by
Amy Flowers

Series Editors

Mary Ellen Brown Andrea Press

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher
The Fantasy Factory

An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry

Amy Flowers

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press PhiladelphiaCopyright 1998 Amy
Flowers All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on
acid-free paper

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flowers, Amy.  The fantasy factory: an insider's view of the phone sex
industry

Amy Flowers.

p. em.  - (Feminist cultural studies, the media, and political
culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 0-81223433-2
(cloth: alk.  paper).  ISBN 0-8122-1643-1 (pbk.  : alk.  paper) 1.
Telephone sex- United States.  2. Intimacy (Psychology) 3. Feminist
theory- United States.  4. Technology and civilization United States.
1.  Title.  II.  Series  HQ23.F66 306.77-dc2l 98-10099 TO ISABEL whose
manifestation made all things possible

Contents

Introduction I

1 Researching the Fantasy Factory 12

2 Fantasy Girls Are Felt But Never Seen 34

3 Phone Sex Consumers: Husbands and Friends?  62

4 The Manufacture of Fantasy 84

5 The Real Product of Fantasy 106

Bibliography 125

Acknowledgments 141

Index 143

Introduction

This is not a book about phone sex.  It is a book about the
disembodiment of intimacy, the unfolding of a personal relationship in
the absence of face-to-face interaction.  The growth of intimacy in an
atmosphere of disembodiment is fertile ground for those who seek to
understand the role of self in pretense and role-playing, the
abstraction of sexuality from physicality, and the role of fantasy in
constructing a useful reality.  Phone sex is the data source, and it
illustrates a greater point than prurience; it illustrates how it will
be possible to be human in the twenty-first century.

Primary relationships are often described by sociology texts as close,
enduring, rather primitive social relationships.

Relationships become more transitory and fragmented with
industrialization and urbanization, moving into a secondary phase.
Phone sex illustrates a tertiary phase of human relations, one that is
mediated by technology.  The facsimile, the telephone answering
machine, the computer modem, the walk mans and watch mans are all
mechanisms that increase the social as well as physical distance
between communicating individuals.  While facilitating distant
communication, these machines minimize personal contact and mediate
interactions between individuals, so that communication is conducted
from person to machine, machine to person.

This indirect quality of communication creates a disembodiment, a
distance between communication and self This disembodiment makes all
things possible.  Disembodiment offers liberation from the constraints
of physical disability, stigma, and stereotype, and is potentially good
for the human spirit and the depth of intimate communication; however,
those who hide their insecurities behind disembodiment may find
themselves alienated from the people with whom they wish to be
intimate.  New gullibilities emerge from the process.  Exploitative
skills are developed.

The best and the worst of human nature stand ready to seize the
opportunity, and it appears to many that the worst of human nature is
taking the lead.

The disembodiment of intimacy is not a new phenomenon, but it has only
recently grown ubiquitous and socially important.  Pen pals have been
taking advantage of the freedom of disembodied communication since the
Pony Express, but they were the exception to human relationships rather
than the rule.  The industrial revolution sparked a debate among social
analysts who worried about the dangerous effects of the isolation and
lack of personal intimacy in modern society (T6nnies 1887; Durkheim
1893b).  Even the most prophetic of the early sociologists, however,
could not foresee the impersonal reality of twentieth-century urban
life.

Visions of a world without direct human interaction are always
frightening projections.  Researchers, fearing the isolation of
physical distance, emphasize loneliness and alienation over innovation
and endurance.  Yet there are glimmers of redemption in the
technological age.  In response to the alienating aspects of modern
life, the individual develops, in the words of Georg Simmel, "an organ
protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of
his external environment which would uproot him" (quoted in Schur 1988:
35).  In a society where intimacy is problematic, people find creative
ways to use the very aspects of communication that have been assumed to
be alienating.  They use technological innovation to reinvent intimacy
in an environment that often hides and distorts intimacy as it has been
traditionally understood.

Two of the most revolutionary developments in communication have been
the invention of the telephone and the computer.

With the introduction of each of these instruments analysts have
cheered the possibilities for communication across barriers of class,
sex, and race.  Each has proved disappointing, however, because the
social constructs are so ingrained in our psyches.  Created within us,
we carry them with us, wherever we go, anonymously or by name.

The disembodiment of intimacy has also raised questions about the
traditional notion of a single self.  If we were able to transcend the
boundaries of race and class by communicating indirectly, we also might
be able to transcend the self as a single, central identity.

Postmodernists have deconstructed the notion of a single self but have
left a minefield in its place, a disjointed, fragmented ground
scattered with concepts that rely on the old concept of self.

in Life on the Screen (1995), Sherry Turkle explores the idea that
on-line selves make it possible to integrate our multi-faceted
postmodern selves with our sense of central self.  The multiple selves
that emerge in disembodied communication are linked to a central self
and are not distinct entities; though details and physical descriptions
may vary, core elements of character, humor, and personality remain
constant.  These elements are not created purposefully by an
individual, but rather are generated by neurological physiology,
socialization, educational training, and previous experience.  Selves
are not created out of thin air, but emerge from a limited set of
preexisting possibilities.

The pornography industry has been tremendously successful in using the
tools of modern communication to respond to the alienation of modern
man, and the impoverishment of modern women, by manufacturing intimacy
in industrial quantities.

Sexual intimacy can now be "had" without physical contact, via
videotape, computer modem, telephone, or facsimile.

Pornographic interest in virtual reality is developing neck and-neck
with the technology that will make it real.  The technological
development of disembodied intimacy provides the consumer with some
intimacy and some security from the riskiness of direct sexual and
emotional contact in the jungle of twentieth century urban life.

The Industry: An Overview

In the ten years since its inception, the phone sex industry has become
a billion dollar business and is continuing to grow despite widespread
varied efforts to curb its availability.  Psychic phone lines, cyber
chat rooms, and many other services are emerging to take advantage of
the desire for disembodied intimacy.  The users and providers of these
services are not strange or extraordinary; they are founding members of
modern society.

You or I might never call a phone sex line, but apparently others do.
Pacific Bell, in the first twelve months after it began contracting
phone sex exchanges local to the New York City area, reaped $13.5
million in revenues (Time 1987).  In 1994, the four international
exchange carriers (Telesphere, AT&T, US Sprint, and MCI) collected $900
million in profits from international 900 number calls alone, a market
that is increasing because of its relative freedom from Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) regulations of obscene content and
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) restrictions on business practices.
These international profits are in addition to even greater domestic
profits from the 900 and 976 lines within the United States (Economist
1994).

Four telecommunications entities are involved in the handling of a 900
or 976 call.  (1) An information provider creates an information
service, such as a "whip-me" line, and works with advertising agencies
to promote the service.

(2) The provider often leases the necessary computer equipment and
software from an independent agent called a service bureau.  Usually
the service bureau solicits would-be information providers by
advertising low-cost, preplanned business strategies that include all
necessary equipment and services.  (3) The service bureau leases the
long-distance transmission services from one of the four international
exchange carriers (lXCs).  (4) All 900 and 976 calls are billed by
local exchange carriers (LECs), pursuant to arrangements with the lXC.
The IXC instructs the caller's LEC on the appropriate charges and the
LEC bills the customer for the call.  The LECs are also responsible for
collecting the charges and adjusting billing when necessary.

Different types of computer technology are available for different
purposes: flat rate for a pre specified amount of time, a per minute
charge, international call billing, or payment by credit card.
Different pricing structures demand different strategies to attract
callers and maximize profits.  A caller can only estimate a per-minute
charge, an imprecise method at best, and if the charges appear on the
caller's phone bill he may not realize the cost until up to thirty days
after the charges are accrued.  An imprudent caller may spontaneously
talk for hours on these lines without realizing the cost of the call.
When the bill arrives the desire has passed, and the caller often feels
foolish for having called in the first place.  Embarrassed, he pays
unquestioningly.  These circumstances -the vagueness of the charges
being accrued, the spontaneous nature of the call, and the stigmatizing
nature of the involvement -all produce an ideal environment for false,
fraudulent, or usurious charges.

The numerous technologies available offer varying opportunities for
fraud.  The lines that are restricted to calls of a pre specified
length enable callers to speak for three or fifteen or forty-five
minutes for a single price that appears on their phone bills.  In order
to maximize profit, companies using these lines need to charge a high
rate for the pre specified time, and they often hide or disguise the
price of the call.  They also often refer callers from one 976 number
to another, offering various reasons to motivate callers to place more
and more calls.

An operator who works a flat-rate line has two conflicting goals.  If
she wants the caller to call back regularly, she will spend the time to
convince him to call back and ask for her again.  Yet at the same time
she needs to get rid of him as soon as possible so that she can move on
to another caller without wasting valuable seconds.  Flat-rate lines
also provide operators with the most freedom to hang up on

"obscene" or unpleasant callers, since the full price of the call can
be billed.  The caller's motivation, in contrast, is to use the full
time allotted him and to delay full gratification until the end of the
call.

Per minute billing, in contrast, offers conversations of unlimited
length.  The calls are billed by the phone or credit card company,
leaving the caller to estimate the length of time he has spoken and the
charges he has accrued.

This estimation is often grossly imprecise, and an imprudent caller may
talk for hours per day for several weeks, accruing thousands of dollars
in charges before ever seeing a bill.  Credit card charges establish an
upper limit at the beginning of the call, giving the caller an
opportunity to hang up or request additional time.  The operator's best
course with per minute phone systems is to create an intense, ongoing
relationship that exploits the caller's emotional or sexual neediness
in a monthly cycle, before the first bill arrives.

There are some standard ways that phone sex operators use to keep
callers on the line.  Some develop ongoing relationships with callers,
leading them to believe they will meet someday.  Some are adept at
wasting time by instructing callers to retrieve pen and paper, or to
hold while the operator looks for a photograph she has been describing.
Prerecorded messages are used to waste time before the caller is
connected to the operator, instructing the ingenuous caller to "press I
for a blonde, 2 for a brunette."  Misleading callers about the price
per minute of such calls is less important than keeping them occupied
while they hold on.

Companies can also use 800 numbers to bypass the LEC and bill charges
directly to a caller's credit card.  The caller must authorize a
maximum amount to be billed at the beginning of the call.  This
protects the customer from amassing a bill he is unprepared to face.
When the pre specified limit has been reached, the caller must either
hang up and call back or be transferred to someone who can authorize
additional billing.  The flow of the call is interrupted at that point,
offering the caller an opportunity to hang up.

The 800 number services also have the advantage of bypassing many
restrictions on content imposed by the exchange carriers.  These lines
can protect themselves even further from content bans by bouncing their
phone connections through foreign phone companies, making the provider
subject to more liberal pornography laws and the billing even more
ambiguous.  An operator working an

800 or international line is likely to discuss some subjects that might
be unacceptable on a domestic system.  She has less freedom to hang up
on offensive callers and less authority to decide what kinds of calls
she will and will not take.

When a caller wants to share his life with Tiffany, he generally does
not want her to ask for his Mastercard number first.  When he calls a
900, 976, or international number, the caller does not have to have his
credit approved, phone number verified, or residence established.  For
the abstract price of a phone call, which he will not face until up to
30 days later, he can have his dreams come true without directly
confronting the mercenary nature of the interaction.  The credit card
billing practices, while protecting consumers, reduce their ability to
lose themselves in the fantasy, the very service they are buying.

Billing issues also affect the level of trust between the participants
and the illusion that they are communicating privately and intimately.
Though their discourse is shaped and influenced by a myriad factors,
the participants would like to believe that it is unique.  This is part
of the fantasy the caller is buying.  Although several agencies listen
to, participate in, and profit from the exchange, the job of these
agencies is to remain quietly in the background.

LECs, commonly known as local phone companies, are united under the
umbrella of the National Association for Information Services (NAIS).
While remaining quietly unobtrusive regarding the dialogue, the NAIS is
a vocal and powerful lobby for the interests of both the LECs and
IXCs.

The NAIS has been tremendously successful in directing restrictive
legislation at the transient information providers who have remained
disunited and relatively powerless.

The phone companies first envisioned the 900 and 976 technology as a
way of disseminating an entirely different kind of information from
that offered in phone sex.  The IXCs had hoped for AIDS hot lines
immigration information services, and mainstream religious messages.
They have held on to that hope, despite overwhelming evidence that a
different kind of provider has evolved.  As late as 1991, Thomas Pace,
director of telecommunications policy for Dowjones and Company, Inc."
claimed that "today's audio text programs help doctors make diagnoses
and prescribe treatment; help investors make financial decisions based
on the most up-to date information; and help responsible charities like
the Red Cross spread their message and collect donations" (U.S.
Congress 1991).  Jim Herold, director of California 900 / 976 services
for Pacific Bell, claimed that "California 900 is an information
source, a business channel, an entertainment center, a charitable or
social help option all in one" (U.S. Congress 1991).  The kinds of
businesses the LEC and IXC executives mention generate a small portion
of 900number revenues, however, while dial-a-porn, psychic networks,
and chat lines are substantial contributors.  According to Tennessee
Representative Bart Gordon, "900 numbers have become a haven for
tricksters, scam artists and high-tech hustlers" (Gordon 1991).  The
phone companies, though they do not set the content of the messages and
have distanced themselves by letting service bureaus intermediate,
nevertheless provide the technology, the opportunity, the billing, and
the customers for these hustlers to hustle.

The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance (1991)
provided an illustration of how the IXC stands to profit by
facilitating a dishonest provider without accepting responsibility for
the ensuing swindle.  A fraudulent vacation sweepstakes used a

900 number to generate $940,000 in billing before a judge ordered all
the money returned to the consumers.  MCI, which provided the telephone
link but claimed no liability for the fraudulent promotions, was
allowed to keep its share of the profit.  MCI stated that the fees were
necessary for the actual cost of the use of the lines.  Congressman
Bart Gordon described this incident as akin to an armed robbery after
which the robber returned the wallet but charged the victim a fee for
use of the gun.  Having the provider return its share of the money is a
step in the right direction, but allowing the IXC to keep its share
does seem to be a prejudicial solution to the problem, and it belies
the relative power and influence of the participants in this
exchange.

Although the IXC appears to be an indirect participant, it controls and
administers the technology, the lease agreements (intermediated by
service bureaus), and, most important, the billing structure.  The
information providers, in contrast, are the least stable and
accountable of the participants, and though they control important
microinteractional factors, they have little power to address the
structural factors shaping the interaction.

The 976, 900, and 800 numbers have made the telephone companies the
largest and most ubiquitous provider of pornographic services.  The
phone companies themselves claim that they would rather not offer the
lines at all, but are forced to do so by the FCC and by First Amendment
issues.

They rarely discuss the profit they make -well over $1 billion in 1994
(Economist 1994) or the structure they impose, emphasizing instead
their costs and losses.

Both the LECs and the IXCs have done an excellent job of sequestering
themselves from the main participants and the content of the calls.
Undeniably, however, the vehicle of transport affects the quality of
the ride.  Because FCC regulations regarding content vary according to
the technology, the carrier clearly affects the actual content of the
conversation.

Figure I illustrates the web of agencies and individuals involved in
the phone sex exchange.  The diagram clearly is not to scale.  If it
were, the caller, like the provider, would be a mere speck on the page
while the IXC would fill the entire diagram.  The caller and operator
are but small pieces of the exchange taking place.

The diagram also makes evident the limited power and scope of the
provider.  The 900, 976, and 800 numbers provide an opportunity for
starting a small business with minimal start-up costs.  The provider
leases the equipment, the phone numbers, and sometimes the personnel
from the service bureau.  When a provider does hire personnel,
operators often work at home on a pay-per-call basis.  Because of the
minimal investment of money and time, because the customers provide
fertile ground for fraud and abuse, and because the industry is linked
to pornography, the providers are, for the most part, unstable,
difficult to hold accountable for tax and other liabilities, and
motivated exclusively by short-term profit.

Phone sex advertising dominates pornographic magazines and newspapers;
entire magazines and newsletters are devoted to phone sex consumers;
and phone sex advertising also fills pages of non-pornographic
newspapers and magazines, and maintains an active presence on late
night television.  These ads usually feature a young, pretty white
woman and the promise of the chance to speak with a "live girl."  The
phone numbers are often mnemonics such as "1-900-99-WILDl" or
"l-900-226-DOLL."

Charges are billed directly to the phone from which the caller places
the call and range from five to twenty-five dollars for the first three
minutes.  I do not know the basis of the price structure, but some
advertisements offer several numbers, ostensibly belonging to different
women, with a different price for each phone number.

The phone sex advertising seems to reveal a profound naivete among the
consumers.  Maybe the callers are simply stupid, but in such large
numbers this seems unlikely.  Another underlying message is being
expressed, another service being bartered, one not mentioned explicitly
but subtly.

Convenience, Isolation, and Desire: The Business of Phone Sex

What callers are really buying is a few minutes of human contact within
a society where personal contact is fraught with ambiguity.  Intimate
physical and emotional contact is dangerous.  There are physical risks
of sexually transmitted disease, personal professional risk of
exposure, fear of judgment and the repercussions of "abnormal" desire.
Phone sex subverts the risk, but it cannot eliminate risk altogether.
The sex of phone sex is disembodied, mediated by machine; an
intervention that minimizes some of the dangers inherent in personal
relationships.  For a pre specified price, anyone can call his fantasy
girl at any time of the day or night.  They can talk about their sexual
desire, the events of their day, the frustration of their lives, and
through this all they can use a pseudonym or hide their psoriasis,
hoping to avoid the uncertain consequences of real emotional or
physical involvement.

The very existence of phone sex reveals sex to be a process, a
particular type of interaction distinct from a physical act.  In phone
sex there is no physical contact.  There is described biological action
but no carnal materiality.  There is no "objective" meeting of penis
and vagina.  The shared perceptions are constructed ad hoc; emerging
from the interaction between the participants and the histories and
ideologies they bring to the event.  The service sold here is more than
just a conversation with a "live girl"; it is the internal, subjective
experience, perception itself.

The new pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our
imaging for us.... The images of our love-making, the stammerings we
resort to in intimacy come prepackaged.... Natural selection tells of
limbs and functions which atrophy through lack of use; the power to
feel, to experience and realize the precarious uniqueness of each
other's being, can also wither in a society.  (George Steiner, quoted
in Soble 1980: 325)

But we do not wither.  Instead, when in danger of alienation, we
exercise the musculature of intimacy, Simmel's "organ," within an
artificial environment.  The pornographers do not do our imaging for us
because collectively we are the pornographers.  The images and their
meanings, like the means of communication, reflect our own social
struggles between technological convenience, isolation and desire. Many
people condemn the newly accessible sexuality while accepting, and even
embracing, the accepted notions of intimacy as fleeting, difficult, and
problematic and of technology as enhancing convenience and
efficiency.

The manufacture of artificial intimacy is a complex process, one deeply
rooted in our social and historical identity.

Technology and intimacy osterize in the phone sex interaction, and,
once mixed, they do not separate.  Those who would isolate phone sex,
cyber sex, and other forms of disembodied intimacy from the mainstream
of modern life underestimate the power and influence of the new
technological forms and will be left behind.  The bonds between
technology and intimacy, fantasy and reality, belief and deception,
however enigmatic, are necessary, cohesive, and secure.

Chapter 1 Researching the Fantasy Factory

Contemporary ethnography, in an effort accurately to map an independent
and external reality, views its subject from many angles.  This study
is the result of a combination of observation, participation,
interviews, and analysis of some pornographic "literature."  Each
method illuminates the phone sex industry from a different angle, thus
exposing shadows of bias and inconsistency cast by each individual
method.

The use of multiple research methods within a single research endeavor
is not unique to social science but common to exploratory research in
general.  A geologist, for example, explores an unknown object hidden
deep in the earth by aiming radio waves at the object from different
angles and obtaining a variety of measurements.  Each piece of
information is fitted to the other; each fills in a gap or limit of
perspective which is generated by other pieces.  The individual pieces
of information are fused by the researcher, contradictions are
reconciled, and a single, comprehensive, three dimensional picture of
the object is drafted.

Sex work as a research topic is dense with the very obstacles that
diverse methods are designed to traverse.  The phone sex industry, and
the pornography industry of which it is part, is an insulated culture
that exists within a hostile society.  These circumstances make
participation a prerequisite for observation.  Yet personal experience
is narrowly solipsistic and laden with the influence of prior
experience.  Thus the researcher must consult the perceptions of other
participants who also work, and often live, in the creation of myth and
fantasy, subjecting the researcher to the obstacles of manipulation and
deceit.  Choosing one interpretation over another, placing focus and
belief where best suited, the researcher carves out a maze of research
actions: steps forward and back, turns, junctures and dead ends.  The
decision making needed to navigate such an environment requires
certitude and decisiveness, yet these qualities themselves generate new
minefields of ethical and practical bias.

Much of the gender, race, class, age, and other bias imbedded in the
history of social science research has been the product of the often
deliberate ignorance of the researcher concerning his (sic) funding
sources, career interests, and more (Keller 1983).  Feminism has
contributed the idea that the epistemology, politics, practice, and
fruits of science are all interrelated.  In light of this knowledge of
the influence of the research perspective on data collection and
interpretation, feminist research now emphasizes, rather than denies,
the life experience that guides the researcher's choice of topic,
methodology, and, subsequently, data analysis.

