Sunny’s Note: Right now I’m going through the Camgirl Museum’s paper archives, trying to read every single thing I saved to try and get a fuller picture of how things really were circa 2001-2005, when 320×240 camgirls were still at their height of popularity1.
One of the things I forgot about and am sort of having fun remembering, even though it wasn’t super fun at the time, was how pissed off people were at camgirls for having wishlists! People had 0 qualms over calling teenage girls “whores”, “to their faces” in guestbook comments or blog posts! Maybe they still don’t, I dunno, but some of the negative stuff I printed out was pretty extreme, considering who these people were writing about and potentially affecting.
I came across something interesting I printed, about wishlists. It was webpage copy, that I copied and pasted into a Word document, and included the link to the page it was on at the bottom – thankfully – so I was able to look it up on the Wayback Machine today. Here it is in its entirety because the text on the original site is microscopic:
Wishlists
by Asa of AceEntrance.net, age 20
Circa 2003
This has been over done and beaten to death but I suppose a one more little ramble won’t hurt on the topic of wishlists …
A girl with a website flashes her assets on a little thing called a webcam and builds a site around her random ramblings of a blog. Is she an attention seeking whore? Or is she just your average 15-25 year old girl who is bored inside her house with nothing to do? Pair up the daily diary entries with a wishlist where people can buy them things in return for their, well…‘just being’, and we have an internet phenomenon that appears to be a glitch in popular media culture that’s found its way into new media art and cultural theory. There’s an argument that camgirls are taking control of the media and their own image and then exploiting them both, and I agree. I get quite a few who are still under the impression that the words “webcam site” are synonymous with ‘free porn’ and if you surf the net even for a minute, try google.com search word ‘teen’ and you will find a shitload of teenage girls involved in hardcore porn. Strangely nobody is interested in them, but someone buys me a gift from my wishlist and suddenly we have interest.
I admit I like to ‘pose’ on cam sometimes. In fact I find it fun, and its a great way to know that I have complete control over how the world becomes familiar with me whether it’s via my cam or my journal. It’s not a vanity thing as some may assume, but is a great tool for expression. … However, whether or not I entertain you, doesn’t really matter to me. I may be sitting in front of the computer broadcasting images of myself in my trackie-daks or even my sexiest swimsuit, but in the end it’s all entertainment to ME – The internet, my site and the hours I spend in my den and you get the watch (sparingly). From AE’s conception, all I’ve wanted is a space to call my own and mess with. All of this is a much needed creative outlet, diary and scrapbook which is still, and always a work in progress for me.
See I’ve had my wishlist for a longer time than I’ve this baby here. When I took notice of the other girls who also had webcams on their sites, I also made out that a lot of them had Amazon wishlists. Since I’m Australian, and already had an alternative one with wishlist.com.au, I added it to my site and thought: ‘Why not?’. I weighed out the pro’s and cons and figured out that the only ‘con’ was that I was concerned of what people would think of me for posting it. So I posted it – on the principle that aceEntrance is my place to play, design and document things. But despite the obvious material advantage, for me running a site has nothing to do with maintaining a wishlist. But seriously, so what if I recieve a few gifts year? I put amounts of effort into my posts and spend quite a lot of time on here, it’s very encouraging when I recieve a few tokens of appreciation. Most gifts arrive during the weeks around my birthday and Christmas to be honest. Very sparingly will I recieve a gift ‘just because’ or out-of-the-blue..
I do get the odd perve proposing ‘deals’ where he/she will buy me things in exchange for extra and sometimes ‘sexier’ pictures of me but I still decline every time. That’s just not my thing. I’m not up for any deals of the sort (so fuck off if that’s what you’re after hah). But hey I’m fully aware of the fact that I’m broadcasting myself over the net and that I have to put of with shit like that so I ignore it. In the end, I say do what you want on your cam, so long as you’re completely comfortable with the idea that anyone could be watching you. Be yourself and make your site a place that you are proud of and never lower your standards for any loser on the net.. even for a few measly gifts off your wishlist.
I guess it’s the media perception that a lot of girls who have the cam/wishlist combo have some sort of major self esteem issue, but I don’t need some old man to gawk at my naked breasts to tell me that I’m “pretty.” It just seems wrong. It’s not me. So I don’t need to do that for gifts either.
Should a girl have a wishlist? Her decision.
Should people buy her stuff? Their decision.
Should anyone buy a teenage girl stuff in the hope she would fall in love with them, take sexy pictures or give anything back? No.
It’s nice to get things for free, but if the only reason you are setting up a website is in hope to get presents… you are setting it up for the wrong reasons. I really don’t think every camgirl started out with the agenda to mooch off any random stranger that surfs by her site, but it’s just sorta happened this way and somehow became a trend. My 2 cents ..
Sunny Again: Asa was an Australian camgirl who was on the Stile Project “Portal 9” webcam portal before me (2001), but I can’t remember if she stuck around after the site became Camwhores/a pay site in 20022, or not. At the time she was “studying at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) doing an undergraduate degree in Science in Mathematics”, I wonder what she’s doing now? I didn’t really know her at all, but she started camming slightly before me and her site’s Wayback Machine archives go as far back as July 2001, if anyone felt like going on a trip through memory lane!
- It wasn’t really until streaming became faster and more viable in 2004, when sites like MyFreeCams started popping up, that the popularity of still webcams that uploaded “live” photos every 30 seconds started to wane. ↩︎
- Lots of original Portal 9 folks left when the site flipped over from a free, general interest portal, to a paid “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!” portal with members only shows and eventually streaming. ↩︎