Anxiety part 2 - the balance between sexiness and genuine personality

[lilithvalentine]

Okay, so here's the deal. Genuine is generally considered the holy grail and I feel it is important to an extent!

BUT first you have to be honest with yourself if your genuine unfiltered personality is sexy vs. Slightly off-putting.

I am a very anxious individual. This shows up in my *unfiltered* actions with rushed talking, idea jumping, constant uncertainty and qualifying of my statements, and essentially in some ways apologizing for being me.

This does not work for most viewers. Unfortunately being an obviously anxious individual will at most get you pity and at worst dismissal. I'm also relatively attractive and when I tried to be completely unrepressed freudian Id my viewer count would consistently stay low and people would come in and immediately leave (implying they're put off by something I'm doing aside from appearance).

So I tried something different. I tried to "act sexy." Things like faking confidence, asking directly for tips, slowing your pace of talking, not qualifying or prefacing my statements with caveats, or running an anxious ramble of talking and bad jokes to avoid the daunting *natural* silences.

And it worked. My viewer counts stabilized at higher numbers, I drew in more tips, and I felt better and more powerful when doing it.

But here's a caveat (breaking my own rule...) you still do need to inject your own opinion. You need to say the things you want to say as long as they're not coming from a place of compensatory anxiety. It's hard to do and feels a bit unnatural at first but I think it's possible for anyone to blend their unique personality with conventionally confident and sexy mannerisms.


More to come.

 

[gotenks93]

Is it feasible for you to keep this up? Do you enjoy acting sexy or do you prefer to be yourself? Its the question whether you would prefer a larger following of people or a smaller more intimate group of fans who like you for who you are.

 

[Horny_ali]

thats very true and putting on an act for hours are u able to do that I would find it really tiring

 

[Deleted member 45270]

What's most profitable is not always what we can keep up with. Just like we can't say yes to every request, even though we may have a higher bottom line when doing so.
We should ideally work towards attracting the audience we want to have instead of what's most profitable, because that way, we can enjoy the job for longer instead of hating what we do for the highest possible pay.

If it makes you feel good, keep doing it. I'm also very anxious on cam, but I enjoy the banter and flirting, which is my fallback when things feel too stressful, and over time, I've learned what words/sentences work best and feel good to use, so they're more or less memorised.
It's good that you're experimenting to see what works for you.

 

[THE MOLLIE MARIE]

What's most profitable is not always what we can keep up with. Just like we can't say yes to every request, even though we may have a higher bottom line when doing so.
We should ideally work towards attracting the audience we want to have instead of what's most profitable, because that way, we can enjoy the job for longer instead of hating what we do for the highest possible pay.

So true. And even if saying yes to everything was more profitable in the moment, in the end it will shorten your time in the industry. So is it really more profitable overall? No way! Set those boundaries as soon as you feel the need! You can change things as you see fit whenever you want. I think that the sooner we believe that, the sooner we can present the best possible experience for us and our viewers. There is big power in knowing what you like to do, and what isn't right for you. But you also have the power to change your mind at any time.

 

[lilithvalentine]

Guys honestly, I think you're right. This post came at a somewhat bad day and I'm a bit embarassed LOL (it felt true at the time).

I tried being myself again and it was more fun and people stuck around too. I'm going to leave this up for posterity.

 

[THE MOLLIE MARIE]

I thought what you had to say was really interesting to read, nothing to feel embarrassed about! Finding the balance is something I think we can all relate to working at.

It is rare that someone shows up to their first ever performance, knowing just how to charm the crowd and work the stage, without an ounce of nerves or uncertainty. And a specific crowd or venue (I am running with this analogy here) may require a performance that contains more of some elements and less of others, versus a performance on another day.

We get to tweak things and try things and witness the results in real time, which can be really fun! I am still figuring it out, I don't think I'll ever stop improving, or trying to at least. One thing I love about this work is that I can always try something new, explore another route.

