For the first few weeks after I started watching Chaturbate, these were some of the people I watched. Chaturbate is a live webcam site that launched in 2011. It distinguishes itself from the many other live webcam sites by its democratic approach. It is free to watch  really free, as in no logging in or setting up passwords  and open to everyone of legal age. Its tabs offer Females, Males, Couples, Groups, and Transsexuals. To start broadcasting, a person has only to register a name and beam herself to the world, eating Chipotle. Total sexual anarchy is forestalled by a zealous volunteer police force of users, who operate along the lines of Wikipedia moderators, reporting and shutting down any performers who look suspiciously underage or who break one of Chaturbates few rules  the usual bans on violence, animals, and excrement.
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Chaturbate first revealed its potential to be something I had not seen before the morning I watched a 27-year-old woman named Elisa Death Naked broadcast from a house in Iceland with glass bricks, a spiral staircase, warm-looking patterned rugs, and a cozy fire crackling in the fireplace. She did not reveal her face, and instead wore, at the beginning of her striptease, a rubber horse mask with a fedora on top, along with a gray crop top, black sweatpants, and rainbow knee socks. Her primary props were a chair painted with a replica of the Mona Lisa and a strap-on dildo. Maybe it was just the house that she was in or her high-definition camera, but even faceless she gleamed with the well-being that emanates wherever per-capita consumption of fish oils is high and citizens benefit from socialized health care. Her sex show, however, was strange.
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Chaturbate was aserendipitous experience  I came across people like Edith and Elisa Death Naked by chance, and sometimes I would never see them again. Some performers would schedule showsone woman had a cooking show, a sex and cooking show, every Fridaybut most didnt. You werent supposed to record anything, although of course people did, and the porn tubes were filled with videos ripped from Chaturbates streams. Still, the feeling of clicking through the 18+ disclaimer into the opening matrix was the one of turning on MTV in the mid-1990s, when music videos played most of the day and kept viewers captive in the anticipation of a favorite performer or a new discovery. Or maybe, to reach farther back in time, it recalled the early days of the internet  the internet of strangers rather than friends. The earliest chat rooms on CompuServe, back in the early 1980s, had been called CB, in honor of the communicative free-for-all of CB radio. Here Chaturbate had revived the form, with the same initials, and the same cacophony of ingenuity and perversion.
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When Max and Harper get frustrated with their off-the-grid life, they usually evoke the specter of OfficeMax. Or sometimes, after a particularly enthusiastic session of sex on camera, they might high-five, and one will ask the other, Want to quit and go work at OfficeMax? The joke is about all thats wrong in the world, to Harper and Max: big-box stores in concrete lots, the drudgery of the dead-end hourly wage, beige filing cabinets, obedience, the myth that hard work for a multinational corporation will be rewarded in any significant way.
Chaturbate was a sexual story, but it was also an economic one. The site offers a very clear picture of a society where wages are so low that they are no longer worth striving for, where ambitious young people cannot advance their educations without going into debt, and where the misfortune of illness results in financial catastrophe. For the people in phases of their lives where they had to serve as a caretaker to an ill partner or relative, the sex work offered flexibility, even if their earnings were often unpredictable or paltry. Other people I interviewed, like a woman from upstate New York who went by the username of JingleTits, were in their early 20s and saw themselves in an intermediary phase between high school and a hoped-for future in college. It was frustrating to be told of their concrete career ambitions and the extreme financial challenges they faced in achieving them simply because their families were unable to assist them with the exorbitant cost of higher education. Those young people who had gotten college educations found themselves questioning the worth of their degrees, and their attitude toward sex camming seemed to come from a kind of nihilism: Masturbating on camera for money was less humiliating and offered more opportunities for meaningful and creative endeavor than the jobs they saw as available to them.
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Chaturbate, meanwhile, changed its rules. Public sex  a mainstay for Harper and Max, who broadcast from hayfields and rest stops, from McDonalds, Starbucks, Walmart, and even a McDonalds inside of a Walmart  is no longer allowed. Tired of the hustle of Chaturbate, of the unpredictability of tipping, they have found a new income stream, a website called Clips 4 Sale that caters to obscure sexual fetishes. Harper and Max now spend their days recording clips appealing to people with fetishes about women doing things in aprons or ripping off their clothes. Harper has climbed the charts and for a time became the number one belcher on the site. They make foot-fetish videos with Vibram barefoot running sneakers. They live happily on an income that has ranged from $400 to $2,000 a month. Their plan is to buy a bus and eventually a piece of land. They call it the quest.
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Some people might look at Max and Harper, or anybody on Chaturbate, and disagree. They might think of clean sheets, a well-made bed, a clearly defined partner, and a closed door and think that they know exactly what sex is  loving, maybe; monogamous, probably; dignified by its secrecy; more authentic for not being shared; sacred because its not mediated through a cell phone. Spend enough time on Chaturbate and such a view starts to feel both rarified and unambitious.
Some people limit their internet sexuality to the private sphere of sexting or video chats with long-distance lovers. Others choose to meet their virtual partners in a semi-anonymous public forum. When mediated bodies can inhabit the same temporal dimension, the distinct purposes of porn, sex work, casual sex, internet dating, and social networking start to blur. Right now I see being sexual on the internet as a bold and risky form of performance. I anticipate that in the future it will just be thought of as sex.
