Revisiting CAM Five Years Later

I was just rewatching the brilliant film CAM (2018) yesterday – about a camgirl whose identity is stolen – and I was struck by how incredibly prescient the movie was when it first came out in 2018. AI wasn’t a viable threat yet, and deepfake technology had just come onto the scene less than a year prior, and yet this movie deals with both, in a manner of speaking.

I was also struck by how the laws surrounding sex work haven’t gotten any better in the five years since the film came out – they’ve actually gotten worse, and pose even greater dangers to sex workers. Thus, I thought I’d reshare an article I wrote about the movie for Daily Grindhouse when it was released in 2018. The film, and the issues it covers, are still as timely as ever, if not moreso:

The film itself shows repeatedly how sex workers are shamed and pushed to the margins by mainstream society. When Alice calls the police to report her likeness being stolen and used against her will, the police can’t even begin to fathom her job, let alone respect her right to do it. Instead of helping her, they make insinuations about her line of work while implying that she’s getting what she deserves. “You don’t wanna see stuff like this? Get off the internet,” says one of the cops, entirely failing to grasp the problem.

When Alice is outed as a camgirl at her younger brother’s birthday party, damage caused by the stigma surrounding sex work is once again evident. Alice’s job is legal, she works hard at it, and it allows her to be self-reliant, but because she trades in sex, her work is automatically invalidated. Alice is shunned from the party for how she chooses to express herself and make a living, despite her success. Later, someone spraypaints the words “WHORE HOUSE” on the side of Alice’s mother’s home.

These reactions are indicative of a pervasive attitude in American culture: that it’s okay to discretely consume porn, and it’s sometimes okay to admit you consume porn, but it’s never okay to admit you make porn. And if you do admit to making porn, you should be trying to get out of the business, if you want to be treated like a human. Ironically, supply-and-demand dictates that sex workers will likely always exist, even though much of society (while browsing PornHub in an incognito window) prefers to pretend they don’t.

Read the rest of the article here.