Respect for the nature of the empirical world dictates that those who
study it apply a methodology consistent with its character.  Any
empirical study, with the inferred interaction between researcher and
subject, is an exercise in reciprocity.  Such reflexivity is meant to
reveal the conditions of research that always exist but are often
hidden in more traditional methods of reporting.  Once a researcher's
standpoint is exposed, the reader can reach his or her own informed
conclusions concerning the accuracy and insight of the study at hand.

Such exposure, however, is not without risk.  Sex work can be a
difficult and uncomfortable topic.  To have researched working at phone
sex has only slightly less stigma than having been a phone sex worker.
Any association with sex work seems to sully the reputation, leaving
the researcher vulnerable to prurient interest, paternalistic censure,
and general trivialization.  These are the de facto rules of
self-disclosure, and they exist as silent guides -unspoken and even
publicly denounced, yet recognized, acknowledged, and generally heeded.
Stigma, censure, and trivialization serve a latent function of limiting
sex research, as well as any other research that is discomforting to
the academic community.  If the terms of exposure are unreasonable,
none but the exhibitionistic will offer themselves for examination. 
The attempt to censure controversial research often comes under the
guise of protection; however, those who would seek to protect are often
the first to judge as protectionism implies paternalism and assumptions
of simplicity.

The choice of topic is itself a coming out.  When a researcher does
extensive work on any topic, a personal interest is often assumed.
Choosing a topic like phone sex invites certain assumptions, and the
subsequent personal revelations are not without risk.

Scientific inquiry requires both detachment and involvement with the
life under scrutiny.  This research, in particular, aspires to explore
an industry in the natural light of its own context.  I use myself as
informant to enlighten the reader regarding the perspective and origin
of the research, yet I have tried to avoid offering myself as spectacle
and consequently limiting my research to the level of anecdote.

My experience causes me to be especially skeptical of the polarity
arguments: the idea that the sex industry is either good or bad, choice
or exploitation, glamor or degradation.

An important and eloquent essay by Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes
for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" (1984), outlines the
concept of sexual relativity, the view that all sexual acts are without
inherent value or degradation.  Although I find this concept very
useful, I limit my use of it to the analytical level.

Empirically, I believe sexual relativity understates the very unusual
sets of life experiences that produce certain sexual desires, often
inherently dysfunctional for the health of the individual.  Eating
another person's feces, for example, is a rare and truly acquired
taste.  The argument that the dislike of such behavior is acquired is
naively privileged and removed from the empirical ramifications of the
act.  Such acts are often accompanied by profound psychological
dysfunction and are intensely distasteful to those who perform them for
reasons other than desire.  To label such actions as "preference"
ignores the conflict and complexity from which such behavior emerges.

Money is often seen as an equalizer for distasteful or humiliating
acts.  Unfortunately, it is easy to overestimate the cash that is
generated.  Most sex workers do not save (Bullough and Bullough 1978),
and many forms of sex work involve real expenses.  Even the relatively
legitimate phone sex employers rarely offer health insurance, and they
usually hire workers as independent contractors, exempting themselves
from paying employee's disability or social security insurance.  As a
worker, I tended to be more aware than many of the inequity of such
arrangements.  As a researcher, I tend to be more aware than many of
the reasons workers accept these circumstances without feeling
exploited.  There are great advantages to sex work, including personal
freedom and ample, often under-the-table, taxfree cash.  Despite the
observers who often see exploitation, many participants are happy with
the deal they have struck.

Inside the Fantasy Factory

The "phone-actress" wanted ads in a local underground newspaper were
abundant, and I applied to several.  My first phone sex job consisted
of reading scripts in a recording studio.  Most of the scripts were
sexually explicit "fantasy" material;

for example, "male schoolteacher disciplines flirtatious female
student."  Usually the scripts relied on social stratification themes;
doctor-patient, teacher-student, officer-citizen motifs were most
common.

"Fresh" scripts were sought after but were rigidly held to a
three-minute, social-stratification, gradual-build-to-climax
structure.

The studio also produced other message recordings.  One script read
"Hi, Gary, this is Susan.  Give me a call tonight.  My number is
976-1212."  This message was repeated using a list of combinations of
names and numbers.  The direction was "friendly."  It now seems naive,
but I did not recognize the ploy as deceitful until I read the
congressional (U.S. Congress 1991) report on the scam.  The messages
were left on the answering machines of previous callers or men who had
subscribed to various dating services or magazines, who had been
included in a marketing list of lonely men.  The goal was to fool the
men into believing that a woman had called on a personal basis.  The
man's desire and hope might preclude him from noticing the 976 prefix
and motivate him to call back, accruing at least minimal connection
charges.  Embarrassment at his own foolishness would keep him from
contesting the bill.

1, like the other actresses, was paid by the completed script, which
often took hours of rehearsals and retakes.

Sometimes an acceptable take was never recorded, in which case the
actress went unpaid.  Ostensibly we made $40.00 for every "completed"
three minute tape.  I never saw anyone complete more than one script
per four-hour day, however, though many takes of three to five scripts
were read and recorded by each actress.

Like the other actresses, I continually perused the weekly want ads,
and when I noticed a phone sex job with a convenient location I
applied. The application process, typical in the phone sex industry,
consisted of my calling the number listed in the advertisement.  An
answering machine instructed me to leave my name, phone number,
experience, and any special voices or accents I might be able to
create.

The messages were screened for certain types of voices the company
wanted.  Apparently I "passed," because a woman called me back within a
few hours to inform me sight unseen, but voice heard that I was
hired.

When I arrived for my first day of work, I sat in the waiting room for
about thirty minutes.  Meanwhile, a tall, very slender young man with
acne was working in a corner of the lobby, folding and stapling fliers
as he conversed with a purple-haired, punkish young woman in her
twenties.  Their conversation focused on an upcoming party sponsored by
the owner of the phone sex company at which the young man had been
invited to work "security."  They were quite open about the prostitutes
and drugs that would be available at the party.

When Jackie" finally received me she was outfitted in a white,
mini-skirted Rangerette outfit that included high heeled cowboy boots
and long, spangled earrings.  She appeared to be about twenty-five
years old.  Despite her youth and her attire jackie came across as a
serious and ambitious career woman.  Her office was cramped but
included a good window overlooking a prime business district.  The
walls of her office were decorated with posters and fliers for
pornographic movies, appearing to demonstrate a playful comfort with
the nature of her business.

During a brief introduction Jackie mentioned that she had started out
as an operator, implying that I, too, might end up with an office of my
own.  In fact, immediately after this discussion jackie led me to the
"phone room," located on a different floor of the same office building.
The operators were not only geographically separated from the office
personnel by two floors but also temporally segregated.  Most operators
worked at night, arriving after the office staff had left for the day.
My first day was the only time I ever saw any of the administrative
personnel, including Jackie.

Given these circumstances, a promotion out of the phone room seemed
unlikely, if not impossible.

Jackie gave me my schedule for the week and explained that I would work
five unspecified days, to vary each week, from 8:00 P.m.

to 4:00 A.m. Notice of my weekly schedule would arrive on Thursday for
a work week beginning the following Sunday, and I was required to give
two weeks notice of any scheduling requests.  (I found that these
requests were usually ignored, in which case it was my responsibility
to cover the shift.) Jackie also informed me that the building elevator
required a security card, which I was not to be issued.  Instead, on my
arrival in the building I was to call collect from the downstairs pay
phone.  The charges would be denied but the signal received, and a
supervisor would then send the elevator down for me.  This practice was
explained to me as being necessary to protect workers "from themselves
and each other."  Without such restrictions, it was thought we would be
tempted to bring unauthorized persons (callers) into the building.

The elevator policy is a good example of the company's attitude toward
rules and rule making in general.  While the company's rules were
upheld rigidly, the rules of the FCC, the telephone companies, the
building management, and any others were flagrantly disregarded by the
phone sex management.  The elevator example also represents the first
of many management contradictions.  When some rules are to obeyed
without question or judgment but others disregarded, what happens when
one must decide which kind of rule he or she is facing?  Either total
acquiescence must be required, or none.

"Some acquiescence" is paradoxical.

Jackie told me that the job involved "sexually explicit talk" and was
"easy," and she demonstrated by saying something like "Oooh, baby, let
me suck your cock" using a Valley Girl accent.  There was no training
and no official period of observation.  Jackie led me back to the
elevator, down to the sixth floor, through a long corridor, and banged
on the door for admittance.

I was then introduced to Nancy, the supervisor in charge, a
sternlooking woman of about fifty who was dressed in a muumuu.  Once I
was placed in Nancy's capable hands, Jackie left immediately.  Nancy
asked me what name I would like to use on the phone.  Although Jackie
had introduced me as "Amy," this was the last and only time I would be
called by my true name at work.  Nancy showed me a list of names that
were already taken.  I perused the list for ideas for a name of my
own.

The list embraced the sexually graphic ("Cum-monger"), the romantic
("Vanessa"), the fiduciary ("Tiffany"), and even the automotive
("Porsche").  I settled on the ambiguously French "Isabel," and Nancy
instructed me to select a cubicle.

The phone room had six rows of six cubicles for a total of thirty six
stations, although several were nonoperational.

Each station had two single-fine telephones (well-used office models
older than their surroundings and clearly leased or purchased used),
and an equally worn list of birth years with their corresponding ages
and an approximate year of high-school graduation dates.  A nearby
operator offered me some rubbing alcohol to disinfect my phones.  She
also explained that I should first ask the caller's age and when he had
graduated from high school in order to screen underage callers.  Within
moments my phone began to ring.  For the most part it was, as
described, easy work.  The lonely callers liked me, as did the
straight-sex callers, and a cross-dresser called back, paying
additional charges, just to say thanks.  However, it was also clear
that the fetish and domination callers were hanging up on me.  At one
point, Nancy announced, somewhat angrily, that she had been going easy
on me because I was new, but that she would have to start sending me
more difficult callers.  Obviously there was knowledge and skill to
acquire, and some operators were more successful than others at getting
particular types of callers to linger.

The elevation of the supervisor's platform made it possible for her to
see into any cubicle, but it was difficult for operators to see into
any other work station.  I never saw more than half the cubicles
occupied.  On most nights only a dozen or so were in use.  The
supervisors instructed operators to space themselves to keep a maximum
number of empty cubicles surrounding each operator.  This pattern
helped to minimize the background noise during a call, but the other
operators remained audible, and it was always useful and interesting to
listen to their styles of interaction.  Although my access to the other
operators was limited by geographical space, and also by the inflow of
calls, operators were extremely friendly and open during free moments.
Joking discussions of personal sex lives, favorite foods and
restaurants, drugs, and recreational activities were common.

Calls were occasionally monitored, but the frequency of the monitoring
varied according to the skill and trustworthiness of the operator.  A
few rather bumbling operators were constantly being reprimanded for
inappropriate conversations of which only a monitor would be aware.  We
were told that supervisors from branch offices monitored our calls, and
that our supervisors monitored only operators in other cities.
Nevertheless, I knew of two instances when operators were monitored by
the supervisors on shift; the supervisors own indiscretion gave them
away.  These incidents, combined with no evidence of distant offices,
led me to believe that no such branch offices existed.  The ploy was
successful, however, in producing an atmosphere of omnipresent,
anonymous supervision.

My naivete about the content of calls I would receive is surprising in
retrospect, but I soon discovered that the scripts I had been reading
were remarkably pedestrian.  The phone sex repertoire includes
sadomasochism, fetishism, and many other forms of sexuality I had never
explored personally or professionally.  I soon learned that phone sex
requires real skill and creativity.

Imagine, for example, talking for ten minutes or longer to someone with
a foot fetish.  Removing high-heeled shoes and stockings and then
describing the color of nail polish and the shape of my toes took a
scant two minutes.  As soon as I would begin to slow down or slammer
for lack of material, the caller would hang up, so I listened to other
operators and asked for their advice in order to learn the details and
fillers used for various kinds of callers.

The biggest challenge of phone sex was not the unexpected commonality
of fetishism but the interaction itself.  Its interactive nature makes
phone sex akin to prostitution, and operators often teased each other
about being "phone whores."  New operators were often troubled by the
intimacy they felt with some callers.  One experienced operator, who
was open about also working as a prostitute, was especially keen on
expressing the similarities to anyone who tried to detach herself.  "
Oooh, baby, that feels so good," she would mimic before adding, "You
ain't nothing but a phone-whore."

In obtaining a job as a phone sex operator, I did not intend to deceive
anyone.  I did not intend to write about my experience for the first
two months out of the four I worked as an operator.  In fact, although
I took notes, it was for an entirely different purpose: they were meant
as a personal journal and an inspiration for fictional stories based on
interactions with my more imaginative callers.  As my intentions
changed, I could have begun again.  I could have gone to the phone sex
management, explained my new objective, and hoped to continue working
and observing under these new conditions.  However, there were
practical concerns.

Pornographic businesses, known for their illegal activities (See 1974),
are not likely to accept a researcher hanging around, and I had already
witnessed illegal activity.  In my experience managers were downright
oppressive toward workers, insisting on a great deal of control over
workers personal interaction and conversation, especially on such
matters as salary comparison, tardiness, and insolence toward
supervisors.  Since I had no intention to organize workers or report
illegal practices, I did not wish to give management any reason to
think I might.

My position as a privileged, white, middle-class, educated, non
committed worker was obvious from my speech, appearance, and demeanor,
and I made no pretense of hiding that at work.

In reality, there was no need to announce that I was a graduate
student.  It would have been self-aggrandizing.

Describing myself as a Ph.D. candidate would have been seen as putting
on airs.  I also avoided using my position as an educated, marginal
worker to explain other workers experiences to them, to mediate or
counsel, or to develop more effective training methods for the phone
sex industry.

I did, when asked, reveal to coworkers that I was a graduate student,
but this information was generally not well received.  It put distance
where there had been camaraderie.

They usually confessed, in a tone of inferiority, that they were not
very good at school.  I often responded with stories of harassment and
agony, which seemed to increase their comfort level greatly.

The benefits of these modest "deceptions" were monumental.  I gained
entry not only to the setting but also to the substance of the material
by working as a phone sex operator.  I was neither completely an
observer nor completely a participant.  Far from being problematic,
this situation was ideal for the purpose of exploration.  After all,
all participants observe, and all observers participate.

Ethics and Inquiry

After weighing the benefits of this research against other relevant
variables such as possibilities for harm (which were slight), the value
of the resulting research (which was potentially significant), and the
potential for harm or offense (which was small).  I concluded that the
data collected during my tenure as a phone sex operator are valuable to
academics and workers alike, and that my own personal risk of exposure
in producing this work is equal to, if not greater than, the risk to
which I have exposed my subjects.

In the phone sex workplace, real names are unspoken and unknown.  I
honored confidentiality of pseudonyms, since during the observation
phase of the research I was working in a setting and within a process
that was not tied to any particular individual.  I knew nothing about
the other workers identities outside the workplace.  Workers did not
have to trust my ethical judgments since my knowledge of them was
limited.  I made no attempt to identify details about where they lived
or grew up and never asked their real names, where else they might
work, the occupation of a spouse, or any detail that might later be
used for identification.  Within this study I assigned pseudonyms for
the working pseudonyms of the people I worked with.

It is possible to discuss difficult and taboo subjects, even to offend
or surprise the participants of the discussion, without serious injury.
The premise that individuals arc somehow damaged by exposure to
offensive or controversial ideas is contrary to the goals of research,
knowledge, and education.  This protectionism presumes a paternalism
every bit as strong as the one that dictated that subjects be protected
from knowing anything about the research.  This newer paternalism
simply protects the subjects from insights about themselves.

There are many individuals who feel quite liberated in speaking about
personal or sexual matters and to whom very little is taboo.  Many
workers and interviewees were openly gay and sported piercings, punk
hairdos, and clothing that might have shocked or horrified the same
administrators who officiate the subjects protection from the shock and
horror of social science research.  The real protection needed by such
groups is from the puritanicaIjudgment of those who would censor the
research that represents their point of view, the reality of their
experience, and the social prejudice to which they are often
subjected.

Rainwater and Pittman (1967: 367) suggest that an honor system of
professional ethics requires an "act of faith."

For "if you believe, that in the long run truth makes men freer and
more autonomous, then you are willing to run the risk that some people
will use the facts you turn up and the interpretations you make to
fight a rear guard action.  If you don't believe this, if you believe
instead that truth may or may not free men depending on the situation,
even in the long run, then perhaps it is better to avoid these kinds of
research subjects."

I believe that forthright inquiry is liberating, and using my own
participation in phone sex serves as my act of faith in that belief.  I
believe that I have as much to risk by my association with phone sex as
any coworker risked by anonymously discussing her or his life with me.
My right to ask questions of them comes from my willingness to subject
myself to them in return, to answer anything they might ask of me, and
to reveal all that is relevant in my own participation.

It is said that subjects "lack both the ability and the habit of
talking back " (Rainwater and Pittman 1967).

Subjects often perceive themselves as having no choice but to
participate, especially if the researchers are of higher status or
appear to be affiliated with agencies on which the subjects are
dependent (Kelman 1972).  While it is true that participants who are
subject to the authority of the researcher are vulnerable, that
vulnerability must be reasonably assessed when evaluating the risk and
harm of the research.

The protectionist view applies best to children, employees of a
research sponsor, or people who are in some way dependent on the
outcome of the research.  The protectionist view may also be, and has
been, applied to those of low social status: sex workers, single
parents, the homeless.  But those judged to be of low social status are
not necessarily dependent on those who would see themselves as being of
higher status; in fact, in many ways they are free from the features of
institutional participation that constrain the rest of us.

Those coworkers and interview respondents to whom I did reveal my
graduate-student status were most often amazed at what they perceived
as my extraordinary ability to genuflect -not in my employment as a
phone sex worker, but in my role as a Ph.D. student.

In the context thus described, the requirements of the Institutional
Review Board seemed somewhat impractical.  The board approved this
research with four conditions.  First, I was required to specify a
single location where the research would take place, preferably on
campus.  The location of interviews had to be flexible, however, to
accommodate informants from a broad geographical area who had limited
time and often unreliable transportation.  Consequently, I continued to
accommodate the informants needs by meeting them wherever they chose:
their homes, in restaurants, a public park, and occasionally my own
home.

I was also required to develop a referral plan in case an informant
suffered an emotional breakdown during the interview process.  I
complied with this demand, although I was often struck by the irony of
my ready referral.  While interviewing subjects who were openly
tattooed or pierced, gay or transsexual characters best described as
"hard core" it seemed to me that I, the pedestrian academic, was more
likely to be shocked, offended, or traumatized than they, who were so
open and honest about sexual issues.

The board also asked me to change a newspaper advertisement to offer my
on-campus office phone number instead of my home number. Unfortunately,
I had neither an office nor an office phone, and was unable to comply
with this demand.  The last requirement was to provide a copy of the
advertisement used to recruit subjects, which I had already provided. 
I did, of course, comply with all substantial, ethical research
requirements during this research, including obtaining written consent
from each interview respondent.

Archival Adnalysis

During the participant-observation phase of this research I also began
to delve into the pornographic literature, primarily to get ideas for
prolonging conversation during fetish calls.  As my research ideas
began to emerge, my focus broadened to a new goal of understanding the
content and structure of the most common pornographic fantasies.

My data sources included Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Forum, and many
of the specialty pictorials found in pornography stores and boutiques.
Eventually I began to include mainstream literature, popular-magazine
accounts of pornographic experience, and other references to phone
sex.

Popular novels like Vox (Baker 1992), an epistolary novel based on the
conversation between two phone sex participants, were of moderate
interest and revealed common conceptions of phone sex and pornographic
experiences.

I also made about twenty trips to various adult bookstores.

The first were in fashionable areas of West Los Angeles and West
Hollywood, stores that had large selections of "adult toys": vibrators,
blow-up dolls, sheepskin handcuffs, girlie magazines, gay magazines,
and arty porn books.  I then turned to more serious pornographic
outlets, including one near Los Angeles International Airport and two
in central Hollywood.

I also explored a store in Las Vegas, Nevada, where I was harassed and
threatened briefly by some young male patrons as I left and walked
through the parking lot.  Although managers perhaps worried that I was
sizing them up for a picket or political attack, or that I was
intimidating their clientele -occasionally asked me to "buy something
or leave," for the most part my presence was unnoticed or even
welcomed.  Such stores usually charge an entrance fee of twenty-five
cents to one dollar, but often waive the fee for women.  Despite this
inducement, I never saw another woman customer in such an
establishment, except in a store next door to a strip club where
strippers came in to buy gum or candy.

I used this "archival analysis" to familiarize myself with the standard
scripts and stories of the pornographic literature so that I could
recognize original scripting if, and when, I saw it.  Ultimately, this
part of my research served to reinforce my observations from the
earlier periods of participant observation and analysis of interview
data.

