Camgirls: Behind the scenes of voyeurism in New York

By Lolita Mang.

Published on 2 September 2020. Updated on 25 June 2026.

We can still remember the erotic tension of Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola‘s iconic directorial debut. Those teenage boys gazing feverishly at the Lisbon sisters locked in their bedrooms. Released in 1999, the feature film marked the end of an era. At the dawn of the 21st century and the advent of the World Wide Web, this gaze was a million miles from what it is today. Once restricted to a window in the building across the street, voyeurism now peers directly into the rooms of those known as camgirls.

In 2020, the Museum of Sex in New York shines a spotlight on webcam culture. The giant screens that welcome visitors move between the decor of a bedroom in Ohio (United States) and surveillance cameras in Shibuya, the teeming district of Tokyo (Japan). “They don’t know that they’re currently being shown in an exhibition, and that is the point,” Serge Becker, artistic director at the museum of the Tokyoites, says. Somewhere between an interview and video installations, Cam Life: An Introduction to Webcam Culture draws the portrait of these camgirls in an online world where the frontier between public and private is blurred, if not non-existent. But what about these 2.0 performers?

Bedroom feminism?

If camgirls are so readily pitted against the porn industry, it’s for a good reason. Alone in their bedrooms, facing their computer screens, these women are the true masters of their bodies, unlike certain porn stars. “We are witnessing a democratisation of webcam culture. While the porno industry is often exploitative, here it’s you who has all the power,” curator Lissa Rivera reminds us. Remember the documentary Hot Girls Wanted that rocked the 2015 Sundance Festival? It followed the fate of young women recruited by the amateur porn scene. Camgirls are the opposite. They are their own bosses…

The Museum of Sex, a pioneer of the genre in the USA, first opened its doors in 2002. It waited 18 years to put webcam culture in the spotlight. “The phenomenon of camgirls could not have been born before our time. It results from the combination of specific ingredients: the power to send and receive videos on the Net, a culture that values the popularity of people rather than their talents and the eternal rite of passage of any teenage girl as she discovers her own sexual power,” Australian researcher Amy Shields Dobson details in Next Wave Culture: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism (2008).

Film yourself to live happily ever after

The 21st century’s notion of “Eldorado” is found beneath the spotlights. In the Sydney Morning Herald, journalist Susan Hopkins analyses the dreams of the younger generations. “For this rising millennial generation, constant surveillance can be a dream come true – an affirmation of identity. Today it seems you are no one if you’re not on camera. If you have a life that is constantly recorded, you are culturally inscribed as someone worth watching,” she writes.

In the case of these camgirls, this sudden thrusting into the limelight is doubly interesting. It’s the chance to highlight how, in the webcam industry, women are much more present than their masculine counterparts, the camboys. While the number of performers increases, it is clear that men still make up the majority of video consumers. For centuries, women have been associated with the intimate and the invisible spheres. The webcam offers them the possibility of accessing extreme visibility. The bedroom, a sacred place of intimacy, becomes a public space, like an ancient Greek theatre. Lines are no longer blurred… They just don’t exist anymore. 

Cam Life: An Introduction to Webcam Culture (2020) at the Museum of Sex in New York.