From Grad School to Cam Girl

I had been freelancing online as a writer and writing tutor for years after grad school before money started to become a problem. I never thought my Masters in Poetry would make me rich exactly, but I am smart. I figured I could make something within the realm of acceptability for my soul to work well enough to live a decent life. But, bills rack up when you make just enough to cover expenses and have a little bit of fun. Still, I had learned how to live without needing much. When I noticed a lump on my dog Luna’s chest, and the subsequent tests were inconclusive, the surgery bills began rolling in. Freelancing wasn’t covering those bills, and that’s when the interest started piling up on the credit cards I wasn’t able to pay off. Interest that nearly amounts to the monthly bills I was paying. Watching myself swirl down the drain into the financial sewer, I had to think of something else.

At the time I was living in Barcelona. I’m from the United States, and I didn’t have a work visa, so getting a job there to help pay the bills was out of the question. Plus, I was already living in an inexpensive apartment, buying the cheapest wine available, and eating pasta and bread as my main form of sustenance. How much more could I downgrade my life to be able to pay these bills and still live a life that brought me a modicum of happiness.

One of my boyfriend’s friends told a story one day about girls that sell their underwear for money. Used underwear that is. Another friend told me about how he sometimes paid girls, just regular girls, to talk with him online, usually naked, sometimes masturbating, he added when I looked confused. Oh, I said, cam girls. He said he didn’t really like being associated with that term, because he wasn’t like the other guys. He didn’t make them do anything they didn’t want to do. Sometimes, he said, they just sat there and talked, in undies.

I’m not the prettiest girl ever. I don’t have big tits, I have thick thighs, my nose is crooked. I mean, I know I am pretty, but I’m no model. But when my friend told me the girls he talked to were just like me, I thought I could give it a try. I needed the money after all, and desperation leads to believing things like earning 10k a week, what they tend to advertise on the popular camming sites. That would nearly pay off all my bills, I thought, and quickly. What did it matter if I was getting naked and letting guys jack off to my alter-ego? I had no intention of ever taking political office. Worst-case scenario, my pics or videos would end up circulating around the internet freely, and I thought, maybe I could make money writing about that experience. So I went for it.

I named myself Pepper. I signed up for a couple of cam sites and a site where you sell your panties. I felt nervous, excited, curious, even a little shy. But the first days were inspiring. I wasn’t making thousands of dollars, but hundreds, and that was ok. And the guys who came to see me had already come because of my pics, so they knew what they were getting into with my barely B-cup tits and thick booty. They told me I was sexy. They told me they loved my voice. They asked me my real name (I didn’t tell them). Some sent me emails, told me they would do anything for me to move to London/Toronto/Jersey/Adelaide/Santiago/etc. They wanted to know if I wanted to see pics of their dicks (I said I did, but I didn’t). I received so many dick pics that I forced myself to solicit.

It turned out that the panty sales website also had a chat option, and in order to sell, lots of upkeep was necessary. In fact, one of my biggest sales was after I Skyped with a guy from Indonesia and sold him the panties I let him watch me cum all over.

Some weeks went by, and I was making ok money. Enough to keep even more debt from piling up from other emergency expenditures from the vet and to keep my own health optimum. That’s when I decided to invest in a dildo, the first I had ever owned. I’m no prude, but I guess I have always had lots of success masturbating with my hands, so I never saw the need. The only times I had been in porn shops prior to that was just for fun, not to buy anything. Shopping for real was a bit intimidating. The sales attendant wanted to know what I was looking for. What size? What material? It hadn’t really occurred to me to think about any of that. Call me naive. I was. After at least an hour in the store, having dildo after dildo explained to me, I decided on one that had an element of realism to it, except for the fact that it was blue. I chose blue for an odd reason. One of my favorite books, or series of books rather, is The MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood. It is a post-apocalyptic dystopian tale that includes these new advanced beings that don’t have emotions. When the males are ready to mate, their dicks turn blue and erect, and they get it on with the willing, also emotionless females. That blue dildo I bought made me think of that, and it made me feel like an elite member of the semi-porn industry, educated and well-read. I wanted people to ask me why I picked that dildo.

Business picked up for a little while with the acquisition of my new sex toy, but things got kinkier than I wanted really quickly. The thing wasn’t THAT big, but it was big enough. What I mean by that is that it was way too big to put in my ass, not that I was going to put anything in my ass anyway. It was hard enough in my experience to have anal sex on the occasions I had done it with someone I love, so me putting an uncomfortable toy in there was just not going to happen, at least not for what anyone would be willing to pay me. Plenty of girls apparently just do it as part of their schtick, so me asking for tons extra just made people leave. Ufff.

