During my six months of online adult webcam work with Xhamster.com in 2020, I learned many things about myself, but also some about other people. First and foremost was the variable lens through which I was viewed by visitors, clients and fans – a lens which adjusted according not only to the viewer’s perception of me in general, but sometimes also seemingly according to their mood, or intensity of feeling. This may not be in itself surprising – anyone who has ever been in any kind of relationship knows that partners call each other by various titles, names and appellations depending upon circumstances. My experience, however – through presenting specifically as a “trans1” Xhamster performer – allowed me to directly experience the full range of perceptions to my own self, and the names by which I was addressed directly, which in turn revealed much about their own mindsets, sexuality and attitudes. Names and titles I have been given, according to my screenshots and notes, include:
“sexy babe”, “slutty little bitch”, “beauty”, “bitchboi”, “sissy”, “sissy faggot”, “sissy boi”, “my queen”, “man”, “hot bitch”, “mistress”, “adorable princess”, “naughty bedroom girl”, “beautiful princess”, “girlfriend”, “goddess”, “my slut”, “my whore”, “cougar” and “my2 woman”.
The broad range of terms is revealing enough, from excessively honorific to downright degrading, if not offensive, outside of their borderline acceptability in such a context. To name is to define – it is also, in the field of relationships, to define status, whether ownership, mastery, subservience or appreciation, but it also reveals the viewer/client’s reading of the performer as subject, as well as object: despite my 100% male anatomy, and the public knowledge that my appearance of breasts was entirely false, many still insisted on referring to me by purely female/feminine terms, even traditional terms of endearment, including sometimes going as far as to define me as their “girlfriend” and express desires to show me off in public, take me out socially and merely enjoy my presence3.
The ratio of fantasy:reality in such statements is neither here nor there – what matters is the recurring tendency to interpret the subject in their own terms (those who did not read me approvingly, as not their ‘type’ or whatever, presumably wouldn’t hang around long enough to do so), and to reinforce that interpretation through language itself – through the naming process, which also cuts both ways (I had men desire me to call them “Daddy”, an affectation I’m uncomfortable with, irrespective of the fact that for that fantasy to risk being true, they would need to be pushing 70 years old. My very first paying client, from Israel, wanted to call me “Mommy”. Others, “Auntie”. One black American client insisted I refer to him by the ‘n’ word, which I was totally unwilling to do at first, both for personal reasons as well as those relating to the website’s terms of service, but eventually conceded - under protest - with “Whatever works for you, man. You are paying after all...”).
In the Biblical ‘Genesis’, God’s naming of Adam and Eve denotes an act affiliated to creation. In our lives, we name children, animals, and even inanimate objects to enforce our personality, our hopes or desires, upon those recipients of names. What I took from the vast range of names I was called through this experience was that the perception of a person like me, despite being grounded in a specific aesthetic and a certain mindset, is capable of being ‘read’ and defined in myriad ways; my peculiarities, disposition and attitude often already formed and defined in the minds of Others – assumptions which are usually dashed, when I reveal no interest in buying into their roleplaying games, master/slave fancies or expectations of what kind of treatment, acts or scenes even interest me.
While I could handle the degrading feminine terms (being – perhaps disappointingly – almost expectant of such), I had more problems with terms like “boi”, “sissy” and “faggot”, for their homophobic overtones, even if the users were not intending to be offensive. It also disarmed me, I felt, in the sense that it stripped my facade down to mere biological reality – any pretence of “femininity” or occupation in the grey area between the gender poles removed and my status diminished to being just a guy with make-up on, being hustled by other guys out on a virtual cruising session or looking for a ‘quick fix’. I appreciate there’s a good deal of theoretical analysis that could be drawn out of the linguistic elements of this, but I would need to delve deeper into Derrida et al. This is perhaps a line of future enquiry.
1 Xhamster’s ‘trans’ category is a catch-all for anything not traditionally cis male or cis female. A hairy man in some lingerie would be as admissible in this category as a fully transitioned person. I always presented as fully ‘femme’ as possible, though with varying degrees of femininity – anywhere from butch biker bitch to film noir femme fatale, usually depending on mood.
2
The possessive was a regular occurrence, not just in the more
degrading terms. The need to own,
to master, to have sole jurisdiction, seems to be writ large upon
male thinking generally – even
in the public chatroom, where others would routinely enter and
converse with me, one could
observe the power dynamics at work between other visitors.
3
Hard to tell if this was some form of psychological deflection, to
frame me purely in feminine – hence, heterosexual – terms in
order to allay lingering fears of latent queerness on the part of
these users, who often identified themselves assuredly as “married”,
“straight”, “just curious about trans”, etc. Other
interesting variable taxonomies referred to my sexual areas, which
could be defined as either wholly male, wholly female, or various
hybridized portmanteau terms. In the course of this I learned a
whole new anatomical lexicon: ‘pussyass’, ‘bitchcock’,
‘boipussy’, ‘manpussy’, ‘shecock’, suggesting that trans
and ambiguous persons are indeed viewed as possessing ‘other’
(Othered?) forms of genitalia – again, the elaborate linguistic
chicanery allowing displacement of the underlying reality that they
are being turned on by what still is essentially, and biologically,
a man, with the identical anatomy to themselves.
