Why are camgirls stereotyped as being broke college students?

[NerdieBirdie]

I will say I was that stereotype when I came to camming in May 2014.

I was a fulltime student at 21 credits who was commuting 3 hours total a day to a minimum wage 40 hours a week job, when in October of 2013 I said fuck it and walked out. I did everything to make money somewhere other than a structured shit job. I did Ebay, flipped stuff locally, took MTurk surveys all day on Amazon.

I came across the AMA Aella did on Reddit while in an MTurk subreddit. I discovered camming wasn't a scam and immediately tried it out of desperation. I was comfortable doing it because I modeled nude for money, it was the perfect broke college chick job.

I graduated in May 2015 and obviously still cam. I want to do it as long as it makes sense to keep it my primary source of income. I do believe it was what connected me from being a broke college student who could only eat beans to someone who could control her life financially.

 

[Gen]

I actually started camming before I became a college student. Camming while working a full time job allowed me to save enough money to move provinces to go to the school I wanted. Since then camming has helped me to work only as much as I want/need and given me fucktons of time to spend on school. When I started first year, I got a part time retail job that paid decently but involved ~1.5 hours of commuting, and was also really boring combined with high pressure to make sales. i realized I could make as much money with one day of filming and editing, or a few hours on Streamate, while still being at home and no commute time.

That said I did take a vanilla job and do volunteering so I won't graduate with no experience. But again the support of camming had allowed me the time to work for free, whereas before I couldn't volunteer because I needed to either be studying or making money all of the time.

 

[jazzymine]

I fit into the "broke college student" stereotype, and I've found that at least so far the guys enjoy that I play up my co-ed side, if only because school is my entire life and I wouldn't know what else to chat about. People seem to enjoy that I'm camming out of a dorm room, that when I talk about my day my topics of discussion are usually class/studying/campus activities, and they seem to think that being a college student who cams somehow makes me "ambitious" and I guess therefore more desirable? Which is, of course, total crap.

The fact is I film out of a dorm room because I have to live on campus because I'm on full financial aid and scholarships. I talk mostly about class because I have to maintain a minimum 3.75 GPA to keep my largest scholarship, and because I'd like to get into grad school and my field isn't exactly the largest (I'm a history/poli sci double major with a women's studies minor). And being on cam doesn't make me more ambitious than anyone else on the site, or more ambitious than my other broke college friends. I turn on my webcam for a few hours a week, chat with some usually fairly friendly folks, and occasionally flash my boobs.

Ambition, to me, is my best friend who has a 4.0 GPA, is in a sorority and has to deal with all the activities that come along with that, is vice president of our student government, was recently appointed to a junior position on our school's board of trustees, single-handedly rewrote my school's sexual assault policy, and has to work at 3 different jobs on campus because she has so little time in her day for work that she just picks up whatever small shifts she can between all her other responsibilities. Ambition is my freshman year roommate, who took an extra class our first year - on top of her insanely difficult biomedical engineering and global health double major workload - in order to become a certified EMS practitioner, and now works for a local squad when she's not busy setting the curve for some of the hardest classes at my school - and when I say working, I mean that every Friday-Saturday she works a 24 hour shift. I am definitely not more ambitious than them.

And I'm certainly not as ambitious as most of the other camgirls I've met - the girls who dedicate hours and hours of their time to providing the best experience they can for the people in their rooms, working for hours to think of cool, fun, elaborate games, making sure that their lighting/audio is perfect. That's not even considering, by the way, the girls who have developed better marketing skills than people I know who have been offered jobs in advertising. I'm not more ambitious than the girls who do this on top of another job - not to mention the few girls I've spoken to who do camming, another job, AND college. I'm not more ambitious than the girls who work their tails off to get their rooms trending.

I don't know what the point I'm trying to make here is - maybe that I, like a bunch of other models on this thread, wish people would not assume that me being a college student means that camming is such a chore for me and that I'm oh-so-strong and brave and should be pitied for choosing to do it? The fact is I chose to cam over getting another job because a) it pays better and b) I have a medical condition that keeps me from driving, so I can only work on campus and c) the jobs on campus pay next-to-nothing for the same hours - see point a. The other night I was online for 3 hours and made 75 dollars - which I was actually genuinely disappointed in (I've recently hit that funk where you're no longer NMS but haven't quite developed the fanbase to make anything close to what I used to be making - the only reason I made even that much that night was because one of my regulars took me to private for actual ages) until I realized that that's literally 25$/hour. Just a frame of reference, the average pay in 2009 for a non-landscape/naval architect was $28.85/hour. I make just a little less, hanging out in my dorm room and chatting with folks and dancing around, as an architect would for the same hours of work.

It's not a bad life. It can be an occasionally emotionally draining life - but so can any other job, especially in customer service. So it's not a bad life.