I Had ONE Job! ☝️😅
Monday was the documentary shoot for the new French-German documentary on camgirls and the early internet. I work nights, so I requested that the shoot be in the afternoon, not quite realizing how late that would make things for the crew in Paris – 8pm, meaning that when we wrapped around 6pm my time, it was actually 11:30pm their time! Such dedication! Which is a good sign! It means they really care about the project and the subject matter!
The day started out pretty chill, I got up before my alarms, because I was excited, greeted Smudge, then had an “everything shower” and blow dried my hair to make it straighter and give it more volume. I forgot to use any kind of product because I so rarely do this step in my “getting ready” process. Whoops! I also forgot to put on any kind of necklace! Double whoops! Failure to pay attention first thing in the morning! 😅 But I did remember to put a colourful sticker over my continuous glucose monitor!
After blow drying my hair, I fed Smudge, grabbed the clothes I’d laid out for myself the night before, sat behind my desk in the carport, put on my Winter 2025 Spotify Playlist, and got dressed.
The outfit I chose to wear for the day was a black floofy skirt, with a black tank top, and an aqua lace babydoll overtop, with fishnets that had a skull and crossbones pattern, and my black, almost knee high Doc Martens. Oh and obviously my black, faux leather cat ears that have white stitching, as well as my black framed glasses. This is one of my favourite outfits and with all the pink in my carport, I wanted to stand out.
Once dressed, with cat ears firmly in place, I opened up my pink, 3-panel, LED makeup mirror that Harold got me for Christmas, grabbed my now vintage, pink Powerpuff Girls makeup bag that I’ve literally been using since 1999, and started curling my eyelashes. My friend and fellow OG camgirl Belinda hates eyelash curlers with a passion, so I think of her every single time I do this, and it makes me smile.
I’m not good at makeup, I’ve watched a few YouTube tutorials but they just made me feel dumb, like, I’m an artist, this should not be hard for me, but alas, makeup is not in my wheelhouse. So, my “face” consists of eyelid primer, black eyeliner on the top only, one colour of eye shadow, and mascara. Upon pondering eye shadow colours to match my outfit, I realized…if my babydoll looked green on camera, trolls could green screen me to death! There’s a reason you rarely see aqua or turquoise on TV! I had to rethink my WHOLE DAMN OUTFIT I thought I’d figured out a week ago! At the last minute! Fuuuck! PIVOT! 💫😵💫💫
After almost crying, I ended up going with this outfit, which is what I wore to one of Harold’s gigs in the fall and was a crowd-pleaser on Instagram when I posted it:
After consulting my peeps on my Discord server on whether or not silver eye shadow would look good on video and settling on a glittery yellow “to make [my] eyes pop”, according to one of them, I let the robot vacuum loose in the carport, went over my 11 pages of handwritten notes based on the interview questions Claire, the producer of the documentary, sent 3 days prior, while I waited anxiously for Jack, the cameraman from Toronto, to arrive.
Once Jack got here, no time was wasted in getting set up because we didn’t have an infinite amount of light considering as it was 2pm and the sun sets here around 5pm. He hadn’t been here 10 minutes before he kissed Smudge on the head, which was ADORABLE and HILARIOUS and a good sign, then he set up and pointed a trillion watt light through the window in my carport, spilling golden light all over me and my desk. Then he set up his camera and giant tripod diagonally opposite to my desk.
Clearly, the goal was to make it look like sunrise for some reason, which seemed like a weird choice, like to fake something in a documentary, but okay! I guess that’s how things are done now, in the age of social media, where influencers fake timelines all the time! Maybe it’s always been done this way! 🤷🏼♀️ Plus, it could have looked totally different on camera, and maybe they wanted 100% artificial light they could control, in case they wanted/needed to shoot me again, for continuity.
Once everything was set, I clicked the link Claire e-mailed me and started their Zoom-like program, called Riverside, on my MacBook.
Riverside worked perfectly and Claire popped up on the right side of my screen, with me on the left. She briefly pointed the cam to the director, Camille, who was sitting on a couch across the room and waved, then turned it back on herself for the interview. I’m honestly not sure what Camille was doing or what she could see or hear as she was backlit on the cam and I could really only see the shape of her. 🤷🏼♀️
Claire explained, in her French accent, that they were 2 years into this project, and that they’d already interviewed Ducky Doolittle, Ana Voog, and someone I don’t think I know who was previously a camgirl back in the day, but who is now a camboy still making content.
