Annabelle T. Baxter - Secrets of a Webcam Girl

Nearly naked, I was in my bedroom but visible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

When the webcam turned on, my profile appeared in the menu of available models. Men selected my name and then entered my room, to view me in my bedroom and send messages. Ideally, members tipped if they liked what they saw. Sometimes this meant I just talked while in lingerie; other times, I stripped, or used sex toys. I considered myself a cyber stripper, and less often a cyber peepshow performer.

Hey baby, wrote BurdeningDesire.

How are you? I replied. What do you like?

BurdeningDesire wasted no time getting to the point. Do you do humiliations, baby?

What do you mean? I wrote back. My knowledge of the sex industry was limited to catching boyfriends viewing porn. At which point, I would wag my finger and tally up one more strike against them. I was clueless as to the lingo.

Ill turn on my cam, and then I want you to point, laugh, and insult me about the size of my penis, he wrote. Unless a viewer enabled his webcam, I couldnt see them, which was my preference.

My immediate suspicion was that he was joking. Perhaps his real turn-on was gullible camgirls.

Really? I wrote as a stalling tactic, while thinking, how difficult could it be? I could think of a couple boyfriends who had been worthy of such an exchange and yet I had refrained from pointing and laughing out of politeness. The idea that this insult could be a turn-on was mind-blowing.

Yes, BurdeningDesire wrote. Come on, please.

My viewers were always frantic for me to watch them. With few exceptions, a click to their cam icon resulted in a close-up grainy image of a cock getting worked over like a cylinder of dough in preparation for baking. I considered myself to be 85 percent heterosexual, yet the image of an erect penis, particularly one on cam, did nothing to stir my lady loins. Penises are like people from another planet: they look too similar to really tell apart. In addition, I hated the oozing that accompanied the aroused male genitalia. If ejaculate were rainbow-colored or flecked with sparkles, there might be something worthy to look at. To me, it looked like a runny nose.

Is it really that small? I asked. I imagined a slender, hairless hand gripping a quasi-erect penis.

Without waiting for an answer, I wrote, For tips, Ill do it. And with that last message, BurdeningDesire evaporated from cyberspace. Like so many other men, BurdeningDesire had no intention of tipping. Exposing their fetish to a camgirl was enough to get them aroused and off.

BurdeningDesire was the first of many visitors to my room who had an erotic fetish. He was apparently a bottom, where psychological humiliation incited sexual arousal, whereas I, as the abuser, would be the top. I wondered if these individuals exposed their fetishes to the lovers in their life; or did they aim for a normal public persona and only choose to expose their freaky side to camgirls?

Although BurdeningDesire essentially stiffed me, more lucrative and equally educational days were forthcoming. An architect, homebound for months with mono, became one of my best tippers, giving me an additional $300 in Amazon gift cards. Another one of my outstanding tippers was a married man whose biggest turn-on was for me to call him on the phone and say I love you, repeatedly while he furiously whacked off. I received a marriage proposal from a wealthy (and unbalanced) engineer from Sydney, Australia. There were even the less extravagant but equally adoring men who paid $20 to receive a 99-cent Valentines Day card signed by me. One of the more extravagant offers I received was an invitation from a Boston caf owner to travel to Italy with him in the summer. Eventually I transitioned to the much more lucrative field of erotic massage. It was an interesting yearso much so that I decided to chronicle my experiences in a blog titled Secrets of a Webcam Girl, which invited some controversy of its own. Once I switched over to massage, I was hesitant to write about the clients Id met face to face and who I saw every weekthen the day came that someone asked me to walk on them in heels and I simply had to tell someone. I had no one, so I resumed my blog.

But it was important not to get distracted. My sole objective was to use the earnings to pay my bills, in hopes that the recession would eventually recede. At which point, I could go back to using my brains to garner my income rather than my boobs.