On each visit to a pornography store, for example, I sketched the
layout of the store, including the space devoted to each type of
pornography.  These maps lent empirical validity to previously
subjective observations that fetishism and domination occupy much of
the pornography market.

There are holes in the empirical research on the sex industry such that
"clear and distinct experiences are intermingled with vague
conjectures; suppositions and prejudices cross well-known evidences;
motives, means and ends, as well as causes and effects, are strung
together without clear understanding of their real connections.  There
are everywhere gaps, intermissions, discontinuities" (Schutz 1964: 73).
A content analysis of pornographic material would provide information
on the relative prevalence of various forms of sexuality, the physical
acts they include, and the emotional and symbolic meanings that are
attached to them.

These data would be illuminating to the debate over the merits and
damages of pornography.  Whether relevant or not to First Amendment
issues, these factors would provide an important link to reality, an
opportunity for stipulations regarding the content of the debate.  Such
data would also provide vital evidence of the causes, effects, and
social significance of this body of entertainment.

In most pornography stores "soft" porn like Playboy or Hustler exists
side by side with other forms, generally believed to be less common,
that feature such themes as sadomasochism, fetishism, bestiality, sex
with children, and other "perversions," that is, socially condemned
sexual preferences (Rubin 1984).  Together these markets consume about
three-fourths of the retail space devoted to magazines in pornography
stores.  The magazines are usually displayed so that the more generic
publications and videos are near the entrance while successively more
graphic, more specialized materials are found as one explores the
innermost displays and shelving.  There is often a back room or
under-the-counter stash of the most extreme specialized publications.

One of the appeals of phone sex is that people who would not otherwise
have access to pornography are given free range of self expression
without ever having to brave a bad neighborhood or risk being
recognized patronizing a pornographic establishment.  Synchronous to
the development of phone sex, has been a wellpublicized burgeoning of
soft-porn adult stores, sex boutiques, and retailers that specialize in
vanilla-sex markets.  Many of these boutiques are mail-order firms that
attract those who might not favor trips to sex districts.  Others are
soft-core boutiques in trendy, youth-oriented retail neighborhoods,
such as the Melrose district of Los Angeles.  Many ordinary citizens
who are unwilling or unable to confront the often threatening ambiance
of the local sex district are now able to enjoy the vibrators and
blow-up dolls that were once inaccessible to them.  The traditional
"trench-coat" market has moved into the technological realm of home
shopping networks.

Unobtrusive measures such as content analysis of existing publications
are more ethically neutral than other more invasive methods, but even
unobtrusive measures pose risks and opportunities for methodological
faults.  Los Angeles is a large urban community, perhaps different from
other cities in the country.  Las Vegas offers no check on
representative ness it, too, is a unique environment, highly sexualized
and geared toward a transitory clientele.  Thus I do not claim to have
done a random sampling of pornography.

Instead, what I have obtained is simply a series of observations
regarding the content of the most pervasive and accessible types of
literature.

In addition to problems of generalizability, I also faced problems of
preconception in the development of classification schemes.  There are
as many possible interpretations of the meaning of any specific aspect
of pornography as there are preferences among porn consumers.

What is mainstream and what is perverted is a matter of opinion,
context, and history.  Although I attempted to remain morally neutral,
assigning meaning where the participants themselves see none is a
perilous undertaking.

I occasionally caught myself using judgments regarding social value,
legitimization, and morality as benchmarks of understanding. Attempting
to see value laden acts neutrally and to assign meaning withoinjudgment
was a serious responsibility, one I hope I have not shirked.

Through working with callers, I developed a vocabulary of the industry
that I could not have gotten on my own in the pornography shops,
bookstores, and libraries.  The incentive of keeping my phone sex
customers interested made me focus on areas I might have otherwise
bypassed.  For example, I might have unthinkingly avoided close
examination of the defecation and excrement sector of the pornography
market, instead assuming a classic feminist interpretation that the
excreter was demonstrating power over the excretee.  In so doing, I
would have failed to recognize the significance of this type of fantasy
and its market share of the industry, and I also would have missed the
motivations evident in the accompanying story lines: even excretory
fantasies are ultimately about purity and innocence, desire and
acceptance.  I did not pursue this particular fantasy until pressed and
consequently risked losing sight of the depth and meaning of the themes
inherent in this odd collection of intimate social interactions.

Interviewing Fantasy Girls

The participant-observation phase of the research gave me the
opportunity to learn some of the assumptions, terminology, and general
conditions of the environment in order to ask pertinent questions in
later interviews (Becker and Geer 1957).  It gave me first-hand,
substantive information about important issues so that I could ask the
right questions and focus the interviews.

To reach potential interview respondents, I placed an advertisement in
the employment section of the LA Weekly, a free local paper that
typically carries two full pages of help-wanted ads for telephone
actresses.  The ad, which read as follows, ran four consecutive
weeks.

TELEPHONE ACTRESSES: Doctoral student seeks interviews with phone sex
"talkers."  Male or Female.  Will pay $20 per one hour interview.  Amy
[Phone Number]

I received approximately two hundred calls during the one month period.
Evidently the LA Weekly has a fairly consistent readership, because the
calls gradually decreased in seriousness and frequency.  When the ad
first appeared, I picked up several persistent obscene callers who took
about eight weeks to tire of me.  Consequently, I used my answering
machine to screen respondents.  If a message was sufficiently coherent,
I would return the call and explain that I was a graduate student at
USC working toward a Ph.D. I informed the potential interviewee that,
if she or he chose to participate, any names or identities mentioned
would remain confidential, the interview would take approximately an
hour and be tape-recorded, and informants would be required to sign
written consent forms.

I would also explain that I customarily met interviewees in public
place that offered some privacy, usually a Hamburger Hamlet, a chain of
restaurants known for dark lighting and private leather booths.  One
respondent chose to meet me in a public park; a few had small children
and chose to meet me in their home or my own.

While explaining my research project, I would probe respondents about
their experiences in the industry: whether they were currently
employed, how long they had been employed, if they had worked at one or
more companies, and whether they worked from home or an office.  I used
this introductory conversation to assess respondents suitability as
informants.  I looked for qualities like verbal ability, candor, and
honesty as evidenced by consistency of detail.

During the participant observation phase I had observed some of the
most successful operators and their styles of interaction, and become
familiar with the qualities for which I later screened.  In so doing, I
left myself open to criticism concerning respondent selection. Although
I would have preferred to interview all plausible respondents, budget
and time considerations made this impossible.  Given the necessity of
conducting a minimal number of interviews, and the fraudulent
intentions of some respondents, I deliberately chose the most talkative
and focused of the callers, ultimately conducting twenty interviews,
one of which included two operators who were friends and chose to come
together.

About 40 percent of the estimated two hundred people who responded to
the ad were men, approximately 80 percent of whom were not suitable
informants.  About one-fifth misunderstood the ad, thinking that they
had found a graduate student who was hot to talk phone sex, and they
called to politely volunteer their services; another two fifths
responded to seeing a woman's name and phone number in the context of
phone sex by making an obscene call; an additional fifth were men who,
for personal or financial reasons, tried to convince me that they were
male phone sex operators who were paid for heterosexual sex talk with
women.  I knew of only one such line in existence, and it required all
its operators to talk to both women and gay men.  (In fact, very few
women call the phone sex lines, and most of them are looking for
lesbian companionship.) Of the approximately eighty male respondents to
the advertisement, about a dozen appeared to be genuine respondents,
and of those I interviewed only two.

About 10 percent of the female respondents to the ad were phone sex
operators who misunderstood the ad to be an offer of a full-time job
and were not interested in a single interview.  Another 20 percent
declined to participate after carefully listening to my explanation and
asking questions about confidentiality, the involvement of USC, and the
safety or convenience of the meeting place.  Approximately half of the
remaining respondents seemed too disorganized, inarticulate, or
inexperienced to merit interviewing.  Of those respondents who
scheduled an interview, about one in four never showed up.

My sample of twenty-one informants included two white men and one white
preoperative transsexual (who seemed intentionally vague about the
gender categorization she preferred).  The rest were women; therefore I
generally refer to operators as "she."  Eleven of the female informants
were black and seven white.  Several of the black informants expressed
concern that I adequately represent black women in my sample, and most
informants mentioned the prevalence of black women in the industry,
which I had also observed.  None of the informants was Hispanic or
Asian, although Hispanic and Asian specialization lines do exist.  At
least two phone sex lines in Los Angeles specialize in multicultural
operators, but no one I interviewed conducted bilingual or bicultural
interaction.

The physical appearance of phone sex operators varies widely.  Some are
college students working part-time while others are single parents
working nights.  Some are strippers or prostitutes who use the phone
sex lines to increase their clientele.  Some are obese pretending to be
slender, others are men pretending to be heterosexual women, straight
men pretending to be gay, or blacks pretending to be white.  Early in
my career a caller complained to me that he had requested a black
fantasy girl.

I called across the room to the dispatcher, "this caller wants a black
operator," and the room erupted in laughter.

"So go back and tell him you're black" was the reply.

All my informants had at least six months experience, and about half
had been in the industry five years or longer.

Companies go in and out of business, change management, change
ownership, are fined or restricted for various acts of fraud all of
which cause frequent layoffs and rehires.  Given the unstable nature of
their employment, many operators habitually browse for other employment
that might offer higher pay, better hours, more amiable management, or
other incentives for change.  This movement between jobs meant that a
great number and variety of workers were browsing the LA Weekly and it
also led me to informants with experience in a wide range of companies.
The operators I interviewed had worked at an average of three companies
each.  As part of my effort to maintain confidentiality, I did not
gather the names of employers, so I have no way of estimating any
overlap.

One informant described how she came to be a phone sex operator:

Looking at everything else that you have to do in L.A."  you really
have no choice but to work there.  Any of the skills I have, they can
pay fan immigrant] $3.00 an hour for.  So that was the only thing
available to me, and it was fun at first.  I sit here, put my feet up.
I read a book, I've got my drink, I light a cigarette at my ash tray at
my own desk.  The phone rings, I talk to some weirdo, say a bunch of
stuff, and I get paid 10 bucks an hour this is great.

Almost half of my informants had been most recently employed in
Hollywood; five worked in West Los Angeles; and the rest worked in the
San Fernando Valley.  The Hollywood respondents, clearly the most
streetwise and porn-literate, represented most of the specialized
transsexual and fetishism lines.

Signing the confidentiality agreement was a source of tension more than
an inducement to participate.  Occasionally the offer of the form
served to officiate my position as researcher, for better or worse, and
it was the only time I ever asked for a last name.  If an interviewee
was hesitant I suggested signing a pseudonym, and two informants did
so.  After recording the interviews, I had them transcribed
professionally, verbatim, and then destroyed the tapes.  Other than the
confidentiality agreements, no record remains of the identities of my
research informants.

Interviews focused on informants perceptions of their work and its
effect on their lives.  Many questions were retrospective, asking
workers to remember personal facts and attitudes held before they began
working as phone sex operators, and to compare their memories against
current perceptions.  The difficulty of retrospective responses is but
one of the problems of interpretation that I faced with these
particular respondents.

Living within the larger society as a phone sex operator requires
resistance to social attitudes that debase phone sex practitioners.  A
phone sex operator can, and often does, play the part of the "girl next
door," and callers often express amazement at finding "a girl like you"
doing such work.  In order to work with these callers, operators must
overcome the stigma of prostitution.  They also must legitimize their
work to outsiders in other areas of their lives or choose to lie about
their profession.  As a result, phone sex operators, like other sex
workers (Henslin 1977), are often intent on legitimizing themselves,
their work, and their morality, making it difficult to elicit honest
responses that are not defensive rationalizations.

Another pothole I tried to avoid in this research involves the fact
that sex workers, like employees of many cash industries, often
overestimate their own earnings to themselves and others (See 1974).
Long-term earnings in the form of real assets, property, and savings
are rare (Bullough and Bullough 1978).

The real dollar value of sex work earnings is often low for those with
a taste for quick cash precisely those most attracted to the industry.
I often heard anecdotal examples of the operators making "good money,"
ranging from $100-per night company bonuses, to tips from customers
such as cash, jewelry airline tickets, and lingerie mailed to
company-provided boxes or private postal boxes.  I was skeptical,
however, of exaggerated amounts and frequencies of such bonuses.

Like the cash that flows through, but rarely to, workers, the events
the workers create are both transitory and memorable.  Because the
events and their effects are entirely figments of recollection, and
because the recollected effects serve to validate an operator's
accomplishments, I fear that many informants may have exaggerated the
effect of their work on the lives of others.  They may have exaggerated
the effect for themselves, to feel good about their work, or they may
have embellished their stories to impress me or, more simply, to make
their stories more interesting.  I was aware of this possibility
several times in the interviews and thus have provided the reader with
a cautionary note accompanying the story.

Believing that it is as important to conduct interviews in an
atmosphere of belief as it is to be wary, the atmosphere I created in
the interview was open, while nevertheless I remained skeptical within.
Although I never challenged an operator on a point I considered
questionable, I privately noted my concerns.

During interviews I often used self-disclosure to establish rapport and
build an atmosphere of trust and mutuality.  The effects of self
disclosure are well studied in the areas of clinical and counseling
psychology but are somewhat less carefully interpreted by social
science researchers (Derlega 1988).  In counseling situations, the
degree of mutual self disclosure has been shown to be an essential part
of the power balance of the therapist-patient relationship, as well as
an important tool in evoking reciprocal disclosure (Watkins 1990).

The reciprocity of the research interaction was fundamental to the data
collection in all phases, from unobtrusive analysis of pornographic
materials to participant observation.  My experience as participant
observer substantially altered informants perception of me.  Many
referred expressly to a feeling that I was simpatico; they felt that I
would be nonjudgmental and assumed that I had felt comparable emotions
and had wrestled with similar circumstances.  Common remarks such as "I
know you've been there" and "You can understand this, Amy" revealed the
informants need to know that, because of my personal experience, I
would understand their reactions and be nonjudgmental in my own.  This
trust was fundamental to getting the essence of their stories, details
of which often included sexual degradation they had experienced,
brutality they themselves had inflicted on persons judged weak, and
guilt that resulted.  I do not believe they would have been so candid
about these activities if they had not known that I had also been a
phone sex worker and had experienced similar phenomena.

Some important topics of the interviews were initiated by the first
informants themselves and later added to my list of questions.  From
the first interview, I was willing to talk about the experience and
opinion of the particular operator, and my informants helped to
identify central issues.  Several times, for example, an operator
illustrated the love and affection she had inspired in her callers by
enumerating the value of gifts she had received.  The company that had
employed me did not offer mailboxes for the receipt of gifts, and
before the interviews I had not known that other companies did.  After
several operators told me about this, and justified their own position
regarding the acceptance of gifts, I started to ask subsequent
informants about gifts.  Only then did I learn about the extent of the
informants involvement with, and their attitudes toward, the callers
who sent gifts.

Occurrences like this insulate me, at least partially, from the
criticism that I, as an interviewer, led the informants.

I was inquisitive along topical lines and approached the interviews
with a prospector's eye for thematic veins and categorical
similarities.  For example, I began the interviews by asking if there
were any calls that the informant would refuse to do.  The operators
repeatedly reframed this question into a discussion of controversial
calls that she did take but which offended her.  The emergent nature of
this moral dilemma, which became a major theme of the analysis,
illustrates my claim to validity for the theoretical constructs erected
later.

The purpose of an ethnography is to elucidate the meanings that are
used by participants in an interaction (Spradley 1979).  The particular
interaction of a phone sex call is especially difficult for a
researcher to interpret because its meaning is so different for each
participant: caller, operator, and researcher.

Bestiality, for example, conveys an alluring promise of gratification
to the caller who requests it, whereas it conveys an automated series
of landmarks to the operator who recognizes the call for a particular
script.  For a researcher, bestiality conveys yet another
culture-laden, politically loaded set of meanings.

The intellectual process of interpreting the meanings of actions shaped
the data analysis, a process that began with observations of my own
reactions as a worker and ended only with the completion of this study.
Throughout the process, collection and analysis were intertwined, so
that methodology was continually honed by empirical observation, and
observation was subject to tests of theory, practicality and
relevance.

The data grew more sophisticated and focused.  As I realized the lack
of content analysis of pornography in the social science literature,
for example, I stepped up the archival analysis, immersing myself in
some of the materials I had previously avoided.  As the format of the
manuscript emerged, I realized that I would need to say something about
the callers.  I stopped assuming that all knowledge of callers was
impossible and began to evaluate data I had that described callers.  In
this backward way, the developing contours of the analysis helped to
shape the body of data.

Aside from its use as mode of studying the unfamiliar or illdefined
subject, an exploratory study is also a way to develop a substratum of
theory that others may build upon (Glaser and Strauss 1967).  Such
theory, grounded theory, most often studies process and assumes that
the building of theory is itself a process.  The process of building
interaction in phone sex is similar building theory in that each
successful interaction provides the foundation for richer, more
substantively dense future interactions.  Thus one use of this research
is to elucidate areas that have been obscured or overlooked so that
future research can begin with more substance.  One use of phone sex is
to satisfy areas of sexuality that individuals often obscure or
overlook, hindered by embarrassment, social mores, or unavailability.
Beginning as a phone sex operator, lacking a provable (or disprovable)
hypothesis, without fixed content or script, I stepped out onto the icy
ground of empirical observation.  This ad hoc methodology may skate or
it may fall; its balance depends as much on the interpretations of the
reader and the researcher as on the merits of the data of which it is
constructed.

Chapter 2 Fantasy Girls Are Felt But Never Seen

Real Fantasy, Artificial Truth

The essence of desire is curiosity and mystery.  The allure of a phone
sex fantasy does not lie in the hope that the girl will come to life:
in fact, it relies on the serenity of the caller's knowledge that she
will not.  If she were to come to life, with her would come the
ambiguity, danger, and difficulties of a real relationship.  She is
desirable only as long as she remains abstract.  With reality she
achieves imperfection.

Despite these obvious truths, callers frequently ask operators, "What
are you really like?"  The callers seem to have difficulty accepting
the fantasy as fantasy and need frequent reassurance that the fantasy
is real.  While I was working as an operator, I would say, for example,
that I was a struggling actress trying to make it big in Hollywood.

"No, really," the callers would say, "tell me who you really are."
Finally I would admit the "truth": I was a dance student, an unemployed
secretary, a seamstress, or a songwriter.  Whatever the second story
was, it carried the weight of a confession and was almost unfailingly
accepted.

Valerie and jade were two of many operators I interviewed who expressed
disdain for the callers need for reassurance in believing their own
fantasies:

A lot of them want to know, and they keep prying, "What do you really
look like?"  Don't wish for what you want, you might get it, you
know?

Why do they care what I look like?  [They're] never going to see me.  I
could tell them that I like looked like Marilyn Monroe.  It'sjust how
he believed that I looked, you see what I mean?  It annoys me how men
are just so, "I believe it and that's all that matters."  Cause if you
want me to tell you a story, I'll tell you a story.  When jade or any
other phone sex operator tells you a story, its underlying theme is the
story of her life.  The operators personalities are the basis of every
character they do.  Although an operator has the freedom to repeatedly
redefine her characters, they remain consistent and predictable because
they are built on a foundation of inner self.

There is a lot more reality in phone sex than anyone might reasonably
expect.  Basic personality factors such as compassion, warmth, or good
humor cannot be faked wholly.

They can and are used fraudulently, but there must be an underlying
knowledge of the qualities themselves for a person to fake them.  An
entirely cold person cannot pretend to be warm, but someone who has
experienced warmth may be able to portray that quality at will.  Gail
and Valerie were not the stereotypical pornographic fantasies they
created on the phone, yet both emphasized the similarities between
their selves and their characters, even physically.

Usually, I say usually, I give my description.  I say she is 5'3", she
has hazel-brown eyes, dark brown hair, very attractive, very
voluptuous.  I would basically tell them the truth; voluptuous, big
tits, big ass, big everything.  I would just say big because sometimes
I didn't like lying to people.  I don't even like lying to guys.  I
just don't.  I'm a big girl.  I'm a big pretty woman, you know.  And
they appreciate my honesty.

I'm not dog meat.  I'll tell them what I look like, and then see what
they think.  So they go "Oh, that sounds really pretty."  I go, "Well,
I do all right."  It'sjust a little personal ego feedback.

Operators take their best qualities and emphasize them within the
context of a basic Barbie-doll framework.

Operators base their characters on their real selves, and they also
revise their own perceptions of themselves with a "fantasy-self," a
self who takes the best physical qualities of the original, but who
fits the cultural stereotypes better than any living human, a self who
has the interests and talents of the original.  The character can
partake of real emotions like love and desire real gifts of jewelry and
cash -yet has permission to be mercenary and deceitful, playing with
the caller's underlying self if he is foolish enough to expose it.  The
operators claim all of the good elements of their phone sex
personalities to be based in reality, but are insulated from
accusations of exploitation or cruelty by the existence of a fantasy
self.

