Isa Mazzei has already written a horror movie based on her experiences in the sex industry.
Now she’s described her time as an online performer in the memoir Camgirl.
In high school,Isa Mazzeihad an unusual daydream.
Credit: CAITLIN FULLAM
Starting in 2014, she spent almost two years camming entertaining and undressing for viewers on a streaming site.
I really want to help normalize and destigmatize this industry, she says.
And Im like, Yeah, sex workers are normal people.
Rare Bird Books
Mazzei grew up in Boulder, Colorado, with a cinematographer father and makeup-artist mother.
In high school, I owned the identity of being the slutty one, she says.
I would take my clothes off at parties.
Id brag about how many people I had kissed.
I kept coming back to this idea of sex work.
Mazzei began camming under the pseudonym Una.
Camming was the first space where I had really clear boundaries that I could set and enforce.
Camming was healing because it was this space where I had agency over my body, she says.
It took feeling I was safe to be able to confront that trauma safely.
Mazzei stopped performing partly to writeCam, which was directed by a filmmaker friend from Boulder, Daniel Goldhaber.
It was the hardest job Ive ever had, she says.
Its all-consuming all the time.
Mazzei and Goldhaber currently have two more films in development, and the writer has plans for another memoir.
I feel likeCamgirlends at the beginning.
