It’s 2am on a Tuesday. I’m alone in my Brooklyn apartment, legs sprawled in the air with my pink LELO vibrator on max speed while my webcam stares down at me and “Trap Queen” plays softly in the background. I’m about to cum when vegancock666 posts in my chatroom:
Webcamming is not new. The original lifecaster was Jennifer Ringley who launched a stream of black-and-white stills in 1996. She hosted her life uncensored on the domain JenniCam.com from a webcam mounted in her college dorm room. Superseding Jenni was artist Ana Voog of Anacam who turned off her cam in 2009 after 12 years of performing. Now the term Camgirl is all encompassing of the thousands of women that participate as online entertainers.
What is new are the means with which viewers and self-broadcasters can communicate and the affections that come along with connecting and understanding each other. Because viewers cannot verbally speak with Camgirls, there are a few options if you want to get babygirl’s attention.
First, if you’re a bro, say hi to your dudes in the room. She’ll notice you for sure.
For the shy guy, send her a casual text-based “hi qt” in the public chat or even a...
If you’re feeling confident you could even C2C with her.
Or lastly, take the troll/fanboy route. Meme and GIF the shit out of her. Aside from tipping, memes are the means to generate a physical and verbal response.
Most posted ReactionGif in my chatroom.
What is the internet used for? Porn and Lolcats tbh- though usually segregated. There of course is the popular adult humor site efukt, but the humor there is based in the past, as most of their content consists of pre-recorded videos meant to garner attention not erections. Sex chats, on the other hand, have the obvious purpose of satiating sexual desire. What makes these real-time sites unusual is that through the principles of memetics, humor can meet sex and laughter can occur simultaneously in the moment of arousal.
This progression is notable for society because viewing sex as a comedic act (during, not after the fact) and females being sexy and witty has always been a conundrum. That someone has attached the sloths from Disney’s Ice Age to what is essentially an Internet foursome 'group show' doesn’t get me wet, but it makes me chuckle. It’s also a subtle reminder of the camming world’s inhabitants and the finesse they have in mutating culture.
There have been great strides in the acronymic language of chatrooms being adapted by pop culture at-large. Internet slang leaves us with broken-down fragments- What is this I don’t even and Relationship goals af- that sound like the creation of a teenager with too many fingers. This leads me to believe the term “bb” originated in chatrooms by one-handed men.
Sadly, I don’t think Internet meme culture has accepted or acknowledged camming past 4chan’s finest micro-celebrities: Cracky-chan (‘05), Creepy-chan (‘05), Loli-chan (‘06), and Boxxy (‘09). These girls (now women) paved the way for female-dominated forums and image-boards like Chanchan, now Chansluts, which later added Camwhores Male and Tranchan to the menu.
Boxxy/Catie Wayne
There’s an endless waterfall of derivatives found only in chatrooms that directly reference larger meme culture. Camgirls, as a collective whole, earn points through generating macros of Scumbag Steve, Good Guy Greg, and snowclones of ‘One Does Not Simply.’ But the Camgirl herself, the woman, has fallen from the throne of being the meme-spiration.
As a woman, I have always felt like the consumer of Internet memes as opposed to a disseminator. #RealCamgirlMemes is a project I started that includes stills of stolen footage from my webcam stream overlaid with chat-specific text. They’re derivative in that they mimic the typographic style, contain a non-celebrity figure (it me), and their potential for viral status is halted due to their insular and pay-to-play community. Although they are accessible to a wide audience via other social networks, the humor is most potent if you are a chatroom participator or a Camgirl yourself.
My argument is not that my meme-inspired imagery is an instance of Internet phenomena, but that the very use of meme’d-up contemporary culture to visually describe one’s sexual arousal in an ironic manner has become the phenomena. The flirting and teasing done in comment sections with yellow-skinned emojis leads up to the courting-by-screenshots in our DMs and texts. Sending a meme in response to another meme in response to another meme becomes a game of anticipating reactions replacing our need for verbal communication. The adult chatroom predates our current erotic social media usage and is responsible for those “Snapchat me that pussy…” requests from randoms.
I’m lubing up my buttplug now and HerpleDerp69 just posted in the chat:
