Parents, stop being your children's friends. It's bad for them.

Your daughter might not "need" your permission, in the strictest sense, but they should never hear that from the their parents. Parents, set hard and fast boundaries and provide structure. They can get soft permission from their friends/peers.

I think Dan's advice is mostly right on. Future "consequences" are meaningless to 18 year olds. These videos are, for the most part, forever. It might be unfair when the other junior bros at the bank talk about your daughter's nips at work and post a racy photo in the back room, but like I said in the other thread: Responsibilities lie with the bearer of the consequences. Just because it's not fair doesn't mean the situation will be resolved fairly for her.

Being a professional sexy model is a lot like being an athlete. It won't last your entire working career, and even people who make a lot of money find ways to blow it. If she's not planning on being in school, she should at least be learning how to manage the business side of things and look forward to a "behind the scenes" role in the sexy-woman field after her camming days are done.

Sex work isn't the commodification of a persons sexuality. It is the performance of sexual labour that attempts to satisfy parts of another persons/people's sexuality. It might sound like a quibble but those who haven't done it find it hard to understand the distinction.

If it were part of her sexuality to want to have webcam sex she would likely already be doing that for the sheer pleasure of it. And sure for some the money thrill and sexual pleasure can cross over into the personal realm but it is all still mediated by the fact that you are, at the end of the day, working for someone else and performing a job - not the hottest for most people.

I know this isn't practical, but my general feeling on sex work is that there should probably be a lot less sex workers out there. More specifically, I feel like the only people that should do it are the people that know they are prepared for a long (perhaps lifelong?) career in the sex industry.

The cruel irony of the sex work stigma, is that the stigma is also the reason it (potentially) can be a lucrative career without any real need for education or formal training. Take away that stigma, and the biggest barrier to entry disappears (along with the decent wages that can be earned by sex workers).

Anyway, the stigma sucks, but shit lasts forever on the internet; and if there's any chance your future career will be adversely impacted by sex work (which is a pretty significant chance given how conservative most businesses are), most people should avoid it. And as Dan alluded to, cam work is not nearly as lucrative as many think. Many bartenders/waitresses make just as much (or more), without risking the future repercussions.

Why take the risk, when the reward may be so minuscule?

Is "Hey Mom, this is something I might consider doing in a couple of years" much different from "asking for a friend"? Young adults who come out as gay in their 20s have been gay their whole lives. It's quite possible the daughter here is already doing sex work, and is breaking it to mom gently.

@1 Sportlandia is right, parents have got to stop being their kids' friends and more like parents. A parent can be both sex-positive and tell their child that a career path might not be the bed of roses the child might think or even hazardous to their future. It's all how the parent frames the discussion.

Maybe in the future came technology will let people digitally alter their faces, tattoos and voices so the future stigma wouldn't be an issue.

Or maybe everyone under 30 will start camming, the way everyone got tattoos, and suddenly having tattoos no longer made people "unemployable" (as their parents had warned).

Dan has partially hit the nail on the head with "emotional labor" and the fact that it isn't the cash spigot some people think it is. I agree with @2 that a solid reason to do sex work is because it is part of her sexuality. However, she needs to not be blind to the fact that there are high risks of relationships becoming transactional and inadequate support networks to help people deal with the real emotional effects. When human interactions are your business, every relationship is a transaction.

Here are a few of specific examples from my friends and acquaintances.

A loves sex so much "she'll try anyone once". She's happily escorting and seemingly in a very healthy place in her life with loving/stable friends.

B started doing Nite Flirt and was incredibly successful at it making 5 figures per month. Once she took a night off and lost 40% of her revenue for the month because the moment a client calls and can't get you, they go to the next option. As a result, she became almost unable to leave the house or shutoff the service leading to a very unhealthy space for her.

C was a stripper who reached a point where she could no longer take a compliment because every day she got insincere compliments from clients.

D is a male submissive who had a dominant female friend (maybe more than one) who started to act like they were losing money by spending time with him when they went pro. Mutually fulfilling relationships were ruined by human interaction becoming transactional.

