61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
The morning that I left New York for a story assignment in Tampa, a scruffy guy with a guitar case ran up to me on the street. "I just wanted to say thank you for wearing a thong on that beautiful ass today," he said, grinning like the idiot he was and pointing at my white skirt, which was, admittedly, a little thin. "Fuck you," I said under my breath, hailing a taxi. "Hey, bitch," he snarled, "you're the one who wore it!"
So there I was in the cab, hurt, humiliated and burning up as I reflected on the irony of it all. I'd been all fired up about this assignment to cover the latest advancement in web civilization, VoyeurDorm.com, a website that rigs a
so-called dorm with forty cameras and then films the supposed co-eds who live there twenty-four hours a day. I'd been brushing up on my feminist theory, thinking lofty thoughts about the new low for womankind that's hit when 6,000 people pay thirty-four dollars a month to subscribe to a website that films seven young women's every snack, shit and shower. And even still, with one outrageously invasive comment, this guy had brought me down.Iwas the idiot for thinking that anyone cared what I think.
I am: long hair, dark skin, big eyes, big lips, big butt, big breasts.
Fuckable.
The first thing I do upon arrival at the house that hosts Voyeur Dorm is sign a model release. For the next day, I will be appearing on the Net as I do whatever it is that I'm going to do, here, in this nondescript ranch house a couple blocks off the freeway in a middle-class Tampa suburb. At night I'll sleep in a bed with a night-cam pointed at it, but I can shower in the stall with a removable cam — "unless, of course, you want to leave it in there," says Hammil, the Voyeur Dorm founder and House Dad who goes by
just one name. I'll go pretty far to get the story, but I draw the line at getting naked for the masses.
I'm ready to meet "the girls," as I'll learn they unfailingly refer to themselves, but they're almost all still sleeping when I arrive at around 2 p.m. Instead, Hammil shows me the chat set-up, which is a big draw on the site: for an extra sixteen dollars per month, members can chat live, twenty-four hours a day, with the co-eds. The girls do most of that socializing in the appropriately-named Chat Room, essentially a walk-in closet with two leather swivel chairs set up in front of two PCs, with a Sony handcam pointing at each. The computers' screens are split in half, just as they are for the subscribers at the other end: the top half shows video, without sound, of the woman at the chat cam; the bottom half is the chat text, which scrolls almost faster than one can read. The men subscribing to chat can choose from any one of forty camera locations throughout the house, and often comment in their postings on what's occuring elsewhere. Already sitting in one of the chairs is Trixie, a bottle-blond with a septum ring. She no longer lives in the house, but drops by every once in a while to do laundry and check in with her old friends on chat.
With Hammil leaning over my shoulder, I sit down in the chair that's facing Chat Cam #2. I peer in at the screen.
Dhmn: Holy shit! Who's that? rexx: Show us your tits, you fucking whore Jagg: She's a reporter, guys look she's writing things down FatBastard: The reporter girl is incredibly hot George: what color panties is the reporter girl wearing
"Jesus," I say out loud. The immediacy takes me by surprise. So does the pack mentality of the postings, the adrenaline-fuelled camaraderie among men killing time looking for skin: Show us your tits, guys look.
"Hot damn! They love you," exclaims Hammil. "Can I get you to move in here for a few months?"
I stand up abruptly and scoot out of the Chat Cam's line of vision, making the short step down to the dorm's sunken living room. It has the feel, not surprisingly, of a cheap set. The lighting is fluorescent, the walls need a paint job, and the dark green carpet looks plush but is coarse to the touch. Milla, wearing only a blue bra and a black skirt from Express, has materialized on the couch. Her face is angular and pretty, like Maria Callas's, and she's eating carrot salad with her sunglasses on.
"God, I'm so bored," she says, in a high, babyish voice. "And I've got the worst cramps! Living in a house with six girls, you know how everyone is on the rag at once. Thank God you weren't here last week when we all had PMS."
Alex, a 19-year-old blond who's made it her business to impose a little order on the place, sticks her head in the room. "Hammil! It stinks in here!" she complains. The dishwasher broke about eight months ago. No one could be bothered to take the dirty dishes out of it, and now they seem to have turned.
"Relax, ladies, I'll take care of it this afternoon," says Hammil.
Milla's long tan legs are curled underneath her as she stares at the television and watches Entertainment Tonight. It's musty and warm in here despite the A/C, and I've got this old red check collared shirt buttoned all the way up. I'm tired from the flight. It would feel good to take my shoes off and put my legs up the way Milla has. I do it.
"Hey, Reporter Girl, you're driving the guys on chat crazy sitting that way," Trixie calls from the Chat Room over the tap-tap-tap of her keyboard.
Milla laughs as I slip my shoes back on and cross my legs self-consciously.
sept87: hi reporter girl
hurrah: is the reporter girl going to eat a snack?
