Phone Sex

Computerization and the deregulation of the telephone industry in the United States and Europe in the 1980s made it possible for companies to provide a variety of services, from banking and insurance to mail order shopping, over the telephone. During the 1980s the telephone rapidly became a major source of income for the sex industry. The mostly male callers to premium rate "fantasy lines" pay by credit card to engage in sexually stimulating and anonymous role playing over the telephone. Some commentators suggested that the fear of AIDS contributed to the popularity of phone sex, which in 1995 generated 45 million dollars of income through calls to "900" numbers—so called because they are normally assigned the prefix 900 in lieu of an area code—in California alone.

Opinion has been divided over whether it is the customer or the operator who is being exploited in the phone sex "relationship," but when interviewed, many operators (also known as "call-doers" or "fantasy makers") described what they do as an ordinary job. Many of the companies that provide phone sex services are run by women, and many women in the industry claim that the life is a liberating one. It allows them to work from home or to look after children; some reported that they are glad to be able to dress the way they want or that the job frees them to work at other things. For others, phone sex is an alternative to prostitution. On the down side, Amy Flowers, who worked for four months as a phone sex operator, pointed to low pay, insecurity, and exposure to abuse as contributors to making employment in the industry a bad experience. For many of the men on the other end of the line, phone sex is an addiction. They spend thousands of dollars on credit cards and run up debts that destroy marriages and break up families.

Phone sex companies provide two basic forms of service: the prerecorded message accessed by the caller making choices through the telephone keypad; and access to live operators, who specialize in performing particular identities and fantasies. These services are advertised in pornographic magazines and sometimes through cards posted in phone booths, placing phone sex somewhere in between the unreality of the magazine and the physical risks of prostitution. Most of the "fantasy makers" in the United States are around 30 and describe themselves as white and middle-class. Similarly, most of the callers are middle-class, white, heterosexual males. A small number of lines cater to heterosexual women. In the late 1990s, there emerged a lucrative gay and cross-gender market.

The prerecorded message is the cheaper of the two services, sometimes generating revenue by credit-card subscription, but primarily by keeping the caller on the premium rate line for as long as possible. Although they can be seen as an audio equivalent of pornographic stories, prerecorded adult telephone messages differ significantly from written forms of pornography in that they address the caller directly and involve him in a secret, personal conversation. This illusion of privacy is achieved despite the fact that the brief messages are played continuously and can be accessed by many thousands of callers at the same time.

The illusion of involving the caller in personal contact is created still more effectively on the more expensive live fantasy lines, paid for by the premium rate call, but more importantly from the caller's credit card. Live "fantasy makers" can respond to the caller's requirements, adjusting their stated identity, occupation, and the story they tell as they go along. They are trained to begin the call by presenting themselves as the ideal woman, then moving on to various stereotypes, such as lesbian, coed, housewife, or virgin. Operators take pride in being able to take on whatever identity the caller demands, to the extent that African-American roles are often successfully played by European-American women, while the few male operators are able to disguise their voices enough to convince callers that they are talking to a woman. Many regard their work as a form of theater or performance art and describe themselves with titles such as "telephone fantasy artist." One operator, interviewed by Kira Hall, described herself as a storyteller and claimed to have improved her work through studying the techniques of Garrison Keillor.

By adopting stereotyped identities, phone sex operators can protect themselves from much of the racist, sexist, and personal abuse directed at them by callers, but they also help to perpetuate racist, sexist, or antisocial perceptions. Kira Hall acknowledged that while European Americans are often successful in playing the role of African-American women, African-American women themselves are sometimes rejected by clients for not being "realistic" enough. The anonymity of the phone sex lines allows the participants on both sides to be whoever they choose to be. As a phenomenon, phone sex can be seen as a metaphor for the way identity and relationships were often defined in the 1990s. In financial terms, phone sex companies are very successful, but Amy Flowers criticized their role in American society, suggesting that they are not selling sex so much as the fantasy of human intimacy.

—Chris Routledge

Further Reading:

Flowers, Amy. The Fantasy Factory: An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Goldstein, Harry. "The Dial-ectic of Desire: For Women at the Other End of the Line, Some Fantasies Ring Painfully True." Utne Reader. March/April 1991, 32-33.

Hall, Kira, and Mary Bucholtz, editors. "Lip Service on the Fantasy Lines." Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. London, Routledge, 1995.