E was a submissive of mine who could never enter that space effectively again after she started pro-domming.

Basically, people who enter sex work should be fully informed that it's not the easy money they dreamed of and the deleterious effects on their relationships can be very, very real. "A" shows that negative effects are not a foregone conclusion but 1 out of 5 aren't great odds.

@6 didn't you hear? Emma Watson's nudes got leaked.

LW, you are her mother not another eighteen year old thinking it's all a hoot.
Tell her your truthful response to her plans.

@2 Thank you for the nuance here. This is something I've always suspected but have never been able to articulate.

Yeah, @2 that makes complete sense now that you've said it, but I couldn't have laid it out.

Camming when she's 'in her twenties'? It sounds as if she's wanting to hear some sort of parental caution, like 'are you sure?' or 'I hope you change your mind'. Alternatively, she's already started, and is dipping her toe in the waters testing out her mother's response.

This is arduous and stigmatised work, which may be a good option for some. I wish it were less stigmatised. I like Dan's advice of waitering Shake Shack tables first.

@9 apparently the pics are from a fitting. Not quite the same thing.

I see doing any kind of sex work as work which doesn't have the potential to last and make for a long and productive professional life, yet can easily interfere with attempts to switch to other kinds of work. The fact is that it is stigmatized. I've read about too many cases of simple artistic photographs coming back to haunt someone. As a parent, I want my kids to have as many opportunities as possible and I would discourage doing something that has the potential to negatively affect the number of possibilities, so I would try to convey that attitude to my kid should he or she ask for my opinion on the subject.

I only have a few acquaintances who do sex work (as far as I know), and I've seen it have some other negative consequences, particularly as they got older, so I am more wary than might be warranted. And they aren't cam performers, but interact in real life with their clients, which of course leaves them open to assault--which has happened to all of them, and more than once.

Take it from a father who knows...many (not all) 18-year old girls are not making totally rational decisions (risk taking areas of our brains don't fully develop until our 20s. She'll probably still do whatever she wants, but you don't have to sanctify it. I hope my daughters will someday appreciate that I tell them what I think they should know, not what they want to hear.

@15 - yep, exactly. As sex-positive liberals, we can and should bemoan and fight against the stigmatization of sex, nudity, kinks, sex work and so on. But as a matter of hard-headed practicality, no parent wants to see their kid seriously 'take one for the team' in the fight to create a more accepting society. The sex they have, paid or otherwise, can go unrecorded for now.

@17 really fantastic phrasing there!
Agree wholeheartedly with most of the comments so far.
I started sex work (stripping) at twenty-five and I feel like that was a very reasonable choice. I moved to the city and had been financially independent for some years, doing various types of low-wage, service-industry work. I didn't ask for my parent's permission, or even tell them, because I felt it was my choice and their "right not to know" as Dan's late mother put it. Also, my folks are kinda sex-negative for a couple of secular liberals, but I don't think I would have told them otherwise because I really enjoyed having something that was "just for me".
If LW's daughter isn't already camming on the sly (as some have suggested) and looking for validation after the fact, I really hope she waits. It's so much easier to set goals, hard limitations (in my case that was quit by thirty, which I beat by nine months because I had started the transition in advance), and keep your wits about you/not be swayed by the false promises of clients, when your prefrontal cortex is fully developed. I know young people hate hearing that, and I'm sure there's a better way to word it, but it's true. I hated seeing eighteen to twenty-one year old women at the club. They were so clearly immature and easily taken advantage of... it broke my heart.

I have no idea how I'd suggest MOM go about asking this, or even if I'd recommend asking this, but I'd want to know:

What is it about doing cam work that makes you want to do it?

A few possibilities are:

I'm worried that I'll never succeed in what I really love (art, music) because the competition is too tough.

I'm worried that I'll never succeed in what I really love (science, tech, engineering, medicine) because the field is tough on women.

