New French-German Camgirls Documentary
Every time I have the urge to post on Instagram, I’m gonna post here instead, because I’m tired of putting my content on another billionaire’s platform, where I’m at the mercy of an algorithm that doesn’t love me.
Instagram made it so that you have to be 18 to view my account, which means going in your settings and putting in your birthdate, which very few people know to do. So the 600+ followers I have there, who started following before this happened, are probably not seeing my posts anymore.
All because I posted a spanking bench. God forbid someone see furniture. 🙄 If I’d have known they’d mark me “adult” anyway, I would’ve posted a lot more than that!
Since my account was marked “adult” on Instagram, my engagement has been nonexistent, so why would I waste my words on that platform? 🤔
Especially when the creator and profiteer of that platform is up Trump’s ass? 😑
If I’m screaming into the void anyway, I might as well do it on my own site where I can post whatever I want. 🤷🏼♀️
Anyway…
On Monday I’m being filmed in my home for a French-German documentary about camgirls and the early internet, which I’m equal parts nervous and excited about.
I’m excited because I get to talk about my favourite subject with an interested party for a few hours. I’m also excited because they want to know about the Camgirl Museum concept and film my paper archives, which may attract some helpers to the project.
I don’t want to fill it with just vintage Sunny content or crown myself thee authority on camgirl history. It’s a big internet, lots of it in other languages even, and I can’t pretend to have known everyone and everything, so it would be nice to have helpers with other perspectives and skills.
Especially once streaming came along. I had to draw a line somewhere or I would have been even poorer from buying printer ink, paper, and new printers over the years. I had to let the streaming & social media girls rely on themselves/each other for preserving their own history.
I also didn’t feel their history was at such risk of being erased from the internet the way ours was. The sites they were/are on still exist and are largely “corporate”. I figured companies can keep their own history, I didn’t need to go broke doing unpaid labour keeping it for them.
The portals and websites we were on, were run by real people, not corporate entities.
Since the documentary interview is on Monday, I’ve been going through my archive today, reading through a thick folder named “Negative Press”, to further break it down into smaller more manageable sub-categories, like “Teen Camgirls” (akin to TikTok teens today), or straight up “Misogyny”, just to name two.
I actually forgot how mean people on the internet were to us for daring to be women on the internet seeking compensation for our labour, that folks, for better or for worse, found entertaining, whether we were 15 or 25, clothed, scantily clad, or naked. The hate and harassment was the same for all of us, like digital rape, in a sense that it happened regardless of who we were, what we were wearing or how we presented ourselves. If you were a girl or woman with a webcam, you were a certain segment of the internet’s punching bag
How that’s even possible to forget, I have no idea, the pages and pages of articles and blog posts I read today paint a pretty hostile picture. It made me recall how it felt to walk on eggshells in regards to what we could write on our sites, LiveJournals, or in our cam captions, for fear of another wannabe “internet celebrity” or gossip site flaming us in a public blog post.
Because like Big Sean once said, “drama makes for the best content”, and honestly, most of them had little else to offer.
I haven’t even opened the InternetGossipDotNet or Cam-Mafia (dotCom? dotOrg? can’t remember off the top of my head bc it was shorter lived) folders yet to see what flaming bags of shit surprises I saved for posterity. 🙄
I do hope I printed out that time InternetGossipDotNet named me trailer trash of the week. My apartment had handmade paneling, made out of actual wood, that my great grama had put on the walls in the ‘70s, that showed in the background of my cam photos, so the site spun this fictional tale that I lived in a trailer (not that there’s anything wrong with that, tbh. 🤷🏼♀️) When I clapped back, they apologized.
I probably didn’t save it though, honestly, I saved so little of my own stuff, not that there was much. I did find this embarrassing interview I did with a web zine in 2002 on the Wayback Machine recently, though. I don’t remember doing it at all, and now I wonder what else I’ve forgotten about myself!
Tomorrow is the twice monthly shibari workshop Harold and I host, where I spend 3 hours sitting at the front door taking names and cash, and making sure street people don’t wander in. I’m going to bring a few folders from my Camgirl Museum archive to read and notate while I do, both to prepare for the documentary, but also because I’ve decided to work on the cam book again, after setting it aside for 20 years.
The documentary made me realize my priorities were out of whack, and that instead of trying really hard to make SunnyGrrrl work, with pretty much 0 success, for numerous reasons, maybe it was time to focus on the book. Maybe now is finally the right time for that book to happen, for our story to be told.
I mean, Theresa Senft’s 2008, out-of-print book that focuses on the “micro celebrity” aspect of camming, can’t be the definitive text on us.
I mean, Theresa Senft’s 2008, out-of-print book that focuses on the “micro celebrity” aspect of camming, can’t be the definitive text on us.
So that’s what’s up. Now it’s time for me to eat an ice cream sandwich and go to sleep, so I can get up early for rope. Peace out, Girl Scouts!
