aberration when she launched, she's now considered a pioneer who staked the
original claim on the now-teeming cam girl nation. Ringley's narcissism was
accidentally transformed into a combination of performance art and small
business. Today's cam girls are much more deliberate, not to mention up-front,
about what they're after. "Who wouldn't want people you don't even know
being all nice and treating you like you are something special?" Millie
asks. "I remember one girl telling me she looks up to me as a role model.
That blew me away."
The cam girls phenomenon could not have happened before this
moment in history. It's the result of a combination of specific ingredients:
inexpensive yet powerful technology to send and receive video images over the
Net; a culture that places a higher value on fame than on the skills and talent
that make people famous; teen celebrities who happily flaunt their bodies on
the covers of national magazines; and the timeless rite of passage that is a
teenage girl's search for identity and blossoming awareness of her own sexual
power.
It's a potent combination. It's a combination with
implications that the girls themselves -- and we as a society -- almost certainly do not understand
fully. But if the cam girl phenomenon sounds uniquely American, think again.
Like so many of our most popular trends, this trail was blazed in the youth
culture of Japan.
There's nothing virtual, or even new, about the teen-girl
sex trade in Japan, where a practice known as enjo kosai (roughly translated,
"compensated dating") is growing every year -- and nobody knows how
to curb it. Tens of thousands of high school girls are involved in enjo kosai.
In exchange for escorting wealthy, middle-aged patrons to cafes and restaurants
(and often providing them with sexual favors), the girls receive financial compensation,
which they use to buy consumer electronics, cosmetics, and clothes.
Many enjo kosai girls come from middle-class families and,
aside from dating salarymen for money, they're not particularly rebellious or
delinquent. Nor do they show remorse for what they do. When a Japanese
newspaper surveyed junior high school students, 17 percent said enjo kosai was
perfectly acceptable behavior; another 13 percent said they wouldn't be
reluctant to participate in an enjo kosai relationship.
Why do they do it? Just as in America, Japanese teens are
the targets of massive advertising campaigns that implore them to wear
expensive clothes and buy expensive consumer goods. Enjo kosai, like a cam
girl's Wish List, is a way to supplement the insufficient allowance a girl's
financially strapped parents give her. Enjo kosai girls, like cam girls, do
what they do for two simple reasons: 1) They don't see anything wrong with it;
2) Because they can.
In the U.S., the cam girls are playing a similar game. To
them, their situation seems ideal: They get convenient, digitally delivered
affirmations of their desirability without the strings of a real relationship.
Modern technology allows these girls to make their virtual presence available
to anyone while remaining physically inaccessible. Transformed into a flurry of
electrons, cam girls feel safe in their bedrooms as they flirt at a little
camera with a winking LED, then check their e-mail and instant-message windows
to gauge the power of their pulchritude. It's like having a magic mirror on
your desk, but instead of an omniscient spirit keeping score, it's a mob of
anonymous voyeurs peering through the other side of the looking glass.
And the mob is where the problem lies. Where an enjo kosai
girl can check out her partner and will likely date only a respectable,
well-heeled businessman, the cam girls are working the yammering crowd. When
the barrier to entry is as low as the price of a CD, the clientele changes
drastically. And, as any conventional stripper can tell you, when you get that
many horny guys together, it's a safe bet that one of them is not going to
understand the rules. To avoid having stalkers show up on their driveway, the
girls' only hope lies in diligently hiding their identity. This is a skill many
have yet to learn.
Some cam girls are very conscientious about keeping their
whereabouts a secret (Amazon and other retailers don't reveal Wish List owners'
addresses), but most simply aren't savvy enough. "I know there are psychos
out there, but as long as I know what I'm doing and I'm careful, everything
should be okay," says Millie. When told that her home address and phone
number could be gleaned by anyone who looked up her domain-name registration
record, she was stunned and asked how to delete that information. (Answer: Fill
out an online form and wait a few weeks.)
This naÌøvetÌ© would not surprise Sharon Lamb, author of The
Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do -- Sex Play, Aggression, and
Their Guilt. Lamb, a psychologist and psychology professor at St. Michael's
College in Colchester, Vermont, says that a large part of the potential danger
of being a cam girl stems from not really knowing what's going on. This is
because teenage girls are just leaving a world in which they were able to play
out all sorts of fantasies in the protected space of make-believe --
"playing fantasy games with friends." The Internet, Lamb says,
"feels to them like a 'play' space. They feel it's safe because, in their
minds, it's just playing around. They can be 'bad' while still being 'good.'
That doesn't mean it can't get real
-- even scary."
According to Dr. Lynn Ponton, a professor of psychiatry at
the University of California, San Francisco, showing off is not the problem.
