Last week I saw 1st cuts of all three 20-minute episodes of the French docuseries about OG camgirls I was interviewed for this winter, called CAMGAZE, which was sort of awesome! It was pretty surreal to see us taken so seriously! I most definitely hate being recorded and watching myself on video, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out otherwise! They did a lot of research and dug up a tonne of archival footage and audio of media interviews with Jennifer Ringley that really brought her to life for me and underlined the impact of what she did! It was so awesome for me to see because I’d never seen Jenni move or speak before! I’d only ever read about her or seen webcam photos! It was like meeting a penpal for the first time! My nerd heart was so happy! 🤓🩷
Ana Voog, Ducky Doolittle, and myself are the three main subjects of the doc representing OG camgirls, for better or for worse, and we just talk about our experiences throughout, while the French narration tells the overall story of how we technically got from us to where we are today with “content creators”, “influencers”, YouTubers and Twitch streamers. We were the predecessors to all of that!
The documentary rightfully points out, that pre-internet the public, consumable experiences of women were entirely gatekept and filtered through mostly male publishers, editors and media executives. To broadcast or be seen on the airwaves or in print – for your voice to be potentially heard by the masses – was to be chosen. The positions were coveted because they were bestowed upon very few, and especially not given to women and other marginalized groups.
Then the internet was invented. Suddenly tech savvy gen X and xennial girls came along who realized that the internet was a whole new media that could be played with and manipulated to create or express anything we wanted – and we wanted to bare it all, our bodies and our souls. No one could tell us “you can say that”, “you can’t show that”, “you can’t do that”, or “you can’t be that”. Most of our parents didn’t even know what we were doing online. There were no mediators, no – or at least few – middlemen, and no rules. Just expensive bandwidth that we all figured out ways to pay for or have paid for us. For the first time, probably ever, there was nothing standing between a girl and her public audience. We suddenly found ourselves at the mic, in front of a massive crowd of voyeurs waiting to see what we would do, and what came out was completely unaltered and unfiltered, straight from brain to keyboard to a public all eager to consume – and criticize – everything we threw out there.
What this did, was give the public audience a rare glimpse, for maybe the first real time, of girls’ and womens’ inner worlds, the thoughts that would ordinarily stay inside their heads or locked away in personal journals.
It seems so simple and insignificant in light of today’s over-saturated social media “internet”, where everyone, but especially girls and women are creatively displaying and expressing themselves in all kinds of ways on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, and yes, the adult cam and content sites.
The difference between what camgirls were doing in the late 90’s-early 2000s, and what we see our successors doing today, was that when OG camgirls did it, it was unexpected, no one had ever done it before, it never occurred to anyone it could be done, and thus, no one knew how to treat us or how to react. No one predicted us. No one saw us coming. Just one day *poof* one clever woman has the idea, drive, and ability to code her own webcam software and website. This, at a time when there was still so little information on the internet to search, that Google hadn’t even been invented yet. No blog posts or YouTube tutorials showed her how to do it, and obviously nothing like ChatGPT helped her. This knowledge had to come straight from Jenni’s learnings, to her brain, to her keyboard. When her innovative coding challenge was complete, she put herself on display 24/7 and became radically visible online.
A few months later, another bold woman figured it out, Ana Voog, inspired by Jenni. She created a totally different website for herself – let’s call it art – with a totally different look, vibe, and personality, using the exact same media and technology, and she put herself and her world on display 24/7 as well!
People watch the cams, the women “go viral” before that phrase existed, and become “internet famous”. The media and society acts impressed, and some of the press is actually quite positive, but almost all of it is tinged with questions like, “wait a minute, one clever girl was one thing, but now there’s two? How the heck did we let these girls get so clever? And why are they both unhinged enough to want to be surveilled? Why don’t they care if people see them naked or having sex? What is wrong with them to want so much attention? Why are they behaving this way? How can this be good? How can we stop this self-expression from spiralling out of control?” and in some cases, “How can we exploit this? What can we try to make them do for us? How can we apply this to make billions and/or conquer nations?” (That last question is no joke. The first part came from porn entrepreneurs that did turn cam culture into a multi-billion dollar online adult entertainment industry, and the second part was vibes from representatives of the Pentagon asking Jenni and Ana questions at a conference around the time of Y2K.)
Suddenly small, independent software companies started putting out simple to use – if you were already somewhat tech savvy – free or inexpensive webcam software that automatically captured a photo and uploaded it to a server every 30 seconds using FTP, overwriting the previous photo uploaded to the server in the process because the file had the same name every time. This was the exact same type of software that Jenni invented herself in her dorm room, less than a year prior, now for sale/piracy to anyone who wanted to be a camgirl, and knew how, or could find someone, to code the corresponding, and necessary, website to display their cam to the masses.
Naturally, more camgirls popped up, coming in small waves, each with her own unique voice, aesthetic, interests/obsessions, talents, cast of characters and opinions, expressed through her website, where she designed, created, and coded every element herself.
And that is part of what’s lost in the walled gardens of social media, where everything and everyone looks and sounds the same, and the only immediately discernible difference between us is the use of emojis in our profiles. It really does feel like that Apple “1984” commercial to me sometimes, and I’m a crazy lady on the internet with a hammer.
Anyway, after seeing the 1st cuts of CAMGAZE, these thoughts initially came to mind. I’ve only watched all 3 episodes once through, but I expect more thoughts to follow as I rewatch it over the coming months and work on my book. It’s being tweaked and further edited over the summer, and will be available to watch for free on the website for the French TV channel that produced it, I just don’t know when yet. I’ll post here once I do! Please don’t laugh at my goofy, inarticulate ass! 🫣