The Latin term person are refers to the mouth opening of a theatrical
mask through which an actor projects his or her voice.  The term
persona eventually took on a more abstract meaning, referring to the
mask as distinct from the actor (Allport and Vernon 1933).  I use the
word persona to refer to the characterizations used by both operators
and callers within the interaction, and the word se4f to refer to the
actor who constructs a persona in response to perceived situational
demands.  References to the self are problematic.

Perhaps there is an underlying self, perhaps, as post modernism would
imply, there is nothing but layer after layer of mask.  In any case,
the conceptual use of self is necessary for differentiating operator
from character, actor from mask, and so I use it here as a construct, a
useful fiction, stipulated for the purposes of this discussion.  The
operators I interviewed, as well as those I worked with, used the
distinction between self and character liberally, and it was essential
for reconciling some of the problems that arise in phone sex
interactions.

There is a lot of freedom in having someone else take the rap for any
lying, cheating, or manipulation that might violate an individual's
sense of moral or ethical behavior.

By separating herself from her on-line persona, an operator removes
herself from the moral debate.  She does not battle conscience or
criticism; all complaints are directed to the persona.  If a caller is
injured financially or personally, the operator herself is neither
present nor accountable.  Her defense is clear: "It'sjust a fantasy"
and "just a character I u " Y

se.  et in other conversations, the distinction seems less clear.  One
operator, describing her delight at "bleeding a caller dry," told me
that it was not she but her character who exploited his vulnerability.
Yet when I asked her why he was so taken by that character, her answer
seemed to contradict her distance.

"I guess he really liked me."

The two identities, real and fantasy, are linked by practical
necessity.  The operator needs to keep track of the details in many
similar interactions.  If an operator pretends to be a college student
studying music but has no interest in or knowledge of music, she will
be exposed as a fake within minutes.  And if she contradicts a previous
description to a regular caller she will lose him.  For the sake of
simplicity, she must use herself as a foundation.

Even the male informants who did female characters including Dallas, a
preoperative transsexual in hiding based their female characters
physical description on their male physiques, choosing not to change
hair color, build, or other basic traits.  Dallas explained:

I just altered my own measurements and my own voice a little bit.  I'm
5'4", and she's 5'4".  I weigh 102 pounds, and I had her at 115.  Long
blonde hair -at the time I had red hair, but I changed my hair color
regularly anyway.  So I sort of made her a part of me.

The operators I met were proud of their characters, and all but a few
of those I interviewed believed that their personas represented the
best parts of their inner selves.  Most of my informants cited the
freedom involved in creating a "fantasy" and I commonly heard that it
was "fun" or even "liberating" to have the freedom to

"be anyone you want."  Most of the operators also mentioned the
"unique" qualities of their characters, and their ability to adapt to a
wide variety of situations.  They clearly did not see the characters
they created as being stamped out of a standard pornographic image.

The variations in character, though real to the operators, seemed to be
as slight as strokes on a paint-by-number canvas.  The characters are
really much the same: an ideal pornographic woman is not an
individualist.  Although the fine differences are engaging, the
perspective used to see the distinctions is very focused.  From a
broader perspective, the operators attempts to create variations begin
to look like the efforts of ants struggling with rigid stereotypes and
carrying the oversized loads of sexism and racism, domination and
egocentrism -the enormous crumbs of pornographic fantasy.

Both Terri and Kate extended genuine personality characteristics in
different directions to create a similar product.  Kate is a loud,
boisterous storyteller.  Close to six feet tall, heavy set, with real
presence, Kate appeared in our interview to be a sharp contrast to
Terri, a reserved, more introspective, more restrained personality.

When confronted with bondage and domination requests, Terri assumed the
persona of "slave."  She exaggerated her own characteristics of
timidity and reserve to create a scenario of powerlessness and
vulnerability.  Kate took an alternate route, emphasizing her natural
authority to evoke the same emotions of powerlessness and
vulnerability, but using them to control and dominate, thus creating
the same scenario with a different persona:I ended up doing well with
the submissive callers, because as hard as I was, a little bit of me
would always come out, and I always sounded like the mother who said,
"This is gonna hurt me a lot more than it does you.  I love you but I'm
gonna beat your ass."  And for some reason I guess a lot of the guys I
talked to, at least the repeat ones, were really turned on by that,
because I sounded like I was really living this.  I didn't sound like I
was doing this to make money.

Terri described taking the role of a young "schoolgirl" while at the
same time allowing a hint of her own independence and aloofness,
creating a character whom she described as "more fun to dominate than
the typical slave."

Whereas Kate emphasized strength and allowed kindness to emerge, Terri
emphasized vulnerability, accompanied by underlying strength.

Identity Versus Character

When entities are linked, separation often becomes problematic, yet an
operator's ability to separate the character from the self is critical,
helping the operator to distance herself from mercenary sex acts and
the manipulation of callers.  Optimally, it also allows her to be
unaffected in her private life, though this is rarely the case.

The linked but separate nature of the characters allows for
reconciliation of several contradictory dichotomies: belief disbelief,
identity character, fantasy reality.

The operators I interviewed and observed jumped back and forth as
needed between polarities without acknowledging the contradiction of
being both a character and a completely separate individual.  One
operator I worked with, Nancy, would be one and the same with her
character when the accolades were coming in, strutting around our phone
room with exaggerated hip movements, speaking in her characterized
voice, blurring the distinction with comments such as "when you got it
flaunt it, and I got it, baby."  At other times, however, usually
following an insulting, rude, or repulsive caller, Nancy would indicate
that her phone sex character was nothing more than a hoax, completely
unrelated to her inner self.

The distinction between identity and character may seem artificial when
juxtaposed with their intimate connection, but such a distinction is
necessary for an operator to maintain her dignity.  It protects her
from insult, from the caller's usurious sexuality, and from her own
callousness toward callers.  Thus a single operator might say both "My
character?  It's basically just me.  I just use myself, and they [the
callers] like that," and later, "I never let myself be exposed.
Never."

Brad, a straight man in his early twenties, took calls as a
heterosexual woman, a situation involving much more than simply
imitating a female voice.  To be convincing as a woman, a male operator
has to create a mental image of his own body transformed.  It is no
coincidence, I think, that many male operators who impersonate women
are at some stage of becoming transsexual.

Heterosexual male operators, admittedly a minority, are capable of
visualizing themselves as women.  I interviewed two of them and worked
with a third.  In my experience however, gay male operators gravitated
toward gay lines, leaving the imitation of women to others who might
consider it personally flattering or sexually enlightening.

For Brad the experience of portraying female characters developed a new
awareness of women and of male-female interactions:

You realize how much men are brought up to look at women as sex
objects.  You know you don't realize it until you're in the whole thing
[posing as a woman on the phone].  You realize how they view women.

[They] look at them as sex symbols.  I've done it and still do.  What
does that tell you?

What this tells me is that "fantasy" can alter reality, at least for an
individual.  But for the most part, the direction is nonproductive.  If
thin women were pretending to be fat and tall men short the possibility
for increased awareness would be endless.  But for those fat women
pretending to be thin and short men pretending to be tall the
metamorphosis into perfection, far from being "fun," can heighten
painful discrepancies.

The operators where I worked frequently swapped stories about
heterosexual callers who had been tricked into "falling in love" with
another man, and who had attempted to extract a violent revenge, often
by finding the location of the phone room and either breaking in or
waiting in the parking lot for the offending operator.  Such myths
provide the threat, and excitement, of fantasy imploding if reality
intrudes, and they caution operators to avoid revealing too much.

Like other operators, the black operators spent their time fantasizing
more socially perfect versions of themselves.

Their working hours were spent pretending to be white through vocal
inflection and self-description.  Like their white counterparts, black
workers displayed an array of personal styles of interaction,
motivations for being in the industry, preferred characteristics on the
phone, and reactions to the job.

My black informants all asserted that pretending to be white was no
different from pretending to be slender or large breasted.  The few who
expressed any ambivalence about the race issue cited their history of
dealing with whites and white society as the training ground for
dealing with racism on the phone and in the workplace.

Workers who experience ambivalence about race or other aspects of the
job are probably not phone sex operators for very long.  One operator,
a young black new hire, openly admitted lying about her age (she was
sixteen pretending to be eighteen) to get the job, which she needed to
support a child.  At $8.00 per hour, it paid almost double what she
believed she could make doing "honest work," to use her term.

"Corvette" frequently deliberated aloud over her guilt and ambivalence
about the sexual nature of the work.  She seemed to struggle with every
moral issue as it arose:

racism, prostitution, manipulation of the callers, exploitation of the
workers.  She would lament to callers on the phone, "They want me to
pretend I'm white," revealing, of course, that she is black.  Although
some callers held on, apparently finding her engaging, she found
herself in loud confrontations with others.  She directly accused many
callers of being "sick" and thrashed them with their own sexual
anomalies.  Corvette was bright and often caustic enough to make even
me, a mere witness, wince.  Mercifully for all of us, she was soon
terminated.

In contrast, black operators who have acclimated to the job react to
race as they do to any other pretenses.  Gail, for example, minimized
her misrepresentation of herself as white by citing the myopic
similarity of her fantasy to the truth.

Pretending to be anything never bothers me.  My background, as far as
race is concerned, [is that] I come from a mixed family.  My mom is
half white and half Indian, and my dad is black.  So I can do any type
call.  I can do white or black.

Gail feels justified in playing white because she is, in part, white.
She never explained how this was relevant to the phone sex conversation
though, and her responses avoided the deeper level of my questions.
Other operators like Briana took a similar route around questions of
race.

Most times the guys couldn't tell what I was.  They thought I was
white.  I would say, "No, I'm not white.  Do I sound white?"  They'd
say, "Well, yeah, you do."  I would say, "Actually I'm Hawaiian and
Indian."

"Oh, I never had sex with a Hawaiian before."

Briana was a very pretty, very heavy, light-skinned black woman about
twenty years old.  Like Gail, she hinted at her real appearance.  It
was plausible that she did have some Hawaiian and/or Indian heritage.
She would also describe herself as "big, voluptuous," hints of her
obesity shaped to fit the traditional fantasy.  Using bits of her own
personal history, Briana created a character reflecting the
traditionally white and slender, pornographic fantasy.  She justified
the incongruity by telling herself and me only secondarily that she is
"really pretty close."

Xanadu, another black operator I worked with, sometimes did black
British character.  She would joke to callers that "I'm black, but it
is okay because I'm British."  Some of her conversations struck me as
extraordinarily racist.  She often disclaimed her blackness by
disclaiming slavery.  For example, she would tell callers that her
being British meant that none of her ancestors were ever slaves, which
she considered proof of their superior intellect.  Mimi, who is also
black, explained how she is able to be comfortable with what might
otherwise be a loathsome situation.

Most men want blondes, so [I'm] usually blonde [laughs].  I usually
have green or hazel eyes, because they like a look that's a little
different.  I've been a redhead for a little while.  I switched it back
and forth.

Rarely do they want a black girl.  Rarely.  [Imitates caller's voice]
"Oh, gee, I was really hoping you were black, but I'll go ahead and
talk to you anyway."  [laughing at the absurdity of this scenario].

I consider myself very Afrocentric, but it doesn't really bother me.  I
don't get many black men on the line, and if I do, they usually want a
white woman.  Since we do live in a mostly white society, it makes
sense that it wouldn't be me that they wanted.

Ajazz musician studying music at a well-known university, Mimi, seemed
extremely practical and grounded in reality.

Our conversations seemed to confirm her view of herself as "very
Afrocentric."  She had participated in several affirmative action
demonstrations on campus and seemed politically enlightened and aware.
Xanadu, in contrast, enjoyed languishing in her fantasy of an idealized
British society in which racism is nonexistent and black women are
desired.  In so doing, she revealed a significant part of her own
psyche -and one of many ironies and contradictions among my informants:
the operators who seemed Afrocentric and aware were the most easily
reconciled with pretending to be white, and those most accepting of
their own body-types were the most comfortable pretending to be porno
archetypes.

The real world is part and parcel of the fantasy world it creates.  If
callers merely wanted to ejaculate, it would matter less what the
operators looked like.  Having green eyes, in and of itself, does not
excite or gratify either the operator or the caller.  What this fantasy
does is to outline the ideals of attractiveness -which operators
ultimately use to measure the social value of their inner selves.

This use of auxiliary characteristics that have no real bearing on job
performance as evaluation criteria is not uncommon.  In The
Sociological Eye (1951), Everett Hughes discusses the fact that in the
1950s many white people in the South were unwilling to be treated by
black physicians.  These reluctant patients would nevertheless override
their misgivings when forced by necessity or emergency, thus
demonstrating the implicit understanding that existed all along: that
the auxiliary criteria are irrational and that, even though the
criteria are generally regarded as important, they really are of little
use in serious evaluation of job performance or potential.

Some callers, such as those who appreciated the honest naivete of
Corvette, are able to accept, and then enjoy, the operators wide range
of characteristics.  Phone sex jobs, particularly those that allow
women to work from their homes, are ideal for those who feel visually
stigmatized.

The obese, the disfigured, the housebound all are low-cost, readily
available, and grateful candidates for such work.

The callers are perhaps similar.  If so if the caller himself has been
isolated or stigmatized -would he be pleased by connecting with someone
on that level?  The answer is a resounding "no."  No one wants to be
further stigmatized through association with another stigma tic
(Goffman 1963).

"I might sign up for a dating service," dead pans one comic, "but I'm
afraid to see who they might pair me with."

Occasionally, however, real connections are made, often by accident or
on the basis of a single detail within the fantasy, even something as
abstract as a tone of voice or style of speaking.  One operator I
worked with, Tiffany, spoke to a caller about a relationship problem
she was having with her best friend, Rachel.  Although she was using a
problem that was on her mind, she tailored it to the fantasy needs of
the caller, changing the details substantially and sexualizing the
whole thing by centering the difficulty around a man.  The caller
responded by offering serious counsel.  As the details of the problem
became closer and closer to truth, their conversation became
indistinguishable from one between friends.  After the call ended,
Tiffany told me that every now and then you find "a nice guy" on the
line, but she warned me against meeting one in person, no matter how
nice, as though I were the one considering it.

As mentioned earlier, operators often shared morality tales about
operators who meet callers and were beaten or raped.

These stories served to reinforce the idea that it is better not to
connect in any real way with the person behind the call, but the
callers, lacking a communication system, seem to have no such mythology
about the danger of meeting operators.  Thus the operators are able to
manipulate many callers with their belief in the wishes and "Why-nots?"
of meeting.  This lack of caution may be attributable to gender.  Men,
in general, do not fear being beaten or raped by women.  This dynamic
may be different on gay lines -where male callers might have reason to
fear male operators as much as the operators might fear them, but
Peter, my only informant who had worked on gay lines, insisted to me
that this was not true.  He claimed that naivete and vulnerability were
universally distributed among gay and straight callers, and that a
caller's risk is not linked to any real probability of danger but
instead lies in the need for the fantasy to be real.

Callers must be aware, on some level, that they are vulnerable to being
taken advantage of or used by operators.

After all, operators deal with caller after caller, and their job is to
maximize the caller's cost for the conversation.  A skilled operator
avoids the problem of being labeled mercenary, obese or, for that
matter, black, by defining an alternative "them."

"Some of these women are so fat," an operator might say, and the caller
returns her compliment: "Most of the callers you talk to must be real
losers."  A good operator changes the point of reference early in the
call, so that the conversation establishes a "we" and a "them."
Callers, and some imprudent operators, who continually ask "Are you
really?"  destroy a carefully and skillfully fabricated social
construct.  A truthful answer will destroy the fantasy, and denial
rings hollow.

There is no right answer to questions about what is real and what is
fantasy.

When Corvette confided to her callers that she was black, they
occasionally responded with sympathy, compassion, and lengthy
conversation.  By including them in her secret self, she invited them
to participate in her betrayal of the phone sex company, and they were
captivated by her illusion of truth.  Offered her confidences, the
callers were encouraged to conspire with her against an evil management
and a white society.  In this furtive way, Corvette perhaps enlightened
the view of a few sympathetic callers who were open to the idea of
interacting with Corvette's grab bag of contradictions: ingenious
ingenue, black porn queen, naive whore.  Although Corvette accomplished
this unintentionally and quit before perfecting a script -other
operators mastered ingenuity as a skill in itself.

Learning the Skills

It's the domino theory.  You learn from the first customer, and then
you take that to your next customer.  And the terminology starts to
build as you talk to more and more people that are into that fetish.  I
read a few magazines.  I went to, you know, little book stores, little
sex shops on domination.  They have magazines on bondage, fetishes -all
that stuff.  So, you know, you research it a little bit, but you don't
really need to because these guys are a wealth of information, and you
learn.  That's how you learn.

The method of learning by doing is probably how most sexual knowledge
is acquired.  Some phone sex companies offer operator's material,
mainly pornographic magazines left around the workroom, but these
"training manuals" are the exception.  Some magazines themselves run
phone sex lines and advertise their product in the magazine, and they
offer their magazines for the operators to reference the advertising,
which often refers to specific girls by name.

Generally, though, the work is judged too "easy" to require general
training or instruction.  Phone sex requires more than a development of
technique.  Sex may be considered a natural ability, but how natural is
homosexuality to a heterosexual?  How natural is a foot fetish to
someone who has never experienced the desire?  Some acts, phrases, and
emphases are not innate knowledge and must be learned.  Peter came to
Los Angeles to be a rock musician and found himself looking for
supplemental employment.  He is in his early twenties, cute, and very
Hollywood hip.  I assumed, wrongly, that his exposure to the youthful,
diverse music world, with its open sexuality, would have prepared him
to talk about all sorts of sexuality.

When I first started and they threw me on a gay line, I was like, "Oh
my God, I don't know what gay people do."  And I heard this other guy
doing it.  They had to sit me next to the biggest gay person you could
ever imagine, this guy Joe.

I was like, "Wow."  And then they put me next to this other guy who I
knew was straight, and he was doing the same thing, and I just went,
"Okay."

The skill requirements for the job of a phone sex operator are rarely
acknowledged.  Discussing the similarities between their selves and
their characters, operators often reminisced about their personal
histories, revising in the light of their current occupation and
looking for the personal qualities and interests that led them to being
a phone sex operator.  Many informants saw a connection to early
sexuality and an innate flair for explicitness.

Charlene was a baby-faced Generation X-er with multiple earrings, a
Jack Daniels T-shirt, and a baby on her hip.  She described the
necessary, but inherent, requirements of a skillful operator.

You have to be able to say to a perfect stranger, "Ooh, baby, fuck me
in the ass."  Some people can do that and some people can't.  I am. I'm
like that, always have been, always will be.

The most experienced and, I believe, skillful operators were
comfortable and frank about their involvement in pornography, their
sexuality, and their personal histories.

They often looked back at sexualized, pornographicized versions of
their own pasts.  Like lawyers who remember argumentative childhoods
and actors who emphasize the garage productions of their youth,
operators often told personal histories that provided early glimpses of
their future employment.  Gail described the early seeding of her phone
sex personality.

"Snapper" [her phone sex pseudonym] started long before phone sex.

When I was seventeen years old, I was watching this porno movie and it
was called Cinderella the Snapper.  And it was about Cinderella, and
she had this snapping pussy.  So, I started telling all my friends that
I wanted my nickname to be Snapper.  I said, "I'm Snapper.  I got a
snapping pussy.  My pussy snaps when I have sex."  So everybody,
everybody all my friends, the whole neighborhood -would call me
Snapper.

So that's how the name came about.  Now Snapper has been "Mistress
Snapper" and she's been "Miss Sweet Snapper," and she's just been
"Snapper, the Snapping Pussy."

The pornographic movie Gail saw as a teenager might have been forgotten
if it had not been resurrected in later years as a pseudonym. Operators
sometimes redefined their histories to magnify parts of themselves and
minimize others, often for an observer's entertainment. Part of the
story is convincing the audience that it is not a story, that the
desire, the name, the sexual propensities exist all naturel. As a
researcher and observer, even as a fellow operator in conversation, I
was included with the callers in the role of observer and led toward
belief in the natural ability of the informant.  The operators work in
a Rousseauean sea of compassion, desirability, and destiny, both
surreal and philosophical.  This, too, is part of the fantasy, but the
reality I observed was based more in Simone de Beauvoir than in
Rousseau (Henri orjacques).  The mode of being was a set of learned
skills (de Beauvoir 1949), and one of the skills was making it all seem
natural.  As Peter put it,

To sit in a room and talk to gay guys and breathe hard as if I am
having sex with a gay guy when I am not even gay, in front of other
people obviously you have got to have some sort of mental conditioning
to get yourself to do that.  Most people [would say] "I'm not going to
do that, never!"  Even before I did that, I went, "God, I am never
going to talk to gay guys," you know?  But now I'm immune to it.

The immunization, or training, teaches five basic skills:

lying, playing along with offensive fantasies, reading and manipulating
a stranger's desire, storytelling, and fearlessly breaking taboos.
These skills enable operators to interact with callers, management and
the phone sex milieu.  They need them to conduct their business, as
well as their personal lives.

