When Dee found out about the opportunity to make money as what she calls an “online stripper,” she got extra excited about her upcoming eighteenth birthday. She says she had just turned seventeen when she learned of Chaturbate, a website where age-verified models broadcast themselves.
“Naturally, I figured I’d be doing stuff of a sexual nature. I was fine with it. I was like, ‘I can get paid for being naked for people? Hell yeah!’”
Previously, Dee had tried and failed to keep other jobs. Her class schedule was jam-packed, and she was completely swamped with work on weeknights. She had a license but no car, and she job-hunted at inconvenient times.
“Sometimes I’d be like, ‘oh my God, I really, really need a job,’ and just start applying everywhere, but never when places were hiring.”
The few jobs she did get only ever lasted a few weeks. Dee found that she couldn’t balance schoolwork and a job. With schoolwork, she said, came an intense amount of stress. She remembers expecting deadlines almost every other day.
It was so structured that it made her hate structure. So, naturally, a part-time job—at least a traditional one—was out of the question.
On Dee’s eighteenth birthday, before she did any celebrating, she signed up to broadcast herself on Chaturbate, which has a somewhat-thorough verification process. The person who wants to be a “model” must submit a scanned photo of an ID (a license, passport, etc.), a picture of themselves, and a picture of themselves holding their photo ID.
In addition, one must provide an “e-signature,” which, Dee admitted, she had no idea that was. Fifteen minutes after Dee submitted her information, she received a confirmation email.
“I was so stoked. I mean, naturally. This was finally the sort of job for me, someone who requires flexible hours and loves showing off her boobs.”
Dee admits that it was pretty slow to start with. She didn’t really know what to do, how to talk to people. For her first session, she muted her webcam and communicated to her viewers by just waving and smiling. Occasionally, she’d get a private message—which can only be sent by members who actually have tokens—asking for her to do certain things, or inquiring about a private show.
Basically, the site uses tokens as currency instead of actual money. Viewers “tip” models with these tokens, which are purchased in sets, the lowest being 100 tokens, and the highest 1,240 tokens. Each token is worth five cents and Dee says no one ever tips just one token.
“If they do, they’re cheap, and I hate them. Sometimes I’d get spammed with one-token tips from people who wanted me to notice their messages, because whenever you send a tip you have the option to send a message with it. Usually, people use that feature to request some sort of action, like, say, taking off my shirt. But a few times, tips turned into harassment, and I’d have to kick someone out of my chatroom.”
The usernames of viewers are color-coded based on how many tokens they have. Dee says that as a general rule she ignored the requests of gray and light-blue users. Dark-blue, light-purple, and purple usernames are where the money is.
“I pandered to those viewers hardcore. They were like the pimps of Chaturbate, and the grays were like the johns. I learned the hard way not to trust grays, who would ask for a PM in the chatroom so that they could try to scam you into doing a private show for them for free.”
Dee’s first few sessions on the website were more exploratory than lucrative. During her second session, she unmuted her webcam so she could talk to her viewers. She wanted it to be more natural, more easy-going on her end. The first time she reached 100 viewers, she says was more excited about the amount of people watching than the amount of money she was making.
“It was awesome. I was like, who wouldn’t love me? I was this hot chick who was also super sassy and funny. I made fun of my viewers if they made outrageous requests, or if the grays got feisty and tried to make demands.”
“There was this one time this guy wanted me to show him my socks. And I was like, ‘wait, you mean just my socks, or my socks on my feet?’ He didn’t answer, so I got a pair of socks and just held them up to the webcam and was like, ‘here.’ He protested, saying that he wanted to see them on my feet, and I was like, ‘well then you should’ve answered my question!’ He was a gray, too. It was the weirdest thing. Like, a sock fetish? What?”
While every job has its perks, it also has its disadvantages, especially when it comes to a job like this. The website was filled with greedy, gross men, some of whom had almost no respect for the models. Dee says her chatrooms overflowed with testosterone.
Men never stopped talking about their penises, which Dee resented—“honestly, I thought it was a really funny, kind of, example of the way that men hijack female platforms and make it about themselves. Maybe I’m thinking too far into it, but it’s like, okay, this is about me right now, you’re all here to watch me, not to talk about how hard your dick is.”
When asked about the worst things that happened to her while camming, she mentioned a time she got scammed into doing a private show. A gray user offered her an Amazon gift card in exchange for a private show. Dee says she was suspicious, and asked why the user couldn’t just pay her in tokens, to which the user responded that they had reached the maximum amount of tokens you could buy from the site in one day.
“I don’t know why I believed him,” she says. “It must have been a really slow night, I probably only had ten or twenty viewers. So, like, why not?”
Still, she was pissed when she found out it was a scam. She had been sent an email saying that the man had sent her the Amazon gift card, so she figured it was for real. How could someone fake something like that? Apparently, pretty easily.
“There are some guys who will come into your chatroom and send you a private message asking your location and telling you theirs. As if a camgirl is the same thing as a sex worker. I was never really offended—I had my tits out on the internet, I was pretty much immune to most humiliation, but it was still annoying. Even worse was when you’d find out they want to bang you for free, after not tipping you at all during the show. Like, no. Double no.”
Dee has stopped camming for now, saying that frequent camming makes her feel a little strange. It can be really isolating, she explained, when you’re being watched by all these faceless men, receiving all this sexual attention that you’re not used to getting in real life. Camming solo can be pretty challenging, even if your chatroom has really supportive moderators and promoters.
“When people ask me if they should cam, I’m always cautious in my response. In theory, it’s really rad, getting naked for strangers and showing yourself off in exchange for money. But it can easily become kinda damaging, especially if you over-exert yourself—not physically, but emotionally and mentally.”
Dee’s main advice for anyone who wants to try out camming is to try to get a more traditional job first. If you can’t do that, she says, and you really want to try camming, see if you have a consenting partner who will do it with you, for mental support and/or extra money. The most important thing, especially for younger girls, Dee says, is to not lose yourself or your sexual identity in the process of camming. “It can get dangerous if you start questioning your self-worth based on your camming. Go into it only when your self-love and self-esteem is rock-solid, and when you know yourself well enough to not get lost in the world of camming.”
