Future Sex (16 page)

She called Chaturbate an “introvert’s paradise.” I asked her how it was that broadcasting her image to thousands of people over the
Internet could appeal to an introvert.

“I have complete control over the situation,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about it escalating physically. I can turn it off whenever I want. I can turn these words on the screen off whenever I want. I can kick people out. I make my own rules, nobody’s telling me what to do. Not that I’m necessarily a control freak, but I’d never had that sexually. I’d
never been in control of a sexual encounter until this, and I think it was something that I definitely needed.”

*   *   *

I met Wendy Bird through Stoner Boner, and it was through Wendy that I came to understand a whole side of Chaturbate that I had not previously contemplated, that there were women—and of course there were—who went on the site not to receive a flood of compliments from perverts
but to perv themselves, to objectify and commune with the legion young men who sat in the glow of a thousand desk lamps in search of a woman, any woman, who might miraculously grace them with some individual sexual attention.

Stoner Boner was a twenty-one-year-old gay man in Alabama, who, when I first talked to him in early 2014, had just reached his first anniversary on Chaturbate. He had joined
the site in 2013 as a joke; two years later he had more than 25,000 followers. Stoner felt that broadcasting sex on a live webcam would become like go-go dancing was in the 1960s, a youthful embarrassment for future offspring to make fun of. “This is going to be the thing with our generation,” he said. “I think cam modeling, or having a porn blog, that’s going to be the thing we did.”

Chaturbate’s
performers might have been a young sexual vanguard but its viewers were frequently of a different generation. One of Stoner Boner’s followers, who also served as a moderator on his website, was Wendy Bird. Wendy was a forty-four-year-old woman in Iowa. She was single, an artist. She had recently left the liberal college town where she had been living and returned to the small town she grew up
in to care for her ailing father. Wendy had never been that interested in computers, but at some point she discovered she liked to guide people through their masturbatory fantasies. One day she was doing one such voice-only session with a man when he said he was going to simulcast the event through his webcam to Chaturbate. Wendy went to the site. “I had never done anything like that and I never
thought I would,” she said. “I was even late to get a cell phone.”

First she just watched, mostly men. Then one day she turned on her camera, trained it on a bookshelf, and began speaking over it. Now, after entering what she called a “hermit phase” of her life, she had discovered “mass intimacy.” People began coming into her chat room and encouraging her. Soon she turned the camera on her mouth
and began doing shows that way. Chaturbate banned her for possibly being underage, “which was kind of funny.” She went through the steps to get her age verified, sending a photo of herself holding her ID next to her face, scanning in a copy of her driver’s license. Finally she put her face on camera and began performing under the name Khaleesi_Heart_ (a reference to
Game of Thrones
). She made
friends, “lifelong close friendships,” through Chaturbate, some of whom she had met in person, though not for sex. One helped her move; another came and visited when he was having some trouble at home.

One night, Wendy Bird, Stoner Boner, and I engaged with what Wendy called “multiperving.” We audio-Skyped with one another while sifting through videos online. Wendy showed me how to set up my
profile to broadcast, and then turn it password-only so I wouldn’t show up on the main site. Then she asked me what I liked. What I
liked
? We scrolled through the matrix of men. They looked so young. “Objectify them,” Wendy encouraged me.

From the beginning of her experience, Wendy had bypassed what she called the “zombie hot girls” that populated the site’s main page. She would go for the men,
but not even the most popular men, instead clicking through to the second or third pages for the real amateurs, the forest of men in desk chairs that I had studiously avoided. It turned out they waited there for a reason. “A lot of the hetero guys are doing it so that they will find someone who will cam-to-cam with them,” she explained, adding that here, where hopes resided in the chance of an
electronic encounter between two people, tokens mattered much less. If, on its landing page, Chaturbate was thousands of men watching a few women, a couple of pages in, the numbers changed to one or two people using Chaturbate to interact privately with another person. Wendy used Chaturbate not merely for voyeurism, but to arrange virtual casual encounters. She had her pick of possibilities, finding
enough willing men to have electronic intimacy at any hour of the day. “Once they know you’re game, they’re like ‘
please
,’” she explained, adding that her first experience of the breadth of such desire, the number of men lusting for interaction, had felt intoxicating. She encouraged me to find a guy I thought looked nice and she would show me how it worked.