The most basic skill for a phone sex operator is the ability to lie.
Most lies are offered under the guise of "fantasy."

Since the caller is paying to hear what he wants to hear, a certain
amount of fibbing is necessary.  Many phone sex managers also pressure
operators to lie to callers about factual details.  Where I worked, for
example, operators were offered advice on how to convince callers to
disregard a recorded message that warned of charges that were
accumulating.  The callers heard the prerecorded message but often
chose to believe the fantasy instead.  Thus FCC regulations were both
met and transgressed within individual interactions.

Managers tell the operator what is expected of her quite frankly, and
no one I observed or interviewed ever confronted management regarding
the dishonesty of the proposed behavior.  A fundamental lie in
operation while I was working, for example, worked as follows.  A
caller would respond to an advertisement that revealed, as required by
the FCC, the price of the call:

about fifteen dollars for the first three minutes and a dollar per
minute after that.  The operator would answer the call, chat for
perhaps fifteen seconds, and then say that she would love to talk more,
but in the hectic phone room she absolutely could not think straight.
She would then propose that he call back on a private line so that she
could go into a private booth where they could talk uninterrupted.  She
would not mention that the "private line" costs $49.95 for the first
three minutes.

For every three-minute call on that more expensive private line the
operator got a bonus point.  Fifty bonus points were worth fifty
dollars, one hundred worth one hundred dollars.

No intermediate awards were made for say, twenty or seventy points, and
points had to be accumulated during a single shift.  Even so, the
management reserved, and practiced freely, the right to confiscate
bonuses and offered operators no recourse or grievance procedure.
Behavior such as "insolence toward a supervisor" was considered grounds
for losing a bonus, and these "rules" were never challenged.

Perhaps the operators already felt unsure about the way the points were
made and were aware on some level that their entitlement was tenuous.
Thus it was a case of easy come, easy go, and operators were easily
robbed of what they themselves had stolen.

This particular ploy was so successful that, even given the
restrictions and abuses, about half the operators during the 8:00 P.m.
to

4:00 A.M. shift qualified for the one-hundred-dollar bonus every night.
To our shock and dismay, we were later informed in writing that because
of our own reprehensible behavior the bonus plan was being
discontinued, and that we were to stop this unauthorized manipulation
of the honest company's good paying customers or we would all be fired.
For the most part my fellow operators were happy to forfeit the points
and not be fired.  I did not hear any of the operators object that the
instructions for the ploy came from management itself, but several of
the best and most skillful operators simply left this company for other
phone sex jobs shortly after this incident.

Some phone sex companies offer special "chat lines" on which the
operators claim to be unpaid callers who want to meet the paying
callers.  They work cities, claiming to be speaking from Chicago,
Peoria, Winnetonka.  Callers who are residents of that city believe
they are speaking to fellow callers, women who might be interested in
meeting them in person.  It was surprising to me that this scam could
be convincing, but I was often surprised by many of the stories callers
seemed to accept.

Schemes and rip-offs are an accepted and expected part of business in
the phone sex industry.  Although clearly beyond the category of
fantasy, these schemes are described by operators as part of the job
the job of convincing the caller of what he wants to believe.  The
skillful and selfassured operator does not question the morality of her
work.

Instead, she maintains a work ethic in which deception and indifference
are sources of pride.

You have to be a total finagler.  You have to lie through your teeth
very fast.  That's important.  They could trap you with anything, and
you can't hesitate.  You have to just keep going, and if they miss it,
they miss it, and if they get it, you make an excuse.  Finagling they
should have that on the job description: "You have to be a good
finagler."

(Anita) Lying is a major skill, basically going for that person's
needs, exactly what they want, and just learning how to be a different
person every time.  It was difficult at first for me to lie so much,
but I got used to it.  (Maria)

In White Collar (1953), C. Wright Mills observed department store
salesclerks who were troubled by the faked displays of sincerity
required by their jobs.  When they learned to be "sincerely insincere,"
to add the quality of insincerity to their genuine repertoire of
personality characteristics, the dilemma was resolved, and their jobs
were less burdensome.

Ironically, insincerity became an adaptation for them, an internal
coping mechanism that helped the salesclerks fabricate candor.  The
hypocrisy was not burdensome but rather provided a genuine source of
comfort for the workers moral conscience.

In Fast Food, Fast Talk (1993), Robin Leidner describes the increasing
self-knowledge and self-assurance service workers sometimes experience
when they examine issues of sincerity and integrity as a result of
faking friendliness at work.  In a study of insurance salespeople and
fast-food workers, Leidner illustrates that despite the seemingly
negative consequences of adopting insincerity and exploitation as
personal characteristics, the evolution is also advantageous.
Manipulation and deceit bring material rewards, but they also bring a
paradoxical wisdom gained through examining of issues of sincerity and
authenticity.

Phone sex operators illustrate a similar cost-benefit analysis,
reporting that lying well is a requirement for doing their jobs well,
and that, as it becomes second nature, it affects their private lives.
Through their work they begin to see the convenience of small lies and
begin to use them in non-work-related situations.  They also pay the
liar's price: heightened suspicion of others.  Valerie said:

I learned that you can definitely bullshit a bullshitter, because I
know they're all bullshitting, and I'm bullshitting them, but they
really believe me.  I think I've learned how to tell when guys are
lying, and I'm more aware that guys have the potential to lie with a
completely straight face, just lie for no reason.  I think that it has
definitely taught me to be more alert.

Operators also have to be able to read the situation for the kind of
interaction that is not required, including exchanges that mimic those
between a therapist and patient.

Many operators described how they started out by offering certain
callers therapy for a sexuality that the operator considered perverted
or sick.  Instead of being calmed by this technique, the offended
caller usually hung up.  The operators appropriately took the
rejections as signs of their own lack of skill.  Seeing that they had
failed to help with therapeutic talk, and had failed to keep the caller
talking long enough to make any money, operators quickly learned that
therapy is not what the callers want.

Successful operators soon learn to play along with the caller's desire,
to read and manipulate it without attempting to change him.  Of the
twenty-one operators I interviewed, eight brought this topic up
themselves, independently, without prompting or provocation, describing
it as an important learning process that operators must struggle with
and resolve to be successful.

I would try to be very moralistic, you know?

"Say, hey, you shouldn't be doing that to your girlfriend."  You know
what I mean?  They didn't like that.  Then all of a sudden they will
hang [up] the phone.  I learned eventually how to come off.

I'd feel sorry for them.  They'd say they love me, and I'd say, "Oh no,
you don't really love me.  You love what you think is me.  " And my
supervisor is going [makes cut-throat gesture].  "Don't give them
therapy.  just say, I love you, too.  Now what else do you want to do
with me?  "

I would try to counsel them.  But my supervisor said don't do that.
Don't make them explain, don't make them be responsible for who they
are.  In the beginning I would ask them if they like hurting me and
why, and she said "Don't get into that.  Don't get into helping them.
Don't get into asking where their wives are.  Don't get into the whole
thing.  That's not your job  Yourjob is making them come."

Sex work requires knowing what your job is and what it is not.  The
interaction between operator and caller is vastly different from the
interaction between the woman who is an operator and the man who is a
caller.  Chances are that the caller would not be pleased knowing the
operator behind the facade.  It is only through their roles and
scripted interaction that a common ground is established.  Everett
Hughes writes, "The prostitute and the psychiatrist must both take care
not to become too personally involved with clients who come to them
with rather intimate problems" (Hughes 1951:

316).  Psychiatrists have formal guidelines, however, and have been
trained to disregard their own issues when treating clients, though
some are clearly more successful than others.  In contrast, the
expressed goal of most phone sex operators is to exploit their clients
however and whenever possible.  If a particular client no longer has
good standing with the phone or credit company and is unable to call
back, for example, a truly skillful operator will get him to call from
a friend's house.

From the initial hello, an operator needs to get a sense of what the
person needs, beneath the level of fantasy.  Sight unseen, and with
only minimal vocal cues, an operator reads the caller and manipulates
his behavior accordingly.  Peter told me how he kept insecure gay men
on the phone for long periods of time by engaging passionate beliefs.

You only should say things like some dumb jocular type, saying, "Hey,
hey, hey, what do you sleep with guys for, hunh?  What are you, crazy?
It's against God."  You say something that some simpleton would think
of, like why they shouldn't be gay.  And they get off on that.  They
have to say something back.  If you had said something intelligent,
they can go, "I don't care what you think."  If you say something
stupid, then they gotta go, "Don't you realize that..  ."

and they are going to stay on.

Learning to manipulate behavior like this has certain advantages, often
cited as a sort of bonus of the occupation, although wisdom has its
curses.  Peter continued, explaining his somewhat condescending view of
the callers and extending it to the world at large.

You know things, other people's fantasies.  People, America, Joe
Average will say things, like "I always wanted to have two girls."  And
you understand that he really doesn't want that.  Ha!  Ha!  He thinks
he wants that, but he really doesn't.  I can tell a person is gay
before they know that they are gay.  In a way it's scary.  It's
something I wish I almost didn't know, but for good or bad.... You wish
you didn't know it, because it spoils everything sometimes, but at the
same time, it's, I don't know, it's kind of cool.

Equally cool is the learned skill of graphic description, of creating a
visual image in the mind of the listener.  These images fill as many
romance novels as pornographic magazines.  Multiple, metaphorical
adjectives and modifiers, slow, rhythmic alliteration, hoarse
inflection and deep breath these techniques are part of the phone sex
repertoire.  Although styles vary widely, most operators speak very
slowly, placing excessive, breathless emphasis on each word and using
hard consonants to sever the exhalation audibly.  Vowels are stretched
and small words elongated and emphasized.  Peter, being British, had
the advantage of a soft accent and slow, rhythmic speech, but he
explained the skills that were more difficult from him to acquire:

Learning to take your time and to explain everything very detailed. You
know, explain to them as you are running your nails down their back
where your tongue is, and what you are doing with the other half of
your body, and, you know, taking up ten minutes just to explain that
you are scratching someone's back.  Every sensation you describe,
making sounds to them, and detailing it.  You learn how to keep them on
just by explaining a simple thing and making it take a long time.  So
you are going to get really into that detail, how it feels, how it
really feels.

Operators, then, are poets at work, since "a poem depends for its life
neither on continuous narration nor on developed argument but on a
progression of specific qualities and intensities of emotionally and
sensuously charged awareness" (Rosenthal and Gall 1983).  An operator
develops and uses inflection, rhythm, and patterns of speech that lead
callers to make inferences regarding sexuality, violence, fear, anger,
or any other elements of the fantasy.  A skillful operator does not
say, "I am afraid" or even "I want you."  What she does is create these
emotions, invoking them without explicit description.

Ironically, the explicit sex in phone sex is narrative and evocative
-less explicit than some poetry, yet more explicit than the most
graphic pornography.

All the operators I interviewed, and many of those I worked with,
believed they could read a caller well enough to know when they were
talking to a child.  Because much of the movement to abolish or
restrict phone sex lines has focused on the possibility of children
getting access to explicit sexuality, operators are provided with
charts listing ages, corresponding years of birth, and approximate
years of high school graduation.  Operators test youthful-sounding
callers by quizzing them on this information.

Though instructed to hang up on underage callers, many operators would
take the opportunity to lecture the child or teen on the evil and
expense of calling 900 numbers.  This display of ethical behavior was a
source of pride among some operators, and in the workplace I often
heard another operator announce that she had rejected an underage
caller.

Of course, the operator received credit for keeping the call going,
and, unless he issued a written complaint to the phone company, the
phone subscriber paid for the lecture.

Sometimes a caller would sound suspicious but pass the initial test.  A
twelve-year-old might have a hard time computing his date of birth and
high school graduation, but a sixteen-year-old merely needs to add two.
Borderline callers are the most likely to avoid detection.

I once received a call from "Sean, " who sounded very young and was so
painfully shy that he had great difficulty even talking to me, his
phone sex fantasy girl.  Operators almost never initiate the sexuality
of a call, instead poking and prodding the caller to say what he wants
from the call.  Sean finally asked me if I thought "self-abuse" was
morally wrong, physically harmful, or religiously proscribed.  We
discussed it a little, and I said that I thought everyone masturbated,
even those who forbade it, and that it seemed pretty natural.  Mostly,
however, I continued to explore Sean's beliefs with him, and it struck
me that he seemed to be terribly ashamed and worried about his own
adolescent sexuality.  He seemed to have no one else to talk to about
it, and seemed to be completely in the dark about the fundamentals of
sex, girls, dating, and other pivotal issues of sociability and
sexuality.

I engaged Sean's trust, and he quickly moved on to the subject of
girls.  He wanted to know how sex worked, how the first time would be,
what was expected of him.  I used the example of a date between us.  I
described to him how he would pick me up, talk to my father, and then
we would go to a local theater for an early movie.  He would order a
single large popcorn, and as we shared the popcorn our hands would
occasionally touch.

"Pay attention," I told him, "to my reaction when we touch.  Do I pull
away?  Linger?  Make eye contact?  If the signs are positive,
continue."  I instructed him to wait for a sad, touching, or funny
moment in the movie, make eye contact, smile, put his arm around my
shoulder, and, again, watch for the response.

In this way I walked Sean through a first date.  The date I described
to him included no sexual contact other than a goodnight kiss.  Every
move was contingent on the girl's approval and willingness.  The goal
of the date was not sex, but getting to know her, being able to read
her feelings and desires, and moving forward in a relationship.  I
speculated that if his parents, or whoever had taught him the
repressive views he recited on masturbation, had been aware of the
actual content of this call, they would actually approve of the
important lessons he learned.

This call was a source of great job satisfaction for me, and I shared
the content with several coworkers, each of whom responded with a
corresponding story of a virginal caller who wanted to know about sex.
Each responded to the situation by teaching her own preferences to the
young man.  Each felt she had created a kind and sensitive young love,
and each described the great satisfaction she got from doing so.

just as operators learn by doing, taking new information from each
caller as they develop a personal style, callers learn by doing, taking
bits of information from each personal interaction, including phone sex
calls.  If the truly underage callers are properly screened, some
inexperienced males (or females), over the age of eighteen, might
actually use phone sex as a sex education tool, a way to gain
experience and confidence before experimenting with their newfound
knowledge in real life situations.  Occupational Hazards

One of the most complex skills of the phone sex operator is controlling
the effects of mastering the other skills.  Most of the operators
noticed a loosening up of their own sexual inhibitions, language, and
humor in their private lives.

Most saw these effects as assets, but at least two informants were hurt
by the discrepancy between their online morality and their private one.
Charlene had described an unequal relationship with her husband.  She
was very young and tough, but she struck me as someone who was trying
too hard to hide her vulnerability.  She appeared more unhappy with her
occupation than any of the other operators I interviewed, but seemed
trapped by a lack of education and skills, her own youth, her
oppressive husband, full responsibility for her child, and a very
traditional view of femininity that labeled feminism as "bra-burning"
and womanhood as weakness.

My husband tells me sometimes, "Geez, the guys on the phone have a
better sex life than I do."  It really hurts.  My husband will want me
to do certain things that I just won't do in real life.  Talking about
it is one thing.  You can tell anyone to fuck you up the ass, and it
doesn't matter, but in my own personal life, I'm shy.  I'm not that
kind of a person.  I mean, before I ever started this job, just the
words would make me blush.  Now I can talk about it without any
problem, as you can see.  But to actually do it?  Forget it!

Most operators cited concrete differences between language and action.
Action, it seems, is a separate entity from language, a distinct,
unrelated, unconnected, dissimilar entity.  While we often acknowledge
that what we say affects who we are, we insist that what we say does
not matter.

"Nature her custom holds, let shame say what it will" (Hamlet IV, 7).

It'sjust questions and answers.  I am not afraid of language, so
whatever language you use, [whatever] matter of expression you have....
I could say some of these things in everyday life, where some people
couldn't.

But language and action are related, and to deny their connection is
senseless.  When the connection is denied, the efficacy of language is
lost.  It may appear that the direct effect of an empty and
manipulative experience must be a destructive force; in fact, however,
I found that many of the effects on the operator's personal, real life
were positive.

One of the effects of speaking things that are repugnant is that they
lose their power and become less so.  Most operators experience an
increasing tolerance for the acts when they are done in real life.
These same acts would have been viewed as disgusting and foreign prior
to this experience.  Many operators talked to me about the discovery
that fetishists, dominators, bestialists, and pedophiles are often
capable of surprisingly normal conversations.  Peter described how
working gay phone sex lines helped him to overcome bias and
ignorance.

I did learn a lot about transsexual, bisexual, and gay life.

I see TV commercials now where I spot "that guy's gay," where I would
never notice that before.  I never knew before, but now I can tell, and
there's probably nothing a person could do to hide it from me now,
which is some thing I learned.

There's something about me as well.  You know, guys have that wall of
competition constantly all of the time.  A gay guy doesn't have that.
So as soon as you get around him, there's this bond, this
friendliness.

"Oh, hi, you're a guy.  I'm a guy, too.  We both have one.  I
understand what you're thinking.  " It's like bonding that you can't
get from regular guys because they are too ... they are not going to
admit they have feelings.  They are not going to admit they have
problems, not in front of another guy anyway.  They are afraid that you
will jump on them and make them look bad.  I learned that.

And I learned the things transsexuals go through.  Life for them is
basically hell, you know?  They can be raped and nothing will ever
happen about it.  Most of them are into drugs or prostitution. It'sjust
something that comes with what they are doing, unfortunately. And
that's something I learned.  I can spot them now.  I know where they
are, and I understand their lives.

By spending time talking to people like transsexuals and others on
their own terms, in their own lingo, talking as if their sexuality was
appealing, unsurprising, and usual, operators begin to get used to a
wide variety of people.

Valerie had grown up in the presence of "lots of pornography" in the
form of girlie magazines and movies that were freely distributed among
her uncle and brothers.  Most of the phone sex scenarios were familiar
to her, but a few extended beyond the range of the prototypes that
appealed to her male relatives.  She explained that she had also broken
the mold of conventional characterization.

It's made me be a little more tolerant of people, like when you hear
someone say, "Oh, that guy is a cross-dresser," you don't immediately
go, " Oh, God."  I used to be afraid of cross-dressers when I'd see
them in the street.  I'd go, "How strange, how weird."  Cross-dressers
are the nicest people, and I know the mentality behind it, so I feel
like I have learned to tolerate certain conditions in our society.

Many of the operators I interviewed told me that as they developed
tolerance, they began to experiment with new things in their private
sexual lives.  Although I never asked any of the informants about their
sex lives, all but a few of them volunteered information about their
own sexuality.

Most were candid and matter-of-fact about how their sex lives had
changed.  Several told me early in the interview, "I know what you want
to ask me.  Do I really get off?"  In fact, I did not particularly want
to know, and had never even thought of asking.  But the answer, at
least for those who brought the subject up, was "yes."  Certain calls
are bound to evoke a sexual response in an operator.  Many operators,
after feeling a sexual stirring during a conversation about bondage,
for example, went home to try it out.  Gail was one of the operators
who volunteered information about the personal effects of her job

It did have a definite effect because there were a lot of things I
wasn't into.  I mean, when I first started out, I would never let a guy
tie me up and spank me or anything like that, you know?  And I think
phone sex had an influence on that because I like that stuff now, you
know.  While I'm having sex, I like to be spanked.  You know, I think
that's kinky.  So I think I have gotten a lot more kinkier, sexually
speaking, than before.  It definitely had an effect.

Briana and Mimi, in separate interviews, concurred.

It made me a little bit more open, from just straight miss
straight-up-and down plain-Jane things.  You experiment more.

That part of it was good, it wasn't kinked out.

I think it has an effect on my sexual life.  It made me a lot more
aggressive about what I wanted.  It made me a lot more open to
different sexuality, it made me just a lot more sexual.  I found myself
asking him for things I didn't ask for before, talking to [my
boyfriend] about sexual toys that we never used before, and I ask him,
"Would you ever think about having sex with me and another woman?"  I
would've never thought of anything like that or even had the gumption
to ask, had it not been for the sexual line.

A few operators felt quite the opposite effect.  One operator, who had
been working as a prostitute in addition to having two phone sex jobs
hit her limit.

I didn't even want to think sex.  Don't talk about sex with me.  Don't
even touch me, leave me alone.  You get to the point where you do it
for sixteen hours a day, you really don't even want to see a real dick
in real life, and that's the truth.  You don't.

Many operators reported that phone sex work also had similar effects on
the rest of their personal lives.  Those who enjoyed an expanding sex
repertoire enjoyed expanding their social and psychological
repertoires, while those who dismissed the sex as overkill also
dismissed the related effects.  Operators experimented not only with
new sexual attitudes, but also with some new personality
characteristics.  To most this was enlightening, but to others
experiments in identity were too alarming to enjoy.

As Brad pointed out, sometimes pretending can make it real.

It makes you feel more confident.  You see how having the fantasy
[makes] you more relaxed.  And you are not necessarily aware of that
until you do something like this.

Then you realize it.  I can sort of see how they enjoy that.

It would be easy to enjoy, I imagine.

But others saw a more intimidating message.

