Unshy
I talked to four girls who make money by taking their clothes off on the internet, and the first thing that surprised me was how unsurprised they were about it.
Jasmin’s eighteen, from Berlin, studies computer science, waits tables. She found the sites through a blog and thought: why not. Men will pay to see you naked. Mostly they’re fine. Sometimes they want weird shit (pee videos, watching her use a tampon) and she says no. Most of the money’s in the chat anyway, just talking. She made twenty dollars once sending a photo to one guy. Her boyfriend didn’t know. She tested his reaction once with a hypothetical and he was so disgusted that she never told him. She doesn’t want her family to know, doesn’t want some future employer finding the photos. But on camera she’s fine. She’s confident in her body and smart about what she will and won’t do.
Sophie from Würzburg is nineteen, pansexual, training to be a care worker. One of her friends got her into it. She sells photos and videos—five to thirty euros depending. What’s interesting is she has no real shame about it. We live in a sexually repressed country, she said. Of course companies think it’s unprofessional. But she’s learning actual business skills, negotiation, persuasion. Things you don’t learn at a register. Some requests are strange, but the clients are usually nice, and if they’re not she blocks them. She’s building something here, even if it’s strange to call it that.
Julia from Bielefeld, nineteen, studies business, is figuring out her sexuality with women. She likes the power angle, gets off on men paying to see her naked. She’s cold about the economics. Bulk produces videos (film a bunch at once, send them around, it’s efficient) and prices things based on how she feels that day. She’s keeping it from classmates and coworkers because that would actually matter. But her flatmates know. One brought her into it. She doesn’t feel bad about it.
Sadie from Portland, eighteen, lesbian, saving for a streetwear business in New York with her roommate. What she got excited about was the humiliation work. They made forty dollars once making a guy stuff raisins up his nose and eat them while they laughed. That was the story she wanted to tell. Not sex but shame, sold to men who’ll pay for it. In regular life she can’t tell creeps to fuck off the way she wants. Online, she gets paid for it.
The money isn’t huge—rent money, book money, escape money—but what struck me wasn’t the money. It was the absence of shame. They’re all genuinely afraid of being found out by family and employers and people who matter. But they’re not ashamed of the work itself. They’ve made a calculation and moved on. Some of them even seemed to prefer this to straight jobs, seemed to actually like the power of it, the clear transaction. I was just projecting. They seemed fine. More than fine, some of them.