Carlton* was a bit drunk and stoned the first time he clicked on an ad to watch a “beautiful Eastern European” cam girl. He had shared a Brazzers account with a few of his friends for a year and was ready to make the leap to something he felt was “more intimidating and taboo.” That night he wouldn’t use any money, but over the next year, Carlton would graduate from cam girl virgin to cam girl pro, tuning in “pretty much any time [he] wanted to jerk off.”
What gets you drawn in is the control and interactivity. With porn, you’re trapped in a pre-recorded experience; thus, there’s no room for manipulating that experience. With camming, you get control — depending on the context and site. Some websites are more focused on private shows, where a girl sitting in a bikini or panties is waiting for someone to take them to a private chat where they’ll get naked and indulge any of the patron’s many fantasies. On the flip side, there are sites where girls spend more time in public chat, soliciting requests from a room full of guys.
Finding a girl who’s offering what you’re looking for is infinitely easier than trying to convince a girl to do what you want her to do. Girls have topics. For example, they’ll ask for $500 before they get naked. Once that amount has been reached, they’ll set a new topic and its respective price. You can always ask a girl what her cost would be for a particular act, but if she hasn’t specifically offered it, your request will likely carry an exponentially steeper value.
The fact that you can have your fantasy fulfilled to the utmost specificity without the burden of personal interaction afterward is liberating. You simply exit the screen and you’re quickly absolved of any of the shame for being compelled by a particular kink in the first place.
Conceptually it interests me because it walks that fine line in a 21st century way in which technology has brought forth this sort of sexual revolution—as well as a certain level of intimacy that isn’t better but that’s definitely different.
In most cases, however, unless you take a girl to a private show, you don’t get control. In my experience, on a site like Camsoda or Chaturbate, where the options vary in terms of individual girls, there tends to be less of a communal sense. Unlike, say, MyFreeCams, where there’s a greater sense of community. At MyFreeCams, there were times when three guys would recognize each other, and the models would recognize their patrons. It feels more like a chat room than just a cam girl site where you’re just there to jerk off.
I never watched couples — the intimacy of a one-on-one is more compelling for me — but in my experience, couples are less likely to go private because they just have sex in a public chat and get tips from that.
In a popular room, where as many as 10 different guys at any given time will tip to have the model watch their cam as they masturbate or interact directly, it’s likely that the model isn’t watching any of them. Instead, she’s tending to the other 800 to 1,000 members watching the room. These are guys who are watching her cam but have no control over which acts she does.
Ask, “How many fingers am I holding up?” It’s a form of validation that you’re being observed. If you get LOLs or smiley faces in response, she has no idea who you are.
I, too, like to be watched. I want to know that my dick is considered big among all the guys in the room — there’s nothing more dominant as a man than that. Especially in the cam setting. When a girl who theoretically spends every day looking at other dudes’ dicks, it’s empowering to be told that yours is bigger or better.
I can’t be sure it’s the truth, but whenever a cam girl compares my dick to another guy’s dick who she’s also watching, she’ll often say to the other guy, “Don’t worry, sweetie, yours is nice too.”
On a site like MyFreeCams, you get models who garner a following of specific individuals. Guys who will support the same girls over the course of months, if not years. That means actively visiting her room and tipping thousands of dollars a year. Personally, I prefer switching it up. I don’t like to watch the same girl more than once because cultivating some sort of virtual “relationship” feels too intimate to me.
Watching a cam girl gives you a certain level of autonomy within anonymity. Once a girl recognizes you in a public chat and treats you differently than her other customers, it would take on the characteristics of a real relationship. I never wanted that.
That said, it’s very flattering when you’re greeted with warmth and given special attention in a room of 800 people. I did like that about the one cam girl I cammed with two or three times over a few months.
I didn’t see how using cam girls could be conceived as cheating until I was caught by my girlfriend, who saw my credit card statement and wondered what intermittent charges from $50 to $100 were doing relatively consistently on my statement.
Until then, it had just fallen under the guise of porn. The fact that there happened to be a real person on the other side of the the cam interacting with me was veiled by years of being desensitized through watching porn. It wasn’t until I was forced to look at my usage — once or twice a week every week for a year — that I realized how it could directly inhibit the intimacy of a real relationship.
Initially, my girlfriend was mortified. Then she was sad, disappointed and hurt. A lot of the issues came from her feeling like I wasn’t sexually fulfilled by our relationship. It was a breach in our intimacy.
When I was faced with the ultimatum — you need to stop or you’re going to stop being in a relationship with me — it was absolutely a no-brainer to stop.
When one is in a real-life relationship, the act of paying for a sexual act to be performed is undoubtedly cheap.
Ultimately, it had nothing to with the girls; it had everything to do with me. If my girlfriend was into camming or having a dude masturbate for her, it would be weird, but I think I’d understand — after all, for me, feeling that you can sexually satisfy a stranger is a fetish and a validation in and of itself.
Nor am I the exception. I feel like I’m part of a growing minority of men who aren’t unattractive, sexually inept or lacking in experience, but who, due to constant abuse of porn, seek a more personalized experience while masturbating.
The feeling of having a random stranger encourage you to ejaculate by reinforcing how big your dick is to them is what I think about most. It’s the praise within a pseudo reality of intimate sexual interactions in a totally non-intimate way that’s the turn-on. Because let’s face it: All you’re really participating in is a bunch of ones and zeros.
Andrew Fiouzi
Andrew Fiouzi is a staff writer at MEL.