I think it is really scary if you are having sex and you start saying
some of the things that you say in there, you know?  And I have, I have
done that, " Oh God!"  Not that it's wrong or anything, because it's
not.  I think it's kind of sexy, but at the same time you think, "Am I
doing what these people do?"

Professional Pretense and Private Lives

Some forms of sexuality, like violence or bestiality, are difficult to
accept.  Associating with these callers, thinking their thoughts, and
speaking their words may not increase one's capacity for tolerance and
empathy.  Peter was a straight guy who had learned to talk as if he
were gay, and he seemed to have a heightened sense of difference from
the callers.  More than the straight women who talked to straight men,
Peter talked about the callers as if there were a sharp line between
him and them.  Unfortunately for Peter, he was too intelligent to
believe that line, and his ambiguous justifications of the differences
between "them" and "him" permeated our interview.  He was ultimately
successful, I think, in aligning his view of the callers as "weirdos"
with his own participation and identity as a sex worker deviant, with
his view of the callers as human, and with his own uncertainty that
they might be representative of other men in his world: friends,
acquaintances, and self.

It affects you psychologically, I think.  You tend to see the bad
nature of things.  You're hearing people's secret fantasies, you know.
You're hearing people's innermost desires of things they want to do.
And it makes you wonder, where does that come from?  What kind of human
nature is that?  I think it does have an effect I think it has a bad
effect.  I think there is some good.  I think there is more bad than
good though, you know?  And you've got to really concentrate or it can
get to you in a bad way.

Peter emphasized the effort it takes to keep the bad effects at bay.
Such effects have provided fertile territory for numerous studies of
paid work and its effects on workers lives.  Hochschild, for example,
has analyzed the dehumanizing nature of professional pretense and, like
Peter, worries that in turning toward a service economy "we may pay a
cost in how we hear our feelings and a cost in what, for better or
worse, they tell us about ourselves" (1983: 2 1).

Leidner's study of McDonald's workers and insurance salespeople (1993)
found that interactive service work routinizes individuality and forces
workers to confront profound questions of authenticity, individuality,
and personal integrity.  She notes that workers can benefit from the
examination of these issues, particularly where the balance between
control of the persona by outside forces is well balanced by the
individual autonomy to express her true self.  Leidner discovered that
the service workers she observed were constructing their own
interpretations of the work rules about presentation of self to suit
their own changing needs.  Although she notes that the change is not
entirely benign, she focuses on the adaptive mechanisms workers develop
under somewhat adverse requirements of emotional labor, such as
insincere flattery of difficult customers.  She finds that these coping
mechanisms have their benefits, including a boost of confidence, the
perception of power over clients, and psychic protection from demeaning
situations.

Paid work is known to affect workers private lives by changing their
standard of living, their daily schedule, and their social and economic
power.  Leidncr found that "participation in scripted service
interactions provides training in cynicism and defensiveness that
affects people's understanding of social relations including their own
sense of power, their expectations of other people, and their beliefs
about their obligations to others" (1993: 230).  The ritualization of
personal characteristics such as friendliness and sexiness makes
service work generally problematic; phone sex, in particular, entails
frequent and heavy application of these rituals.  Phone sex also poses
problems for the phone sex practitioner operator or caller and anyone
who is romantically or sexually linked to her or him.  Operators often
discussed the difficulty of maintaining personal relationships while
they were doing sex work.  In the following discussion jade talks about
the effect of phone-sex work on her relationship with her boyfriend.

jade.  In the beginning he helped me.  It was fun.  Then he kind of
looked at me with disrespect.  He had some kind of disrespectful
attitude, you know?  He ... it was hard to give him attention.  He
really needed attention, you know?  And then he started timing all my
phone calls.

AF: Why did he time the phone calls?

jade Because I had to maintain a certain average.  Understand what I'm
saying?  But they didn't really care too much about your average.  If
your average fell a little bit, then your average would soon pick up
cause there's hang-ups and that kind of thing.  But then sometimes, he
just well, see it was hard, because it's a matter of turn off the TV,
turn off the stereo.  He, he started getting this feeling, and it's
like, she's talking dirty to all these guys on the phone and I'm just
sitting here.  You know what I mean?  See, what I did want to do was
just work when he was at work.  But, they really didn't have any
openings then.  Then he lost his job.

So now we are back to square one.

Only four of the twenty-one operators I interviewed had steady
boyfriends or husbands, and each remarked on the particular
difficulties their work posed for personal intimacy.  The two related
obstacles to these operators intimate relationships were, first, their
partners' jealousy over the attention being paid to callers, and
second, their partners becoming increasingly lurid, demanding, and
caller-like themselves.  Three of the boyfriends who were jealous of
the intimacy being merchandised were also dependent on the income it
produced.  Perhaps it was the dependency itself that festered into
resentment and hostility.

The operators who tolerated such relationships did so either because
they felt destined to remain in a bad relationship by a past filled
with similar affairs or because all men are basically mean and having a
man requires tolerating abuse.

jade -whose boyfriend timed her calls and then accused her of lingering
longer than necessary and enjoying it explained to me that she loved
him.  She understood his insecurity, saying "when love is like that,
real strong, you don't want anybody talking like that."  Each of these
four operators focused on the guilt they felt over dividing their
attention and sexual energy.  They seemed to believe that the service
they were giving to men on the phone was identical to the service
required by their man at home, and every ounce of intimacy sold was an
ounce that ought to have been his.

Operators did not usually extend their work beyond work hours, and many
spoke of the need to leave their jobs "at the office," yet their phone
sex interactions extended beyond work hours into their personal love
relationships, and often into personal friendships as well.  Still,
they drew careful distinctions in an attempt to minimize the effects.

Janeen: A couple times I thought they [callers] were guy friends that I
knew, and I still don't even know to this day.  I never fully checked
it out, and I think both times I just hung up in mid-sentence.  I
didn't even want to know, because if I knew, I don't even want to know
if they do that.  AF: What if they did call?

Janeen: I don't know, I couldn't even ... I've always put that out of
my mind.  I suppose it would gross me out a little bit.  It would give
me a totally different perspective on guys.

"A totally different perspective on guys" was very commonly reported by
my informants, and quick to follow was a totally new perspective on
self.  The more the work encroached on their personal lives, the more
important the distinctions between work life and personal life, caller
and civilian, seemed to be.  The view that all men are callers at heart
seemed to imply that all operators too, were essentially phone-whores.
Distinctions needed to be drawn.

With the increased openness and experimental sexuality of phone sex,
some operators start enjoying certain calls more and more.  This, in a
sense, makes their participation similar to that of the callers.
Operators often told me that they especially enjoyed some calls, and
several confided that they occasionally "get off" during phone sex
calls.

This, of course, is a caller's dream, his ultimate fantasy, as
evidenced in the pornography literature and the advertising content:
the wish that the caller can touch the operator in some enduring,
carnal, intimate way.  Chapter 3 Phone Sex Consumers: Husbands and
Friends?

Estimations of Reality

During my four-month tenure, I would estimate that I spoke too some
3,200 callers, but my knowledge of them was limited, and factual
information income, height, penis length was as subject to exaggeration
as it was exempt from confirmation, I spoke at length to other
operators about who they thought the callers were; this chapter offers
the interview informants , my coworkers , and my own perceptions of the
callers.  During my shifts in the phone room I took notes on the
interactions I had with callers.  It was not unusual for operators to
keep lists of callers names and other relevant details in order to keep
up with a succession of names and stories that would otherwise become
quite confusing.  Operators commonly interact with as many as ten
callers per hour, sixty or eighty in a single night, sometimes two at a
time.  If an operator were to breathlessly sigh, " Oh Tom, I love your
hairy chest!"  to a smooth and hairless Henry, she would lose the
caller.  My notes were simply more extensive, and more personal, than
most: additionally, I dated and saved them.

I estimated the validity of some callers claims about their social
selves through the cues discernible by telephone.

Grammar, inflection, and background noise are a few of the more
concrete elements, while assessments of education and occupational
field are among the more subjective impressions I collected.  (The
error estimation of my own personal acuity, of course, remains unknown;
I can only assume that it is sufficiently accurate.)

just as operators have trouble faking some basic attributes, we can
assume that the callers do, too.  Every person is able to test the
accuracy of phone impressions by meeting someone previously known by
phone and noting how well expectations meet reality.  Such observations
from prior experience provide validity checkpoints for many operators,
and are often used to evaluate whether a caller is what he describes.

When I heard other operators freely discussing their opinions about the
callers identities, I thought they were too easily taken in by
associating class with money.  For them, for example, it seemed easy
for a medical school intern to become a "famous heart surgeon," but the
ill spoken owner of a large construction company would be immediately
suspect.  The other operators took good grammar and education as
concrete indicators of financial well being, while bad grammar was a
flag for poseurs.  While I shared their skepticism regarding bad
grammar, I was even more skeptical of the white-collar group.  If a
white-collar sounding caller claimed to be a lawyer and seemed well
versed in legalese, I concluded that he might be an office manager or a
small-time attorney, but that he was probably not a janitor or
mechanic, and probably not a doctor or a stockbroker.  In short, I
accepted general information but not the particulars.  Although I
believed that the office manager could "become" head of the firm, I
doubted that the janitor, or someone completely outside a law office,
could pull that off.

AF: How much of the real person [the caller] do you think you can
really know?

Valeyie: Probably 80 percent.  Because you can find out a lot of the
important things.  Are they honest?  Are they violent?

Do they hate women?  Even if they are talking about their appearance,
you can tell when they are lying if it sounds too good.  I really think
you can tell.  Also, sex brings it out.  All of a sudden, you know them
real well.

Sex may create an illusion of intimacy and cause one to think one knows
the caller well, but in fact this knowledge is highly contextual.  I
agree with Valerie that aggressive and violent callers often show
themselves early, but I believe that there are more callers than the
operators suspect who are able to deceive an operator and hide certain
parts of themselves.  For example, some callers probably cheat on their
taxes, can't hold a job, or abuse their wives but seem perfectly nice
and are able to talk about other aspects of their lives.  Unless the
personal characteristic, or problem, is evident in every interaction,
or unless the problem is somehow tied to the phone sex interaction, the
operator would not know about it.  Operators tend to downplay these
outside factors as having little relevance to the phone sex
interaction.  Briana described changing her own description to callers
as being basically truthful -exaggerating but never lying.  She
extended this system to her callers, believing them to be basically,
but not entirely, what they seem.

Briana: I got to talk to some really nice callers that seemed like they
would have been really, really nice men in real life.  You run into
some that made the job kind of miserable, but for the most part, most
of the guys for me were really sweet, real nice.

AF: Have you ever met a caller in person?

Briana: No, I wouldn't want to.  I heard about a girl, she met this
caller on the phone line.  She met this guy, and he raped her.  Another
girl who used to work with me, she went to New Jersey where the guy
lived.  She got hooked on this guy and she went up there, and soon as
she walked in the guy's house, he started beating her, and it was just
the grace of God she was able to get out of there.  I think that taught
her from doing such a thing.  I know I would never want to get involved
with a caller.

"The callers are real nice, but I'd never want to meet one in person
because he might beat, rape, or murder me" the apparent incongruity of
these beliefs is no mystery.  The practical operator is interested only
in the phone interaction.

"If the caller wants to enact a murder-rape scenario, okay, but only if
he asks nicely.  "

Gail: There hasn't been a caller that I didn't really like.

There have been callers that just basically ticked me off, but it's
really not a like or dislike thing.  I don't think of those callers as
people that I like or dislike.  It's just another john, you know?  I
mean, I'm a telephone whore, so this is just my trick.  It's not that I
like them or dislike them.

Now there was this one guy who goes, "I want you to watch a poodle lick
Skippy Premium Peanut Butter out of my ass."

Now, that guy, I mean, I thought that the sick est thing I ever heard.
But you get a lot of strange things.  It's really not a matter of
liking it or not.

Gail's view was basically "as long as the caller stays on the other end
of the line, he's tolerable."  If he were her neighbor or boss, Gail's
"Peanut Butter Man" might become somewhat less likable.  Many operators
find it necessary to separate the types of men they know in real life
their neighbors, boyfriends, and family members from the types of men
who call phone sex lines.  Brad said, "I'd like to think that they
[callers] could be crossing the street, and you would know."

Most operators are reluctant to concede that they do not really know
who the callers are, and that the stereotypes we all have of who the
callers must be as false as those about operators.  Operators often
said that they had thought long and hard about who these callers are,
and some felt that they had begun to spot some common
characteristics.

In three years I've talked to maybe one woman, a real conversation.
Women don't call.  Women don't do that.  I let people know that a lot,
and I let men know that.  it's not us.  It's you guys that's doing
this.

Not to make it a racial thing, but the majority of the men that call
are white, you know?  You don't get very many Hispanics, Orientals, or
blacks that call this number.  The majority of the men that call are
Caucasian.  So, this sort of makes me wonder about Caucasian men, you
know?

It is fallacious to assume that because most callers are white, most
white men are callers.  Several black informants, however, described
phone sex as being "white culture."  It is true that most callers are
white, perhaps because most advertising is directed at them.

Some lines do specialize in black operators, but none of my informants
had worked on such a line.

Some interesting information about callers in Virginia was revealed in
a 1982 computer check on long-distance phone calls made at work by
state employees.  In March of that year alone, 2,509 calls (the most
directed to any single number) went to a fifty-seven-second prerecorded
phone sex message.

The largest number of these calls came from the University of Virginia,
followed closely by the Department of Highways and Transportation (U.S.
Congress 1991).  Operators often knew that their callers were calling
illegally: in fact, for some it was a source of work satisfaction:
"Look at the lengths he will go through just to talk to me."  Callers
routinely call from their workplace:

representing the schedule of the work force, the white-collar callers
are common during office hours, while the callers become more varied as
the evening progresses.  It is not at all uncommon for small groups of
white-collar men to conference call the phone sex lines for collective
"laughs."

Regardless whether a caller is an attorney at work, a professor holding
office hours, or a burglar working a house, the name of the game for
the operator is looking the other way.

Types of Callers

Operators talk to callers of all kinds, though with unequal harmony.  A
typology of callers emerges that influences the operator's approach as
well as her reaction.  I cannot say much about these callers as
individuals, but I will say much about them as callers.  These data
emerge from field notes taken during participatory observation and from
informants comments at work and during interviews.

Throughout the interviews and discussions with coworkers, callers were
a frequent topic of conversation.  Operators opinions of the callers
seemed remarkably consistent, and although the labels they used varied
widely, a clear typology began to emerge.  The following classification
scheme originated in my discussions with other operators, but the
labels for each category are those I myself made up.

Other operators rarely grouped callers by type, but the succession of
individual stories generated this taxonomy:

Candymen The majority of callers, offering little or no conversation,

usually asking for fast, specific sex acts.  Psychos Dangerously
violent callers, women-haters, and pedophiles.

Gomers Lovelorn callers who call the same operator repeatedly, make
plans for the future, offer marriage.  Goobers Gomers who become
jealous of the operator's professional sexuality and attempt to
establish their own sexual territory through sexualization of the
romantic relationship.  Turners Attractive callers who arouse the
operator's true sexual or personal interest, thus turning the tables on
the operator, making her the caller, or voyeur, of the conversation.

Candymen

Named for their low nutritional value, the "Candymen" do not stay on
the line long enough to accumulate many charges;

their only advantage is that they are found in quantity.

During the participantobservation phase of my research, these quick-sex
callers comprised as little as 10 percent and as much as 75 percent of
my daily clientele.  I believe the variation depended on management's
choice of the type and placement of advertising.  Periodically callers
would comment about an advertisement, often assuming that I was the
actual model featured in it.  As other coworkers confirmed, quick-sex
callers rarely call a particular operator repeatedly, but they are
rarely so selective that they reject or dismiss one.  Some Candymen are
so skilled at getting what they want from the phone sex experience that
their calls can be extremely easy to maneuver, while others who are
evasive or sexually passive can be difficult to please.

Callers whose sexuality wanders into the anal, paraphernalia oriented,
homosexual, or bestial comprise a subgroup of Candymen known among
operators at my particular workplace as "perves," or perverts.  Most
operators handle these callers no differently than those who request
straight sex.  They simply pull the appropriate script out of their
repertoire.

Psychos

Although a certain etiquette might seem dictated by the requirements of
civility, there is a wide range of behavior among callers.  Those who
make personal contact with the operator by using her name in
conversation, speaking in a pleasant tone of voice, and saying
thank-you at the end of a call inspire an operator to do her best, and
the interaction leaves her with a feeling of satisfaction.  Not all
callers are interested in inspiring operators to be their most pleasant
or congenial, however.  Some prefer conflict.

My field notes indicate that about 15 percent of my callers expressed
extreme hostility and anger toward women, yet my coworkers reserved
"Psycho" label for only the most extreme of these angry callers.  Some
lines advertise directly to this type of caller, but to my knowledge
ours did not.  These callers were notable to me, and to other operators
as well, because they seemed to demand real pain of their partners.

What these callers want to hear is not fake or imagined pain, but
genuine suffering.  Peter described the difference.

This guy was sick.  This guy was really sick.  He never said anything
that was crazy, but he was sick.  I could tell he was a walking
psychopath, and a Jeffrey Dahmer type or something.  His voice had this
anger, I mean incredible anger, hidden underneath it.  I would love to
see what this guy looks like.  I would love to find this guy, and just
see what he does, where does he go to work, does he have kids?

You know what I mean?  He would scare me.  I would be afraid to talk to
him because he scared me.  The feeling I got just from talking to him
he never said anything violent or terrible -it's just the feeling I got
was very chilling.

I'll definitely recognize his voice if I ever meet up with him.  I'll
definitely recognize his voice.  I would never forget his voice.

Although qualitatively and subjectively evaluated, there is a
perceptible difference between someone who likes to pretend and someone
who wants to hear real pain.  The scripts may be similar indeed they
may be identical: the divergence is in the voice.  Not all callers who
have extreme fetishes are Psychos.  Some are described as "nice" or
"friendly," the difference lying in a caller's seriousness.  Most
operators say they can sense when a Psycho is for real, and when a
caller is a mere voyeur, trying simply to scare her for his pleasure.

There were some people who were into violence, and some who were really
into it.  I mean, that had nothing to do with sex, choking you and
slitting your throat, and I didn't like it.  Now there's one guy who
wants to be executed, cross dressed and then executed.  And there's one
who wants to be dressed like a baby girl.  It's really bizarre, but
he's a nice guy.  He pays his bills.  Everything is fine.  But he's
just a little strange.

The operators who deal with the more serious callers face troubling
questions.  Who are these men, and do they really rape, murder, and
mutilate in their private sex lives?  As with any caller, the
social-class indicators of voice, grammar, and coherence of argument
indicate that the Psychos include men of varied backgrounds.  It was
especially frightening and remarkable to me to hear a cultured,
educated voice demonstrate cruelty and pretend to inflict suffering.

A study of phone sex callers backgrounds similar to Laud Humphrey's
(1970) study of gay men who frequent "teahouses" for casual, anonymous
sex would be tremendously interesting but empirically and ethically
impossible given today's standards of ethics in research.  Humphreys
followed men home and, misleading them about the subject of his study,
interviewed them about their lives.  The best we do is to operate on
our hunches.  Perhaps as many as 15 percent of the callers I interacted
with fell into the Psycho category, and though some seemed so
personally impaired that I believed I could spot them on the street,
sneering and cursing, most seemed capable of leading normal lives.  I
do not include all bondage and domination callers in the psycho
category.  Traditional domination scenarios usually include an "out
code," a sincere way for the submitter to communicate "stop" amid fake
cries for help.  Those who follow these ritualized scenarios tend to
fall into other categories.  (Many may even be "Turners," considered by
most operators to be relatively easy, enjoyable callers.)

Psychos are distinct for the level and the individuality of their
violence.  I encountered many in first time encounters, but they seemed
to find me either unsatisfying or unconvincing.  Nevertheless, I
learned to recognize the edge in the voice before the words were
phrased.  One Psycho called several times, and even though he did not
request me, we were connected by coincidence.  I quickly recognized his
long pauses, and even in the space before he answered my "hello," I
knew it was he and felt dread.  Long after my "good-bye" went
unanswered, the dread remained, not because of what this man said to
me, for others had said worse, but because of the flat, impersonal tone
of his voice.  There was anger, real anger, that permeated even the
initial, introductory conversation, and it instantaneously revealed his
desire.  Speaking to him on the telephone made me feel as if I were
approaching him in a darkened garage.

Some of the harassing callers who responded to my advertisement for
informants seemed to be Psychos.  Although the callers who left hostile
or threatening messages were rendered ineffective by call screening,
others whose interest lasted beyond a single call did begin to disturb
me.  One respondent, Steve, left confused, angry, detailed messages
late at night for several weeks after the ad appeared, making me feel
threatened enough to call the LA Weekly and make sure my personal
information would be protected.

