In 1996, Jennifer Ringley, a junior at Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, purchased a Connectix webcam, the first mass-market gadget of its type. Ringley placed the camera, which looked like an eyeball swivelling on top of a small white pyramid, on her Mac and began recording. Within two years, her live feed—JenniCam—was receiving more than a hundred million visits a week. People from around the world logged on to watch Ringley do her homework, brush her hair, masturbate, make out with her boyfriend. She began to charge viewers, using a new system called PayPal. JenniCam was a sensation. Ringley consulted on the script for “The Truman Show.” In 1999, another Jennifer, Jennifer Lopez, adopted cam-girl aesthetics in her music video for “If You Had My Love,” which shows curious fans logging on to watch Lopez, in her metallic-minimalist home, washing her bathroom mirror, showering, and performing a Latin dance break. A year earlier, Ringley had appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Letterman asked her, “Now, have other people started doing this?” There were hundreds like her, she explained, though most were paid strippers. Letterman grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper. “How do you get to those?” he asked—joking, of course.
There are now millions of “cam girls” of all genders. More than four and a half million are on one site alone: OnlyFans, a subscriber-based platform on which users can pay a monthly fee for exclusive content from their favorite toe spreaders, breast-milk pumpers, scantily clad Call of Duty players, et cetera. Users can D.M. creators with custom requests. (“Dick ratings,” the more belittling the better, are quite popular.) But what’s truly eye-popping about OnlyFans is the amount of money in play. Sophie Rain, a self-professed virgin in her early twenties, claims to have earned more than a hundred million dollars on the site. Everyone loves a bootstraps tale—it’s the original American foot fetish—and OnlyFans’ headline-grabbing payouts have taken some of the stigma out of sex work. In 2025, L’Oréal made the twenty-five-year-old OnlyFans creator Ari Kytsya a brand ambassador of Urban Decay, a makeup line beloved by mall-rat teens.