I'm worried that the field I love doesn't pay well enough to pay off student loans (pretty much anything in the humanities or fine arts).

I think I'm no good at anything.

I imagine cam work to be easy and to pay a lot.

I find the idea of men looking at me sexually exciting. It's realizing my own fantasies.

Sex work provides a unique way to help members of disadvantaged groups realize their fantasies. It helps the wounded, the disabled, those with unusual kinks and fetishes. It's like social work except it has the potential to pay better and really help over the long run.

Needless to say, MOM's reaction depends a lot on the answer she gets. In the mean time, I recommend making no assumptions.

@4: Yeap, she's already camming and trying to figure out if Mom will react poorly if she finds out.

@15. Nocutename. "...work which doesn't have the potential to last and make for a long and productive professional life, yet can easily interfere with attempts to switch to other kinds of work".

How about college football? It isn't even paid. Its potential to interfere is greater than a few cam turns--all those bumps to the head. Society's hypocrisy about sex is a bad thing.

The thing with people watching you have sex...

Maybe at 18 you don't realize this (or maybe it's different from the selfie generation) but things that look good from the outside and things that you enjoy when you are doing it are not always the same. What I mean is, porn is performance. Most of us alternate between looking really sexy and looking kind of silly (on the outside) when we have sex- the positions that feel good aren't always the ones that look good, most of us have sex faces that can be weird out of context, most of us alternate positions depending on response of partners and stamina, not what someone looks like from the POV of the camera. When I watch amateur videos - just sex tapes people make- some of them are just sort of boring or you can't really see anything, etc. And the amount of money you'd make from really amateur camming can't be that much. I don't know if the work/effort put into it would be worthwhile considering alternatives.

I just wonder if an 18 year old girl is thinking "oh it would be easy to make sex tapes!" without really know what she's talking about. Also I've never done sex work, but I wonder how getting into the habit of thinking about sex that way- as a performance for others, as content, not as something you are engaged in in the moment- would affect your sex life later when you are just fucking for yourself and your partner(s). Seems like we could discuss all these things without coming across as hysterical or judgmental.

@21: Harriet_by_the_bulrushes: If I had a son who wanted to play football, I would use every single tool in my bag of tricks to stop him. Not only are the big concussions dangerous, but multiple, repeated small concussions that are shrugged off and "played through" also lead to permanent and sometimes quite severe brain damage. Sometimes that brain damage doesn't show up in a measurable way until years later, but that means that every time a player steps onto the field, whether in a game or at practice, he's putting himself in a potentially risky situation. It's a very dangerous sport and I don't think it's worth it, even at the professional level, where the pay is so high.

Three differences between being a cam girl and a college football player which I think render the comparison useless:
1) Virtually any woman can be a cam girl. It takes no special skill or training, and you can set up the operation out of your home. All you need is your phone and an internet connection. However, the vast majority of boys who want to play college football can't. That is, not too many young men can just decide they want to be a football player and become one.

2) While camming might make a woman decent money, it's not going to make anyone rich. As someone upthread notes, you have to keep and increase your fickle client stream and there's constant competition. You can't charge too much at once, so it's a steady trickle of money, not a giant waterfall, and you need to pay your bills, run your errands, and get your own healthcare while you're doing that, as you would with any other job. It's true that college football doesn't pay directly, but college football players receive free education and room and board from famous universities, which is a definite investment in their futures, and worth far more than most cam girls can make in four years. The cost of four years of education at a prestigious school, plus room and board, plus books, tutors, healthcare, personal trainers, and athletic gear is somewhere around $300,000, none of it paid for even by those players who sit on the bench for 3 of the 4 years they're on the team. The perks of being on a college football team are many, and include having access to a private gym, a chef, and not having do do so much as your own laundry (I know; I have a friend whose son is a college football player). With that degree from that university and the ability to mention that they were on its football team, many job opportunities open to people who aren't even necessarily qualified for them. And if those football players turn pro and join the NFL afterwards, which is the dream of all college football players, they stand to make obscene amounts of money.

