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Inside the building

Inside the building, Studio 20 occupies the first and second floors. Forty rooms open off pristine, white corridors, their walls adorned with pictures of women in states of glamorous undress. A closed door means business. Inside that room a woman is live and direct via webcam with international clients - and as long as she is alone in the room, it is entirely legal. In this world of virtual relationships and cybersex, those in front of the camera are "models" and the men who watch are "members". "It's up to you as a woman to lead, and that's quite empowering."There's a lot of burnout in this industry," Domino tells me over the phone from one of the three houses she owns in Wisconsin — one of them a lakefront property outside of Madison. She says it with a serious voice that sounds a little tired.Are there any really common requests that you get?

I am angry and I am allowed to be, because I am tired of being put in a box. But what is most important is that I do not have regrets because I know what I am.For the unfamiliar, camming is where clients pay to either watch a livestream of or have an individual video chat with a sex worker. It can’t be pirated and watched for free because the whole point of it is that it’s intimate and personal—you’re actually interacting with the person behind the screen.Theres so much free porn that I feel webcamming is more of a personal one-on-one. You can go online and find any ol stuff, but webcamming is more personal; its tailored exactly to what you want and what youre looking for. Youre not sharing it with 100 thousand other people. This is your show. Most of the time you build up a relationship, I talk to you as a friend and I respect you as a person. How has your day been, what did you get from the shops, what are you cooking for dinner… its like an online relationship. She started as a nervous 18-year-old girl and cashes in on her signature 'innocent' look – pulling her hair into pigtails before she heads online to meet her guests.

"It's about selling your brain, not your body," she says. "I see it like a performance, like a show. But this is not a job for everybody - a lot of girls quit after a few weeks or even days, because they have this mindset that they're selling their body. Your mindset is what matters in this job. I have my limits, and I truly do not feel exploited.Is Sandy Bell a victim? She says she is not, though feminists such as Irina Ilisei say the question is more complicated than it seems.If abuse were such a big problem, Anna says, then why would any Romanian girls bother with it at all? Why wouldn't they just find some other job? In a country whose GDP only stopped shrinking two years ago, with 20 per cent of the population living below the poverty line and personal income levels far below Kazakhstan, Iran and Gabon, that question answers itself. There's a reason Anna's so happy to be independent from her former employers, a status she equates with nothing less than her "freedom".Inside, Studio 20 feels like the Paramount Pictures of camming. You walk in and theres hallways and hallways of rooms. One of them is decorated for a surfer girl, one of them is a girly teen-looking bedroom, one has teddy bears, one has a stripper pool, one is a fake bathroom with a tub. And theyre all just these fake sets where one side is a bedroom and the other side has a huge monitor, camera, computer, and professional lighting.

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