holidayting6-blog

[holidayting6-blog]

I met Anna because

I met Anna because she flatly offered to talk to me — clothed or unclothed — in exchange for money. She's Romanian, a model from a region with a reputation for sordid conditions and rapacious studio owners. If there were a dark side to the industry, she'd at least be nestled closest to it. But when her camera first flipped on for me, I didn't see the stained walls of a prostitute's den. Instead: a bright, modern apartment inhabited by a bright, modern girl. In her pink underwear. Anna embodies almost every delightful stereotype an American brain can hold over a young girl from Romania. At 24, she's clever — even cunning — sarcastically flirtatious in a way that makes you want to check your back pocket, and possesses stunning slavic beauty.Her conditions at the next studio were bare at best, and at times the most personal privacy she had, while performing for strangers on live camera, were a few hanging sheets separating her from the others walking in and out of some rundown flat. Although she was the frequent victim of what would certainly qualify as flagrant, physical sexual harassment in any other business, Anna stuck through it, priding herself on her ability to talk a path out of a "bad situation" with male employers.As with most sex work, webcamming doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s often seen as exploitation or a last-resort hustle to pay off debt, but Reed Amber, 26, explains how webcam models are just your average self-employed freelancers with the same amount of agency and independence as anyone else.But some women are not free to make the choices Lana has. Oana, 28, counts herself as an escapee from the sex industry. At 16 - a minor - she fell in love with a boyfriend who persuaded her to do video chat.

But there's really nothing exotic about Anna. She's occasionally lazy and often messy, spending most of her days, as far as I can tell, puttering around her Bucharest apartment in pajamas, playing with her cats, drinking enormous plastic bottles of soda, working on coding an iOS game, and taking occasional trips out to pick up fried chicken and buy new underwear. She claims to have almost no "real" friends off of the internet, but is consistently cheery, and enormously talkative. While video chatting, she always asks if I mind before she smokes. Anna complains about having to take time away from Diablo 3 for her cam sessions, where she chats with regulars, masturbates, mouths along to pop songs, and waits, waits, waits for someone to send her money. And when it comes, it comes. Anna's a MyFreeCam loyalist, earning $US6 a minute via "tokens" — a clever way to obscure how much her customers actually spend. It's a lot easier to fork over 900 tokens than thinking about the $US75 you just spent in minutes. This is Anna's sole income, and what took her out of rural Romanian poverty and the whims of other men.The first time I went private with a guy I freaked the fuck out. All he wrote was get naked. And so far all Id done in a chat room was flash my boobs for an influx of tokens. I froze up in stage ­fright and closed the room. In my group chat I wrote: Sorry, cam froze. And I logged off for the night.Odds are, you're referred by a newspaper or website listing. Maybe a friend suggested you try it out. Maybe you're shifting from traditional strip club work to the online equivalent — a popular trend in wealthier countries. Maybe you're working in a brothel where web camming is just another expectation. Whatever the case, you'll have to stream yourself through a web cam portal, one of the massive sites that catalogues thousands of models and acts as a go-between between customer and model.Why do you think some men, and probably women as well, prefer it to porn?

A lot of what we see in the media doesn't help either. People have this idea [about] the type of person who does webcamming, where they're either not good enough for porn or they're too lazy to find a real job, and that's all bullshit. Unfortunately there's a lot of girls who do turn to webcamming for the wrong reasons, especially when it comes to money, and a lot of people feel guilty for doing it. But we sell our souls for money all the time, why not our body? Why wouldn't you have a bit of sexual fun at the same time?There are still big ticket European customers these days, men who Anna is reluctant to call "addicted", but "spend more time... you need to entertain those people who are going to stay for hours and hours in your room, even if they finished what they came for — they want to get to know you. Either way, camming keeps Anna in comfy sweatpants and Fanta.Working an eight-hour day, she earns close to 4,000 euros (£3,600) per month - nearly 10 times the Romanian average wage. As Lana's employer, Studio 20 also makes 4,000 euros per month from her online sessions. And at the top of the video chat money-making pyramid, LiveJasmin - the online cam site that streams Studio 20's content and is responsible for collecting payment from the credit cards of clients - takes double that: 8,000 euros. Since the dawn of streaming, the porn industry has been suffering financially. As people have started watching and uploading porn on tube sites for free, the days of big-budget porn and making a lot of money as a porn star are fading away. At the same time, though, streaming has also spawned a supplement to the porn industry that cant be replicated: camming. CONTINUED BELOW...