I read in The Daily Beast that Jenna Jameson broke her solemn vow made on the eyes of her young children that she would never again engage in pornography for profit: she would never again spread her legs for a buck.
Sadly (really) Jenna has fallen on hard times and has returned to titilate and frustrate real men by showing off her body and her skills as an internet cam model, trading film and video tape for a much more immediate internet experience. Is it pornography? That’s debatable but if it in fact puts food on the table for her children and keeps the purchase of shocking-pink dildos to a minimum, then who am I to question her?
After reading this article I visited several of these cam sites (Google is surprising accommodating when you seek out internet smut and degradation) and with very little evidence, I think I see several “lessons” in this not-really-pornography. First, the different sites appear to have different rules: in one there are nothing but women, sometimes in pairs or groups, and men are not allowed. These cam models vary from friendly chatting with all their clothes intact to laying back on the bed and poking themselves with a power drill attachment for hours on end.
Other sites allow for an even greater variety of sexual-peccadillos: a woman, more than one woman, a man, groups of men, groups of men and women, trans-whatevers, mixed men-women-trans, seeking men, seeking women, seeking profit, chasing loneliness, having a party, showing off their naughty bits, fat, skinny, tattooed, pierced, in the bath, on the veranda, neon lights, wheels of fortune, games of chance, raffles, semi-naked pitch-women, etc. For some models I’m sure it is a safe way to show off those expensive attributes that aren’t normally exposed in public: think of it, a model can tell a gent to fuck her and not have to worry that he might actually do it!
For those of you curious about the various shapes, sizes, and sensual accomplishments of thousands of women around the world, you might find ogling cam girls an educational experience. And as a Public Service Announcement I will also remind you that Playboy publishes some interesting articles you might try reading. And here’s an important point that needs to be emphasized: these webcam sites consolidate models from all around the world: Europe, Eastern Europe, China, Japan, America, South America, counties you have heard of and countries you didn’t even know existed. Thus my first observation about cam models:
Naked women are the same all over the world: as far as semi-naked-ersatz-pornography is concerned, it’s a open and free global economy.
There is, however, a small fact that in some ways applauds the free-enterprise system and in others begins to smack of what might be viewed as a slave-trade in women and sex: although many models operate a cam room out of their own homes, in some areas there appear to be large studios set up to broadcast nude models who presumably don’t have the funds to set-up their own studio. I don’t know the economics of these cam-room warehouses but I assume the models pay an amount for the use of the room (and if you watch long enough you begin to realize that the same room is used by several models during the day and the night). Now add to this the percentage that a cam model pays to the online site and you can see that, even if you accept the need of some women to make money anyway they can (especially in under-developed countries), there is plenty of room for businessmen of questionable character to make big, big profits of a woman’s body.
The article in The Daily Beast suggests (questioningly) that top cam models can make as much as $50,000 a month. I assume this is what they net and even if we discount the income taxes on this money, it’s a very good living. But let’s not forget that more than half of the gross a webcam models earns goes into the pockets of these corporate clearing houses of smut. I doubt if there is any serious oversight of this industry and it doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that bad things can happen and the powerless cam models can’t do much about it. My second observation is, therefore:
It looks like it’s all fun but looks are deceiving and where greed is a possibility, someone is going to get hurt.
The horny guys watching these cam models purchase tokens with their credit cards and then show their appreciation to the models my tipping them a few tokens. Depending on the website, these token can cost ten cents or a dollar or some number of rubles, renminbi, or pesos, depending on the origin of the web-voyuer. As a typical example of the cost, the voyeur might go into a private session with a cam model for 60 to 120 tokens a minute and watch the selected model squirm and moan for 20 or thirty minutes of naked exposure while the gentleman consumer gets done what he wanted to get done (he then disappears from the model’s room, the website, the whole internet in some cases). At 60 tokens a minute for 20 minutes the gross is 1200 tokens or, using ten cent tokens, $120.00. The website takes half of this off the top and also any extra charges or fines and the model might expect to make $60 at most. Hey, sixty bucks for twenty minutes work isn’t bad. But what does the model earn for the next twenty minutes of moaning and thrusting and playing hide-the-dildo? Maybe nothing: so that makes it $60 for 40 minutes … it goes on. This my third observation:
Like all of life, cam girls are subject to the 99:1 rule: yes, a cam girl cam make $50K a month but there are hundreds if not thousands of cam girls that don’t clear lunch money.
There is, however, another observation that makes the previous observation less troublesome:
Some cam models are online to have fun, meet people, and show-off their bodies without any concern for profit.
So let’s try to stay happy-clappy.
Another source of knowledge that is freely dispensed by many cam models is the almost infinite variety of dildos and butt plugs: latex, silicone, plastic, chrome, glass, twisty, smooth, long, thick, glowing, vibrating, and even making corkscrew motions my Mixmaster would be jealous of. Several cam models even have realistic full-sized latex moldings of what is possibly their favorite dick-jocky’s rampant torso. This brought on my next observation:
Most naked cam models who lay spread-out in front of the camera could just as well be replaced by a latex model, and the corollary, most guys drooling over the cam model will not even be aware it is actually a model of the woman’s torso with all her naughty bits made immortal in questionably realistic pink latex.
I spent half of the last century trying to get a squeeze or a feel or even a gratuitous hand-job from a long line of women. Back when, you pretty much had to get married to get steady sex. Of course then the joke was on you because for some reason marriage puts a damper on sex, especially when there are kids involved. But nowadays you can find wilder sex on your iPhone than you ever imagined in your youth. Utopia, right?
Actually my last observation is an admission that I have seen it all and nowadays a nice dish of that cold lasagne is good enough to get me all hot and bothered; as Bill Maher said the other day in reference to online photos submitted by loving cat owners:
I have already seen a lot of cats and can’t imagine why you still want to show me yours.
A Celebration of Reading 