The author of The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do and The
Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and
Girls, Ponton has been studying the cam girl phenomenon closely. "It's
okay for girls to have Web sites and be creative, and to express themselves,"
she says. "As girls develop physically, they want to show off the changes
in their bodies in a positive way and get attention, and get good feedback.
They're saying, 'I'm proud of my body and I want others to admire it.' That's a
healthy aspect." But Ponton also points out that a Web cam and Wish List
could be a signal that a teenage girl isn't getting enough positive strokes at
home, and that is prompting her to turn to cam fans for attention.
"Culturally we're not finding ways to support
girls," Ponton continues. "They don't feel good about themselves, and
it results in these types of activities." To make matters worse,
advertisers use pictures of teen girls with lean bodies to sell products. The
idea that showing skin equals merchandise encourages cam girls to engage in a
kind of virtual sex trade. "It's no longer, 'Hey, look at my body and
click on my site and tell me I look beautiful.' They're now asking for gifts
and cash. It's unhealthy risk-taking and not an area we want them to branch into."
So are the cam and enjo kosai girls manipulators of men? Are
they victims of a youth- and sex-obsessed society, or simply time-honored
products of it? The answer isn't so simple. Whenever sex is exchanged for
compensation, identifying who is the victim and who is the victimizer is a
matter of perspective. That's a harder argument to make, of course, when one of
the parties is underage.
As girls begin to develop into adolescents, says Lamb, they
pick up on cultural signals urging them to adopt a male understanding of what
it means to be sexual -- "and to men being sexual is being sexy. Cam girls
are playing at being sexy to men." Lamb explains that in the culture we
live in, only men can confer a "grown-up" status: "Only men can
tell a girl that she's sexy and have her believe it." Why else, Lamb
suggests, would Viagra spokesman Bob Dole be shown leering in approval at
Britney Spears in a Pepsi commercial?
Even though most underage cam girl sites are not overtly
sexual (cam girls over the age of 18 post quite explicit photographs of
themselves, as a quick stop at Cam Whores will prove), the subtext on the sites
is often sexually charged. They won't post nude pictures of themselves, but
they'll gladly put porn ads on their sites and collect the referral revenues.
They also ask their fans to vote for them in popularity contests run by
porn-laden cam portals. They'll post lewd pictures sent in by fans. They'll ask
for sexually themed gifts on their Wish Lists, such as 14-year- old Natalie's
request for a copy of the Lily Burana book Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell
Journey Across America.
Natalie may be too young to know who Ms. Burana is, but Lily
knows Natalie, or someone a lot like her. Burana edited Future Sex, a seminal
magazine of the early '90s that documented the collision of sex and technology.
She also worked for several years as a stripper. These two experiences make her
possibly the most qualified person on earth to speak to this issue.
"Everyone vies for the attention of teenage girls -- from men to marketing
departments to entertainment industry tastemakers," says Burana.
"They're choosy, they're sophisticated, and they're cultural arbiters in
their own way, and everyone knows it. No one can sell a teenage girl something
she doesn't want, so the fact that a lot of these girls want my book is to me
the highest praise."
Cam girls have no illusions about the sex factor of their
sites, but most of them also know to draw the line when it comes to posting
pictures of themselves. "I think some skin can be tasteful, but nudity is
illegal and wrong," says Pamela, whose site bears the subtitle "suck
itÉI'm coming!" I asked Pamela if she would mind if I talked to her
parents about their feelings about all this. "My parents don't know about
my site," she replies, "so I can't help you with that."
In fact, I asked the same question of every cam girl I
interviewed. Not a single one would allow me to speak to her parents.
"Girls who are struggling to gain their independence and chafing against
what they perceive as parental intrusion is something I see on my site all the
time," explains Esther Drill, editor of gURL.com, a culture and game site
for teen girls. "There's a whole issue about privacy. But I think they
probably understand that there's something wrong with what they're doing with
this Web cam stuff. So there's more of a reason to keep it hidden."
Psychologists who specialize in adolescents say it's normal
for girls to want to hide certain behavior from their parents. But that doesn't
let parents off the hook. "They'd better start to understand what's going
on in their daughter's room," says Dr. Gilda Carle, the former host of the
Love Doc show on MTV.com and the author of the teen-girl book He's Not All
That! How to Attract the Good Guys. Ponton agrees: "Parents need to be in
touch with their kids and understand that this is an aspect of their child's
sexuality. They need to be sharing opinions and having conversations with their
kids." The cam girl phenomenon, she says, "verifies that we are not
having those conversations."
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Mark Frauenfelder, a Y-Life contributor, is the author of the forthcoming Mad Professor, a science experiment book.