How This Woman Went From Barista To Cam Girl During The Coronavirus Lockdown

On 31st March, Texas announced a lockdown restricting public movement to essential services and activities. Molly Thorne(27) was among the first to lose her job as a barista when the independent coffee shop she was working at was forced to shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic. With her primary source of income cut off, she wasted no time in setting up a business that would keep her afloat during the lockdown—camming.

“It was always at the back of my mind as something that I could do for some extra cash before the pandemic hit. So, when the lockdown started, I got rolling on it almost immediately,” says Thorne on a video call. Camming or webcam modelling is a dynamic virtual service that could be described as sex work a la carte, where the models choose the service they offer and to whom. A cammer might offer relatively tame videos of themselves twerking in a bikini or pictures of their feet but racier services include performing sexual acts on request, with an audience watching. Levels of nudity and the sex acts performed can be requested for a fee and customers can also request private sessions for a higher fee.

Since the coronavirus pandemic took hold around March, 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment support but Thorne isn’t one of them. Her home state, Texas, requires her 2018 tax returns which she doesn’t have because she was living abroad during the time. She feels particularly let down by the state of the benefits system. “I got laid off pretty much as soon as the pandemic hit and then I was denied unemployment benefits even though I’ve been working here since August,” she says. Despite being eligible to receive unemployment benefits, she’s not even able to appeal her case because the phone lines aren’t being answered.

With no job or external aid, her only option was to start her own business with the tools available to her: her body, smartphone and the internet. She started by creating an account on OnlyFans, which is essentially a social media platform behind a paywall where she posts content to her feed and even sells pay-per-view content of herself. “I use my social media accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit mostly for self-promotion to redirect people to buy content from my OnlyFans or directly from me,” she says. In just a month, she has also been successful on ManyVids, another homemade porn site where she earned a place in the ‘MV Top 50 Newcummer Earners’.

Having known only one other person who had done camming, Thorne wasn’t sure how much money she would make or the time she’d have to put in but soon discovered it’s anything but easy money. In her first month as a cammer, she had made around $750 but had put in more hours than any full-time job. “I feel like I probably work more than 40 hours a week doing promotion, making content, posting and interacting with customers. There’s a tonne of media labour; tedious little things that take all day and I end up making just enough to pay my rent. Definitely not enough to pay additional bills or anything more.” she says.

The stimulus checks from the US government haven’t done much to alleviate the financial strain she says. “The $1200 (£650) stimulus check is less than two months of my rent and since I’m eligible for unemployment—which I technically cannot file for—I only get the $1200 and nothing more,” she says. Her situation signals a broken benefits system during a medical and economic crisis that is letting a lot of people slip through the cracks.

The checks were good for business though. Thorne explains how she and many of her fellow cammers ran ‘Stimulus sales’ for the first few days after the checks being deposited in Americans’ bank accounts. She ran promotions, giving people a discount on her content on OnlyFans and other platforms. “I had some customers in the US tell me they bought my services with their stimulus money,” she says laughing.

The lockdowns and social distancing measures have made people lonelier than ever so it’s no surprise that most of Thorne’s clients—in bad financial shape themselves—would pay for human interaction. “I find a lot of people are just looking for comfort. I’ve had many customers say ‘Oh, I would buy more if I had the money’, so it’s clear we’re all doing what we can to get by.

“Most of my customers are so nice and I feel like a lot of them are only looking for someone to talk to. People are bored, stuck inside by themselves. Some of my regulars are people who talk to me all the time to ask me what I’m doing,” says Thorne who lives alone herself. “Sure, you’re bound to have people send you weird comments and there are some people with very specific questions and desires but I think that’s normal considering what I’m selling is sex.”

The new career has forced some pretty fundamental changes on Thorne. “It’s very strange to exclusively be thinking about how I look all the time. Sex has come to the front of my mind and this new focus has been good in some ways and extremely tiring in other ways.”

However, Thorne is not alone in her recent foray into the world of adult camming. Seeing her, many of her friends who had also been laid off have started camming, so there’s now a local community of sorts. “We are super supportive of each other; we even have group chats where we trade tips and advice,” she says. The community extends online as well, with girls on Twitter and Instagram who reach out to her with encouraging comments like “Your stuff looks nice.”

Social media plays a vital role in understanding how to break into the business, she says, “On Instagram, I started following people who were posting similar hashtags as me. A lot of the girls that I follow, end up following me back, some even get in touch for advice. I observe other people to see what kind of marketing they’re doing; when they’re doing their promotions and how often etc.” Especially since the marketing on each platform is very different. “On Twitter, you post more hardcore things and on Instagram, you post softcore things. Also, the hashtags are completely different on each platform,” she says. Other social media websites like Reddit are used to redirect people to buy custom things like soiled underwear and pictures to supplement her income.

As someone who was always pro-sex work, she says didn’t find the transition to camming as uncomfortable as it would have been otherwise. “My perception is ‘Get whatever you can, however you can’. If that’s how you want to do it, that’s how you’re gonna do it,” she says. Her new job has given her a much better understanding of the whole lifestyle, both the pros and cons. There’s a newfound respect for sex work beyond her previous ‘live and let live’ attitude. “I do hope that the current situation changes people’s minds, especially if people are supporting sex workers but maybe not so openly. Now that they see what their life is like without them,” she says. “I also hope people realise how this pandemic negatively affects each individual sex worker who is unable to support themselves.”

Unlike porn, camming has an interactive element to it which makes the emotional aspect of it very real for the performers. As a job, Thorne says she’s never done anything that took such a mental toll on her. “It would be a lot harder if I wasn’t as thick-skinned as I am,” she says. “I think that if I were even a few years younger than I am now, it would have affected me deeply. I’m happy that I’m doing this when I’m a bit older and more secure in myself so that negative comments don’t hit me as hard.

“Camming is so much work—emotional and physical—and so many hours of effort that goes into it. I will never look down upon any sort of Instagram girl ever again because they’re all working their a**es off,” she says. She also hopes that people acknowledge how broken the US social system is that people like herself have had to turn to sex work for a source of income.

Her new job has her on the phone nearly 24 hours a day which she says is not fun. “Sex work is work and it should be respected as much as any other profession. It’s just our way to make money,” she adds.

Despite the stigma attached to it, Thorne feels fairly safe. “Sometimes when things get a bit too local or if someone nearby sees me and recognises me, I kind of get a little...wary,” she says. “I don’t feel unsafe but I would prefer that no one mentions that they saw my sex work I run into them in public,”

Thorne does all her sex work under an alias. She also teaches English online with any time off she gives herself from camming which is not a lot of hours, she says, “Hopefully, my teaching English at the same time will show my future employers that I was still moving forward in other areas during this time. So, it won’t look like I was doing nothing,” she says.

Thorne says that the owner of the small coffee shop where she used to work is not sure if she’ll be able to reopen, even after the lockdowns are lifted. For Thorne, this means that her career as a cam girl may not end any time soon.