Identity Crisis: Are You Being Cyberstalked?
Magazine
Amor Hilton, Photographed for SPIN by Danielle Levitt
On Friday, December 28, 2007, Amor Hilton went to the North-ridge mall near Los Angeles with two friends. Petite and spacey with wide blue eyes, cotton-candy-pink hair, and a silver nose ring, the 17-year-old looked half-anime, half-emo. Maybe she'd buy another Hello Kitty purse for her collection, or some bright new nail polish to match her latest dye job. But mainly, like most kids in the San Fernando Valley, she was just going to the mall to hang out.
The Israel-born Hilton was used to being on her own. Growing up in the Valley, she never knew her father, and she bounced between living with her mom and her grandparents. Sometimes, she'd chum around with the other self-described "scene kids" -- young punks who trolled Sunset Boulevard in tattoos, tight black pants, and piercings. Or she'd stay home, log on to her computer, flip on her webcam -- and try to become a star.
Every Wednesday night, she hosted a live video show on Stickam, a burgeoning do-it-yourself social network. What distinguishes it from MySpace or Facebook is that Stickam lets its 3.5 million subscribers broadcast video in real time as viewers chime in via instant message. It's a place where Hilton and other like-minded extroverts could become their own reality stars, engaging in goofy, sometimes risquéé confessionals. Kids talking to kids, without any pesky adults interfering -- kinda like Peanuts. Or Lord of the Flies.
For Hilton, it seemed like the perfect platform when she first logged on in early 2007. As a little girl, she had dreamed of becoming an actress like her favorite, Hilary Duff, but the reality of auditions and compromises got her down. "It's so, like, boring waiting around all the time," she'd say in her Valley Girlese. Her mother was a part-time pinup model ("Like Bettie Page," Hilton says. "She's really hot!"), and Hilton craved the same kind of iconic fame. She scored a small role on Hannah Montana as a mean girl, but hated how pedestrian she appeared. "I had to sacrifice the way I wanted to look to do the job," she recalls.
On Stickam, though, she could be herself. With her pixieish charm and the bubbly appeal of a lovable bad girl, Hilton insinuated herself into the punky popular crowd. She'd preen on camera in American-flag short-shorts on a red shag rug or play drunken voice mails from admiring boys. She began dating and cohosting Stickam shows with an androgynous would-be model named John Hock. One time, she sat at her webcam as two guys soaked in a bubble bath behind her. "I want to get in!" she chirped, before stripping down to her black skivvies and joining them.
And people watched, making Hilton one of the most popular entertainers -- or Cam Girls -- on the site, racking up more than a quarter million viewers, a modest number relative to TV, but enough to make her a whale shark in this small pond. Hilton saw Stickam as her springboard, and launched her own site for other online pinups, Brutal Dolls. She began hiring other models to pose in Suicide Girl–like regalia. She even parlayed her notoriety into modeling gigs for Hot Topic.
Despite her casual air, she also knew that she was attracting no shortage of creeps.
