MY LIFE AS A CAMGIRL
Lights, camera, action! A top amateur porn star reflects on the addictive experience of baring it all online — and reveals why she hung up her garter belts for good
ISA Mazzei was nervous. The 23-year-old had just finished watching a YouTube tutorial showing her how to make her bed look crisp and perfect, like a hotel room’s. She rearranged the sequined throw pillows she’d bought for the occasion, then hung dark, heavy curtains on the windows to shield the neighbors’ eyes and ears.
Next came the lingerie. “I went for the vintage aesthetic,” she tells The Post. That meant lots of lace, garters, stockings — and pearls, for a touch of class.
Finally, Mazzei was ready. She turned on her camera. And just like that, Una the camgirl was born.
“Having hundreds of people watching you is really hot,” Mazzei, now 28, tells The Post of her two years stripping down in front of her Web camera. “It definitely is a turn-on for me.”
In her upcoming memoir, “Camgirl” (Rare Bird Books, out Nov. 12), the UC Berkeley graduate unveils the highs and lows from her lucrative stint in sex work. The tell-all book arrives on the heels of her screenplay for the 2018 Netflix horror film “Cam,” starring Madeline Brewer (Janine in Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”).
Before her years in front of the lens, Mazzei had a complicated relationship with her self-esteem and sexuality. Although the California native was raised in a comfortable, upper-middle class home, things weren’t as idyllic as they seemed. In her book (inset), she claims that her father, who directed music videos, was bipolar, and that her mother, a makeup artist, was an alcoholic.
Although she declines to discuss the details, Mazzei also says she was sexually abused when she was younger and suffered from trauma as a result.
In high school and college, Mazzei became a “slut,” in her words. She remembers making out with groups of both girls and boys at parties for attention, and feeling dirty and ashamed after sex.
After graduating from college, where she studied comparative literature, she
became “addicted” to Tinder. As she swiped obsessively, she tried out a string of conventional jobs, including Web development, retail and even a stint as an assistant high-school teacher. All of them bored her.
The idea for camming hit Mazzei in 2014, during a trip to a strip joint with a boyfriend. She was transfixed by a dancer who was “comfortable in her sexuality and practically ‘owned’ the club.”
Mazzei was envious — and inspired. After all, she was young and attractive, with a size 2 body and 32C breasts. She wasn’t sure about dancing onstage, but, like most millennials, she had some digital expertise. So she hatched a plan to broadcast live sex videos from her bedroom.
After a little research, Mazzei found a platform called My Free Cams, where viewers could watch “for free” and tip “when they wanted.” She studied other camgirls to get a sense of how they acted and what people liked. She came up with the persona of Una — a slightly goofy, nerdy character who wasn’t afraid to bare it all.
“It was a combination of a fantasy of who I wanted to be, plus the results of my research as to which camgirls were the most popular,” she says. The pseudonym Una came from its singularity, and just like her real name, was unusual and made up of three letters.
Even with a few technical glitches,
Mazzei’s premiere was a soaring success. Visitors were intoxicated by her offbeat humor and, of course, the strategic closeups. She earned $450 that first night.
“Here they were, hundreds of eyeballs glued to my every move. I was Queen Seductress, and I had found my people,” she writes of that first performance.
In one show, she sat in a foam-filled bathtub wearing a bikini and sailor hat, as her online visitors paid money to pick which scrap of fabric should be discarded first.
Mazzei found that she got a kick out of manipulating and controlling the mostly male audience who communicated with her via chat. And the money was good, too: Viewers would tip $125 for a sexy action, like taking off her bra or spanking herself with a paddle. So she kept going. Soon, Mazzei had some regular visitors to her chat. One, whom she calls the Whale, often tipped big to make other users jealous. She offered private shows for those willing to pay a premium. “They were mostly great guys,” she says.
They certainly were generous. As Una, Mazzei raked in as much as $15,500 per month. She drove two BMWs, rented a luxury apartment in a trendy part of Boulder, Colo., and had a manicurist on-call.
To keep business booming, she diversified her act to include girl-on-girl shows and BDSM — a highly lucrative area, she says. She even made an in-person appearance at a porn convention in Las Vegas, where she signed autographs for adoring fans.
It wasn’t all about the money and fame. Mazzei says sex work boosted her selfesteem — and, on a deeper level, helped her reframe her complex relationship with her sexuality. She discovered how she could control others with her sensuality and body. Camming, along with therapy, helped her deal with her past trauma from sexual abuse.
“I finally felt like I was safe enough to confront this thing that had happened to me and begin the process [of healing,]” she says.
Of course, her unusual career had its disadvantages. She had to keep her work a secret from her family, and it took a toll on her body. The most lucrative time for camming was during the night, so she kept weird hours, sleeping most days until 6 p.m. This meant she neglected her reallife friendships because of their opposite schedules — and leaned more heavily on the attention of her online followers. Not all of them were kind, either: A handful of trolls called her “fat,” and one illegally posted her camming videos to a porn site.
Those pressures added up. By winter 2016, Mazzei was getting tired of Una.
“I started to feel like I had lost control over my digital identity,” she says. “I wanted to regain the feeling of agency over my own image.”
So the camgirl made a brutal decision: Kill her off.
But Una didn’t die quietly. Instead, Mazzei faked the character’s drunken suicide before a rapt audience of regulars.
“Once [Una] was dead, Isa would be reborn,” she writes in her book.
Now, resurrected as Isa Mazzei and currently working in film — a different kind — in Vancouver, British Columbia, the single woman says she finally feels “real” again. But she doesn’t regret her years on camera.
“I’m proud of my sex work,” Mazzei says, matter-of-factly. “It’s something I celebrate.”