The Secret Life Of The American Camgirl
I stayed with an Internet “camwhore” and wrote about it.
She was naked and wearing handcuffs.
“You don’t have to do this,” She begged to the camera. “Please let me go…” She tilted her head back and moaned. “Please….please stop fucking me…” She started hyperventilating, like she was having an anxiety attack. Then the video did a slow, unseemly fade to black.
We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“So you sold this?” I said.
“I sold all of these,” she said, clicking through the files on her computer window. I saw their titles: “Masturbating for daddy,” “Scat unedited,” “Pissing on leg and dancing.” “You probably don’t want to see the scat, it’s really gross,” she said.
“What do you do?” I said.
“Oh, I’ll take my own shit and rub it on my legs, play with it. Talk about how much I like it.”
I ask her how much she makes. She thinks. “When business is good and I’m selling videos and doing shows,” She says, “Easily 500 to 750 dollars. Per night.”
I had driven in to Indiana, Pennsylvania earlier that day to stay with this girl, Femanonymiss—or so went her alias to the Internet camgirl community. The closest city to Indiana is Pittsburgh, and that’s an hour away. It’s the kind of Appalachian country where, driving through, you’ll see huge, futuristic houses tucked into the trees, and 5 minutes later, a shit trailer park bannered with dirty tarpaulin.
Indiana is home to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where Femanonymiss goes to school as a sophomore. I found her off-campus address and knocked on the door to an ordinary-looking apartment complex. She answered the door wearing a bunny suit. “Hi,” she said, in a thick Pennsylvania accent.
That threw me off. We had talked on the Internet a couple times before, and she was always flirtatious but not completely—brief and provocative, holding a little back, the charm of a female using sexual attraction as a vehicle for power, or at least financial gain. Accordingly, I had expected her voice to be feminine and seductive. Instead, it was low, weighted and slowed by a life spent in rural Pennsylvania. It was almost like a guy’s.
She led me to her room. Scattered around her room were sex toys, fetish outfits, boxes of envelopes and packaging, panties to wear and sell, even used socks that I would later find out she was selling to someone for $25.
She explained to me how she got started camming. “When I was 16, my friend told me about this website called 4chan,” She said. She seemed surprised that I had heard of it. “There’s rules on that website, like if you’re a girl, you have to show tits or get the fuck out…” She put a proud emphasis on “get the fuck out,” like a foreigner who picked up, and took an affinity towards, a particular word in English. “And so I started whoring myself—putting up naked pictures and doing shows—for attention.”
“I grew up in a perfect, cookie-cutter family,” She continued. “My parents never had a divorce, neighbors never had a divorce, never even heard of a divorce, and I guess this was my way of rebelling and getting attention. And people on 4chan ended up not hating me.” She said the last part with pride. “And then people started to ask me, why do you do this for free? That’s when I decided to start making money doing it.”
“Did they know you were 16?” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t think so…She giggled as her voice trailed off.
Later, I will show my friend, who frequents 4chan, a picture of her. He will instantly recognize her. “Oh, that girl,” He says, then his voice lifting with his eyebrows—“She’s been on there a lot actually.”
Femanonymiss told me that 4chan users, at one point, traced her location and sent a bunch of her nudes to her mom. I asked her if she cared. “Not really,” She said. “I mean, my mom never said anything to me about it. And I’ve trolled a bunch of people too. It’s 4chan—they’re all just a bunch of beta faggots with fedoras.”
I asked her about the weirdest inquiries she’s ever gotten. “I did an attempt to gape video,” She said. “What’s that?” I said.
“It’s like, you make your asshole as huge as fucking possible,” She said. “I’ve also pissed on my leg, done scat. A lot of guys will ask me to make fun of their dick size, because they get off on being humiliated. People have also asked me if my own family members could be involved, like doing something in front of my brother.”
“Do people’s desires ever make you psychologically make you feel uncomfortable?” I said.