After the interview began, was when I realized I framed my cam really poorly because either me or Jack moved my MacBook to get a better shot of it from the back, and I forgot to readjust it. Dammit! I didn’t want to adjust the cam after we started the interview for continuity reasons, so I just left it even though it was bugging the shit out of me the whole time. I figured if it was bugging them, they could have asked me to move it. 🤷🏼♀️ Too much ceiling! I had ONE job in the aesthetics of the filming and I fucked it up because I was nervous! 😫 I normally excel at making pretty pictures! I also forgot to take a screenshot of the interview even happening! UGH! I suck!
As for the actual interview, the shoot itself was fun, it’s nice to sit there and talk about your favourite subject with an interested party for 4 hours, but I think I said 5% of the things I wanted to say, and I said them poorly, so I’m gonna assume I’ll end up on the cutting room floor after all that. I feel I ended up being a terrible ambassador for the community, for a few reasons:
- I hate being on video, especially if I can see myself during recording.
- I hate Zoom and I don’t take or make phone calls from/to literally anyone – not Harold, not even my best friend – except customer service for important shit like utilities, taxes, doctors or dentists.
- I’m an introverted textibitionist, I’m not a social, well-spoken person.
- I’m a 320×240 static camgirl who quit camming when streaming became the only option.
- This documentary came out of nowhere, I had less than a week to prepare, and had a number of prior commitments that prevented me from devoting 100% of my attention to doing so.
I did it because they said they were interested in the Camgirl Museum and my archives, and I really need help with that project if it’s to go anywhere before I’m 65. 🫵❓
The producer, Claire, sent me the list of questions 2 days before the interview, and I made notes to reference during the interview the night and morning before, but in the moment it all just sort of went out the window and I could never find what I was looking for fast enough to answer from my notes. It all had to come out of my brain, which felt about as reliable as a goldfish’s. 😕
The other thing is that, I was speaking to someone who wasn’t there for any of this and knew very little, piecing together digital history from our verbal stories. I couldn’t just show them what a cam portal looked like or how iFrames worked, I had to explain and describe them to the best of my ability, before I could tell any stories about them. So much of it was like that, where I felt like I spent over half the interview just desperately trying to give context. 😒 I’m sincerely worried they didn’t get anything good or usable out of me.
Another thing is that the questions weren’t exactly linear as far as timelines. Like I don’t think I got across that Ana Voog (who is also in the doc) and I are different “generations” of camgirls, from different “eras” in camming, even though the technology was the same, we only started 4 years apart, and there was overlap in the years we were active.
I also said a stupid thing that I hope won’t get used, or at least taken out of context.
It was either when they asked me how I felt about the OG camgirls who have started making content again in their 40’s, or it could have been when they asked me about “taking back the internet”, but basically I said something like, I was thrilled to see this happen because “Ana and I are like, the only visible ones left from back then!” 🤦🏼♀️
What I meant, and communicated poorly, was that very few OG camgirls and “internet celebrities” from 2001 are still making content, especially under the same name today, as they did back then, and are as easily found as Ana and I. I can only think of Belinda Short, Tousled Elegance, Goddess Lilith and Halcyon Pink, off the top of my head, who, like Ana and I, never stopped making content and are still visible “internet personalities” from back then. I’m sure there are more and I’m just not thinking of them tho! (Which is why I need help with the Camgirl Museum! 🙏)
One of the things they asked, was if camgirls were feminist back in the day, and I said something like, “it’s funny you mention that because I just dug something out of the archives! Were we feminist? No! Well, we were, but we wouldn’t have called it that”, then I went on to explain that on a white male dominated internet, “feminist” was a dirty word, and since our audience was primarily men, we didn’t usually use it or get on “girl power” soap boxes. If we did, we’d be hammered down by trolls. Some of those trolls were misogynist women…but most of us didn’t even know there was a word for that yet. We were teens and 20 year olds!
