WASHINGTON -- Jennifer Ringley is spending a lot of time these days playing down the sex thing.
Never mind that she and her boyfriend, Geofry Glenn, are watching an erotic art flick from India, or that her chosen wardrobe for a recent magazine profile photo consisted mainly of fishnet stockings, or that her Web site features sections titled "Name That Curve" and "Anatomy One-Oh-One." Her fame, she insists, has very little to do with her sexuality.
"Every time you read an article, it's like, woo-hoo, you can see Jenni having sex or getting naked," she grumbles, sounding not quite as annoyed as she would have liked. "It makes me sound like Jenni is, you know, sex-o-rama cam."
In the flesh, Ringley, a buoyant 21-year-old, comes off as just another struggling college grad, camped out in a one-bedroom Washington apartment, not quite attuned to the present as she gropes toward the future. She's never heard of Linda Tripp.
But in cyberspace, Ringley is an icon: Jenni of Jennicam fame, www.Jennicam.org, known by millions, not just by name and face, but down to the most intimate detail, the most nuanced look, the most erotic proclivity. Considering she lives in a city famed for its closed doors, her life is an open book.
Ever since she, as an awkward 18-year-old Dickinson College student, set up a digital camera in her Carlisle, Pa., dorm room, wired it to the Web, and began chronicling her every private moment, Ringley's fame in the alternate Internet universe has grown exponentially.
Her Web site is a constantly updating window on her life, or at least her bedroom. Pay $15 a year, and you get to see a new picture every two minutes. Freeload on the site's guest lounge, and you're treated to a new view three times an hour. Most often, you see an empty room and a large, unkempt wrought-iron bed. You may catch Ringley making that bed, or working at her computer, or sipping coffee or chatting with friends. You may catch other activities most of us would prefer to keep private.
By Ringley's reckoning, this most examined of lives is viewed by 750,000 people a day, 10,000 people at any given second. That may be an exaggeration. Media Metrix, a New York-based Web audience measurement company, recorded roughly 170,000 Jennicam viewers in March, more in line with Betterhealth.com than, say, Disney On-line, which reached 2.7 million people that month.
Still, the numbers aren't bad, and since March, media attention has significantly boosted the audience, Ringley said. The "Leeza" talk show was a real kick, as was an interview on National Public Radio and a cameo in Cosmopolitan. Besides, Jennicam is more than a crowd-pleaser. It has spawned a whole genre of Jenni wannabes, some run by prostitutes, some by pornographers, and some by men and women just like Jenni.
Exhibitionism pioneer
But Ringley's was the first -- if you don't count the amazing fishcam, which was trained on an aquarium, or another early camera that fed images of a soda machine onto the Web. And hers is still the most popular. A free-lance Web site designer by profession, she swears she makes no money off the site. The $15 fee just covers the $2,000 a month it takes to keep it up and running, she says.
She refuses to take advertising, which would make her a mint -- "oh, advertising is so tacky." A certain unnamed soda company recently offered her $10,000 a month to prominently display one of its products in her room, she says, and she turned it down.
"I don't want to do it for the money, because then it becomes a job, an obligation, something I have to be conscious of 24 hours a day," she explains. "This way it's fun. It's still a hobby."
In truth, her site is less sex-o-rama than an uncomfortable reflection of our own lives. We see how rarely the good stuff comes along. Yet an air of prurience hangs over her Jennicam site, the thrill, perhaps, of violation, albeit violation by invitation.
It's a public service
"If [voyeurism] is an issue, I prefer that people are coming to my Web site to see me and not sneaking to their neighbor's house and peeking in the windows," Jennifer offered, "because at least I'm OK with it."
It is the Dane of the voyeur and exhibitionist writ global, yet Ringley really does not seem all that strange, at least not in person. The camera, not much bigger than a golf ball, sits unobtrusively over her computer, easily forgotten after awhile.
It was born out of an insecurity not at all uncommon to 18-year-old women the world over, especially those like Ringley who feel insecure and unattractive. Like many other college students these days, she had set up her own personal Web site, with biographical information, favorite CDs, book recommendations, a smattering of poetry.
When somebody showed her the "fishcam" site, she had an idea.
"I have fish of my own. They're interesting for five minutes tops. But everybody talks about how they like to people-watch," she recalled. "I thought, if a person would do this, it might be interesting for more than five minutes. And the only person I could sucker into doing it was me."