3) You are dead right about the hypocrisy. Not only is there no stigma attached to men using their bodies as battering rams and tanks, but football players are celebrated and turned into celebrities. No one ever lost a job or a boyfriend/girlfriend when their past as a football player was revealed. No one has ever been blackmailed by someone threatening to reveal the information that he was a college football player. Parents of football players are always aware of their son's athletic career and are proud of it, often boastful. Given that there is such a discrepancy in society's response to any sort of sex worker and college or professional athlete, I don't think there's any validity to the analogy.

It's fine to point out hypocrisy, but I don't want to sacrifice my children on the altar of of "rightness." The fact is that many young women think that being a cam girl will be fun and easy and while it is for some, it's not for a lot of others, and the pay is not as good as they'd imagined it; the window of opportunity to make money in the field is relatively short; and the potential for it to come back in ways both professionally and personally and do damage is significant. My daughters, like everyone else's, are going to do what they're going to do whether I approve or not, and I will love them and support them no matter what they do, but if one of them asked what I thought about being a cam girl at age 18 or 20, I'd tell them exactly why I discourage it. I don't have sons, but if I did, I wouldn't allow him to play little kid football or high school football, which would probably leave him ineligible for college or pro football. I would consider that doing my duty as a parent.

Many (many) years ago I was a dancer at the Lusty Lady, which is sort like camwork in that there is zero possibility of physical contact with clients (it was all behind glass). It was also about as safe as sex work gets. I was never in any physical danger - the bouncers would escort me to a cab after my shift so that no creepers could hang around outside the door and wait for me to emerge. However, I found the psychological toll quite high. It did interfere with relationships (lots of men think it would be fun to date a stripper until they are dating a stripper when all of a sudden they don't like other men jerking of to their girlfriend). Over time, I felt my own sexuality sort of shrink and become twisted and warped. I saw the worst side of men all day, men at their least attractive and most annoying. After a couple of years I stared to really question whether I would ever be able to love a man again. That's when I quit. And it did, in fact, take several years before I felt back to "normal" in my feelings for men. Obviously this is a personal reaction and other women may not react the same way. But I do think sex work of any kind heads the potential to influence your sexual psyche, if you will, in ways that 18 year olds cannot predict.

Gueralinda, thanks. I was going to say something similar to elaborate on my post above, but I wasn't sure if people would consider working in a strip club to be similar to cam work so I didnt.

Yes one of the things that I noticed after working in a strip club was that I got pretty good at knowing how to move or speak or flirt in a way that men really responded to. Then later on in life when men would respond to those behaviors in a similar way or expect them of me, I admit that it grossed me out and made me lose all respect for them. In a way, this has been a good thing in my life, so I'm reluctant to say it's a negative consequence as I see girlfriends falling for shit from guys that I can call out right away, and I see guy friends falling for tricks from girls that I can see through immediately. But it does leave a sort of sadness and anger. I don't know exactly what to say about all that, and I think you said it better.

@gueralinda, That was well said. I don't know, but I suspect that many other women who have done some sort of sex work (and yes, I think stripping and dancing counts as sex work) end up feeling the same way you so eloquently articulated it. Plus, I know the Lusty Lady!

@23. Nocutename. The basis for the analogy was that they're both hard, technical, specialized work (though they're sometimes seen as something else), burnished by a superficial glamor (maybe that of physical prowess or nonconformism), with serious downstream consequences. You're consistent at least in ruling against college football.

I would think camming more skilled than you do. I can believe that the hardest-working and most able cammers earn five to ten times the average income on the same hours, and this comes from having a portfolio of skills not based on physical appearance but mostly to do with managing client relationships. As to camming's economics, I'm mostly in the dark. I've anecdotally heard a grad student in law school (my student, who correctly supposed I was mostly gay) say it put her through two years of a good state school. Not improbable; but I fear we're mostly moralising and blustering and chewing the fat, and that someone with experience like @2 Adalove could put us right.