“Sometimes I’m just like, you really want me to do that?” She said. “And I think about it, and I’m just like, hope I can do it right for you. I hope I can do a good job, because this really isn’t what I do. I mean, I’ve had people ask me to drink my own piss. And what I think about initially is, how can I fake it. So it’s not even like, why do you want to see me drink piss. It’s like okay, that’s what you want. I want to satisfy you, either way if it’s right or wrong.”
This is where I used to smoke weed,” She tells me as we pull in next to an office building near the brick heart of Indiana. We’re here to do a photo shoot on the roof.
Even though it’s late at night, the door is unlocked. We ride a tiny elevator to the top floor. She leads me to a huge, locked gate. We climb it.
We find ourselves in a dark, expansive room. There’s debris, dust, broken glass, and rusted metal everywhere—the kind of place where you’d lose your foot, from the cut and then the tetanus, if you walked barefoot. If this was a horror movie, this is the part where the bad guy would come out of the ceiling and kill me as she screamed.
With my iPhone flashlight as a guide, she slips off her sweatshirt and sweatpants and puts on her bunny ears.
“Tell me what to do,” She says.
“Look seductive,” I say.
She puts her finger in her mouth and laughs nervously. “That’s the only way I know how to look seductive,” She says, and I believe her. I snap a picture.
We climb a ladder to the roof. Behind her, a clock tower frames her bunny ears. I snap another picture.
Afterwards, we walk out of the office building and back onto Main Street. Students our age line up outside a local bar, packed and buzzing like insects, to get in. “Sucks for them,” She says.
“Doesn’t it weird you out, having this total secret life?” I ask her as we cross the street.
She thinks about it for a second. “No,” She says. “I mean, my biggest issue with my friends is that they would see me differently. They’d get concerned. But I wouldn’t know how to express to them how much I enjoy doing it.”
That night, she offered to let me see a show. She opened up Skype and it was blown up with messages from customers. “Every time I open Skype, it’s like this,” She said.
Some guy messaged her to set up a show. They set pricing ($30), time (10 minutes) and style (“vanilla,” aka not hardcore). “Please be nice to me,” He added.
She called him and immediately got to work. Her voice elated as she went into this bouncy sexual superdrive. She had the smile, eyes and mannerisms of an anime character.
“Alright I’m going to tell you exactly what to do,” She said. “I want you to stroke up and down, okay?” She started sliding a dildo in and out of herself. I suddenly felt awkward, like I was intruding on an intensely private moment, and I slid down the wall to sit at the foot of the bed. I kept my eyes glued on my computer screen, typing down everything that I heard.
“Can I switch hands?” He asked.
“Yes you can. Look at you, asking like a good little boy. You’re my good little boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” He whispered.
She continued. “Okay you can go a little faster now. Just be natural and normal. Play with your balls with your other hand. That’s a good boy. You want to fuck me, don’t you? You want to see my tits? I didn’t tell you to stop.”
“My name is Peter,” He suddenly said, with a nerdy and robotic voice. Like it mattered.
She threw her head back and laughed. “Okay Peter. Is Peter my good little boy? Is he gonna cum just for me?”
“Yep,” he said quickly.
I caught a glimpse of glazed boredom in her eyes as she played with her tits. “Okay Peter, you have two minutes left,” She said. “Are you gonna cum?”
He whimpered.
“When you cum I want you to cum in your hand, so I can see how much it is,” She said.
Peter started to groan. “There it is,” She said, and energy shot to her eyes again. She cooed. “Bad Peter,” She said as he exhaled heavily. Things wound down. She smiled at him.
“Thank you for telling me not to eat it,” He whispered.
“What?” She said. “Are you into that?”
“No,” He said, and exited out of the call.
She looked at me with big, weirded-out eyes. She started to put her bra back on. “That was gross,” She said, her voice dropping an octave. “He was this fat 20 year old. He had a really short and stumpy dick. That’s just like, so sad. How can he actually establish connection with me? He just paid 30 dollars to cum into his hand.” 