I wrote a message to a guy lying in
bed wearing nothing but a pair of Ray-Bans. From her computer, Wendy clicked on his page and wrote, “Emily is new, we are chatting off CB and I’m teaching her the ropes right now.” Wendy predicted that the minute “Mark Smith” knew we were women, he would want us to broadcast to him. She was right: he wasted no time. “One of you should go online,” he typed in reply. So I turned on my camera, made
it password-accessible, and gave him the password. I sat there in my bedroom, fully clothed, insisting nervously that I was just testing things out. He kept encouraging me to join him in nudity. I refused and apologized. Wendy encouraged me not to apologize—I could remain fully clothed if I wanted to. I was embarrassed to have Wendy and Stoner Boner on the line, but they knew they had taught me to
crack a code; they had taught me how to engineer a private and anonymous online sexual encounter, and they giggled wickedly at my embarrassment.

“There’s this freedom, in that you don’t actually have to meet any of these people and they don’t actually know you,” Wendy explained. “You can be whoever you want to be. You can show them any part of yourself that you want. You can be totally open and
bare and share everything without having to worry about people rejecting you or you can totally make up a new self and be someone different.”

I’d recently read an essay in a book called
Times Square Red,
Times Square Blue
by the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, a gay African-American man who had spent years in the 1970s and 1980s frequenting the porno movie theaters in Times Square, where
he had hundreds of casual and anonymous sexual encounters with other men. He wrote that it was a shame that women suffered risks in the pursuit of similar experiences, but that also “What waits is for enough women to consider such venues as a locus of possible pleasure.”

He went on to describe the benefits of his vast experience in casual sex. The movie theaters had served as laboratories in
which he had learned to discern the nuances and spectrum of his sexual desire, where sexual experimentation happened entirely outside narratives of love or emotional entanglement. His observations about sexual attraction consistently disproved conventional notions of beauty and ugliness. (He discovered, among other proclivities, that he had a thing for burly Irish-American men, including two who had
harelips.) Describing the importance of the anonymous sexual encounter, he wrote:

We do a little better when we sexualize our own manner of having sex—learn to find our own way of having sex sexy. Call it a healthy narcissism, if you like. This alone allows us to relax with our own sexuality. Paradoxically, this also allows us to vary it and accommodate it, as far as we wish, to other people. I don’t see how this can be accomplished without a statistically significant variety of partners and a fair amount of communication with them, at that, about what their sexual reactions to us are. (However supportive, the response of a single partner just cannot do that. This is a quintessentially
social
process, involving a social response.)

For women, the pursuit of wide-ranging sexual experience
had always come with disproportionate risks and stigma. But online, in the context of what Wendy called “mass intimacy,” some of the women I spoke with were undertaking Delany’s endeavor with the risk of pregnancy, violence, and sexually transmitted infection minimized through the medium of encounter. Chaturbate and its ilk—everything from My Free Cams to the Gone Wild amateur porn thread on
Reddit—could be the equivalent of the darkened porno theater of the twenty-first century, but places more welcoming to women, where women could go to consider their desires, where they could learn what attracted others to them, and discern and name what they found attractive.

Traffic estimates indicated that visitors to Chaturbate were overwhelmingly more male than female. The sexual performances
that I found most intriguing were usually happening in the corners of the website, and felt contrary to Chaturbate’s expectation and design. If there was ever going to be a site specifically promoting anonymous sexual exploration for women, a place for the encounters in numbers that Delany found so important to his self-knowledge, Chaturbate would not be it. I pictured spaces on the Internet
free of sidebars advertising lonely MILFs where women went for digital manhandling by handsome strangers using advanced teledildonic technology. The worry that the encounter would be recorded or that its data would be hacked punctured the serenity of the dream.

