Candy from strangers

What do the parents make of all this? Several kids said their parents wouldn't even know how to find their Web sites if they gave them the URLs, much less what their children do online. Others say their parents use the diaries on their sites to keep up with what's going on in their lives.

And Mom can be a big fan: "My mom loves the site," brags Katneko. "She thinks that I'm beyond hilarious, because I talk about everything from guys having dinky winkies to guides on butt sex." Other parents hope that all this monkeying around online could be the ticket to a hot career. Brittany, 19, says: "My dad thinks I should apply my skills to getting a computer-related job, and that's pretty much the only thing he says about it."

Brad Danielson, 35, a Maine Web designer, is one older guy who has seen a lot of cams. He's one of the creators of Eyefever.com -- one of the many cam portals from the tame to the explicit and smutty (like Stile Project, Superhyperdemonchild and Sinnocence) that cam kids submit to in hopes of getting listed and ranked by popularity.

"At 14, 15, 16, I also think that girls are really starting to come into their sense of what their sexuality can do," says Danielson. "I think that some really enjoy that attention for whatever reason." After all, isn't it potentially safer to show a little skin on a webcam than pretty much anywhere else? "They're pushing their sexuality out into the world a bit, pushing it out to the public to see what kind of response they get, while still in a safe environment," says Danielson. "It's even safer than if some young gal decided to wear something revealing on a beach or on a street -- you're not going to get whistled at or approached."

Of course, as Ponton points out, there may well be risks for young women in revealing themselves to strangers online, too -- just different kinds. And even Danielson admits a certain unease about the cam sites: "I don't know if I'd want my 14-year-old daughter doing that, if I had a daughter."

"I think that these girls are just now discovering that they can make men do things, buy them things, and especially say things just because the men think that they are desirable," says Bridget Therease Guildner, an 18-year-old from Corvallis, Ore., who posts her online diary, writing and photography on the Web, but no voyeuristic webcam. "However, I think that the reason why we don't see many 25-year-olds running cam girl sites is that with experience comes the realization that being used is unpleasant, even if you are using the person back."

In the do-it-yourself world of the cam sites, the girls choose exactly how much they want to reveal or conceal. "Some of the young girls really aren't showing that much skin to be worried about it," says Marissa. "They're showing enough to have that Lolita-esque hint of desire. It teases vulnerable men -- 'Maybe if I buy her stuff, she'll show me more.'"

But the Web has a way of making even the most straightforward picture of a 14-year-old caught on her webcam into a pornographic image. "Everything can be sexualized online because it all lies in your imagination," says Marissa. Some cam portal sites create databases of hundreds of images lifted without always asking permission of the girls in the images. The sites mix nude images with photos of ordinary girls that are hardly suggestive at all.

It's the mixing of soft-core porn with lifted photos that raises the ire of the cam community. Daign of Daign.com, who specializes in writing bitchy reviews of cam sites on his lunch hour at work, recently posted a call-to-arms to send hate e-mail to an especially egregious site: "Did you know that our friends over at the pedophile site ... are back up? So nice that a bunch of 40 year olds are jackin it to your daughter's webcam."

"I think that these databases take undue advantage of the girls. The line for me is drawn when they are divorced from their personalities and become literal objects," says Bridget Guildner.

It's the occupational hazard of being a cam girl to have your image stolen without your permission and put into a vast database of cam images without even your name on it. That's the contradiction of the cam girl world -- the technology that gives the girls a place to be themselves and show off is the technology that can strip them of their identity and reduce them to a nameless database of images.

For the girls themselves, running cam sites is about a lot more than scattering their image across the Web or nabbing wish-list booty. Brittany says that running her site since she was 17 has made her better able to deal with the scrutiny of others: "It's helped me be more open and accepting of myself. I used to be terribly shy. Now, I'm more comfortable with people passing judgment on me. That used to be one of my biggest fears, people judging me without knowing me. Now, I couldn't care less."

The girls also learn about the demands of a public life. Perfekt, who has had a site since she was 13 and is now 18, says, "Some days, I want to break my camera. I hate feeling obligated to take pictures, and yet, if you don't update your cam, it's like you're not in circulation."

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