Former Cam Girl's Testimony

I started working on the cams shortly after the first time I caught my dude using porn. He'd gone to extraordinary lengths to hiding it from me (even cutting off my call to the TV company to dispute the nameless charge on my bill) but wrote off his secrecy as knowing I'd overreact. I was crazy. My problem, underneath it all, was jealousy. Truth be told, I didn't know WHAT my problem was. The feeling of betrayal was too intense to dissect exactly where the betrayal was. My friends and family laughed, said it was a dude thing and I needed to loosen up. But still, what I now know to be my inner feminist raged on and I was furious.

I went to Google, sure I couldn't be the only person alive to feel the way that I did. All I could find was religious articles promoting abstinence and, as an atheist, I couldn't relate to much of what I was reading, and ultimately it compounded my belief that I was wrong. Fast forward a couple of months and I was watching "Loose Women" on TV (for the uninitiated, it's a talk show featuring women who discuss current topics) and they were discussing the rise to popularity of "Diary of a call girl". They had a guest feminist who was using words like "empowerment" and unfamiliar concepts such as "dismantling patriarchy". I took to Google again. Blog after blog after blog, website, podcast, YouTube channel, all endorsing and supporting sex workers in their "choice" to empower themselves through their work. And thus began my assimilation of liberal, choice-based feminism.

Initially, cam girls earn quite good cash. At least, for a girl as broke as I was, it was a LOT. I started out with very clear ideas about what I would and would not be prepared to do. I rigidly adhered to those guidelines. They were my commandments of empowerment and to veer from them would be to compromise on who I was and what I stood for.

As I browsed through the profiles of the other girls, I made a list of things I saw that I would never do. Rape fantasies (as a survivor of rape and sexual assault, this was non-negotiable to me), daddy-daughter narratives. The usual.

The thing about becoming a cam girl is that, initially, you're a novelty. Fresh meat. That's why the cash rolls in, but it doesn't last. Soon enough, that list of commandments becomes less important, because you need to make the cash you were making to begin with.

And there's another aspect that is often less talked about, and took me a while to articulate well, but I'll try. Negging is commonplace in camming, and it has a LOT more power in that setting because these people have access much more sensitive and intimate information.

Once you've been told a hundred times that you're not pretty enough for your premium, suddenly your self-worth is inextricably tied to making that same amount of money that you made to begin with.

So, I started out not showing my face. I'd be negged heavily to manipulate me into showing more. "Your premium is too high for such shitty looking tits. Show me your face to make up for cheating me out of money or I'll report you for misconduct and you'll be banned from the site." So I showed my face. My face was recorded. Stills were taken from the footage. "You'll be my rape victim or I'll make sure EVERYONE sees your face. Slut."

People think money makes the world go round, but in the porn world, manipulation is the currency of choice. It's then that your standards for yourself disappear altogether.

You become completely reliant on the validation of abusive men to retain even a small semblance of self-esteem. The money isn't important anymore. It's still as necessary as it was when you got into this deal, but it's not what motivates you to get in front of that camera.

I was extorted into providing free shows for those who still had dirt on me. Manipulated into providing freebies for guys who harassed me and wore me down until I could fight back no more.

There simply wasn't a "block user" button on the site I used, and contacting the site owners to resolve harassment was fruitless in every instance. They didn't care, we were financing their lives whether they helped us or not.

I lived with constant vaginal discomfort. Swelling. Thrush. Burning, itching, soreness. A few of the girls taught me a trick to make it look like I was using a vibrator when I wasn't, but the camera angle had to be perfectly aligned or you'd give the game away.

"Fuck yourself with a stiletto or I'll tell everyone you're a fraud." "What else do you have in the house to stick in your pussy? Show me." The pain was excruciating, and still I did it.

I try to understand why, but you can't apply rationality to something that is so fundamentally surreal. It doesn't translate. I don't recognize who I was, or how I came to be manipulated so heavily during that time.

I was asked to pretend to be his sister whilst he got off on the concept of raping me. Asked to trample live animals and show him the soles of my bloodied feet for him to masturbate over. Asked to cover myself from head to toe in paint. Asked to pretend I was breastfeeding him. Asked to call him daddy. Asked to beg him to stop. Asked to suffocate myself. Asked to piss on myself. Asked to drink my own piss. Asked to cover myself in menstrual blood. Asked to dangle my used tampon in front of the camera. Asked to defecate on myself. Asked to insert enormous objects inside of myself. Asked to stretch my vagina until I couldn't bear the pain any longer.

Some of these requests I honored, some I did not.

When I didn't, I lived in fear that my face would be released. I'd be outed without consent. I had panic attacks and wanted to quit but if course there were threats tied to leaving the site, too. I ran away to quit, in the end. To lick my wounds in safety and begin to cope with what I now know to be PTSD. It's been seven years and the flashbacks are so vivid it could have been yesterday.

And the libfems? Well, they call me SWERF and tell me not to kink shame. I live in a world where feminists protect punters before they protect other women. ~*~ Side-note from Empress Cynthia: Punter = Consumer who views porn or goes to strip clubs regularly