Psychos are especially problematic for an operator because the caller's
sexuality is violent, aggressive, and threatening and aimed directly at
her.  That kind of interaction feels like a rape, regardless of the
fact that an operator is paid for the exchange.  Such a call can leave
her feeling assaulted and violated, and harboring frightening images.
Yet the operator's job is still to encourage a seemingly dangerous man
to enact his sexual violence, and to convince him that she, like all
potential victims, wants or deserves to be raped.

Although many of the operators I interviewed worried that they may have
shirked some social responsibility or sisterhood to other women by
encouraging a rapist or murderer of women, most informants stood ready
to defend their interaction with these callers.  Several operators had
callers intimidate them by claiming that they could find them, in the
flesh, and hurt or kill them.  Myths were common about disturbed
callers who had stalked operators, usually after an inadvertent slip of
a location.

These are big burdens to carry, and most operators battle the
implications continually in their own minds.  Many of the operators
said that they had given deep thought to the subject and they were glad
I would include it in my study.

They recited their hesitations and justifications in a list, going back
and forth, pro and con with the issue, as though they had worked
through the dialogue with themselves many times before.  A pattern
emerged of five approaches operators used to justify their
conversations with Psychos.

1. Phone sex as a social service 2. Counterstrike 3. Reassignment of
responsibility 4. Temporary but necessary evil 5. Boundary
heightening

"Phone sex as a social service" was the justification used most often
by informants to explain why these troubling interactions are not
harmful to women or society.  Indeed, many operators are convinced that
it is for the long-term good of society to let these callers 11 talk it
out."  Because he is able to live in fantasy, the caller is relieved of
the urge to commit the heinous acts "for real."  Gail believes phone
sex operators make important contributions to the social good.

If there was no phone sex, if it was abolished, the crime rate would be
a lot worse.  And it has gotten worse because they cut out the 900
numbers.  They cut sex out on the 900 numbers because the FCC had had
so many complaints from people about it.  I think that is responsible
for a lot of crimes that are being committed right now.  Because it's
an industry that's needed, you know?

This argument is commonly used by pornographers who claim that, far
from encouraging or condoning violence against women, pornography
provides potentially violent offenders with a peaceful vicarious
outlet.  The results of social science research are mixed on this
point.  Although most serious offenders also use this kind of violent
pornography, it is unclear, and more difficult to prove, that most
users commit real offenses (Linz 1989; Padgett et al.  1989).

Operators often maintain this belief in social service even as they
note that the callers often believe so strongly in the fantasy that
they act out directives that cause themselves real pain.  It was not at
all unusual for operators to express both beliefs, side by side,
unflinching in the face of contradiction.  One operator after another
basically said, "If they are dangerous, at least we're keeping them off
the streets and they're not going out raping anybody."

Perhaps society is safe for the fifteen minutes or so that the caller
rapist is busy on the phone, but occasionally such a caller will have a
partner with him -a woman or child who plays along with the scenario. 
If it is a child, operators are supposed to hang up, and based on my
observations and interviews, they do.  These calls are especially
disturbing because the operator realizes that she can remove herself
from the situation by hanging up, but the child or woman remains in the
presence of a Psycho.  If the coconspirator is an adult, the
distressing nature of the interaction is moderated by the belief hope
that the participant, like the operator, is just "pretending."  If the
participant is a child, however, there is no escape into the fantasy
excuse, and the operator is left to ponder the child's fate.

When a Psycho calls alone, his hostility is usually aimed directly at
the phone sex operator.  Occasionally he will say, "You're just like my
ex-wife" or "You bitches are all the same," but it is rare for anyone
to call and rage at a particular person who is not part of the call.  I
never heard of a caller who enacted or planned a specific attack on a
third party, but I believe there must be a few.  just as psychologists
have license to report a client who endangers someone's life, in these
cases there should be some tracing and reporting system in place.

The callers who vent rage not against a specific person but in a more
general way might also be said to endanger women.

Informants and coworkers often said that they hoped, believed, or
wished that these callers were interested in violence purely on a
fictional level.  The important question for operators is whether her
participation in the phone call vents and relieves anger or directs and
intensifies it.

Anita expressed some uncertainty about this issue.  It's hard, because
I figure that if they're going to treat somebody the way they treat me
on the phone, they're gonna out and do it to a woman.  But if they're
gonna rape somebody, I'd rather have them rape me imaginatively on the
phone than actually go out and do it.  I try to say "Okay, I'm
providing a service, and I'm helping women."  But, you know, in the
back of my mind, I'm going, "You're really being very exploited."  It's
hard to reconcile those feelings.  Some days I feel I'm helping out.
Other days I'm going, "God, are you terrible."

There is a third alternative.  Perhaps the phone sex calls neither
intensify nor release hostility, but merely coexist, like bakeries and
obesity.  Bakeries service a wide variety of people, including those
who abuse caloric desserts.  They do not cause the abuse, though they
might cater to it through advertising, knowing the abusers to be among
the best customers.  Phone sex may simply be one more product industry
servicing a variety of patrons.  The sample of callers may merely
represent, to an unknown degree of accuracy, the larger society without
magnifying or minimizing the violent elements.  And the operators, like
servers at the bakery, should not be responsible for correcting the
customers abuse of the product.

"Counterstrike" is one way the operators who feel that they are
responsible for proper use of the phone sex product demonstrate that
they are doing their part to ensure it has a beneficial effect.  This
argument relies on a contextual view of phone sex and portrays the
phone sex operator as a vigilante, righting the wrongs that have been
done to women throughout history.  The operator uses this view to
relieve herself of responsibility for her own controversial part in
these conversations.  Because she must survive in a sexist, misogynist
world, it is necessary for her to make creative use of the sexual
violence that gushes past her.  In a counter strike encounter the
operator, as the object of anger and violence (elsewhere known as the
victim), is paid for her participation.  The caller, or offender, pays
a financial price for his acts, unlike a real rapist.  In this dim
light, one sees justice.

I'm good at drilling them to the last drop.  I was one of the top-notch
girls because it was a game to me.  To me it was a game, because the
higher your holding time, the more money you made.  So in my mind, I
thought about all this money, and I thought about how guys use women
out in real life, so it's my turn to get back.  I would really lead
these guys on really good, really, really good to the point of draining
out their phone bill, having the credit card really abused, you know?
One guy, and this is a true story, the guy's credit card bill ... had
gotten over $50,000 from calling that company asking for me.  It was a
game to me.  It was a job.

Counterstrike implies that two wrongs make a right, and this tenet is
as questionable as the accuracy of the $50,000 sum Briana describes.
Even assuming, however, that a large bill was charged, it is possible
that the caller never paid it.

Customers who amass enormous bills are sometimes surprised to find the
rules in their favor.  The phone company cannot shut off basic service
for nonpayment of a 900 or 976 charge, and those people who do abuse
the services may be minors or fraudulently charging the calls to third
parties.

In either case the person legitimately responsible for the bill can
easily have the charges reversed as long as they agree to 900 number
blocking.  Fraudulent charging affects legitimate, occasional consumers
most, since the callers who are so obsessed as to amass huge bills are,
to the phone companies chagrin, adept at dodging the bills (U.S.

Congress, 1990).

Some operators make a practice of reporting the most dangerous callers
to the management.  This "reassignment of responsibility" approach
relieves the operator of guilt because she has done her best to control
the effects of her job.  She has gone through the proper channels and
acted officially and responsibly.  She has filled two responsibilities:
in her capacity as a phone sex fantasy girl, she has done her job by
playing along with the caller, and as a conscious and responsible
citizen, she has reported the call to the proper authorities.  None of
the operators who reported such calls knew of any action taken by
management to control, punish, or even keep track of the callers.  Most
expressed doubt that the management even took note of the reports:
however, they still felt that they had done their part.  The actions
taken by management were beyond their responsibility.

I just try to get their phone number.  Hopefully they'll give me the
real number.  At that point, I just turn it over to the company. That's
in their hands, not mine at that point.

I've had guys that call and say, "Oh yeah, I'm going to look to find me
a little baby tonight."  And that's enough to really, really piss you
off.  I would just get their phone number and turn it over to the
company, let them deal with it.  What they do from there I really don't
know.  To this day I have never heard of any follow-up action taken
against any caller.

One of the women I interviewed had been threatened by an abusive caller
who sent letters through the U.S. Postal Service to a mailbox provided
to her by the phone sex company.  The company's managers examined the
contents of the mailbox before forwarding whatever they deemed to be
acceptable communication.  Managers apprised her of the situation,
confiscated the letters, and apparently ended action there.

The caller was not banned from calling her or other operators.  In
fact, he continued to be a steady, valued customer until, claiming to
be facing a prison term for violent offenses of which he was innocent,
he said his goodbyes and ceased calling.

Some operators see the exchanges with violent callers as a "temporary
but necessary evil."  Tamara quickly outlined her dilemma for me.

Tamara: There are some of them that really do hate women, and that's
why they call, to get out their frustrations and get girls on the
phone.  I had one guy that called for me, I'd say seven or eight times,
and he was a half-hour caller, and for that half-hour he would want me
to cry.  He would say, "I'm gonna beat you, I'm gonna whip you, I'm
gonna shove my cock in your ass real hard," and he beat me up
physically, and I just sat there and cried and whimpered and said, "No,
stop, don't rape me, don't do this to me, don't, don't, don't."

They hate women, they really do, but I guess my part of it is I would
rather them do that than go out there on the streets and actually beat
somebody up.  I'd rather them talk on the phone to me and do it.

AF: Do you think they do that in real life, or is it just something
that they like to talk about?

Tamara: Sometimes, yes, I sometimes think they do it, and that's why
you'd have to question whether it's actually better for you to pretend
that you're doing this.  There are some people that you really know you
shouldn't pretend you're doing it at all.

At the moment I'm only still there because I'm able to work at home,
and I want to take care of my daughter, so to me, it's like something I
have to do.  I need the money.  I have to do it.

Tamara seemed to see herself as more of a victim than any other
operator I encountered.  She seemed close to tears as she told me how
she needed to do phone sex for the money and described the pressure her
husband put on her to continue, even though he eavesdropped on her
conversations, criticized her for having phone sex with other men, and
presumably helped to spend her earnings.  I felt sorry for her because
she seemed to be forced into an occupation she found troubling.
Fortunately for them, most of the operators who spoke of "doing it for
the money" had a better handle on what they were selling.

You figure there are no callers that you really don't want to talk to.
You get paid, so when you get a caller that you don't really care for,
you sit there and think about the money.  I forget about how nasty this
caller is, and he's Mr.

Wonderful sometimes.

Whether or not the caller is transformed into Mr.  Wonderful, most
operators need to make money leads them to go farther and farther in
accepting callers a novice might refuse to speak with.  Still, as they
often stated, they have their "standards."  By using a " Boundary
Heightening" approach, a process of drawing distinctions that justify
morally ambiguous behavior, an operator is able to say, "I may do this,
but at least I don't do that."

When I first started out, there were certain calls I would not do.  I
would talk sex on the phone, but I would talk what I considered normal
sex, you know, heterosexual sex.  As I got deeper into it, I started
doing transsexual calls, transvestites, cross-dressing.  The only calls
I do not do, and the only calls I refuse to do to this day I refuse to
talk to a woman about sex.  I will not do lesbian calls, and I will not
do bisexual calls either.  Now, if it is a two girl call, where it's me
and another girl, and we are having sex with this guy, that's okay as
long as the guy doesn't want me and this girl to get it on.  But you
don't find that.

Most of the time when a guy wants to talk to two girls, he wants the
two girls to get it on.  And I just don't do that.

But I will pretend like I am a transsexual or a transvestite, or I will
do cross-dressing.

When I first started out, I wouldn't do "Golden Showers," which is to
be urinated on.  And then there were "Rainbow Showers," and that's the
other, to be, you know, all of that.  I wouldn't do that at all, you
know?  But then I figured, "Hey, some guy wants me to shit on him, I'm
getting paid for it, why not do it-?"  As I got older and thought more
about it, I said, "This isn't so bad."

One benefit of maturity is the ability to see the small but important
distinctions that might, to others, seem arbitrary and impermanent.
Operators are able to control the effects of their job on their
personal lives by redefining their boundaries as needed.  The Psycho
callers however, are able to accomplish what some operators call a mind
fuck which has a lasting impact despite the operator's maturity and
best efforts.  These callers are able to offend or distress the
operator by bridging the chasm between talk and action, by crossing the
line between fantasy and reality, commentary and performance.  The
operators I observed dealt with these disturbing consequences as best
they could in a difficult and unpredictable job.

I won't take violence to women unless I know the guy and I know that
it's just a little scenario he is doing.  But I will not take a cold
call from anybody who wants to do any kind of violence to women or
children.  There is a guy that I do.  The boss will not let me turn him
down.  He does violence to little girls and he's pretty sick, but I
know that he is never going to do anything about it.  I know that he is
just an older guy who has this thing with doing things to little girls
and really hurting them.  So I don't like it, but usually I won't do
those kind of calls.  I'll do pretty much anything, and I'll turn down
boring guys, the guys who take too long.  I mean that's just a general
rule.  But as far as being offended, I won't take violence to women and
children.

Any kind of thing, like murder, you know, any kind of weird thing like
that.

Operators standards change continuously to adjust for violations as
they occur, partly because most operators are under pressure to take
objectionable calls.  Standards also change to accommodate the
unforeseen desires of a wide range of callers.  Nevertheless, most
operators agree on the difficulty of participating in these kinds of
calls, and none of the operators I encountered ever liked a Psycho or
got any benefit or satisfaction from conversing with one.  At least
Psychos are predictable and noncontroversial.  They are the callers
that operators can hate with unanimity, with absolution, and with
grace.  Other callers, less conspicuous than the Psychos, elicit malice
in more insidious ways.

Gomers and Goobers

Named for the simple, uncomplicated, innocent character of Gomer Pyle,
the "Gomers" are the lonely, lost, or lovelorn callers who for the most
part call to "talk."  Gomers reach out to touch the operators in a more
earnest way than the Psychos.  They are kind, polite, and respectful,
and their calls usually are nonsexual.  Naturally, many operators are
relieved to talk to them and often consider such conversations to be a
short break from the sex routine.  jade told me that sometimes a real
conversation would take her by surprise.  [We would have] a delightful
conversation.  And they would really say, "Thank you for the delightful
conversation," and I would just think, "What is this world coming to
that people have to call up and pay to have a nice conversation with a
lady?"

Gomers may sometimes leave an operator feeling sad that there are
lonely people who need so badly to talk, but they can also be a source
of job satisfaction.  They are polite and complimentary, rarely
insisting that an operator describe her body, and when they "fall in
love" with an operator, they are obsessive and make excellent repeat
callers.  Gomers will often hold for long periods of time, and just one
of them can change an operator's slow and uneventful shift into a
lucrative night's work.

One caller, "Hank," called to tell me in detail about the kitchen floor
he had just laid.  He wanted accolades for a difficult job done well,
and he explained that he felt so proud of himself he needed to tell
someone about his accomplishment.  It was a refreshing idea, but Hank
was extremely dull and went into fastidious detail about the shape of
his kitchen and the corners he had covered.  The call lasted about
twenty minutes before he thanked me and hung up.

During this call I was able to browse the reading material I had
brought to work, gaze out the window, occupy my own thoughts, drink
tea, and generally tune out.  An occasional "Oh, really?"  or

"That's great!"  was all this caller required.  He told me that he
called these lines occasionally, when he "felt like it."  He was not
trying to fall in love, and had never taken a liking to any particular
operator or any particular line.

He did not make a permanent note of the phone number but simply called
spontaneously in response to a television commercial.  This type of
caller rarely plans to call.

Because they are not obsessed or irrational, it is difficult for an
operator to pressure or cajole them into repeat calling.  These
callers, who are looking for casual conversation that is well grounded
in reality, comprised about a third of the Gomer category, based on my
observation.  The other two-thirds "fall in love" with the operator,
usually within the first twenty minutes of conversation.

Once a Gomer falls in love, there are boom times ahead.  If the
operator is nice to him and willing to tell him that she loves him back
"for real," he is easily hooked.  These callers carry the fantasy to
the extreme and seem to confuse fantasy with reality.  They want to
believe that they will meet the operator, have a big wedding, and live
happily ever after.  They often make concrete plans toward these ends,
such as sending an engagement ring to a mailbox, or planning a visit
and buying airline tickets.  It does not matter that the operator and
caller have nothing in common.  Callers ask the operators to make them
believe.  Because these callers level of belief seems so high, however,
operators often have second thoughts about whether they are deceiving
callers or "leading them on.  "

Most operators, no matter how brief their careers, encounter several
lovelorn callers, as did I. Ed, a gas station mechanic from a small
Southern town, called illicitly from his work phone.

Within fifteen minutes of conversation, he claimed to have fallen in
love with me.  I was struck by the fact that if he knew me -somewhat
Jewish, academic, politically liberal, and a feminist he would hate me.
But I told him none of those things.  I simply kept quiet and let him
talk.  He continually insisted that he wanted to know my "real name,"
so I finally "admitted" that my real name was "Karen," and he was
completely satisfied with that.  I told him I was from Santa Monica,
which he confused with San Jose, and he set out to learn to play "Do
You Know the Way to San Jose?"  on the guitar.  He often called to
serenade me, although I could barely hear the music and would sometimes
set the phone down and walk away for a short time.  Still, these
"romantic" evenings seemed to inspire and hearten him to the
possibilities of love.

For several weeks Ed kept track of my schedule and called regularly. He
was desperately unhappy in his real life alienated from his family (for
reasons he would not discuss) and recently rejected by a girlfriend. 
Finally, after a few days of unexplained absence, he called from his
mother's house to explain that he had been fired for the 900-number
calls and was coming to San Jose.  He intended to rescue me from my
life of sin and marry me, and we somehow would live happily ever after.
But he needed my last name to be able to find me.  When I refused to
tell him, he vowed that he would find me anyway, and on that note we
parted.

The duplicity of my own participation in this caller's selfdestructive
behavior troubled me.  I worried that he really might go to San Jose.
Although I believed that I had fulfilled a real need for him, I hoped I
had not caused him to lose his job.  I knew from previous experience
that if I had turned him away with "No you don't love me, you love what
you think is me," he would have simply called back and talked to
someone else.  He was adult, rational, and making his own life choices,
however badly.  I knew that he had lied to me about some details of his
life: I suspected depression and alcoholism were problems for him, but
I had never confronted him with these suspicions.  He did not call for
my real opinions; he called to hear a fantasy, and that was what I gave
him.  I do not believe that he really went looking for Karen in San
Jose.  (At least, it is my fantasy that he did not.)

Occasionally a Gomer who has fallen in love will try to become sexual
with an operator.  He is intrigued by knowing she is sexual with other
callers -yet often jealous.

Although he wants to rescue her from the sex lines, he is often down
and out in more than his love life and barely capable of caring for
himself.

He wants to protect her from the strange men who call, but he also
wants her for himself, never seeing the irony of this position.  At the
point where he begins to share his sexual desire, he becomes a Goober.
Two of my coworkers warned me about such callers because they believed
I was a "nice girl" and especially attractive to this type.  Each of
them warned me separately that as nice and as wholesome and innocent as
they may seem, Gomers were bound to turn sexual and, in the process,
would destroy my faith in chaste friendship.

I did, in fact, attract many Gomers while I was working, and a few
became Goobers.  Chuck was especially memorable, a lonely, urban
academic living in a small Midwestern town.  He called the 900 number
on an impulse after seeing it advertised on late-night television.  I
believed he was an academic, and I tried to fulfill his fantasy by
speaking to him in his own language.  When I admitted to him that I was
really a graduate student at U.C. San Diego, he was floored.  He
thought fate had guided him to me, and even I had to concede that the
chance of his finding someone like me on the phone sex hotline was
very, very slim.

Although I had begun by playing along with the idea that he loved me,
it made me feel isolated and quite unloved to be part of this silly,
reprehensible charade, and the more enamored Chuck became of me, the
more contemptuous I became of Chuck.  Somehow my contempt began to stir
sexual desire in him, making me suspect that he was attracted to women
who were far more attractive than he, women who were uninterested in
him, whom he described as "bitches," arrogant and aloof.  I, however,
was "different," he said, and called excessively, talking for two,
three, often four hours a night.  He whined incessantly about his
loneliness, the ruthlessness of the women who had rejected him, and how
he wanted me for himself I tired of him quickly and dreaded his calls,
feeling they would go on forever.

During the Christmas season the line was very busy.  Since Chuck had
become a regular fixture on my line, the supervisor began to send me
additional callers to speak to while he was on hold.  Chuck quickly
caught on to this; he wanted to know all about the other callers and
what I was doing with them that I was not doing with him.  He then
began to demand sex for himself.  He wanted to see what it was like and
wanted me to demonstrate.  He may as well have planted himself on my
living room sofa, arms folded in anger, and demanded that I "give him"
sex.  It is impossible for one person to give sex to another without
some cooperation or mutuality, but he seemed incapable of this.  It was
as if he had no desire for sex in itself but only wanted to know that
he was not missing out on what others were getting.  We began to argue,
and the "relationship" quickly deteriorated.  He continued to call for
several more days during a

"break-up" period.  After several days of not hearing from him, a
coworker described her new caller, a midwestern college professor who
wanted to marry her, and I believed that he had begun to repeat the
process.