 

[IsabelaHarlow]

We should ideally work towards attracting the audience we want to have instead of what's most profitable

What KMH said here is detrimental if you want to have people who are with you in the long run. I'm glad that you had positive outcomes from being yourself in the past few days, so focus on that rather than portraying someone you're not.

Intelligent people always see through the masks we put on when we're not feeling great, and if those are the people you want to have in your room, you need to be genuine, and trust me, they'll stick with you over time.

We all have to figure things out in the camming industry, so until you find out what's best for you, try new things and you'd be surprised of what you can find out about yourself.

 

[Deleted member 45270]

Also I want to add that it might be a good idea to take some time to find people in the industry to look up to and take inspiration from.

For example, I love Nina Hartley; a famous porn star who genuinely looks like she's having so much fun working. Watch any interview and you can see how in her own element she is.
Watching her makes me feel more comfortable to openly have fun and banter as opposed to staying within a strictly sexual persona.

I'm also looking at people's twitters to see how they balance showing their personality vs marketing tweets (I'm still trying to figure that balance out for myself). Aella_Girl is a great example of someone very chatty; if you looked at her twitter, you'd see a lot of text. That's not something that's very profitable for many to suddenly start doing, but (afaik) the audience she has attracted over the years seems to like that and responds in kind.

 

[InAweOfCB]

Guys honestly, I think you're right. This post came at a somewhat bad day and I'm a bit embarassed LOL (it felt true at the time).

I tried being myself again and it was more fun and people stuck around too. I'm going to leave this up for posterity.

Your original post... made me sad... I didn't want that sort of effort to have worked... and I was disappointed that it seemed to work.

Although I was going to question whether you could in unbiased fashion discern whether your own personality is slightly off-putting.


I remain of the strong feeling that in never-before-known-to-(hu)man environments like webcamming (where sooooooooooooooooo many individuals from entirely across the globe are incentivized to be in the same place while inviting intimate physical scrutiny), a woman affords herself her very best chance for success if presenting her OWN uniqueness above all else.


IF you live in Denver, you can't really have a complete sense of how much more unique your beauty is made to seem to those viewing from Warsaw... or from Prague... or from Seoul... merely because they are so far across the world, where customs and skin tone and small personal routines are considerably different. I know a first impulse by new cam models is to scan other channels, and then think they need HER hair... HER bra... HER tan lines, HER height... HER ass... and so on...

But if one even could go out and acquire ALL of those elements... it is far more probable that she'd then look almost identical to someone else on the site... than it would be if she just remained the sweet, random person from Denver, who was already as unique as she could be upon arrival... Arrival to this arena where removing your make-up might be more effective than putting on make-up in such a unique gathering of humans.

At the end of the day... that last part just could be a benefit to all of humanity.

 

[LauraSP-CMD]

What's most profitable is not always what we can keep up with. Just like we can't say yes to every request, even though we may have a higher bottom line when doing so.
We should ideally work towards attracting the audience we want to have instead of what's most profitable, because that way, we can enjoy the job for longer instead of hating what we do for the highest possible pay.

If it makes you feel good, keep doing it. I'm also very anxious on cam, but I enjoy the banter and flirting, which is my fallback when things feel too stressful, and over time, I've learned what words/sentences work best and feel good to use, so they're more or less memorised.
It's good that you're experimenting to see what works for you.

Ufff totally, I mean you can pretend some days but every day of your life is impossible, plus because your job becames a huge part of your life, so being fake as doing it is just tiring and impossible to mantain in the long term.

 

[SASHA1bgw]

I agree with others about being yourself on cam. I know that my realness is the biggest draw for my regulars and having people come to hang out with me due to my personality has given me the biggest confidence boost

AND I also think that it's okay to be a little bit fake, doing things like acting confident or slowing down your speech, or playing up the sexiness/flirting. Because it's not about being someone else but about testing out the hidden parts of myself. If I like how they feel, I adopt them and, really, many didn't stick. I've grown as a person since I started camming due to being just a little bit "fake", as in turning up the aspects of myself that I like and turning down those that I don't. It helped me learn what those are too