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This post was written in response to Pygmalion but also to other debates about the role of coercion in the Cam Industry, so I decided to move it here onto my "home court." ULlink to the original thread: http://camgirlnotes.15.forumer.com/index.p...t=0&#entry19158
Pygmalion, I think you answered the question well enough. And help to raise another question in turn. Is anybody else beginning to see a pattern here?
Katrina tells us of the risks of going independent in the Ukraine;
http://camgirlnotes.15.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=2693
Then Dancing Days reports the same for the SM Studios in Belarus here:
http://camgirlnotes.15.forumer.com/index.p...t=0&#entry18526
And nobody who's sane dares say a thing about what happens in Russia - except for camsculptor who must have earned a place on somebody's hit list by now with comments like these on the studios in St. Petersburg..lol http://camgirlnotes.15.forumer.com/index.p...st=0#entry19058
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St. Petersburg first of all is flooded with beautiful women, formalized prostitution in the hotels and nightclubs, high end strip clubs and literally hundreds of cam studios. The owners of the studios are pretty savvy and have figured out two things.. first.. keep the studios in small well distributed apartments where 5-20 girls can work in different shifts.. this keeps the cops at a distance.. and it also minimizes the girls talking to each other too much.. makes them easier to control. Second, make the studios nice.. the performance rooms are elegant.. there are typically decent showers and a stocked kitchen.. So far so good right? Sounds like porn starlet paradise??? Well.. that is where the nice stuff ends. Shifts are 12 hours and sometimes 24 hours. Girls have to make a minimum of sold minutes or they simply do not get paid for the shift. Even if they are five minutes short.. no pay. If they are short and the next model who has reserved the room arrives tough luck.. no pay. They are "fined" for all sorts of violations and their conversations are monitored typically in real time. Any conversation that violates the "script" they are supposed to use constitutes a "fine". Any TOS violation from any site is a much more serious "fine". Showing up late is a "fine". There are also other punitive measures that are applied.. for really "impudent" models they can get "locked out" and are not allowed to work yet are still responsible for their minimum on the day or days they are "locked out". One of the most insidious methodologies is the loan sharks.. big surprise a lot of girls need to borrow money for this or that.. pay advance or outright loans.. and once this starts.. they are going to be working on cam for a long time. |
And then we've heard lots of stories out of Romania over the past four years that suggest that there can be very "sticky exits" for studio models who want to go independent. Not that it can't be done = as both Andra and camgirl have told us. But all the same, this all suggests that the Eastern European studios are able to keep the industry and its profits pretty much under their control to their advantage, because the Western web-pimps on web-site like MFC or PF work with them to help keep it that way. Now why would that be to their interest - if it wasn't to ensure that there would be a constant "over-supply" of models on their web-sites involved in a desperate "head to head" competition between themselves for client tokens?
As I said elsewhere. lol
http://camgirlnotes.15.forumer.com/index.p...st=0#entry19053
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It's interesting to note that MFC is reluctant to sign on Romanian models and independents and prefers to stick with its Studio sub-contractors which are owned by male web-pimps- what the Romanians call the "peste." This is what we were told by Sweet_October years ago about PF's refusal to hire independent cam models who were "free agents." Perhaps this is a way to keep the mix of "free and unfree" labor competing against each other on MFC's web-site? Of course this is equally true of F4F, LJ, Peeks, PF, SF or SM. This competition between workers with unequal access to information and different degrees of bargaining strength now appears to be a structural feature that's true across the entire industry. |
And here in my response to Nocturne the one -that she blew right past without making a real response:
http://camgirlnotes.15.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=2737
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| UncleLewis. If you start to look at this global industry from the vantage point of North America or the UK what leaps our at you is the fact that the market is "owned" by women who are independent entrepreneurs, who manage their own time, define their own business model and marketing strategy and keep most of the money they earn. However if you look at from the Global South or Global East then a whole different picture emerges - so different that it's like describing "a whole other profession" in terms of pay, working conditions and above all else, personal autonomy in the workplace. One is a post modern form for sex work that's very entrepreneurial, managed by and for women and the other is a semi-industrial corporate setting, again managed by women, but for companies where men are the "big studio bosses" - usually because they have heavy political connections within national economies based on a form of "crony capitalism." This is what the French would call "Le Capitalisme du Mafia et du Cul" What I think that our little research project on CGN has established after 5 years of effort is that some big and medium sized web-cam content providers, companies like, Streamate, Vivid (f4f); *keepshows*; Private Feeds, Secret Friends, 2Lips - and to a lesser extent ImLive and MFC - rely heavily on their partnerships with studio owners in the Colombia Central and Eastern Europe, The Philippines, Russia and The Ukraine who act as subcontractors to recruit and manage most of the models that appear on those web-sites. This is even more true of the European cam sites like Euro-live, XLoveCam and many of the Belgian, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish live cam sites. To a great extent the Eastern European studios - especially the Romanians but also the Russians and Ukrainians - "own" this Euro-market. And when they don't, immigrants from those countries make up the bulk of the work-force in the Dutch, Italian and Spanish studios located in Western Europe. The number of studios is in the thousands and the number of cam-girls in their employ must number in the tens of thousands (20-40,000 in Romania alone). These studios and their employees are very important "live content" providers for the global industry of which you are a part. |
The question here isn't whether going "independent" is to the advantage of the individual model -clearly if she can cut out the middle man and manage her own time, it is.. The question is it to the advantage of anybody else to let her do that? So why not stop her if you have the necessary muscle? Which is exactly what they do in Asia, Colombia and Eastern Europe.
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| UncleLewis: March14, 2011. There are other countries in this world where that idea that women can be so empowered by new technology that they can capture most of market and take for themselves the lion's share of the industry's profits, will simply not be tolerated by the Mafia/KGB alliance in power. And those are the same places where the Western web-content providers (web-pimps) have found some of their best partners as well as most of their "product." Their decision to "off-shore" much of their content production was not a simply as matter of economics, but also a preference for corrupt and repressive regimes as business partners. |
And why does this matter to Western cam models?
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The sex industry is under siege in the US because for some Americans the idea of women selling sex is a scandal, and more to the point, for a lot of men, the idea of you're selling sex and then getting to keep the lion's share of the money earned is absolutely intolerable. So the Christian Right, the Radical Feminists and their liberal friends are in a sense the objective allies of the cops and the mafias who would drive sex commerce underground again so as to restore male leverage over you all, and their ability to extract heavy "protection rents." |
"I would no more be a Master than a slave. It does not conform to my idea of Democracy." Abraham Lincoln 1856.