I took a night off from work to go see Parthenope with S. I haven’t seen him since the week I started camming, so there was a lot to talk about over dinner and after seeing the film. I loved Parthenope. I am still thinking about it, though part of me believes a true pleasure shouldn’t be dwelt upon scientifically. Like a fragrance with a beautiful onset, it should be appreciated for the beauty of a first experience, and allowed to dry down into something musky, inconspicuous, a substantial base note of one’s life, but not a crisp memory or idea in focus.

Last week has been my slowest week in terms of profits; I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that February is ending, or to do with the American economy, or with the mere fact that I hadn’t streamed more when I was doing well the week before. I took too many days off last week because I was satisfied with how much I was earning, and because I wanted to write. Now I’m sort of doing it again, thinking about this movie about a beautiful woman instead of streaming. I wasn’t aware as I watched it, but the movie’s tagline is curious:

“Is she a siren or a myth?"

Parthenope, as I also wasn’t aware in advance, is one of the sirens whom Odysseus encountered in Homer’s Odyssey. Her name means virgin-voiced, and she “cast herself into the sea when her songs failed to entice Odysseus” (Wikipedia). Then her body washed ashore in Naples, where the movie is set.

S, in my view, fits the classical ideal of a beautiful man who isn’t at concerned by most mortal affairs, he is neither emotionally demanding nor possessive, but neither is he distant or cold. He’s the perfectly round, frictionless, spherical sort of object that makes it easy to “roll with.” He is actively non-monogamous, with a kind of wide-eyed innocence and curiosity that I rarely find in the men I meet on dating apps. I met him a few months after he moved out of the apartment he had shared with his ex-wife, and since then, he’s accumulated a string of lovers, and I am always curious to hear about his journey with these new women.

I want to listen, I want to be a mentor of sorts, but in reality I speak more than he does. He’s more inquisitive than usual, as if he were empty of his own “content.” The reality, according to him, is that he is slower to articulate his experience of life, so he’s less able to comment in detail on the women he’s been seeing.

When I first met him I was duly smitten, it was the first time in a long time that I had met a man I truly found very beautiful, whose beauty was at the forefront of my mind. I was a bit disappointed when I realized that he wasn’t one to express desire to see me as frequently as I wanted to see him, but I quickly adjusted to reality, and though you could say I lost some amount of feeling for his beauty, his beauty is constant; I still appreciate him as a beautiful man and friend.

On Wednesday, when we last had sex, I wasn’t able to feel much, so we stopped after a while. I keep on thinking about Parthenope, and camming, and about my failure to fuck well with a beautiful man, whom I nonetheless enjoy talking to.

Working in sex, or doing sex work, has displaced and sublimated a lot of my questions and anxieties about love and desire. If I were not so occupied with streaming, camming, and making drafts of “content” for subscription sites, I’d probably be wondering who my next subject should be, my next object of thought, my next locus of questions and fantasies. On CB, men ask me what I’m into, whether I have a type, whether I might be into them or like them were no money involved. The reality is that I do have something of a type, constructed through my history of relationships, but that my history has led me to a place where I seem unable to hold on tightly to a fantasy of an ideal love-object.

Parthenope has a narcotic effect on screen; she moves with such slowness, with such an omniscient, intentional slowness, that she seems to become the measure of time. In concert with the camera, she determines how long it will take for our eyes to glide across each exhibited surface of her body, she determines how our eyes will linger and flicker and jump between eyes and nose and mouth and hair and back and vertebrae and breasts. Unlike in the dominating, active form of the scopophilic “male gaze,” it feels as if she is doing the looking to us, asserting her will over our passive enmeshment. And what really what makes her so narcotic is her smile, a smile which invites interest, a smile which often corresponds with her eyes looking into the camera lens. She knows, with that smile, that we are interested in looking at her, and she also knows that we are interested in knowing what lies behind that smile. Hence the question she is most commonly asked:

“What are you thinking about, Parthenope?"

This isn’t a question I’m asked when I’m on camera, but I do get asked, “how are you?” I never quite know how to respond to this question, because I hesitate to talk about the truth of what I’m thinking about, which is commonly, on stream, when is my next tip going to arrive and under what circumstances?

And in this vein, what have I done to attract the flow of money, what does the person on the other end receive or achieve by sending money to me in this way, on a public ledger, with each transaction making a little sound for everyone watching, though if a tip note is attached, it’s only visible to the streamer.

Anyway, the idea is that I smile, I invite, I wonder what leads people to be attracted enough to me to give me something, and I wonder what I can do to invite more attraction, and I wonder about the woman on the movie screen who might be wondering about the same thing. In the movie, it’s implied that her beauty causes someone to take his own life, and she wonders about this. It darkens her face, she appears in shadows instead of in pure sunlight, she cries, she presses her face into a stern gaze, or a sad, wistful, slightly droopy aspect.

