CAMGIRL
Written by: Isa Mazzei
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
OUT NOW! Buy on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Rare Bird Books, or wherever books are sold.
“I said who, I said where, I said how much.”
*warning: spoilers ahead*
Control is something we struggle with for most of our lives and never fully get a hold of. We want to be in charge of our lives, our destinies, and who we are. Sometimes, we want to control what other people think of us. We command dominance and obedience and power over them. We say who, we say where, and we say how much. Isa Mazzei goes through an unbelievably strange yet incredible journey to find out what control means. She instead learns that control is very much uncontrollable. However, in that search, Isa figures out her sexuality. She also obtains an understanding of who she is and what makes her comfortable and uncomfortable. It took a lot of trial and error, but it’s incredible.
CAMGIRL focuses on the life and times of Isa Mazzei. Isa realized at an early age that she wanted to be the only girl in the room. The only girl that can lure you in and command your desire. Isa has a knack for manipulating men to do what she wants and becomes a bit of a heartbreaker in the process. As she grows older, she explores her sexuality in several different ways, including stripping, dancing, sugar-babying, and good ol’ fashioned masturbating. However, she finds her one true passion when she decides to become a camgirl. In this time, Isa forms a new identity (Una), gains popularity, builds a small empire, explores her sexuality, and, eventually, kills herself. It’s a long road, but Isa knew how to do it.
When receiving the PDF to review, I didn’t know what I was in for. Come to find out, it was extremely my shit. I love a memoir that slowly but surely allows you to figure out the person you’re reading about. But they also figure themselves in the process of the pages. Isa Mazzei takes us through a long stretch of history from an upsetting childhood, to a blossoming career, to her finally letting things out when she lets go of camming for good and seeks help. It’s one of those books that has you holding your breath, but towards the end, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that she’ll be okay.
I ebb and flow-ed between two feelings while reading this book. On the one hand (and this is not in any way me being mean!), she can come off as a bit of an asshole, but I understand why now. As I said before, I want to figure out the person I’m reading about, but her opening up, then keeping you at arms-length, was almost intriguing.
Isa is a bit manipulative and she even acknowledges this. With some of the boys, she uses them for her gain, but somehow, it’s not malicious at all. On pg. 320, it’s almost a perfect description of who she thinks she is. She says to a therapist,
“This is Isa. She seduces boys. She fucks boys over. She breaks their hearts. Only now, I do it for money. But it’s the same thing. Seducing them. Making them like me. Manipulating them into thinking I’m somehow perfect for them. The perfect fucking girl. That’s me, that’s Isa.“
Now, this is where my other feeling lies. I feel so much empathy for her. It got to the point where I empathized with her because I just fundamentally understood where she was coming from, even though she didn’t give herself enough credit for how far she came. Isa is impulsive and reckless but also cunning and VERY smart. She’s a control freak at every point even to how she puts on her shows. However, in that description of herself, it made me think more about “the perfect girl” she wants to portray. She doesn’t control that aspect of her life, but she desires to badly.
The perfection always goes out the window when it comes to situations of intimacy; it becomes way too much for her. She overthinks way too much, and she loses control, thinking this is what she’s supposed to do. Even with her camming sessions after a while, she pushes off the responsibility from herself to her followers, wanting them to take over and absolutely losing control of her.
That’s when I realized Isa’s memoir is all about control.
“Camming had given me what I needed; it had given me enough control over my body to be okay admitting at some point I’d had none.”
There are some insanely essential parts to the book that make you go “OOF,” but one chapter took me from liking Isa to loving Isa.
When Isa switches over to a different program with her camming, she starts to become interested in BDSM. BDSM is an easy way to allow yourself to feel pain and relinquish control to another person. Before this, she thought WAY too much about her interactions with people, and intimacy would be on the table, but there’s no way she could complete it. When she switched to BDSM, things would get more intense. She would allow her followers to tip her and tell her what to do. She let them have control. In giving them have control, she invited a friend/follower Bomb/Aaron to her apartment on impulse with sad results. She almost had that control, she almost gave up that control, but in the end, she didn’t.
I’ll repeat this. Control is something that we struggle with for most of our lives and never fully get a hold of. We want to sway others into thinking that we’re the person who we think we are. We want to be in charge of what we do, what we say, what we think, what we feel, what we want. However, when that control is taken away from you, or you feel like you’ve never had it, you can become reckless. Trauma is something that affects your ability to feel in control as well. You can become wild, but you can also become as powerful as you want to be.
As Isa started to become a camgirl, she becomes as powerful as she wanted to be. There’s this intoxicating aura about her through the computer screen. She’s seductive, bewitching, tempting, and flirtatious. She didn’t have to have that immediate intimacy like how she does face-to-face, because she can avoid it and control it to a point. She wants control over others. But when it came to herself, it wasn’t as easy. In the end, she finally gained control of her body (with work to still be done), her persona, her camming, and you can’t help but admire and be inspired to be that confident and self-aware.
As I finished up CAMGIRL, I talked to my therapist about it in one or two sessions. As I talked about Isa’s struggles with intimacy, we both kinda realized I had my own struggles with control and intimacy. It hit home in a way that I didn’t expect that made us re-evaluate my mode of treatment and what to accomplish. I wanted to be as in control and okay as I could be as Isa is. I ended up saying to my therapist at one point during the session, “I want to say who, I want to say where, and I want to say how much.”
Isa’s life is so lively yet terrifying, bold yet dramatic, scary yet you want to learn more about it. She teeters on being a sex goddess for all to see and also being an anxious woman trying to figure herself out. Isa’s journey into camming has had its ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies. It’s filled by men and women who think they control her and the ones who want to help. Throughout it all, Isa told them who, where, and how fucking much.
Do yourself a favor and change your life with CAMGIRL. Read it on the train, read it to your mother, read it to your boo as a midnight story for Valentine’s Day. Just read it. Also, support Isa even more by streaming her screenwriting debut CAM, out now on Netflix.
CAMGIRL
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