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My Life as Sex Worker Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About Money


If I didn’t work, I didn’t earn—there is no paid time off when you’re a sex worker. Sick days meant no money, so I cammed as much as I could, sometimes seven nights a week.

Some nights I made $900, some nights I made $25. Some months I made $6,000, others I made just $1,500. One month I made over $15,000, while a few months I barely made anything. My total income depended directly on how much I worked, how much energy I put into my shows, and—especially—how much time I put into maintaining my relationships outside of business hours.

Over all, in my year and a half as a cam girl, I earned over $100,000.

Step 4: Keep My Clients Happy

Building relationships with all my viewers was critical to maintaining an engaging room, but with some, my relationships were much more complicated. The bulk of my income came from “whales”—regulars with deep pockets and generous spending habits. Whales often tipped large: $125, $200, $300 at a time. Their tips had the potential to grow my income and stature in the industry, but they often tipped unpredictably, sometimes for nothing in particular.

Generally whales wanted more—emotional care-taking, private sessions, access to my personal life. If neglected, they would leave, and the loss of their support could cause my rank on the site to plummet. Whales took up a significant amount of my time, and I couldn’t incorporate them into my standard income calculations. If I didn’t build a relationship with a big tipper, if I neglected them, or if I failed to figure out what they liked fast enough, they’d quickly move onto someone else.

Step 5: Learn My Lesson

Camming taught me how to run a business. I learned to be entrepreneurial, to make a living off my creativity and self-expression. I learned about tax law, self-employment, digital marketing, the importance of a savings account and the difference between gross and net profit. I learned how to take a risk on myself.

More than anything, I learned how much work it takes to make porn and to be a successful sex worker. I learned that everything the movies taught me was fake: no rich clients fell out of the sky, no one mailed me piles of jewelry “just because,” no one gave me a million dollars for a smile.

Being a cam girl was the hardest job I’ve ever had. So, the next time you find yourself enjoying the content that sex workers make, compensate them—pay for your porn and tip your strippers well. Sex work is work. And, as it turns out, hard work at that.

Isa Mazzei is a screenwriter, producer, and the author of Camgirl. Follow her at @isaiswrong.



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‘Big Mouth,’ a Cartoon, Has Taught Me More About Menopause Than Any Other Show


A cartoon has somehow taught me more about the female experience than any other show I’ve watched. I’m talking about Netflix’s adult animated comedy Big Mouth, which centers on three teens, Nick, Jessi, and Andrew, going through puberty. Interestingly, the show is doing some serious heavy lifting for feminism—educating both women and men, in hilarious ways, about the realities of the female body. I admit, as a 41-year-old woman, I felt embarrassed at first about watching a cartoon until I realized that Big Mouth covers topics relevant to women’s lives—including, much to my surprise, menopause.

This specifically happens in the fifth episode of season three, when a hormone monster dressed as a witch approaches Andrew’s mom, Barb, who’s sweating for no reason. “The change is coming,” the witch says to her in a maniacal tone. At first Barb has no idea what the witch is talking about, but soon it hits her: menopause. She’s initially terrified of the concept, but the witch, in her own bizarre way, eases Barb’s concerns. I’ll reveal how she does this in a second, but first I should explain why this episode means so much to me: I’m currently experiencing changes in my own menstrual cycle. And like Barb, I was originally freaked out.

For months now I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. Last winter my periods went from being exactly seven days a month to, now, only three. But when I went to the doctor (a female one, mind you) and asked why this might be happening, she said, “Well, our bodies are not machines. Nothing is perfect.” OK, sure, but my periods have always been machine-like in predictability. So what was the deal?

The witch and Barb in Big Mouth

Netflix

It wasn’t until I spoke to my older sister that I found out what was going on. “Night sweats, weird periods—you’re in perimenopause,” she told me. “Nobody warned me about this crap either.” This was the worst thing she could’ve told me—or so I thought. You see, thanks to TV and movies—and a complete lack of sex education, but that’s a rant for later—I’ve dreaded menopause for as long as I can remember. The general consensus seems to be that menopause turns women into perpetually angry monsters who are always hot. Think back to the episode of Sex and the City where Samantha receives an unsolicited magazine in the mail about approaching menopause. She views this as a death sentence, and relief comes only at the end, when she gets her period.

My ingrained, internalized misogyny has convinced me to fear menopause as the time when women become “dried-up,” “unfuckable” hags who can’t have babies. But Barb’s story in Big Mouth makes me see it in whole new light, as something I should maybe look forward to.



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My Life As a Cam Girl Taught Me About Pleasure, Consent, and Healing


For two years, my days looked something like this: sleep late, buy props, clean my room, get online, do my show, get naked. This was my life as a cam girl.

