Ana Voog just showed me this video by a YouTuber named FlunderingChipper, that’s all about the history of women in livestreaming! It features Ana prominently, talks about HereAndNow, LiveJournal, running a live cam on dial up and how hard and expensive that was, having sex on cam in 1997, how Justin.tv became Twitch, and how women founded this whole industry, yet we get no credit for it and camgirls still basically take the most abuse online out of all streamers for doing it! Sounds like nothing’s changed after 25 years! Why is that? 🤔
Camgirls were both put on pedestals, and treated like scum of the internet, in almost equal measure in the 2000s! But since we were the ONLY internet celebrities, it meant more people cared enough to also hate us for “ruining” the internet, or otherwise have an opinion about us. Meanwhile now, there are millions of camgirls all over the internet that civilians don’t even think about as they surf Facebook, and the internet has “real” celebrities and influencers to love/hate on. Back then, it was just us, and the amount of us total at the time, was only about 3-4 digits. The concentration of hate towards us was often palpable, but we wiped our tears with our dollar bills and free, pink laptops, and forged on from our bedrooms. 💪😂
Now the live streaming industry is worth like, over $200 billion dollars! And camgirls are still mostly naked computer nerds camming from their bedroom floors!
The intro to FlunderingChipper’s video seems like a non-sequitur about a video game probably no one reading this has ever heard of, to illustrate a somewhat philosophical debate about the term “simp“, but once she related the term “simp” being unfairly pegged on male cam fans, I got where she was going. That’s been a sentiment since the very beginning between men on the internet regarding camgirls, but all I have to say to that is, some of the cam dudes who would have been labelled as “simps” by other men in 2001, by the shittiest definition of the term, I’m still friends with after 2 decades. What are all the “alpha” dude keyboard warriors from back then doing now, I wonder? Actually no I don’t wonder, I literally could not care less, same as back then. 😂
When FlunderingChipper started enthusiastically geeking out over Ana Voog around 8:00, I was practically screaming and cheering along with her because Ana is my friend! And Ana is amazing! And this girl was only TWO YEARS OLD when Ana started her cam!
How the hell does she even know all this early camgirl stuff?
She said she read Theresa Senft’s book about camgirls that was published in 2008, which was largely written with the participation of camgirls on LiveJournal, many of whom I knew, or knew of, because we ran in the same internet circles (considering those circles were still very small, simple webrings, if you will). I have her book in my Big Box Of Cam Culture (now worth over $50 on Amazon for a paperback! And it’s not even a LONG book!), but I’ve never actually read it because when it came out, I was too busy being a camgirl and trying to just capture and print everything going on around me that I was privy to, that I could, before it all disappeared, not really absorbing any of it. I knew preservation was more important than analysis. I would say that 90% of the printed material I archived from the internet in my office box about cam culture in the late ’90s-mid 2000s, I haven’t actually read, or if I did, I don’t remember any of it. It’s all mostly organized and now labelled, thanks to my new label maker, and I’m hoping to go through it piece by piece and post about it here. Since I never know what to post here or where to begin, maybe I should finally read Theresa’s book and do a review from an OG camgirl’s perspective…🤔 If anyone has any opinions about this, please e-mail me!
Anyway, FlunderingChipper’s video is great, and she really does a good job describing some of our challenges and achievements! If you’re reading this, I bet you’ll like it too! And if you do, here’s a link to her Patreon!
Enjoy the video! Peace out, girl scouts! 😊✌️
PS. The ONLY thing I think she got “wrong”, was that Ana never lived in the HereAndNow house!
