Frauenfelder on cam girls
Mark Frauenfelder, one of the editors of Boing Boing, has a great feature article at Yahoo Internet Life about teenage cam girls and their admirers who buy them stuff from their Amazon wish lists.
The cam girls phenomenon could not have happened before this moment in history. It's the result of a combination of specific ingredients: inexpensive yet powerful technology to send and receive video images over the Net; a culture that places a higher value on fame than on the skills and talent that make people famous; teen celebrities who happily flaunt their bodies on the covers of national magazines; and the timeless rite of passage that is a teenage girl's search for identity and blossoming awareness of her own sexual power.
Frauenfelder draws connections between the "cam whore" phenomenon and the practice of enjo kosai or "compensated dating" among Japanese teenage girls.