I hate saying this so much 😬, but the page I had on my site for the book on cam culture I was gonna write in 2003, even said (paraphrasing) “this book is NOT feminist bullshit” because people, camgirls and our viewers, probably would not have participated in my research if it didn’t. ☹️
Claire seemed thrown off by this, which I understand – how could a large group of “modern,” intelligent women not be feminist? But it makes sense when you consider what Ana Voog told me she already said in the documentary: that we were a wave of women on the internet suddenly capturing the world’s attention, coming into focus just a bit after “girl power” saturated the media. She pointed out, as she did back then, that we could have united for a single day, displaying the same feminist message on our cams at the same time, and how that would get the world’s attention, but the idea never gained momentum. Instead, she was ridiculed, by men and women alike, for even suggesting it. 😔
Unfortunately, I think for my “generation” of camgirls – the girls and women of the e/n scene that came after Ana – “feminist” came with too much stigma, and potential grief online. We’d seen how Jenni and Ana were treated, which is exactly why the closest things I could remember us doing in that vein were purely for dumb, lulzy reasons. Like the time around 10-15 of us on CamwhoresDotCom turned ourselves into t-shirt ninjas, updating our cams with photos of ourselves wearing t-shirts on our heads and faces, leaving our audience completely bewildered since they weren’t in on the joke. Funny yes, but feminist? Not so much.
(Censored by me because I do not have permission to post Trisha’s bare tits. 🤷🏼♀️)
None of this is to say we weren’t feminist, most of us just didn’t claim the label. Camgirls, Camwhores in particular, did all kinds of things for each other and for the community that were definitely for women by women, and I tried to explain this to Claire the best I could. Since she’d never heard of Stile Project, Portal 9, or Camwhores, I’m pretty sure I just sounded crazy talking about people cooking kittens in Asia. 😵💫
The thing that sucks, is that there’s not much on the internet anymore explaining what those sites were, or their association to/impact on cam culture, that the documentary crew can just google up and read about! So I guess I’ll just remain sounding crazy until I have a chance to write about them myself for the Camgirl Museum. Y’know, in my infinite free time. 🙄
The only questions that made me really feel useful were “why is archiving important?”, “did you face misogyny and violence?”, “how did you defend yourself?”, “when did you get the impulse for archiving?”, “why does it matter?” and “why does it matter that we ‘take the internet back’ from billionaires and start posting again?” Those questions didn’t require 20 minutes of backstory each, like most of the other questions.
Then there’s the fact that we simply didn’t have enough time to go through all of the questions because suddenly it was 11:30pm in France and Claire was fading, so we needed to wrap up.
I did get to talk about the things camgirls pioneered, how I learned how to build websites, how camgirls often ripped off each other’s code and layouts and would get pissed at each other over it (but also explained that that was how the internet was built – good ol’ right click—>view source), and also about gossip sites.
I talked about how I thought it was really unfair that our web design and writing skills were often overlooked on the assumption that “tits=hits”, so that must have been the only reason people were visiting our sites. The fact that my audience has been 55% women since the LiveJournal days never supported that!
I talked a bit about how I made money as a camgirl over the years (or more to the point, didn’t), and about dudes buying out my entire Amazon wishlists on the regular, but how it was never about the money for most of us, and that I only ever made about $4500 US total the entire 15 years I was on Camwhores.
I told them that we were just “naked nerds”, which Claire loved and we had a good laugh over. I’ve honestly been using that term to describe us for so long, I forgot it was funny! 😂
I told them that whenever Ana’s piece in Vice gets recirculated, people in the comments say that what she did was impossible back then, that it’s fake news and she’s a liar, but that in reality, she had 7 fucking phone lines running into her apartment! I also told them about how Steph The Geek had an interactive map on the front page of her site, that showed her precise geolocation from her phone in real time, in an era before smartphones existed! And both women built their own websites! Naked nerds!
Claire mentioned how they had been curious in the beginning, if there had been any French camgirls back in the day, and when they searched, they could only really find…and I interrupted her and said, “Sandrine?” because I knew exactly who she was talking about.
Sandrine was on Camwhores with us, but never interacted with the tagboard (chat) or community there, so I never “knew” her, except from what I saw on her cam every day. A lot of girls just added their cams to as many cam portals as possible but never actually went to or interacted with the community, or they did, but it was on a different site. Sandrine was one of these girls, likely because I don’t think she spoke English. So technically, we cammed together for years, she just probably didn’t know it!