We learn from seeing this transformation that beauty really does seem to come from the open invitation of the smile, and from the question of what lies behind it; sadness made visible indexes its own feeling, it’s plain and without mystery, compared to the mythical smile of a virgin creature. The first morpheme in Parthenope comes from the Greek word for virgin, and the word I was familiar with before I saw the film, parthenogenesis, refers to asexual reproduction. Smiling, even if it displays a kind of sexual knowledge, is really a kind of virginal act, insofar as it betrays no knowledge of an inviting smile’s consequences, which might lie just minutes or hours ahead.

Being bad at sustaining love-feelings, being bad with men in the sense that I have attracted intense emotions that I failed to respond to adequately, I’ve come away from the fall and winter seasons with a sense of blank indifference with respect to love. I am not worried about how bad I am at love, that is. I acknowledge it as the present reality, and see little harm in living a loveless life. But because I attempt to now make a business of flirtation, I am reminded of what lurks beneath the surface, of how my work allows me to avoid dating. Now I don’t have to worry about those moral conundrums I faced when I went on a fourth or fifth date with a man knowing that he liked me more than I could.

S is such a perfect intermittent partner because I am not dating him in order to progress a narrative of mounting intimacy; he could be there or not there next week and it wouldn’t really matter. That we’ve seen each other just twice this calendar year seems satisfying enough. The irony with him is that the perfect and beautiful sexual partner correlates with such sexual detachment on my end; no matter how real or obvious his desire to fuck me may be, and no matter how much I appreciate his marvelous head or torso or legs, he doesn’t make me wet.

Maybe my true fantasy would be to maim or disfigure him, but how can I actualize that? On our first date, I left a contusion above his clavicle, maybe that’s the furthest I’ll ever have gotten. Interactions with good-looking submissive men on feeld leave me cold; I can’t imagine stomping on a man who has told me in advance how much that gets him off, unless it’s for a fee. The extremely asymmetrical relationship between the client-tipper and the provider-streamer on a camsite gets me much more aroused than any BDSM scene I can imagine acting out in reality. On Chaturbate, I am an image, an apparition of femininity, scalable to any size, sometimes viewed by men on TV screens. The men are little amalgamations of text: in terms of physical qualities, I attribute to them primarily the sounds and associations I make with their usernames. In terms of personality, I read something from the messages they type. In terms of sexual contact, I feel only a response to the quantities of tokens they tip me, the notification sounds these tips make, and the tip notes that they sometimes write.

Not being able to experience this collective of symbol-based men as entities with physical weight or particular voices or hair texture allows me to enter into a relation which feels immensely and absolutely erotic: sex is no less corporeal, but it enters into a much more direction relation with the abstraction of numbers.

How many people are in the room? How much is he tipping me? How much have I earned so far, and how many hours have I been streaming for? Do I feel like I’m at a place where I might attempt to cum? Am I satisfied, happy, with my earnings? And if so, who are the users in my room for whom I would like to display my utmost sexual pleasure? How much more will they send me?

And of course there is the dimension of me looking at myself on screen. This image is unique to the activity of camming; the image I see of myself in the mirror, or in the photographs I might otherwise take of myself, are nothing alike. It’s this image constructed for someone else to look at, this image which will only modify itself to perform certain acts when it receives tokens from tippers, that’s the libidinal, eroticized image that I come to when I do come on stream.

I do recognize, now, how much of my sexual fantasy life must have lived in the world of cameras and mirrors, even before I began camming, otherwise how could I have such a genuinely strong physical response to my work?

I think I do want to dwell on this scientifically. What makes libidinal currents, flows of energy, so potent when what’s flowing between me and the other, is nothing much more than a video stream, and the receipt of a transaction? Is it a purification ritual, a paring down of all of our circumstantial attributes into just the necessary thing, an image, which invites, and the symbol of the number, which designates a quantity (and therefore a quality) of interest?

Clean, and pure, this is what work feels like when it approaches an ideal. I’ve hardly mentioned the physical sensations involved, of reclining on the bed, often propped up on one bent arm, and adjusting my body in ways that I deem visually appealing, and of smelling the fluids that come out of me onto my fingers or the glass dildo I’ve been using on stream. As I stream I’m aware of the odd feeling of being naked, of being cold and naked, of doing crunches to raise my core temperature, of wearing a thong which I would not normally wear, of smelling my spit and cunt juices. This is not so clean and pure; it is true that physical labor is involved, that I am not in absolute harmony with my own wants. But ultimately the quality of my attention feels clean and pure because its both so diffuse, and so fully directed towards the activity in the chat. When I’m working, I feel a real sort of love for the people participating in this strange situation.