Jack Davies, writing for Vice:
Marius’s friend is almost 30 years old and lives in the southern United States. He hasn’t come out to his parents as gay yet, but Marius is coaching and supporting him through the process. Their relationship is non-transactional as well as non-sexual—Marius’s friend tries to wire him a couple of hundred dollars to help him out when he can, but Marius insists the friendship would continue even if the money stopped.
The cousins aren’t the only foreigners running studios in Bucharest. The internet is full of people from America and Western Europe looking for advice on setting up a studio in Romania, and plenty of studios were founded with foreign investment. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about the business, but the return on investment can be phenomenal. A talented model can generate $13,000 of revenue in a month, which is big money in one of Europe’s poorest countries.
Officially, the Romanian government is not a fan of adult entertainment. The law requires that anyone starting a porn site in the country must password protect it, and multiple laws have been proposed over the course of the last decade to allow for the blocking of adult websites. Unofficially, someone’s put a lot of work into the country’s telecommunication infrastructure, with the result that Romania now has a faster download speed than any G20 nation. Like it or not, webcamming is a great way of getting foreign capital into Romania, and that’s not going to change until someone finds a better alternative.
Interesting, if sad.