I started doing this thing where I would read poetry, both my own and my favorites, to my customers. Sometimes, if they paid me, I would even write special poems for them. That helped things out for awhile, but if that niche exists in the cam world, the ones who love watching an undressed poetess read poetry to them in a slow and sultry voice, I wasn’t finding it. I felt sad because of this. I had finally found something that I actually, truly enjoyed about camming, something that was stimulating on my end as well (not only theirs), something that would help the light inside of me, the real light, shine for them so that there could be a semblance of trueness between us, and not many were interested. Translation: the money wasn’t coming in through this medium. Sad face.

I had a couple regulars after some months of the old, non-poetry camming, but I started to feel gross about it. I had one guy who said he was ex-military and lived in Tennessee who wanted to talk to me about my personal life, told me all about his personal life, and he was getting really attached (he also was one of my highest paying customers). Anytime I responded in an even remotely detached way, he would get awkward and a little mean, saying I was playing games with him. He became really pushy when he asked me if I would quit camming and move to be with him, and I just had to put up with it, because I needed the money. I was able to put off my “move to Tennessee” for a couple more months before he snapped, called me a liar and a slut, and I never “saw” him again.

Another guy was from London, and he was another high roller in the Pepper department. At first he was nice, sweet, and took a real interest in my “story.” I told my customers I was a writer and an online tutor, which is true, and he always told me all my students must be in love with me. Honestly, this guy took a bad turn when he got really angry when I wouldn’t come to London with a ticket he was prepared to buy me. Up until that point, I of course “entertained the possibility” of meeting up, but said I had a boyfriend, and that he didn’t love the idea of me actually getting physical with anyone. Online was one thing, but it was dangerous in many ways. I thought that would get me off the hook, but after he had just put a big chunk of money into my account for a session where I read parts of a dirty romance novel and masturbated for at least an hour, he told me I owed him to come visit. Then he started insulting me for staying with a guy that couldn’t even support me, that he would give me everything I ever needed, so I was an idiot and a bitch for not complying. Needless to say, that was the last time I ever “saw” Mr. London.

There are a bunch of other less intense cases as well of this sort of thing, but it made me think I was doing something wrong. When I was completely honest and said I was just in it for the money, they wanted me to do things I wasn’t willing to do (just anal really), and when I lied and pretended that maybe someday we would meet, things turned sour whenever they actually made it clear that their patience was running out in terms of that meeting. What is the happy medium that earns girls thousands of dollars per month? I wasn’t even asking for the big bucks, but for the amount of screen time and primping time and effort put in, the amount of reading sexy stories and engaging in anything from genuine intellectual conversation (naked) to being super naughty and talking dirtier than I ever thought possible from myself, I thought more money would be coming in.

I thought also that maybe I just wasn’t pretty enough. I thought about the novelty aspect of it: the whole porn industry, especially especially especially camming, at least to some extent, is based on novelty. So many guys just flock to the newbies. There wasn’t a formula that would make me a ton of money without a lot of plastic surgery both on the outside and a bit on the inside. My ability to turn my soul into plastic became more and more limited with each guy that said something unsavory to me. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell them how disgusting I thought they were. I wanted to tell them that their wives should divorce them for being such pieces of shit. I wanted to scream at the screen until it shattered on their end and pieces of glass flew into their beyond needy penises, always wanting more and more and more, never satisfied with the plentitude of sexual acts that I was offering.

One especially tragic incident for my soul happened when a guy paid me to suck my boyfriend’s dick, during a time when I really needed the money, and the things he made him do to me, the sheer amount of choking and degradation (and I told my boyfriend to just listen to whatever he said), were just too damaging. That’s when I stopped. I felt disgusted with myself. I felt disgusted that my boyfriend had seen me that way, had participated in it from my asking, and I even felt a little resentment toward my boyfriend for doing what he did to me. That was completely unfair of me to feel that way, because I told him to do it, but it was hard for me to separate the good from the bad for awhile after that incident. That was the last time I had cammed for a long time until recently.

I honestly can not wait for the day that my finances take a turn in a direction where camming is not something I consider doing anymore. Now, at least it is only a part-time endeavor for extra cash when freelancing work drops off, but the same feelings and experiences are creeping up and eating me inside again. I thought I could handle the cam world after that break, but I’m not holding up that well, to be perfectly honest. If only I could find that small niche of intellectual guys who would love to watch me read poetry in the nude, I could find some pleasure in it. I could relish in the fact that the world of sexual desire is not limited to rubbing cum on my face and in my hair, to putting dangerous object inside my vagina, to squirting and aggressive anal and violence and other over-the-top acts that seem so far from attractive and natural to me that I sometimes throw up in my mouth a little bit just reading what they want from the other end.

Until then, life goes on...as it always does.

xo