Stand on one of the main squares in Bucharest and there’s nothing to see. Government buildings, international chains, people coming out of the metro, and a white ten-story block from the communist era, in better condition than most.
Inside that one building, at any given moment, more than two hundred people are working as webcam models across several studios.
That’s the finding from research published in 2025 by Hanne Stegeman and Kate Hardy, comparing the industry across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Romania. It’s the detail that undoes the usual picture of this work, and everything else follows from it.
Why does Romanian camming happen in offices?
Because the bedroom in the frame is usually not the worker’s bedroom.
In the Netherlands and the UK, performers generally work from home. In Romania, most work from studios. Of fifteen Romanian performers interviewed in the 2025 study, thirteen had worked from a studio at some point. Most Romanian cities have them.
The studio supplies the room, the set dressing, the equipment, the internet connection, and the shift. A room is furnished to look like a private bedroom and is used by different people across three shifts. What appears to be an intimate space in someone’s home is a workplace fitted out to look like one.
The reason is partly practical. Platforms have technical and presentation requirements a domestic connection and an ordinary room often can’t meet. And the shift pattern is dictated from elsewhere: around ninety percent of paying clients are in North America, so the working day is inverted. Lunchtime in a Bucharest studio is nine at night.
How is the industry regulated?
It’s not, and the mechanism by which it’s not is precise and worth understanding.
Running a webcam studio is legal in Romania. But the government doesn’t issue these companies the business classification code that every other Romanian company receives for tax and benefits purposes. Without a code, a studio can’t tone as what it is.
So they tone as something else. Model management agencies, mostly, or telecommunications providers, using those codes instead. A manager of one of the largest studios in Bucharest put it as not wanting to lie to the government and not feeling there was a choice.
The consequences run in both directions. The industry works legally and entirely without oversight. And the state has no measure of its size, because the thing it would be measuring doesn’t exist in its own records.
Estimates therefore vary wildly. Romanian authorities have suggested somewhere around five thousand women, and nobody treats that as reliable. One of the country’s leading human trafficking lawyers has said plainly that the scale of any connection between camming and trafficking is unknown, because the authorities hadn’t looked into it.
What does webcam work in Romania pay?
Well by Romanian standards and unevenly, and the split is where the story is.
The BBC reported models working eight-hour days at one large studio earning around 4,500 dollars a month, close to ten times the Romanian average wage. The studio earned the same amount from that model’s work.
That fifty-fifty split is at the generous end. Sixty to seventy-five percent to the studio is described as the Bucharest norm, and a studio taking only forty percent was reported as unusual enough to be presented as charity, though the operators themselves acknowledged it was a hiring necessity in a market with more studios than models.
Earnings also depend almost entirely on building a base of repeat clients. That takes months of unpaid effort before it pays. That structure is familiar from every platform economy: the returns are real, they’re concentrated among a minority, and the work of becoming one of that minority isn’t compensated.
Researchers at the Romanian Academy proposed a term for the resulting condition. Flexi-insecurity: real flexibility and real precarity produced by the same arrangement, so that the freedom and the exposure can’t be separated.
Who works in the Romanian webcam industry?
Not the population the assumption predicts.
People interviewed in the industry consistently report that a large share of performers hold university degrees, including master’s degrees and doctorates. The reason is arithmetic and nothing more interesting than that. A graduate job in Romania pays a fraction of what a studio shift pays, and the gap is large enough that a degree becomes a reason to do this work instead of a reason not to.
The industry also began expanding into male performers, with at least one Bucharest studio working exclusively with men across three shifts a day, seven days a week.
What sits underneath all of it is that this is an export industry. Romanian labor, North American money, a platform taking its cut in between, and a working day set by a time zone five thousand miles away. The economics are the economics of outsourcing, and the fact that the product is intimacy doesn’t change the structure.
Where does the harm sit in Romania’s camming industry?
This is the question a serious treatment has to answer, and the answer isn’t the one either side of the argument wants.
The recurring documented problem isn’t the work itself. It’s the studios operating in the unregulated space that the missing business code creates. Reports describe operations opening with the purpose of exploiting people, promising contracts and then refusing to pay, or closing, rebranding, and reopening at a new address.
The arrest of Andrew Tate and his brother in December 2022, on charges including human trafficking, brought international attention. What it also revealed was how little anybody knew, and how little changed. Studios pay tax largely at the discretion of their owners. Romania is a known source country for trafficking in the EU, and the connection to this industry remains under-investigated because it had never been investigated.