Weeks after the cam began clicking, she was sitting at her computer in a nightgown when a fan e-mailed his appreciation.
"I was tickled that some guy thought I was cute," she admitted.
She let a strap slip from her shoulder, and 10 more e-mails cheered her on. She kept going. To call the ensuing performance striptease would be to sell its sexual content short. The response was "very much, like, kind of an ego lifter," and it prompted other performances, five "shows" in total, by her count, though David Dennis, one of her fans, has counted a few more.
He should know. The computer programmer from Marina Del Rey outside Los Angeles has captured them all on his own Jenni appreciation Web site, which chronicles strictly the good stuff.
Her behavior in those early stages of the Jennicam could be seen as no different from that of countless other vulnerable young women who have done regrettable acts with the encouragement of lascivious and appreciative men. Her activities were far safer than many a drunken escapade in fraternity houses or the back seats of so many Cadillacs, although her audience may have been a tad larger.
It got her noticed.
"One thing about Jennifer is she's an extrovert; she gets a lot of value out of the people around her," said Dennis with notable understatement. "For Jennifer, of course, she has told me, and I don't take it as a big secret, that she is an exhibitionist."
Since those early days, the Jennicam has evolved to a more realistic cinema verite, one which she is proud of, and one whose audience, though still maybe 90 percent men, continues to grow as the sexual content shrinks. She toned it down after receiving an e-mail demanding she perform or be "cut up." The threat spooked her.
"Every time somebody e-mails me and says, 'You're the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,' that doesn't thrill me, but every time somebody writes and says, 'You're a fat, ugly dog,' that doesn't upset me either. No matter what other people think, I know who I am. I've fooooound myself," she cooed theatrically. "People take months of therapy to find themselves. For me, it took two years in front of a camera."
The camera is no longer ubiquitous. Her boyfriend refuses to perform for the crowds, insisting that the lights go off at night, although Ringley confided he was a bit more liberal when the relationship first started a few months back.
"I think he's realized the magnitude of the endeavor," she offered.
Glenn, her boyfriend, is remarkably nonchalant about the whole thing, especially considering he had no idea of her on-line presence when they met.
"I figure it's like one of those things that sort of comes with a relationship," the computer programmer shrugged. "Anytime you have a relationship, there are things about the other person you just have to take for granted. For Jennifer, it's that she has a camera in her bedroom."
Ringley's audience was furious earlier this year when the two jetted off to Europe for a vacation. The last picture -- the one that remained on her site for days -- was Glenn, asleep on her bed, a hairy armpit aimed at the camera.
Sex potential
It is really her audience that seems most baffling. As long as the Internet is ungoverned by pornography or censorship laws, there are Web sites where Ringley's audience could receive their titillation in far more efficient ways than laboriously monitoring the Jennicam.
For some viewers, it must be the sex, or just the hope of it. If not, why would Internet pornographers snap up every alternate spelling or iteration of Jennicam's Web site address to catch errant browsers?
For others, it is just the chance to share a woman's life.
"A lot of them watch it out of boredom," guessed Josh Willner, a South Florida security guard and Jennicam archivist. "Sex isn't it. It's just watching somebody's life go by."
And for some, like David Dennis, and to some extent like Willner, it's something akin to love -- or at least they think so.
"It was in 1995, Sept. 9, that I encountered her Web site," Dennis remembered with remarkable precision. "I immediately fell for her like a ton of bricks."
"When I was in love with her, I would watch her all the time. I'd be working and slaving and have her as a little piece of my desktop," he explained wistfully.
That ended bitterly when she shot off a "Dear Dennis" e-mail. His naughty Jenni archive can be seen both as revenge and as good advertising for his own computer ventures.
"It's the source of a lot of hits," he said, insisting his devotion has waned. "When you've got up one of the most popular things you've ever done in your life, quitting it would be kind of silly."
Willner's archive is far more representative, more loving, in fact. He insisted he is not obsessed. But he needs Ringley for some reason. He needs to know she is out there.
"I'm on night-shift security," he said, still groggy in the early afternoon. "I used to always be walking around. Now I'm stuck in a guardhouse. So I'm going to buy a laptop and a ricochet modem to keep in touch."
Jenni, via ricochet modem. The Web is a different world.
Pub Date: 5/13/98