In a hyperconnected yet disassociated world, some college students are confronting feelings of isolation by turning to sex work, not just for income, but for a sense of agency and emotional connection. At the same time, they are grappling with how porn quietly shapes their self-worth and understanding of desire. To shed light on this, we speak with a cam girl about how porn has influenced her identity, boundaries, and views on intimacy. James Perez, Bobby Diaz, and Elijah Reyes report.
The desperation of job hunting can lead people to consider options they never thought possible. A 21-year-old University of Nevada, Reno student, majoring in secondary education, who goes by “Chloe Duncan,” is from the small town of Wells, Nevada.
She found herself in a position she never imagined herself to be in. While desperate to find a job to pay for student fees and other living expenses, Duncan turned to a familiar source of income that she had known since she was just 15 years old – sex work.
While she was in high school, Duncan was offered the opportunity to make a quick hustle by performing sexual acts on older teens, and as a naive high schooler, she accepted.
“Most of the people who paid me to do it were seniors,” Duncan said. “A lot of them liked being dominated, and they would pay me hundreds of dollars to step on their balls with my heels on. They were 19 and I was 15, [doing those sexual acts] made me feel so empowered.”
Several years later, by the end of her Fall freshman semester at UNR, Duncan found herself draining her savings account.
“I applied to over 50 places, mostly bakeries, kitchens, and places with kids,” Duncan said. “I ended up getting turned down a lot because of the way that I look. I have dyed hair and a bunch of visible tattoos, and there’s a big stigma against that.”
Unable to land a job due to her physical appearance, Duncan turned to a niche area of online camming called Financial Domination or FinDom, where someone called a “Pay Pig” pays a sex worker to humiliate them, with specific rules.
For example, if a Pay Pig doesn’t respond fast enough to an order, they have to send the worker $500.
“They just want somebody to talk to,” Duncan said. “I feel like people who are in these higher positions kind of get separated from society, and they get lonely, and I'm empathetic. I don't think I ever purposely manipulated anybody, it's just not my style.”
Despite only being on this site for two and a half months, Duncan earned roughly $12,000, which she used to pay for her dorm room, textbooks, car payments, and pets. Although the pay was substantial, she felt it was too good to be true and would be difficult to explain to the IRS and her family about where the funds originated from.
With a replenished savings account and a new sense of self-independence, Duncan decided to try and share her personality online through different streaming sites like Twitch and YouTube.
She wanted to share her art, play video games, and build a community with her viewers. When the views weren’t coming in, the money dried up with it.
“With Twitch, it's either you go viral and you get big, or you don't,” Duncan said. “That's when I kind of leaned more into what sells the quickest, and sex sells, and so I started looking into camming sites again.”
She chose Chaturbate because of the website's user security features, which allowed her to set up region filters that prevented anyone from Nevada and its surrounding areas from watching her content, to protect her identity. She also chose Chaturbate because all new users are automatically pushed to the site's main page, allowing her to build an audience from the start.
Despite being a new face on a cam site, she did not use it to show off her body, but rather to promote her art. For the first few months, she didn't post any nude content. Her viewers paid to have discussions with her and get to know her as a person rather than a model. It was more intimate than FinDom, where she was able to be herself and get paid for it.
“After those first two weeks, you're not being promoted as much,” Duncan said. “So, the viewer count goes down, but now you've kind of built a loyal clientele. So, more people that I knew who were familiar with my streams were coming in, and they felt more comfortable with me, and I was pretty consistent with it, and so they wanted to pay me more.”
As time went on, Duncan became more comfortable with her loyal audience and decided to cater to their sexual requests. She had her limits, of course, but she believed the less she was willing to do it, the more she would charge for these acts.
“So it was like, if I was going to do it, it was going to be worth it, and I have some hard limits, you know. I don't show anything below the belt on a public stream,” Duncan said.
In her first year, Duncan raked in nearly $1500 a month, with her biggest month peaking at $5000 due to large donations by viewers for more explicit content. After doing this for three years, Duncan’s wish to work in a traditional job ended up coming true when she landed a job at a local bakery.
“I have not been streaming nearly as much as I used to,” she said. “I used to do it probably every day. Like, maybe take a day off or whatever,” Duncan said. “Now I probably only do it maybe twice a month. I only do it when I want to get a little extra pocket change now. The more I do it, the more likely it is to be found. I have to take into consideration, if I want to be a teacher, you know, I have to stop camming to do that.”
It wasn’t just her future career that pulled her away from camming, it was also the fear of losing the ones closest to her. Duncan has never told her mom about her camming because she knows her mom wouldn’t accept her for it.
“She thinks kind of in a traditional way in that aspect, I think she believes that doing sex work in any form degrades your self-value as a member of society, which sucks,” Duncan said. “I love my mom, I need her in my life, I want her to be that support, and I don’t want to break that.”
While her mother’s disapproval weighs heavily on her, Duncan has not let it stop her from creating her way in the crowded camming field. She's learned to mix her sense of independence with caution, acknowledging both the freedom and the risks associated with the position.
“My advice to anyone who wants to be in this field is to take it cautiously and only do what you’re comfortable with,” Duncan said. “You are your boss. The moment you want to do it, you can hop on, press broadcast, and end it whenever you want. But I do think people should think about it, because things like this, the internet never forgets.”
Reporting by James Perez, Bobby Diaz, and Elijah Reyes shared with Our Town Reno