I started camming on Chaturbate because my boyfriend wouldn’t have sex with me. It was COVID; we were stuck together. We lived in the same apartment but with separate bedrooms and two other roommates. He was addicted to porn, and I don’t simply mean that he used it excessively. I mean it was his true and only love. He would often masturbate to porn in his room, then he’d come and tell me he had done it, as a sort of insult. He said he preferred porn over having sex with a real person, because with a real person, he had to keep some kind of emotional circuit open. He also had sex with men from Grindr a couple times a month.
Please don’t ask me why I tolerated this; it was COVID, I was trapped, and honestly I’d kind of brainwashed myself with “sex positivity” for a long time, so by the time I realized his behavior was actually a problem rather than just a set of kinks, I was already very much in love.
Anyway, he rarely wanted to have sex with me. I knew he’d been a patron of camgirls a few times in the past, so one day I asked him, “What if I were a camgirl on the Internet? Then would you want to have sex with me?”
Instead of saying yes or no, he just said, “Hah, that’s funny.”
So the next day, while he was out of the apartment, I made an account on Chaturbate and cammed. I got a lot of people in my room, over 1000 at one point. It was more fun than I expected.
That night, I told him I’d done it. His initial reaction was pretty neutral; then, a couple hours later, he had sex with me for the first time in weeks.
The next day I learned that when you make a new account on Chaturbate, you get a “New” tag on your account for seven days only, which boosts you in the algorithm so you can start off strong. Since I’d enjoyed the camming more than I expected, I figured I might as well make a good go of it. I’d dropped out of grad school in Boston and was waiting for COVID to resolve so I could move back to New York. I had nothing to do, and camming was at least a way to not be alone in the evenings.
So I started going hard on camming. I did a 12-hour day, then an 8-hour day, then another 12-hour day. I joined a camgirl Discord, read Aella’s post on the topic, set up my tip menu, generated as many show ideas as I could.
When you’re a new girl on Chaturbate, lots of guys try to scam you in various ways. Sometimes they want to get something out of you for free, other times they just boss you around. Usually their advice is trash. But there was this one guy, “robbbyboy,” who was some kind of genius. He would DM me telling me exactly what to do on cam. He’d have me make micro-adjustments to my posture and clothing position. “Lift up your butt a little higher. Good. Now bend your legs so we can see the bottom of your feet. Get a little closer to the camera. Pull your shirt down.”
Whatever robbbyboy told me to do, it would work. Instantly. The viewer count in my room would go up, and people would start sending tips. I truly don’t know what I would’ve done without him. I made about $1200 in my first week and I credit robbbyboy with most of my success. If I knew who he was, I’d buy him dinner.
I didn’t learn terribly much about male sexuality from Chaturbate, but two things did stand out to me.
First, I realized very quickly that men do not like lingerie. I started off wearing corsets and lace, my preferred style, but no one engaged with me when I looked like that. What they really loved was an outfit that looked like I was just lounging in my bedroom, but suggestively. One of my most popular articles of clothing was a white souvenir T-shirt from Berlin that I’d cut off at just the length so it hung off my breasts like a shelf and showed a hint of underboob.
I don’t know if this is a prevalent male preference; it might be endemic to Chaturbate, since guys on there are choosing Chaturbate over other kinds of pornography because they want some kind of personal connection. So it makes sense that the “lounging in my bedroom” aesthetic would appeal to them. It makes you relatable, someone they can talk to.
The second thing I noticed right away was that neoteny was very popular. Not even just physical cuteness, but visual signals of childlike-ness. I am not neotenous at all, so I didn’t lean into this vibe. But camgirls who looked very young and had stuffed animals and pink walls often did extremely well. Sometimes Chaturbate would kick girls who were actually verified to be 18+ off the platform if they merely looked too young; girls would complain about this in the camgirl Discord a lot as if it was a huge injustice, but from Chaturbate’s perspective I actually think it’s the right policy. Something feels a little off about explicitly banning underage camgirls from your site but then allowing pedophilic users to basically get the pedophile experience anyway. It’s not like they checked your ID. And when you deliberately stuff your cam room with teddy bears and rainbows, I mean, come on. What are you expecting?
So once I’d been camming hard for about four or five days, doing research on top of working long hours, my boyfriend came into my room one day.
“Thessaly,” he said, “you are not okay. You are manic. You are obsessed. And Henry”—here he gestured at my beloved cat, who is always by my side—“is very upset, because you are not paying attention to him.”
I was floored. He could not seriously be saying this with no self-awareness. But he was.
I tried to defend myself—the New tag, trying to take this seriously, it’ll only be like this for a week, isn’t it nice that I’m feeling enthusiastic about something?—but everything I said only made him more upset. Eventually I mentioned that I was excited about making money off of this. That was when he completely lost it.
“I thought you were doing this for your own erotic exploration, not to make money!” He was extremely distressed, furious. I could tell his body wanted to hit me.
I had no idea why that comment, of all things, had upset him so much. But once he left the room and I had some time to think, it was obvious: he had patronized camgirls (and camguys) himself. He was a customer. Of course he was invested in believing that camgirls are just there for fun, that they’re genuinely turned on by his requests, that the money is incidental. If that weren’t true, then what would that make him? Just a mark.
Reading the camgirl Discord would’ve wrecked him.
Anyway, we broke up pretty soon after that and he moved out. I kept camming for another six months. I may write more about it at some point; I’ll have to dig through my memory banks to retrieve the details.