BDSM Cams Have Come A Long Way
I’ve never been a heavy cams user, but as a BDSM blogger for more than 20 years I’ve had BDSM cams sites as advertisers, and I’ve followed a lot of kinky cams links in my time. I’ve spent plenty of time scoping out the cams performers on fetish-branded sites, and engaging in the free chats. (Although not too much of that, because it’s rude to waste a hard working cammer’s time if you aren’t a paying customer.) I tell you truly: two decades ago, there really weren’t lots of good BDSM camsites. My theory? In those distant days, the performers themselves were responsible for self-tagging and self-categorization, and they would spam-select all the keywords, to appear in as many categories as possible on every site.
I’m just guessing, but that’s how it felt. In every kink-keyworded section of every old-school cams site, you’d find about 70% vanilla-looking dildo princesses, about 20% more with tats and alt-girl accessorizing, and the final 10% might be dommes in full dominatrix kit. If you were looking for somebody who could play with you in the male-dominant female-submissive kinkspace, you’d have a difficult search.
To be fair, BDSM is trickier to virtualize than vanilla sex. In the vanilla space there’s a direct line between pre-internet phone sex (everything happened in the mind’s eye) to video chat (where men’s powerful reaction to visual stimulus is easily catered to). A pretty woman with tits and a pussy and good grooming and some nice lingerie and a handful of sex toys was all set! She might also need personal warmth and good people skills, but what she didn’t need was a ton of sexual imagination or a particularized understanding of her customers’ fetishes.
Meanwhile BDSM manifests itself visually as a flock of fetishes flying in a group. Some of the kinky signifiers (especially bondage and impact play) are challenging to perform solo, without an on-screen partner to do the tying or the smacking. It helps to have a good understanding of all the relevant kinks, to know what their various signifiers (impact toys, bondage gear, and more) are, and to deftly play with all that solo in a way that engages your customers’ fetish imaginations.
The good news? Over time, the BDSM cams scene has improved a lot! Nowadays, when you land in a place like the Rabbits Cams BDSM category, the performer thumbs are much more promising than they would have been back in the bad old days:
There are still plenty of online dominatrixes, but they belong; femdom is as much a part of the fetish as the male-dominant stuff that’s my preoccupation here at Bondage Blog. However, in 2024 you can tell at a glance that purely-vanilla performers haven’t been allowed to self-tag themselves into the BDSM category. You see kinky couples in the thumbnails, you see whips and paddles, you see leather that looks more like functional bondage gear than like lingerie. You see kinky performers in submissive poses. You see a vast array of cams performers offering genuine fetish variety! We’ve come a long-ass way in 20 years.
Kinky-rabbit image credits, top to bottom: The vanilla bunny girl doing a dildo show for her top-tier subscribers is by Spanish artist Kekitopu. The kinkier bunny girl wearing the “Fucktoy” collar and preparing to ride a fuck machine for her heavy tippers is by Finnish artist Loimu. The lesbian cams performer pair is by Brazilian artist Pom. The bunny girl getting tickled in a cams dungeon by three predator-hooded doms is by Quakehoof. The busty babe wearing bunny ears and tail while she’s roughly doggyfucked for a camshow is by Japanese artist Kilesha.
Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:
