The Emptiest Sex Cams

For the past several weeks I have been obsessed with live, for-pay sex cam sites. I tried a couple of times to look at them in a sexual way, pulling it while trying to type and chat with the person on the screen, but I’m a cheap skate and it gets expensive very quickly. Not surprisingly, it also gets depressing very quickly. It doesn’t help that the people working, while generally very nice, seem either bored, desperate, sad, or pretending. When you’re stripping (and more) anonymously through the Internet, how could one not feel that way?

Certainly there must a lot of people for whom this line of work is fun, but mostly its seems otherwise. The sexual element, in a base animal way, is still there, but it became impossible to get into it when the performers’ true emotions were so plain.

The more I looked the more interesting it became in an aesthetic and sociological way. There are people from every continent, and you can even choose which one you prefer. It became more a chance to look at how people were dressing, or assess if they were pretending to be happy and enthusiastic. I’d ask myself if they sometimes seemed genuinely happy. Most of all, I found myself studying what kind of space were they working in.

The most amazing one I saw was a school classroom with rows of desks in the background.

Once there was a wide shot of a man’s living room and he was walking out his front door carrying two huge gallon jugs. He had a cat in the room and a disco ball in the background; the cat jumped on the disco ball and knocked it over. This all happened in real time, in what is supposed to be a paid sexual context. It was an amazing moment in life. The man came back in the front door without the jugs, was again on screen, looked at the disco ball, sat down at the cam and cracked open a beer. There was a trumpet next to his desk.

However, in all of this seedy (or not) exploration, the most intriguing scenes were when a person was not there at all. They had stepped away from the camera for unknown reasons but the camera was still on, showing where they worked.

This happens maybe one percent of the time you pick a video stream. On the sites, there are rows of photos to click on that preview the stream. Sometimes the photo is just the room. It seems like the cam refreshes the image one sees at random every few minutes and sometimes people have stepped away at that moment.

Frequently they have returned and you find them there even though their icon shows an empty room. For me, it was like a treasure hunt to find who was really still gone and take a screen shot.

This whole world seems like it could be the greatest performance art space in human history. It is touching and honest and terrifying and stimulating and enlightening and filled with a dear and challenging sorrow and humor.

Jamie Stewart is the lead singer of Xiu Xiu. This essay was adapted from his blog, where you can listen to a song from his new album, due out in March.