So Harm concentrates where oversight is absent. That’s a claim about regulation and not about morality. A recognized industry with a business code, employment protection, and inspection would have a floor. This one doesn’t, and the ghost studios work in the gap.
Where did Through the Looking Glass come from?
Through the Looking Glass came out of interviews, not research. A message arrived from a young woman in Bucharest in 2016 who wanted a book written and couldn’t pay for one. She worked in one of the largest studios in the city and was open about it from the first exchange.
The terms were unusual in both directions. She wouldn’t pay, and the book would belong to me. Her single condition was that her real name never touch it. So the interviews happened under a pseudonym, the book went out under a pen name, and somewhere under those layers there’s a person I couldn’t identify today if I wanted to.
The interviews ran over Skype in her fluent English, compressed into two weeks because the window felt like it was closing the whole time. One rule governed all of it: you don’t have to tell me anything, and you can’t lie to me. Declining a question was fine. Inventing an answer wasn’t, and that mattered because the studio trains models to lie as safety equipment. A model who tells the truth about herself can be found.
She also supplied the second sources, bringing other models into the sessions so their account of the room could be checked against hers. And a few times she came back and said she didn’t want something in the book. Those retractions held, including after she vanished and could never have checked.
What is true in a fictionalised memoir?
The skeleton is hers. The rest is composite, built from what the other models described, with structure and drama added where a novel needs them. The suicide in the book is a real event from a real life. It didn’t happen in hers.
The composite method exists to solve exactly the problem this subject presents. Straight reportage either protects its subjects into vagueness or exposes them, and both fail. A composite lets the particulars stay true without any particular person being identifiable. That’s the only way to write honestly about work that people can’t afford to be named doing.
Some of what she told me isn’t in the book at all. It was too rough, mostly from earlier in her life, and I left it out. A book like this needs a floor, and below that floor is material that belonged only to her. That line, between witnessing a life and selling one, is the thing the project taught me.
Why does the novel end without a rescue?
Because rescue is an event in that world and not an ending, and the book is built to say so.
There’s a chapter called Rescue and it sits in the middle. The final chapter is called Forever a Cam Model. She looks at her options and she stays, and I refused to improve on it.
Her account was that the money was decent without being high end, and that it was hard money. There’s degradation in the work. Most of the men, by her account, aren’t nice, and the ones who seem nice turn out not to be. They arrive because of broken marriages, loneliness, or because a relationship conducted through a screen is the only kind they can sustain. Nobody in that room, on either side of the camera, is getting what they need.
A triumphant ending would have falsified the saddest thing she taught me.
The title carries the argument. In Alice, you step through the glass into a world with its own inverted logic, and in this book the men are the ones stepping through. They pay by the minute to enter, believing the glass reveals a hidden girl. What it shows them is a room she built, running on rules she wrote. The line arrives on the first page: it’s my room and my rules.
Ten years on I’d add something I couldn’t quite say while writing it. Inside the room she was in control. She was also very young and very naive, and I think that worked against her elsewhere. Both are true, and both are in the book. That’s probably why it holds up.
Writing about sex work without flinching or leering
Two failures, and they’re more alike than they look.
The tragedy version. Every performer a victim, the work uniformly degrading, the only possible arc an escape. This flatters the reader, contradicts what the workers themselves say, and removes their agency in the name of defending them.
The liberation version. The work uniformly liberating, the money the whole story, the precarity edited out. Equally false, and it happens to be the version the industry prefers.
Both are ways of not looking, and they share a structure: settle the moral question in advance and let the details arrange themselves around the verdict.
The workable approach is to report the shift. The room. The lighting. The tally. The regular who has been there a year and what that’s like. The rent. The mother who doesn’t know. Someone who’s good at this and knows it, and is also tired, and is also saving. All of that is true at once, and a book that lets it be true at once is doing the job.
The other rule is that the money must be specific. Vague references to good earnings let a reader place whatever they already believe into the gap. Naming the split, the hours, and what it buys in that city is what makes the choice legible instead of mysterious.
What the record supports
A real industry, concentrated in one country, employing an unknown number of people, operating legally and without oversight because the state declines to classify it.
Pay well above local alternatives, split heavily in favor of studios. A workforce more educated than the assumption. A schedule set by clients on another continent. Documented exploitation concentrated in the operators that the regulatory gap makes possible.
That’s a labor story with a shape any economist would recognize, and it happens to involve sex. That’s the only reason it usually gets written about as something else.
The book is Through the Looking Glass. More of the research behind the fiction is in the writing hub. The writing side of it is in how the book came together.
