Re: How can I use a camsite in the most ethical way possible
LilyEvans said:
IsabellaSnow said:
So... it was a dig at the forum?
8 hours a day 6 days a week is pretty intense. My ex has I think a 47.5 hour contract which doesn't include his breaks which means he has to work 10 hours a day 5 days a week. In fact he rarely even gets to take a break during these shifts, maybe 5/10 mins. It's not legal but hard to monitor. Doing those sorts of shifts on cam is crazy. Thing is with camming, though some girls seem to have crazy amounts of energy and can act like hyperactive sexy, cute, interesting sexbots for 8 hours straight most people just cannot handle that without going mad! In a regular job I don't have to act like I'm having the time of my life without actually having any interaction with others besides words on a screen and some background music.
ItsBillyBitch said:
We make our customers lives better and that's all we do.
I'm guessing from the use of "we" in this comment that you're part of running a studio or you are a model? You don't really sound like a model though from how you're coming across.
I'm not entirely sure camsites do make customer's
lives better. I think we live in a world that has become so over populated that it's become lonely. People shy away from strangers and making connections is not as easy as perhaps it once was. We have these screens in our houses where inside is a wealth of information and miraculously, other people! So we go on these screens trying to form connections as of course we're lonely, anyone sat at home alone will be lonely as we are naturally social creatures. Places like MFC take advantage of this.
Problem is, it masks the symptoms of loneliness rather than dealing with the root of the problem. This can be an incredible thing, but it can also be people's worst enemy.
Do camgirls make a member's life better? No I would say they don't. Your life is outside the computer and camgirls can either distract someone from the real world or they can help give them the confidence to venture into the real world.
Do camgirls help combat the sting of loneliness? Yes they do.
Suicide is a major killer in men at the moment. I think possibly a large part is because loneliness and depression go hand in hand. Having someone on the other side of the computer screen who's fun, chatty and is interested in talking to you I imagine helps make life easier to live if you're going through a rough patch.
I disagree that camgirls don't make members' lives better. I mean, obviously not ALL camgirls improve the lives of their members, and not ALL members have their lives improved by camgirls. But you seem to be implying that men who watch camgirls only do it for lack of other human interaction which is certainly not the case for every member.
I have had members who moved on from me because, according to one, I helped them regain their "mojo"; that is, interaction with me helped them understand that talking to women IRL doesn't have to be daunting or scary. This is a member I had grown particularly close to so his absence hurt a bit but I was so glad to hear that the hours (literally) we had spent together on camsites had changed his life for the better! I have also had married couples, or dudes who use cams as a surrogate for intimacy they don't get in their real life relationships (ex: a man whose wife is alive but cannot engage sexually, who uses cams to that end because an IRL sexual relationship outside his marriage is not in the cards.) Many more members just use cams as a form of entertainment, like TV or video games. I get Snaps from members like this full of friends, concerts, pets, jobs, and family, so they are clearly not lacking in the social department.
Obviously there are some members to whom cam sites can be detrimental but I do not believe they are the majority.
I fully agree with Lily, camgirls do definitely make my life better simply because they provide interaction with people who have very different lives to mine. Admittedly, I use MFC less as an escape and more as a source of entertainment when I have a few minutes/hours to kill. It doesn't interfere with my social life nor does it make my life any less interesting. If I had not made an MFC account, the time spent there would have gone into watching movies, reading books or playing games.
Camgirls provide an outlet for me to explore parts of my being that I don't get to explore and share with "traditional" friends. I'm currently sitting on my best friend's couch as I write this, and despite the fact that we share pretty much everything else, my sexual interests/fetishes seem to be off-limits. I don't know why, but we just never seem comfortable talking about stuff like that (despite or maybe because of the fact that neither of us is interested in anything but a purely patonic relationship).
I'll bet that the majority of cam-pervs are doing it for entertainment, with only a fraction of members actually using these sites as a substitute for human contact.
But in all the cases you gave the member ventured out into the real world which made his life better. Life isn't on a computer, it's in the real world.
You seem to have a very black-and-white view of how this works. I'm a communication major and part of becoming one means that there have been long stretches of time where I effectively lived on the internet/my laptop. Implying that the time spent living like that didn't count as "real life" or didn't improve my life would diminish the wonderful people who ended up geting me to explore new forms of art, new lines of thinking or who simply gave me a look into a wildly different culture, making me more knowledgeable about the world as a result. Everything I learned from strangers on the internet whom I will never meet face-to-face has helped me become a more (for lack of a better term) interesting person. Interacting in that unusual kind of way has helped me come out of my shell much further than I had previously, when interaction was still fairly daunting because I had a much smaller reference pool.
Speaking of which, with the internet at my fingertips, it has become much easier to immerse oneself into any subject, again fueling further interaction by granting new avenues of potential conversation topics. This past Saturday I finally came face-to-face with two people I had met through the internet (or technically through the aforementioned best friend), despite the fact that we had never met before, the three of us had a blast talking as peers and mrore importantly, like people who had known each other for years.
A member enjoying the time of a model and then getting the confidence boost to go into the real world and change things isn't the model making his life better, that's all him. She was just the one who helped him through a harder time and gave him the extra push, but at the end of the day it was him who made his own life better. If he'd stuck around camsites forever then his life wouldn't have become better. Does that make any sense?
It does, and I do agree that a large part of it is the fact that that member took the step to put what he'd gained by talking to the model into practice. But that does not mean that the camgirl's effort in making his life better no longer counts. Without the camgirl's interaction, his life would not have developed in such a way at that time, so she most certainly did make his life better, simply by being the force that put him (back) on track towards an improved life.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are a bunch of camgirls out there whom I know I would be buddies with had we met in the conventional way. But this would have never happened if not for the camsite, which facilitated the meeting of two people who had similar interests. These girls definitely enriched my life through talking back and forth and being there to bounce ideas off of (in addition to the regular fapper-fappee camgirl interaction, of course), but I would not have met them normally because I don't generally go to the US for shits and giggles, and even then I'd have to have the massive luck that I'd gone to the place where they lived, went out at a time where they decided to do the same, etc. A LOT of chance goes into a meeting of two people and with the internet making the world smaller, the chance to meet people who will make a positive difference in your life increases, because we're no longer bound by the limits of conventional communication.
Speaking of communication, I cannot begin to tell you how much my life has improved simply by having 75-80% of my daily communication having been in English for several years. It may seem silly, but that time spent interacting with people in a different language got me a LOT of practice that ended up helping me get a girlfriend in both Scotland and the US, neither of which I'd have met without the internet. Not just that, but the best friend I mentioned? She's English. As are the guys I met last Saturday, as is the friend I visited durign the Halloween weekend where I met my best friend, as is her 8 year-old daughter who got me out of a fairly gloomy time in my life back in the summer of 2008, the list goes on for quite a bit, but my point remains that all of these things were possible because my communication skills were kept up by my daily interaction with people from 6 different countries in a language that is not my mother tongue.
I am adamant that my life has improved as a direct result of my having discovered camsites. Not just in terms of interaction, but also because the past two years taught me more about my own sexuality than the rest of my life put together. Something I would have only found out otherwise in a stable relationship with the right partner.