I had always been fascinated by sex work. I was sexual. I was seductive. I was the girl who took her clothes off at parties. I was the girl who wanted to be wanted. I was the girl who needed attention—sexual attention—all the time. It would have shocked anyone who knew me to know that I never actually got any pleasure from sex. It was the control I craved—the sex at the end felt obligatory. The truth was, in my teens and early twenties, I didn’t know how to experience pleasure. I liked everything around sex but I didn’t enjoy sex itself. It was difficult to reconcile—so for years, I didn’t.

Sex work seemed like an enticing and empowering idea—a way to be desired so much men would pay me for my company and worship my sexuality in a transaction where my pleasure was irrelevant. The perfect job.

Only one problem: I had no idea how or where to get started. Then I learned about sugar daddies— found one on a sugar daddy dating website. We had a lot of fun together, but ultimately, I wanted more from my career in sex work. One night, I was talking to him about the fact that I wanted to try being a stripper. “Have you heard of cam girls?” he asked. I hadn’t.

Being a cam girl meant many different things, I soon discovered. Many cam girls perform sex acts and erotic activities via webcams for money. Many also paint, sing, make art, build friendships and communities, emotionally support clients, and more. I fell in love with what I saw these performers doing, so I made a profile on an upscale subscription-based cam site, built a cam identity, and signed on. I was pumped.

The first site I worked on had a culture based on privates—where viewers paid by the minute for my time. During privates, viewers made specific requests of me, which I pressured myself to comply with, for fear of them ending the private show. I felt like I’d felt almost every time I’d had sex IRL—like I was just going along with what they wanted because I was pressured into it either by the other person, or by society, or by myself. In all of those situations, I told myself I had seduced them, egro I needed to have sex with them. Now, I was being paid—I owed the viewers.

This was not the empowering sex work I had pictured but I wasn’t ready to give up on camming yet. I wanted to feel more agency over my sexuality, so I joined a different cam site. This one was free and based on “tips” for various acts: Tip to set the music in my room. Tip to dim the lights. Tip to tell a joke or sing a song. Tip to show my breasts. Tip to have me touch them. Tip to bring out a sex toy. Tip to use it. I created the menu and set the prices.

Every night I performed for my webcam, putting on quirky shows, trying out an arsenal of sex toys, chatting with the viewers in my room, building a community of regulars. Within months, I became ranked among the top 100 cam girls on the site.

The author during her camgirl days.

Courtesy of Isa Mazzei

This is what I had been looking for. Camming was this structure where I not only set boundaries but I enforced them. Just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, I said who, I said when, I said how much. It gave me a sense of value of my body and more importantly, camming gave me control over that value in a way that was really powerful. It was a safe space to exist not only as a sex worker but as a sexual person.



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Lauren Lapkus: How My '90s TV Deep-Dive Taught Me to Live in the Present


Catch actor, comedian, and Raised By TV podcast host Lauren Lapkus in Between Two Ferns: The Movie, streaming now on Netflix.

There’s nothing like snuggling up in front of the TV and unwinding with a good memory. I can nuzzle into the wedge of my couch with a faux-fur blanket and relive my childhood spent within the halls of Bayside High, on the window seat of Clarissa’s bedroom, sitting in the cozy booths of the Peach Pit, staring at the top of Stimpy’s beautiful, red butt.

For me, the words “summer vacation” evoke more memories of Wild N Crazy Kids and Brady Bunch reruns than horseback rides at camp or jumping off docks. (I tried camp once…not enough TVs. Also, I can’t really swim, but we don’t need to get into that now.) Don’t get me wrong: I had exciting summers! I danced outside of the school gym with Zack and Kelly because her dad lost his job and she couldn’t afford to go to prom. I fainted on the treadmill with DJ when she felt she had to lose weight for Kimmy’s pool party. Wakko taught me all the state capitals, and I promptly forgot them (which is probably what he would have wanted).

I watched it all, indiscriminately, everything from Family Matters to Jerry Springer to my favorite of all time (FOAT?), The Oprah Winfrey Show. This was before our attention spans became too short for theme songs, and I can place just about any of them after hearing a few notes, or even just the lyrics spoken without a melody, as I once proved on a friend’s comedy show. (No one was as excited about this as I was, BTW.) The Who’s the Boss? theme song is deeper to me than most Shakespeare:

There is more to life than what you’re living. You take a chance and face the wind. An open road and a road that’s hidden. A brand new life
around the bend.

It brings a tear to my eye to picture that van heading to a new life at Angela’s house. This was the early ’90s—the (first) golden age of television. These shows are fucking perfect. Or…at least that’s how I felt until I started a podcast about all of this.

My Raised By TV co-host, Jon Gabrus, and I both grew up with our faces melting in front of our TVs long before the concept of “screen time” would ruin everything. This core commonality instantly shot him into sibling territory like that little shooting star from “The More You Know.” (Don’t remember a single one of those lessons, either.) Finding that person who will giddily sing the Tiny Toons theme song with you is a special thing. So we started the show raring to jump back into our pasts, to bask in unbridled, nostalgic joy, to relive beautiful moments we had spent alone and realize we actually never were because we both—along with so many others, we’ve learned—had these exact same memories.



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