Isa Mazzei on Camgirl, sex work and finding her voice

We speak to Isa Mazzei about her memoir, Camgirl, which chronicles her journey into the world of camming

Feature by Kirstyn Smith | 21 Nov 2019
  • Isa Mazzei

She’s masturbated, drawn pictures, fucked girls and explored BDSM on camera, but former camgirl Isa Mazzei wants to push her boundaries even further. Despite the antics in Mazzei’s shows, it was writing her new memoir Camgirl, which chronicles her journey into the world of camming, that was her most exposing experience to date.

“Camming in general is an extremely creative outlet,” says Mazzei. “The creative aspect was what really drew me to camming. It’s so much about self-exploration. That’s what’s at the root of art – the idea of exploration.”

The cam girls perform, but they also decorate their sets, light and shoot themselves, create costumes and perfect their make-up. That’s on top of painting, drawing, singing or designing games on camera as viewers tip to win prizes, unveil more flesh and convince themselves the more they pay, the closer they might get to the girl.

Camgirl isn’t the first creative endeavour Mazzei has embarked on that’s based on her career as a camgirl and sex worker. She’s the writer of CAM, a psychological horror film about supernatural identity theft and has been outspoken about her experiences in the industry. “I’m an open book," she laughs when asked questions that verge on overly personal. But Mazzei is very aware that her ability to be candid without being rejected by her community is not a privilege afforded to most sex workers. 

“I can feel safe talking openly about my career. That’s part of the reason I feel it’s so important for me to tell my story and keep talking about it,” she says. “A lot of people can’t do this. Sex work is very normal. The more it’s normalised and seen as another profession, the better things will get.” 

Her friend, kink writer Tina Horn, has written a graphic novel called SFSX (Safe Sex) which centres on queer sex workers living in a dystopian world. At one point, the protagonist tries to get a job, but the hiring manager asks her to explain the gap in her resume which represents time spent making porn for several years.

“I think that’s such a good indicator of how it feels to be a sex worker,” says Mazzei. “Sex workers are not a protected class in America, so people can discriminate against them just for their past and that’s super fucked up. Especially when you look at the fact that a lot of skills in sex work are completely transferable to a huge variety of other jobs.” 

It’s always been the onus of sex workers to have to advocate for themselves, to shout about their rights, tell their stories and share their experiences. How can things change in terms of safety, harmful stigma and legislation? 

“The main thing is that people need to start listening to sex workers,” says Mazzei. “The most powerful thing we can do is to listen to those stories and continue to support those communities. This goes all the way up to the legislators who are passing laws they claim are to protect sex workers, but in fact cause more harm than they do good. That can be easily remedied by listening to the legislation sex workers actually want, talking to them and asking them what would help their communities.”

Another of the multitude of stigmas sex workers have to strive to overcome is the messed-up notion that anybody involved in this career choice must have a mental health illness, addiction or daddy issues. People in every career have varying mental health, Mazzei points out, but nobody connects these things in quite the same way as they do sex workers. In her case, Mazzei lives with PTSD (just like eight million other Americans, who can’t all be sex workers), but she mentions that people enter all kinds of different professions for a lot of different reasons. 

“To say that I chose sex work because of my mental illness is to take away my agency over my own decisions. That’s incredibly invalidating,” she says. “There’s also a problem where people want to rank sex workers, as in ‘one type of sex work is more acceptable than another type of sex work.’ That completely takes away a sex worker’s agency in their own lives.”

It’s clear Mazzei feels very strongly about this, and rightly so. Through Camgirl we can see that she’s smart, wickedly funny and driven by an ambition to find her identity, something that most young women can relate to. She hops from job to job, wondering why she can’t use her ability to seduce men to bring in some cash until she realises that’s precisely what she can – and will – do. After two wild years, Mazzei emerges as someone who has a much tighter grasp on who she actually is. 

“I came out of [those two years] aware that whoever I was, I wasn’t going to find that person in the external,” she says. “I had to start confronting things. I had to start working through them. Camming was transformative and important, not just as a career, but as something that gave me back my life.” 

Mazzei had been avoiding dealing with childhood sexual trauma, but sometimes it would bubble to the surface. A partier in her teens and 20s, she would often black out and tell her friends everything that had happened to her, but forget she’d done so in the morning. Over the years, her friends came forth, ready to admit they knew everything she was trying so hard to dodge. However, working as a cam girl set Mazzei on the path to rebuilding her life. 

“Sex work was the reason I was able to process and heal from it,” she says. “Camming was the first place I actually felt safe in my sexuality, where I set boundaries so explicitly, where I decided who could look at me, where I decided what I did and didn’t want to do with my own body.” 

This reclaiming of power, as well as finding a good therapist, was enough to allow her conscious mind to feel able to begin processing what happened to her. For most of Mazzei’s sexual life, she dissociated during sex, but creating her own boundaries helped regain a sense of control. 

“That was the most powerful moment for me as a cam girl,” she admits. “It was while I was doing one of my pseudo BDSM shows. I was in pain, but I felt grounded and embodied. I had always been dissociating during sex, but I realised it’s actually supposed to feel like you’re in your body and you’re present. I had never felt that way until reaching that point of exploration in camming.”

In Camgirl, Mazzei’s goal is to fight against the stereotypical notions people have about sex workers: it is, under it all, a memoir about an awkward, 20-something woman trying to find her way in the world. But it’s biting and vulnerable, and a fascinating exploration of sex, friendship and mental health in the digital age. Camgirl gives the reader a glimpse at what goes on off-camera to highlight the tensions between our very private and very public selves, as well as normalising the reality of being a camgirl. 

“I want to be artistic. And beautiful. Not just dangerous,” Mazzei says. And with Camgirl, she’s certainly achieved that.


Camgirl is out 28 Nov from Rare Bird Books

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