Even though I’m not usually a cams customer, I must confess a serious fascination with the effects that camming and cams performers have had on our erotic visual culture. This should be no surprise to you, my loyal readers. After twenty years of sex blogging, it ought to be obvious that I usually view culture through a porn lens, and especially an erotic art lens.

Thus, it’s barely noteworthy when I look up from my pixel-stained workspace and mutter something like “Hey! I’ve been noticing this new phenomenon popping up all over in erotic art. I’ve known about it for years, didn’t give it much thought, but gee, if I’m seeing a lot of porn of it, I guess it’s becoming culturally important?”

I’m so old, I actually used to do this about things I saw in glossy paper porn magazines. But that, as the man in the airplane said, is not what’s important now. No, this is a blog post about how camgirls (and camboys, this isn’t a gendered observation) started cropping up as the erotic focus of the porn I was seeing. Before that, when I thought about camsites like RabbitsCams at all, I thought of them as “this new thing that’s giving old-fashioned pornographers fits and empowering performers”. That was true, but it didn’t capture the extent to which camming itself, rather than the sexy stuff performers would do for us, had become an eroticized transaction.

To offer an example from the late 20th century, consider the humble cell phone. My first one wasn’t smart, and didn’t flip, but it was a sexy curved slab from Nokia in bright yellow plastic, about the size of two bars of bath soap. I loved my cell phone, but I didn’t eroticize it. If you saw cell phones in porn, they were props that signaled “rich bastard”. They weren’t sexy, although as signifiers for money, they certainly didn’t hurt. And then, surfing the early web, especially the amateur porn upload sites, I started seeing the cell phone eroticized within the porn: inserted like a sex toy, and sometimes misusing its in-built vibratory features. And that’s when I knew: this is an important cultural thing. As, indeed, it proved to be.

Image credits, top to bottom:

The 3D callipygian beauty flashing her snatch through the webcam on her laptop is by MissfittedArfist. The anal vibe camshow is by Dmitrys. The couples-sex shoot with the good lighting is by Reizstan. The gay sexcam show is by CoocooChan. The deliciously-meta flashing-boobs blowjob mirror-selfie being viewed on a phone held by large male fingers is by Laliberte.

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