*   *   *

The performers of Chaturbate had economic as well as sexual motivation. In talking to people who earned money on the site,
a pattern emerged, of a society where wages were so low that they were no longer worth striving for, where ambitious young people could not advance their education without going into debt, and where the misfortune of illness resulted in financial catastrophe. For the people in phases of their lives where they had to serve as 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, including Karastë and a woman from upstate New York who went by the user name of JingleTits, were in their early twenties and saw themselves in an intermediary phase between high school and a hoped-for future in college. They had concrete career ambitions but their families were unable to assist them with the
cost of higher education. Those young people who had gotten a college education found themselves questioning the worth of their degrees, and saw masturbating on camera for money as being less humiliating and offering more opportunities for meaningful and creative endeavor than the jobs they saw as available to them. One such couple was Max and Harper.

Max and Harper met on OkCupid in spring of
2011. Harper was twenty years old and a student of English literature at a college in Washington State, out east for the summer to work as a nanny in New Jersey. Max was twenty-six, moonlighted as an improv comic, worked at a restaurant in Tribeca, and slept on a love seat in a shared apartment in Harlem. Their first date began in Times Square and ended the next morning at the Port Authority, where
Harper caught the bus back to Jersey. Six months later Max moved to Washington to be with her.

Out west, Max had trouble finding a job he liked. He was hired at Starbucks but quit out of boredom during latte training. In November 2012, to pick up some cash, the young couple began sex camming on the website Live Jasmin. It was fun, but Live Jasmin had a lot of rules. A cammer could not eat, drink,
or wear logos while the camera recorded. Until someone paid to enter into a private chat, the models just sat on their beds fully clothed, hustling like prostitutes in the windows of Amsterdam’s red light district. “It was a lot of waiting around, trying to trick people into doing a show with you, just selling it hard,” said Harper. It still felt like a job, in other words, but a job that Harper
liked more than her actual job, which consisted of “hanging pants on hangers and making small talk with people I don’t like.”

Live Jasmin also had rules to make its performers act like “cam models,” with the obsequious pliancy and sweet demeanor that characterize the collective adulation of the male ego on most sex sites. For Max and Harper, the whole point of sex camming was to avoid customer
service. What they envisioned making together instead would be like the low-budget amateur variety shows that used to be found on the old cable-access channels; “
Wayne’s World
with tits,” as Max described it. At other times they referred to it as “digital street performance.” In the summer of 2013, Max found Chaturbate.

On Chaturbate, from a single account, they could perform alone or together
or have a threesome. They could make Max conduct an endurance test where Harper dipped his penis in ice water and counted to thirty. She could sit in a Starbucks and silently reveal her breasts to the camera. They could have puppet shows, and threesomes, and a food fight. Harper could give Max a henna tattoo of a rooster with a giant erection. They could hang their Christmas lights on the wall behind
them to spell out
FUCK
. They could reward high tippers by recording video of themselves stripped naked and running down the street yelling, “I AM THE KING/QUEEN OF SCOTLAND.” Within two months of joining they amassed more than 20,000 followers (eventually they reached more than 81,000). Some days were slow, but on others their audiences reached more than 7,000 people.

Through the money they started
earning, they also began to envision another kind of freedom. The idea to buy a van came to Max on a mushroom trip, one summer in 2013 as the sun set over a field in Washington State. He hallucinated a conversation with an entity that Max, an atheist, could only call God.

A few weeks later, Harper and Max used their combined $1,000 in savings to purchase a 1994 Ford Aerostar for $900. They decided
to shed their material belongings and Chaturbate their way across the country. They called their show “Fucking in Fifty,” and they even recorded a peppy theme song (“We’re gonna hit the road / we’re gonna help you cum…”)