Former camgirl Isa Mazzei last year came out as the screenwriter of a made-for-Netflix movie, Cam, which was the first mainstream Hollywood film to explore the lives of the women who make their living performing sexual acts on webcam. But she told her story in the guise of horror film.
This week, however, Mazzei tells her own true story with the release of her book Camgirl, a memoir of her experiences camming.
“I had been thinking of a memoir since the process of selling Cam because people would ask ‘How much of this script is real?’” Mazzei told Marie Claire magazine.
She told the magazine that because she was open about her line of work, even when she was on dates, the typical reaction she received was, “Oh that means you want to have sex with me.” The other response she heard frequently was, “Oh my God, but you look so normal.”
“It’s kind of a shame that I had to become successful in something mainstream for people to take me seriously as a person,” the 28-year-old Mazzei said.
Despite her experience, however, Mazzei said, “sex is still something that is not the most comfortable for me,” according to New York magazine. Her discomfort is another major topic of the book, with the opening chapters devoted to her high school years.
“When I look back on it, I just feel like I had a lot of shame. I was definitely called a slut and a whore,” she told Marie Claire. “Some of the behaviors that I had back then, the need for every boy to like me, to date guys and then break up with them and then jump to the next one—it was a way for me to attempt to protect myself.”
In fact, Mazzei said, sex at that early age was “something that I suffered through and something that I dreaded.”
Camming served as a kind of healing process for Mazzei, she said.
“Camming, first of all, gave me a lot of confidence in myself. Confidence as a business woman and as an entrepreneur. It really showed me that I could create something that was successful—which was incredibly validating,” she said. “Camming was also the first place where I learned that I could set and enforce boundaries around my body and my sexuality and that was also incredibly empowering.”
She also said that she hopes by discussing her own experiences, she can help remove the stigma around sex work that continues to exist.
“Sex workers are discriminated against all the time for the work they currently do, for work they did in the past. You’re not allowed to talk about it for fear of being fired, or not being allowed to live in an apartment building where you want to live, or not being allowed to put your kids in the school that you want them to go to,’ she said. “It’s not only dehumanizing but it also perpetuates violence against sex workers, because it normalizes discrimination.”
Photo via Rare Bird Books
