In 1996, Jennifer Ringley installed a webcam in the corner of her dorm room and opened a website called Jennicam, where denizens of the early internet would tune in to watch an ordinary 19-year-old study, sleep, eat, talk to friends, and yes, masturbate and have sex. It was a working prototype of the salaciousness and social experimentation that cyberspace could offer; Ringley had turned herself into an adult performer by hooking up in her own bed on her regular schedule.
Cut to 2019, and “voyeuring” is a fringe, but fast-growing sector of the sex industry. So while the independent projects of enterprising sophomores are a thing of the past, there are now many companies that manage a whole network of young men and women who’ve outfitted an apartment with cameras set to stream nonstop, 24/7, giving a global audience a taste of their everyday lives. Sometimes that means a quiet dinner in front of the TV, sometimes that means a quiet blowjob in front of the TV. And the business model is extraordinarily shrewd: On Voyeur-House.tv, for instance, a customer gets access to the living rooms and kitchens for free, but the bedroom or the bathroom? You’re going to need to pay $40 a month.
It’s a great deal for anyone in the adult industry who doesn’t want to service customers. Just like Ringley, the men and women on camera aren’t doing anything they wouldn’t be doing in the privacy of their own home. But by simply laughing, fucking and existing, they’ve become sex workers — at least that’s how I was introduced to “Adrian,” who’s in his mid-20s, and voyeurs with his partner for Voyeur-House.tv. The couple is from Romania, and as you’ll read below, they’ve been involved in the voyeur scene for about 18 months.
Adrian was willing to jump on a Skype call with me to talk more about his experience as a voyeur performer, the particulars of making sure an apartment is capable of hosting live cameras and the omnipotence of the porn business in Romania.
I found him to be unusually candid, but when you live a life constantly on camera, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
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We started voyeuring about a year and a half ago. I got interested in the business after growing up watching reality TV. I was 15, and fascinated about having my life documented in a live broadcast. You had this big house and all these young people. But our first experience wasn’t with our current website, Voyeur-House.tv. No, our first time was with a Romanian site, and it wasn’t very positive. Not everyone in this business is interested in having a good relationship with the people on camera. The other company kept all the information away from us. We didn’t have access to the site. We didn’t have access to anything, it felt like they were just using us and nothing more.
We switched to Voyeur House because we wanted to work with people who understand us, and want to work with us. Today, I can say that voyeuring takes care of the majority of my income, but we have some other activities we do to fill in the margins. But most people out here don’t look at the sex industry as a job itself. It’s more of a fun way to make money. [A manger at Voyeur House clarified, saying that income fluctuates depending on how popular the performers are. Some, he said, can make up to $10,000 a month, others are considerably lower than that.]
That’s how it goes in Romania. I’d say that about 30 percent of young people are involved in the sex industry in some way; be that camming, voyeuring or anything like that. We prefer the voyeur business compared to those other choices because we get to make an income without having to interact with viewers, and we still have time to live our lives. That said, you have to be very careful in order to not be taken advantage of. Romania isn’t a poor country, but it released itself from communism 30 years ago, and Romanian people have this mentality to do anything to survive. Do anything to survive. Live for yourself. It’s difficult to explain this mentality to people who aren’t Romanian. In this country, you need to have a sixth sense to know if you should trust someone or not.
We both perform in and manage voyeur houses in Romania, and there are a lot of factors in making a house ready for voyeuring that you might not think about if you don’t know the industry. First things first, you need to find an apartment that works. If an apartment is too big, it can mess with the camera angles. Like, if you have a camera far away from the bed or the living room, it makes it really hard to make out what’s going on for the viewers. The quality just isn’t there. So you have to eyeball how the cameras will work in an apartment. You want the people to see what you’re doing, that’s the whole point right?
Some voyeur performers choose to voyeur from their own home. If you already have a house that can be equipped with cameras, why not, right? That’s the option I’d choose myself. But sometimes you run into people that don’t have a home, and they contact us, and want to work with us, we have to find them an apartment that fits with them. When you have a group of six people who want to voyeur in the same house, you have to find them a place with multiple rooms. Because you can’t have a one-bedroom apartment with six people — that’s a nightmare.
The other thing is internet speed. That’s hugely important. You need an internet provider to ensure that the speed is going to be good in the apartment. A voyeur house has five or six cameras live-streaming, with live audio, 24 hours a day, and you need to make sure that the bandwidth is up to the task to deliver that content without a hitch. I know a lot of gamers would dream about living in a house like this, with the kind of upload speed we have.
Our friends and family all know that we live in a voyeur house. Maybe this will be surprising, but they’re very accepting and open-minded about the lives we live. We even have friends who want to try it, but they have small kids, so they can’t, because kids are forbidden by law from appearing on a voyeur house stream.
Honestly, it doesn’t take too long before you forget the cameras are even there. I mean, we know one of the main reasons people tune in is to watch us have sex, but there’s never a moment where we feel like we’re performing for anyone. I mean, it’s sex! It’s the most intensified experience you can have, so why would you be thinking about anything else? Maybe at the very beginning, when we started doing this, we were more self-conscious when we hooked up. But that was just a few days before we got over it. It’s not something we do for the cameras. It’s a lifestyle. You have to just go with the flow.
That’s not to say that there aren’t times where we want some privacy, but we’ve got places we can go for that. We have some nice outdoorsy places around here. We also have a dog, and when we want to disconnect ourselves from the cameras, we go walk the dog and lose ourselves. It’s very peaceful. There are also bars and parties, all the normal stuff. You can have a pretty normal life and still live in a voyeur house.
As time goes on, money isn’t quite the motivating factor as it used to be for us. Our perspective has changed since we started. We were afraid to do things like this before, but it turns out that it’s a lifestyle that suits us. I don’t know if other voyeurers would say the same thing, but that’s our truth.
Luke Winkie
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego. In addition to MEL, he's written for Rolling Stone, Vice, the New York Times, Gizmodo, Vox and anywhere else good content can be found.