I’ll put the notes I was trying – and utterly failing – to follow, based on the questions I was sent before the interview at the end of this post. Keep in mind we barely scratched the surface of any of this because I was told to explain everything as if the interviewer didn’t know anything, and then it turned out Claire really didn’t know a lot about the e/n1 scene.
She even seemed surprised we pioneered online payment systems! I didn’t even get into the fact we’re the canaries in the coal mine in regards to free speech on the internet or why that’s especially important right now!
Ugh! So much to cover! So much we didn’t cover! So little time! Too much distance! I’m so awkward! I hate being on video! I’m sure I sounded super stupid! Ahhhhhh! 🫣
After Claire and I wrapped up, it was 5:30pm my time and I was exhausted from struggling to feel understood for ~2.5 hours, feeling like I’d done nothing but flounder the whole time. I knew it was too late to take anything back or try again, so I just had to roll with it and ~*let it gooooooo!*~
Even though the interview was over, Jack and I weren’t finished the shoot. The documentary crew in France wanted some footage of me and Smudge interacting, then they needed footage of me typing on my keyboard, so I opened Bluesky and started typing dumb shit:
In hindsight, we should have used my iMac keyboard because it’s pink. We used my MacBook keyboard because it was in front of me at the time and it’s a silvery champagne colour, which is pretty boring. Another missed opportunity! *sad trombone* Jack did say that throughout the interview, you could see the stickers I make and sell on the back of my MacBook though! I tried to add a couple more before the shoot started, but there was no room!
Jack also said my carport/office “photographed beautifully”, which made me feel good because this is my favourite place.
After filming me typing, we needed to film the Camgirl Museum’s paper archive and me going through it on my daybed with all my Squishmallows, which was fun because I have some real gems in there. It’s super organized, I’m very proud of it, and I was excited to show it to someone because so far the only people who have seen it is like, Harold and my former husband, and not in any kind of detail.
Once we were finished filming the archive, I really wanted to smoke a joint, so I told Jack I’d brb, and went outside to my chair in the outer part of the carport to do so. While I did that, he was inside filming Smudge, and random things on my walls and desk, for b-roll.
When I went inside, Jack said they wanted drone footage of me walking to my house from down the street, in the snow, and going inside. So I put on my scarf, coat, and mukluks and did just that, even though it felt totally weird not knowing where the drone was or what Jack was seeing and snow was flying in my face! 😂
I was also a bit nervous about showing my “front door” area because I’ve been reorganizing and renovating the house – I just got all new windows 3 days before the shoot – so there’s debris all over the place outside under the carport, that’s just waiting until spring so we can call the township to take it away. There’s too much snow right now to put it on the side of the road. My hope is that enough of it was covered by snow it won’t be prominent! 🤞
After recording me walking into my house a couple of times with the drone, Jack packed up all his gear, said goodbye to Smudge, and went to leave, but it had snowed so much while we were inside shooting, that the plow had gone through and pushed more snow into the end of my driveway. Jack hailed from Toronto, where there is NO snow, and one of the last times there was a significant amount of snow there, they called a state of emergency. So, when I offered to guide him out and then to “just gun it”, he was like, “newp, this is a rental car”, and opted to grab a shovel and dig his way out instead. He was not even wearing a winter coat or boots! 🙀
I assume he made it home okay. I also assume Claire and Camille have gotten the footage by now. I have not heard from anyone how it went, so for now, I’m left speculating until they reach out. Jack mentioned they had a meeting scheduled for Wednesday with someone and were hoping to be able to show that person/those people clips from my interview, so I don’t expect to hear from them until at least Friday.
Maybe later this week I’ll write a post about how this documentary experience was vastly different from the one we shot in 2005, the finished product of which I only saw myself for the first time maybe 2 years ago and have never written about.
Or maybe I’ll save that for the book! 😘🤔
Here are my notes that I made the night before and morning of the interview. Sorry my writing is crap!
- “e/n” means “everything/news” or “everything/nothing” and was a term used to describe the content and subject matter of our websites, which would later go on to be commonly called “blogs”. ↩︎
