I logged into Chaturbate the other day and got a notification about “Webcam User Survey 2022” with an invitation to participate, it wasn’t there the next day so I’m not sure if this is random or simply being shown for a short period.

Participate in research! Take the Webcam User 2022 survey, administered by a third party.

It wouldn’t be the first time that an organization did a “survey” so they could create a “study”, and from there a “press release” and an “infographic”. All in quotes because I know from my marketing experience that these are all basically ways to generate publicity.

A bit like how Pornhub does a “study” on porn usage. Sure it is interesting, but they are not really doing it for academic reasons, they just want the mentions in newspapers and blogs about it.

Therefore I wasn’t too hopeful about the legitimacy of this so I clicked through with reservations, but then I saw the landing page boasted it was from a legitimate university. Specifically the University of Portland.

Now that could mean one of two things, first it could be that it really is an academic study, and the other is that universities get hard up too and need to lend their gravitas to marketing studies.

The title of the survey is “Webcam User Survey 2022.”

Sounds good

And then goes on to say a bit more about it.

The research is being done by Xtine Milrod, PhD, email: [email protected], and Martin Monto, PhD, University of Portland, email: [email protected].

A red flag here is that the lead researcher has an email at their own domain, which implies to me a commercial organization, while the second researcher is offering an .edu email address that seems more legit.

Yes, this is judging-by-email address, so sue me.

Checking into the researchers in a little more detail shows me that Xtine Milrod is a sex therapist. That’s fine on its own of course, a valid profession and clearly one who might be interested in webcam sex.

Looking at the second researcher gives me more pause for concern though. Again this is someone with an interest in sex, but more specifically “social aspects of sexuality, the sex industry, and violence”.

That’s a quote from their LinkedIn. It goes on to mention:

Recent successes include high profile research on “hooking up,” customers of prostitutes, and non-suicidal self injury.

My emphasis

And then also :

[…] Completing the third year of a USDOJ Campus Violence Prevention Grant

This emphasis on violence is worrying to me.

As an online sex worker myself I’ve never been involved with violence, nor found it to be significant in any of the online camgirl forums I’ve participated in here on my site or others.

While I don’t discount that violence exists in the sex industry my own lived experience is that it is not as prominent as some, mostly mainstream and negative, portrayals of sex work suggest.

All that put together makes me concerned that this “survey”, rather than being for the purposes of generating clickbait marketing material, may focus instead on the “problems” experienced by either suppliers or consumers of online webcam sex.

Obviously, that’s just an impression and an opinion, and we all know what opinions are like.

Everybody has one and most of them stink.

Not mine though, I mean my asshole, I keep it fresh and clean in case anybody wants to kiss it or I want to wear a nice pretty jewel buttplug.

Bottom line, did I take the survey? Should you?

I didn’t, at least not really, I did page through the questions which means I’ve submitted an answer. I was expecting there to be an “other comments” question at the end where I could say “discard this entry, I’m not really answering”, however, there was no such thing.

Webcam User Survey 2022

As I entered random garbage into the form just so I could page through it I presume my entry will be discarded during data cleaning as an obvious outlier. Hopefully. I mean serious researchers do know about data cleaning right?

Having looked at the questions though I do suspect I feel a bias towards showing that camming is a “problem”.

Questions such as: “I think this camming platform and others should be illegal.” that you have to agree or disagree with.

It is somewhat balanced with questions such as “I think this camming platform and others contribute positively to society”.

My impression was that the negatives were more common though. I didn’t count them so that’s just an impression, perhaps driven by me being more sensitive to “negative” views on online sex work.

Even if neutral I’d still be worried that it would be cast in a negative light somewhere along the line from study to clickbait headline on some news site. “Study shows webcam sex is bad for mental health”. That sort of garbage that all scientific studies are vulnerable to.

Did you take the survey? What do you think, is it biased or neutral?

Let me know in the comments.