There are introductions all around as more of the women roll out of bed. In addition to Trixie, Milla and Alex, there's Amber, 19, Tamra, 20, J.J., 22, and Nikki, 20, who fell for Hammill over a recruitment meal at Bennigan's several months ago and has been dating him ever since. All use fake names on screen; all are high school graduates from blue-collar families in the Tampa area; and nearly all say they broke up with their first serious boyfriends
immediately before moving into the dorm. Each has her own reasons for earning her living this way: for Nikki, the only one who's stripped before, it's just a job like any other; for Alex and Amber, who say they've always wanted to be famous, it's good publicity; for Milla, "it's another chapter, a juicy one, in the story of my life"; for Tamra, it's on-the-job training — she and her boyfriend have discussed the possibility of starting their own for-profit web-cam site. Most of the women plan on taking theater classes or voice lessons at Hillsboro Community College in the fall. Tamra already has a degree in criminology from a community college but says she wants to be a pilot; Milla, who claims to be 24 years old, but is in fact 28 according to her friends, has a real estate license but is counting on Voyeur Dorm to pay for the classes she needs to get her Series 7. On top of rent and the couple of hundred bucks the girls earn each week, Voyeur Dorm will pay up to $1500 a semester for classes.
It's hard to see how they can possibly afford the time for coursework: each girl is only allowed two nights off a week, and three girls are required to be in the house at all times. The girls make the schedule themselves at a weekly Monday night meeting, but Hammil has set down other rules: no drugs, no
penetration on camera (illegal in the state of Florida), no more than three
guys in the house at once (the viewers don't like it), no drinking alcohol on camera (illegal for minors), no giving out phone numbers or meeting chat members in real life (considered a liability), no covering cams (for obvious reasons). Hammil has just added "no laziness" — now every girl must do three activities a day. That's both more and less onerous than it sounds: swimming in the pool, working out in the dorm gym, and even reading a book count; catching up with family on the phone, watching television, and napping to get through the interminably long day don't. Everyone generally abides by all of the rules except the one regarding phone numbers — each girl has a "favorite" whom she talks to on the house phone. That's no small token of affection to bestow: although to the world at large, these girls have forfeited any kind of privacy as it's commonly defined, to them, the difference between being seen and being seen and heard is a dramatic one.
The 6,000 people on the other end of the cams peering passively at their images rarely enter the girls' minds — that's "too deep, too abstract" — but they do think a lot about the guys on chat. "I don't have any of the friends I used to have," says Tamra, a petite woman who wears her strawberry blond hair
slicked behind her ears. Last night she'd had her nipple pierced, and she spends most of this afternoon with one breast exposed because it hurts too much to have cloth touch it. "My parents are kind of weird about it, so we don't talk much anymore. Now the guys on chat are my friends. Like Jagg. He's a really cool guy. Or Fatbastard. I love him."
"I like Jot," says Nikki, a brunette with frizzy hair. "I always write, 'Jot, will you be my husband?'" says Nikki. "And Hahn is cool too."
"Hahn is okay," continues Tamra. "But he's a little bit of a wuss — he's always like, 'C'mon, guys, leave the girls alone.' He's a kiss ass. Jagg is the best — he doesn't just sit there and tell you how beautiful you are, though that's nice to hear. Jagg jokes around with you like you're a real person. And he doesn't attack you either. I hate it when guys talk about my fat stomach like, 'Nice stomach, when are you due?' Or 'Nice roll,'" she says. "Sometimes I'm ready to cry."
"When I was first here, they'd always call me 'fatass,'" says Nikki. "It really bothered me. But you know how if you can laugh at yourself then no one will laugh at you?" she asks. "Now I log on under 'chunkygirl,' and they never call me 'fatass' anymore."
so-called dorm with forty cameras and then films the supposed co-eds who live there twenty-four hours a day. I'd been brushing up on my feminist theory, thinking lofty thoughts about the new low for womankind that's hit when 6,000 people pay thirty-four dollars a month to subscribe to a website that films seven young women's every snack, shit and shower. And even still, with one outrageously invasive comment, this guy had brought me down.Iwas the idiot for thinking that anyone cared what I think.
just one name. I'll go pretty far to get the story, but I draw the line at getting naked for the masses.
immediately before moving into the dorm. Each has her own reasons for earning her living this way: for Nikki, the only one who's stripped before, it's just a job like any other; for Alex and Amber, who say they've always wanted to be famous, it's good publicity; for Milla, "it's another chapter, a juicy one, in the story of my life"; for Tamra, it's on-the-job training — she and her boyfriend have discussed the possibility of starting their own for-profit web-cam site. Most of the women plan on taking theater classes or voice lessons at Hillsboro Community College in the fall. Tamra already has a degree in criminology from a community college but says she wants to be a pilot; Milla, who claims to be 24 years old, but is in fact 28 according to her friends, has a real estate license but is counting on Voyeur Dorm to pay for the classes she needs to get her Series 7. On top of rent and the couple of hundred bucks the girls earn each week, Voyeur Dorm will pay up to $1500 a semester for classes.
penetration on camera (illegal in the state of Florida), no more than three
guys in the house at once (the viewers don't like it), no drinking alcohol on camera (illegal for minors), no giving out phone numbers or meeting chat members in real life (considered a liability), no covering cams (for obvious reasons). Hammil has just added "no laziness" — now every girl must do three activities a day. That's both more and less onerous than it sounds: swimming in the pool, working out in the dorm gym, and even reading a book count; catching up with family on the phone, watching television, and napping to get through the interminably long day don't. Everyone generally abides by all of the rules except the one regarding phone numbers — each girl has a "favorite" whom she talks to on the house phone. That's no small token of affection to bestow: although to the world at large, these girls have forfeited any kind of privacy as it's commonly defined, to them, the difference between being seen and being seen and heard is a dramatic one.
