When it rains, it pours
I feel like I’ve been scooped. On Monday, Salon.com ran an article about the “camgirl” phenomenon. In a nutshell, the trend is young girls – aged, say, 15 to 21 – setting up websites that have a daily blog, not unlike my own, and a webcam image that is updated a few times a day. Many of these girls also link to Amazon wishlists, and generous lonely old perverts purchase items for them, which get shipped anonymously. The article makes a few good points, but it is largely one-sided with the “Who’s Exploiting Whom?” angle. I think there’s a lot more to this than exploitation. More in both the positive and negative senses. And the article sensationalizes that these girls “show skin” – some do, but as a generalization it is wrong. (One of the girls profiled, Katneko, had other issues with the article… read them at her site.) So anyway, this article is run, and now they’re talking about it on MSNBC, and these girls are getting booked on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones, and here I am in the middle of writing a script, one which I spoke of a few weeks ago (THE INADEQUATES was the working title at the time; I don’t know what it is now), about a meek 16-year-old girl whose parents get her a new computer for her birthday, and it all goes downhill from there… and now I’m all, FECK! I’m just following a trend now! KRAP! You can see the position I’m in. I mean, I think that my take on the thing might be unique enough to still be interesting, and my character doesn’t have much in common with most of the girls mentioned in the article, but it’s no longer a subject that’s all mine to plunder.
If you steal any of my ideas, I will beat you.