Is there discrimination based on skin color on live webcam sites?

This article provides findings from a sociological study of online webcam modeling. Webcam models are a subset of sex workers that offer a variety of sexual fantasies to voyeuristic internet customers, ranging from innocent chat to exotic stripteases to graphic sex activities. This research includes statistical analyses of models' performance as evaluated by the website-generated camscore (how the website analyzes the success of monetary models) with the independent variables of race and country of origin. This research attempts to illustrate the complex ways in which race-, class-, and gender-based inequalities are maintained on a popular webcam site by using participant observation data and applying the concept of intersectionality. Webcamming is a sort of highly racialized online body labor. Given that researchers have acknowledged the ways in which the circumstances of labor influence a sex worker's success, experiences of exploitation, job happiness, and agency, this article addresses race as a major element that impedes the success of black women in the ebony webcam live modeling.

The first contribution of this research is to review the extensive to the extensive literature on sex work by expanding our understanding of an emerging kind of sexual labor: adult webcam modeling.

Webcam models are a subset of sex workers that utilize highly styled chat rooms to offer voyeuristic internet customers a variety of sensual fantasies, ranging from innocent conversation to exotic stripteases and graphic sex activities. According to a CNBC story titled "CamGirls: The New Porn Superstars," the webcam sector has made over $1 billion and is frequented by around 5 percent of the world's daily internet users, with the most successful webcam models reportedly earning up to $100,000 per month.

A Google search for the phrase "list of webcam modeling websites" returned 6,150,000 results. Such searches will also return websites for recruiters and agents that claim to assist models in being placed on the "top" websites. Clearly, it is a vast market with many participants, including workers, customers, sex entrepreneurs (agents, recruiters, etc.), and moral entrepreneurs (policy makers, rescue industry agents, etc.).

The fundamental objective of this study is to collect basic facts regarding this area of employment, about which we know relatively little outside of mainstream media.

See Table 1 for data from a sociological research of online webcam modeling presented in this paper.

Table 1 - Frequencies for categorical variables race and nation of origin

Thus, my study also addresses an essential yet unexplored question: how do current racist discourses online disadvantage sex workers? Does the racial pay gap prevalent throughout labor markets exist in the online sex industry? As previously established, the response to these questions is affirmative; racism and discrimination in erotic labor result in lower trade values for bodies of color. Therefore, the affordances of online sex labor as depicted in the extant literature are heavily racialized and unequally experienced. In addition, new study reveals that although both male and female escorts claim that racism affects their work experiences, only female prostitutes report that it affects their income. Future lines of investigation must pay more attention to how race and gender influence the income, work experiences, and working conditions of all online sex workers.