The one asset of the Comers is their non sexuality so once they begin
to demand sex and become Goobers, they lose this singular charm.
Coworkers confirmed this observation with their own stories of similar
experiences.  Sounding like 1950s high school students, they would
describe these callers as if they were offended and hurt at their
boyfriends pressure to go all the way.  Although it is easy for
operators to simulate quick sex with total strangers, once a

Goober professes sincere love for an operator's true self, sex becomes
dirty, lewd, and emotionally messy.  Charlene thought she tended to
attract Goober callers, and she appreciated and enjoyed the early
phases of these relationships.

I have had a lot of people that, you know, I just tried to be myself,
and there were a few people like that, too.  There was this one person,
and he was calling me while his girlfriend was out, you know, just to
talk to somebody.  And it never got that explicit sexually, which was
nice.  Even though he knew he could try.  Sometimes you would start out
talking, and you wouldn't give it to them right away, and they would be
really nice, but if you gave it to them, then you couldn't even go back
to talking about normal subjects, and it would ruin everything.  It's
like the sex attitude.

It's so much more not to be sexed.

A Gomer's transformation into a Goober is repulsive because

Gomer's love for an operator is supposed to be simple, pure, and
chaste.  To lose that purity is to admit that love itself is impure,
and that the operator herself is "sexed."  These interactions, though
they go by the name of fantasy, represent real-life scenarios with
real-life participants.

The Goobers and Gomers, like the Psychos, call into play questions
about the relationship of fantasy to reality and the importance of
defining the difference.

Turners

A "Turner" is a caller who, the operator believes, could have been a
date or a friend if they had met under other circumstances.

These callers often lend prestige to an otherwise stigmatized
occupation by being of high social status, such as doctors,
celebrities, or government officials.  Operators often express surprise
that people like this call phone sex lines, often excusing them because
it was "the first time" they called a phone sex line or because they
did it "only out of curiosity."

These are the callers an operator is most likely to be tempted to meet,
and my coworkers and informants often speculated about who they are and
why they call.  As with the other subjective categories, categorizing a
caller as a Turner depends as much on the operator's perception of the
caller as it does on the caller himself, If, for example, my midwestern
academic found someone more naive and more admiring of his academic
vocabulary, he might have become a Turner to her.

It is easy for a caller, with some effort and know-how, to convince an
operator that he is different from other callers.  First, he displays
the kind of social class that goes with wealth.  He has good grammar,
precise enunciation, and a gentle, cultured voice.  He also has a
reason for calling that sets him apart from the other callers, and he
acknowledges some particular aspect of the operator's personality that
sets her apart from other operators.  He does not coerce manufactured
physical descriptions from the operator, for that only makes her feel
inadequate and unable to meet him.  Most importantly, and most
elusively, he displays a little charm, catching an operator off-guard
with humor, compassion, insight, or some other strength of his
personality.

Even given these qualities, Turners do not attract all operators.  Some
find them quite disturbing, precisely because of their likability.  If
an operator can like a caller, it makes sense to wonder who else she
likes might be capable of calling.  Her neighbor?  Her boyfriend?  Her
father?

An operator needs to know that callers are weirdos, set apart from the
pool of eligible friends and dates.  The existence of the seemingly
normal Turners is frightening because it indicates that every man is a
potential caller.

It is also much easier for an operator to separate self from character
if the caller also can be clearly and thoroughly defined by his role as
a caller.  When he crosses this line, he breaks what Goffman in
Interaction Ritual (1967) calls a "transformation rule."  The rule here
is that the participants remain in character for the duration of the
game, that is, the phone call.  Transformation rules govern what the
players may become and what may and may not be pulled into the sphere
of play.  By encouraging an operator's belief in his being what he
seems, the caller is violating his role as caller.  In so doing, he
violates the operator's own role definition, the separation of self
from character, and thus threatens her private life and physical
security.

It is not unusual for an appealing or intriguing voice to spark an
operator's interest, reversing the roles and making her feel like a
participant in the exchange and more disturbingly, a voyeur actively
seeking the involvement of the (former) caller.

Many operators have expressed discomfort at being engaged in an
interesting conversation, of having the tables turned.  By virtue of
her interest in the exchange, and her stake in the continuing
conversation, the operator becomes the caller.

She no longer drinks her Coke, reads her magazine, or looks for reasons
to hold.  Instead, she begins to participate.

I, too, experienced this unwelcome role reversal while working as an
operator.  I answered a call from someone who seemed thirtyish,
educated, introverted, with a low, calm, and rather sad voice.  He told
me that he was struggling with the guilt of having done something very
bad.  He was unable to tell anyone, yet unable to forget.  He wanted to
talk to someone about what he had done but he was afraid of even my
anonymous condemnation.  After he asked if I had ever done anything
that had brought me similar shame and fear, we conversed for about
fifteen minutes before he hung up without confiding in me.  Thirty
minutes later, he called back and asked about my sense of morality. Did
I think there were things so inherently evil that they could never be
forgiven?  Did I believe in God?  In Hell?  We discussed the relief of
confession, its possibilities and limitations, for another fifteen
minutes or so until, again, he hung up.

Thirty minutes later, he called back.  He said he liked me.

He felt he could talk to me.  Had I ever been in love?

These calls continued for a week, and he gradually confided more and
more of his life as a voyeur and a stalker.  As I prepared to go to
work each evening, I wondered if he would call.  Each ring of the phone
brought the prospect that the story would continue, and I was ensnared
in a trap he had skillfully laid.  The tones of our voices belied our
true positions.  I was the eager and curious one, he the detached
observer.  And, as I later realized, he was the consummate voyeur, for
when the story concluded and the calls stopped I continued to think of
him to ponder the intricacy of the interaction he had constructed: the
control he had demonstrated over the direction, speed, and flow of
interaction, and the spectacle his sexual proclivity seemed to
require.

Goffman (1967) describes ordinary interaction as a game that requires
the commitment and cooperation of all the players.

Of course, one player may be more involved than another, and the more
"tightly" that person is involved, the more his or her experience of
the interaction is bound by the rules of the game.  In the same way,
some callers are so tightly bound by the requirements of their sexual
rituals that they lose perspective on the game, an act

Goffman calls "flooding out."  For either participant to flood out
reveals the instability of the boundaries between fantasy and reality.
This confusion has an effect not only on operators private lives but
also on those of the callers.  Despite everyone's best efforts at self
protection the disembodied interactions of phone sex intrude on each
of the participants.

Chapter 4 The Manufacture of Fantasy

The Script

The script of a phone sex conversation exists like predawn Disney land
-awaiting the noise and animation that only live consumers can supply.
The consumers of phone sex enjoy an illusion of great freedom and
adventure, but their actions are considerably constrained.  The
customers choose the ride the Mad Hatter or Alice in Wonderland but
once their choice is made, they can anticipate a predictable sequence
of events.  Their experience can be influenced by variations in weather
or mood, but for the most part the consumers can enjoy both the fiction
of adventure and an experience that is guaranteed safe and
dependable.

With few exceptions, phone sex fantasies follow standard scripts.  A
foot fetishist, for example, wants to hear that toes are painted, skin
is supple and smooth.  The polish might be pale pink on dark Nigerian
toes; sunlit orange on lightly tanned California feet; dark red on pale
pink feet fresh out of black satin pumps.  The content varies in the
details, but the form is constant.  What the consumer experiences as
spontaneity is actually the product of careful planning and design.

Phone sex, like any interaction, is constructed within many preexisting
contexts, and it is assembled from an especially grimy mix of belief,
cynicism, pretense, and sincerity.  This mix produces a tenuous facade.
The caller wants to believe in the fantasy, and he often behaves
imprudently, establishing a willingness to act on his belief.  The
operators themselves are often caught acting on their beliefs in
details of the fantasy, despite great familiarity with their own
fabrications.

Elements of belief and cynicism are necessary.  Each fantasy relies on
both participants commitment to the story line.  If either party alters
it in an inconsistent or inappropriate way, the constructed reality is
easily destroyed.  Such an interruption is very rare, except when an
inexperienced operator blunders and mistakenly breaks the rules and
disrupts the process.  Even if the caller or the operator wants to end
an encounter, they usually stay within the context of the fantasy to
its conclusion.  To get rid of callers they find tiresome, operators
fake car and plane crashes, terminal diseases, and impending
engagements.  I also heard stories about steady callers who had "moved
away" from operators to new cities, relationships, or prison.

Real-life situations are commonly introduced into the fantasies, and
the fantasies have elements that transcend their unreality and
influence real events.  The process that transforms fantasy into
reality resides in the structure of the phone conversations.  The
formal requirements and rules of civility oblige participants to use
certain known falsehoods as if they were true.  This process, widely
used in the conduct of disembodied intimacy, often leads to a
disillusionment with reality and an increasing craving for the comforts
of fantasy.

Craving Belief Many of the operators expressed surprise that callers
actually believe the details of the fantasies and seem to be engrossed
at a level of belief beyond fantasy.

New operators, particularly, expected callers to be able to enjoy the
imagery without actual belief.  The empirical evidence, however, of a
few callers acting on their beliefs gradually convinces them that
callers are taking the details seriously.

"You'll tell them I'm a blonde and they hang up.  They don't want a
blonde, they want a brunette.  Or they want a redhead.  But the picture
has got to be right or they hang up," Another operator said, "They
really think that we're sitting there having sex with dildos and
vibrators.

They get so caught up in their fantasy that they lose touch with
reality."  Still another said, "I didn't want them to hang up, you
know, so, I'd say, Go get me a piece of paper.  And they would."

All the operators I interviewed believed that some callers move beyond
fantasy.  Peter often enjoyed manipulating callers for both fun and
profit.  I [have] made them go and get things and they have come back
with it, which I always thought was the funniest thing.  Why don't they
just lie?  just say you have the brush in your hand.  You don't have
to, but they would do that.  They would do things, you know, like sing.
I'd have them sing to me, or spank themselves.  They would do that, put
vibrators up their butt.  You'd hear them crying on the phone from the
things you have them doing.  Really crying in pain, you know?

"And does it hurt?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's good, too bad."  Poor guy is crying, but he likes it. So,
I'll go ahead and do this.  That's what the guy wants me to do. But
it's ... it's funny.

When Peter asks "Why doesn't he just lie?"  he never questions whether
the caller did lie.  How does he know that the caller got the hairbrush
he was ordered to find?  He assumes that if the caller uses expensive
time to search for an object, he must be physically seeking the object.
He assumes that it is in the caller's interest to use as much of his
paid time as possible in actual conversation, and that the time he
spends in non conversational activity is wasted time.  Furthermore,
Peter assumes that the caller's enjoyment of pauses is very different
from his own enjoyment of the very same pauses.  Perhaps the caller is
as happy as Peter to have a short break from the conversation while
still maintaining contact.

The caller offers his belief first, simply by placing the call, and
acting first leaves the caller vulnerable to being manipulated by his
commitment.  For example, if a caller reveals a penchant for elaborate
lingerie, the operator might use this information by repeatedly asking
him to hold while she fixes the seams of her stockings.  The operator
sees herself getting away with something, because in her estimation she
is.  She thinks that she is cheating the caller of conversation and
stealing a few moments of privacy in the midst of the encounter.

It is quite likely however, that the caller does not feel his time is
being wasted and continues to enjoy the fantasy even during the pauses.
A skilled operator can maintain a fantasy even while she flips through
the pages of a magazine, whispers to a coworker, or runs for a Coke,
and she considers the caller a fool to spend his time and money while
she does these mundane things.  But these are not the actions the
caller visualizes.  He sees the adjustment of stockings, the high
heels, the pedicured feet.  He can enjoy an interlude as part of the
interaction, because, presumably, he stays within the realm of his
fantasy.  From his perspective, the rules of his fantasy have never
been violated.

Mimi noticed that the callers themselves did most of the work, creating
their own fantasies from the raw material she provides.

It's funny how many men get into it, and it's really funny to me how
easy it is to get into a man's psyche and make him think whatever you
want him to think.  From my voice he'll create this entire picture and
fall in love with it, and will keep calling and spend thirty-five to
forty dollars a night talking to a woman about whatever he wants, sex
or whatever, and then calling back the next night.  I think it's
interesting not funny, but interesting.

As operators become accustomed to the idea that a caller can be carried
away by the fantasy, this becomes less surprising, less funny, and more
interesting.  A caller's belief makes him vulnerable, and an operator
begins to see the usefulness of his belief.  She learns that she can
ask a caller to hold while she looks for a vibrator or other mythical
object, or she can direct him to find something while she holds,
billing extra time without having to converse.  When she does converse,
she can echo his most inane interests and hobbies ("What a coincidence,
I love motocross!") and even embrace misogynist or racist sentiments
with mocking displays of sympathy and compassion.

Valerie considered herself an expert at even the most unusual of
fantasies, but even she expressed surprise at some men's apparent
gullibility.

It surprises me how stupid men are, and it surprises me that they are
buying any of it.  When a guy does say to me, "Oh, do you really look
like that?  You are not really doing that, are you?"  I say, "I am very
insulted that you don't believe me.  This is really turning me off." So
you put him back on the defensive.  Because he's putting you on the
defensive.

That's my little trick.

Valerie's trick belies the competitive nature of the interaction.  The
caller puts her on the defensive by questioning the reality of the
fantasy.  By challenging her this way, he questions her ability to do
her job  So she counterattacks.  By moving the conversation onto other
topics, she deflects further questioning.  If the caller concedes and
moves on with her, she takes the moving on as a token of belief.

As an operator learns to manipulate a caller through his apparent
belief, she demonstrates her own belief through acceptance of the
caller's descriptions of his actions.  It is every bit as surprising to
me that the operators are engaged in belief as it is that the callers
are so engaged.  Perhaps the caller cannot find the paper, and so
brings a paper napkin instead, saying that it is the white notebook
paper that she requested.  It is just as likely or unlikely that he has
fibbed as she has; the probability is unknown.  Whether callers really
lose touch with reality, or whether they simply are enjoying the
fantasies they have requested, the operators, despite their vigorous
efforts, are often captivated by their own fantasies about their
effects on callers.

Fantasy actions are accepted as real because they are the basis for the
most important fantasy of all, that of presence and intimacy.  Perhaps
the caller has no choice but to believe, for if he does not he has
wasted the whole of the call.  His ongoing belief may be a show of
throwing good money after bad, a reluctance to cut his losses.  It is
also possible, however, that the caller is enjoying the call, and that
the excitement of having the operator waiting there on the phone is as
valuable to the caller as the act of conversing.  Perhaps the caller is
fooling the operator, giggling on the other end, holding the phone to
his chest as he pretends to get the paper.  Whatever the actions or
beliefs of the caller as he holds, he apparently feels that he is
participating in an interaction that is entertaining to him.  What is
so surprising or funny about that?

To an operator, the caller's belief is surprising.  To an observer, the
operator's belief, and her surprise at the caller's belief, are
surprising.  Whether or not a caller is physically acting out the
directives, an operator is being drawn into beliefs that are every bit
as potent, and as fantastic, as those of the caller.  The operator
believes, without questioning her own gullibility.

Whereas the callers often question their belief as when they ask for
reassurance from the operator, "Are you really.  operators find it more
difficult to acknowledge their own beliefs.

The willingness of operators to believe their fantasies illustrates
their similarity to callers, who share belief and fantasy.  For the
caller, sharing raises him to her level of professionalism; it
distinguishes him from the plethora of callers.  For the operator,
however, commonality with the callers represents a loss of
professionalism and dignity and a loss of important distance from the
roles she plays during phone sex.

more Than a Mission

Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983) developed the concept of "emotional
labor" to describe the estrangement of feelings for commercial use.
Emotions are not all that is bartered in a phone sex encounter.
Operators produce personalities designed to fulfill someone else's
fantasy.  They promise to be what they sell, and they sell what they
are.

Hochschild noticed that emotional laborers take varied stances toward
their jobs in order to cope with the threat of alienation that
accompanies the sale of the self Each of these stances revolves around
the distinction between the worker's sense of self and her working
identity.  Workers either over-identify with their job by failing to
distinguish their selves from their work, risking "emotional deadness,"
or they under-identify and withdraw their emotional labor altogether.

The essential problem is how to adjust one's self to the role in a way
that allows some flow of self into the role but minimizes the stress
the role puts on the self... For whenever people do acting for a
living, even if they have some control over the stage, they inhabit
their own stage faces with caution: behind the mask, they listen to
their own feelings at low volume.  Chheerfulness in the line of duty
becomes something different from ordinary good cheer.

This applies much more to the flight attendant, who must try to be
genuinely friendly to a line of strangers, than to the commissary
worker, who can feel free to hate packing the threehundredthjello cup
onto a lunch tray.  (Hochschild 1983:

188-89)

Sexuality is deeper and more intimate than "cheer," and Hochschild's
principle applies powerfully to the phone sex operator.  She separates
and objectifies her own sexuality in order to be the "embodiment," the
living voice, of a pornographic ideal.  Because a phone sex operator
cannot accept only those callers she finds inspirational or exciting,
she must learn to sell intimacy and sexuality by duplicating desire to
the point of monotony.  Her services are offered more or less
mechanically, often to callers whom she finds uninspiring and even
repulsive.  As she develops her skill at creating fantasy, she develops
an ability to manipulate feelings of intimacy, which strongly affects
her own understanding of intimacy, her sense of an underlying self, and
her personal intimate relationships.

Hochschild assumes that behind the mask there is a central, guiding
self, but postmodern debate calls this basic assumption into question.
Whether there is or is not an inner self who directs and manages the
persona, operators and callers use the concept of self frequently, so
it is essential for a discussion of phone sex interactions and the
disembodiment of intimacy to stipulate the existence of a true, inner
self The fact that callers and operators various selves are
inextricably interwoven and share many personality characteristics
provides evidence of a central, guiding self.

Many operators said, enthusiastically, that on the phone an operator
has the freedom to "be" whatever she wants.  The woman who hired me as
an operator listed this freedom as an extra benefit that went with the
job.  And it is true: the creation of the persona is free of physical
constraints.

Phone sex allows an operator the freedom to be slenderwaisted, buxom,
and blonde.  Yet the phone sex operator is in another sense more
constrained and restricted than ever.

Phone sex characters have less variation and less individuality than
real life human beings.  The characteristics of her persona and the
circumstances of her stories are prefabricated pornographic images
much older than the operator herself.  Her on-line character is like a
Jungian archetype, emerging not from any individual but from a
collective, primitive, human consciousness.

A dominatrix, for example, is tall, strong, and buxom; her hair may be
long or short, but it is always straight and black, in keeping with her
harsh, direct temperament.  A submissive, in contrast, is small and
thin, delicate, refined, dependent.  Her hair is more likely brown or
blonde, and must be long enough to pull.  Either fantasy girl can be
found in dark, dank environments, but neither is likely to be found
outdoors, swimming on a deserted beach.  Despite the possibilities for
detailed variety within general themes, the major components are
rigidly set.  When the operator dons a particular mask, her self shows
through, but only appropriate features are emphasized, while any
inappropriate characteristic is altered, hidden, or down played.  The
operator interprets her self in light of her persona.

By looking at herself through the lens of fantasy, an operator comes to
see her inner nature as fitting the fantasy.  Many operators I
interviewed and worked with sexualized their personal histories and
described them as leading directly to, and culminating in, the
occupation of phone sex operator.  By describing themselves as a "phone
person,"
"a natural-born phone whore," or "always lost in my own fantasies,"
operators incorporate their working identity into their private
conception of self.

Some operators noticed how others confused their real selves with their
on-line characters.  This confusion was in the form of conceit -they
expected the social privileges that accompany the attractiveness and
social position of their fantasy characters.  Charlene, discussing her
own on-line character, said "I exaggerate a little bit."  Then she
added:

I don't take it too seriously.  Some people do.  I have seen some
operators, they talk about themselves, and they believe that things are
as wonderful as they are saying.  The way they describe themselves, and
they really think that's how they are.  And that's as amazing as the
people at the other end of the phone.

Goffman, using the same metaphor of the mask, has suggested that the
mask may overtake the self and become more real than the actor who
wears it (1959, 1961).  In the case of the phone sex operators, other
entities -from supervisors to International Exchange Carriers have as
great an interest in their personas as in the actors themselves.  If an
operator is overtaken by this persona, however, she can be alienated
from herself, seeing herself through the eyes of the persona as a
pornographer might, and judging herself by those uncompromising
standards.

Callers also present a persona on the phone which they reveal in
several ways.  Callers sometimes admit to an operator that they are
shorter, heavier, older, poorer, or balder than they had originally
described, and as they reveal their true selves they often refer to the
image they had originally created.

One caller explained to me that he often started out a phone sex call
by describing himself as a

"Playgirl centerfold," and then as the conversation progressed, he
would "check out" the operator to assess her compassion.  Other callers
revealed using a pseudonym ("My real name is Jim") or acknowledged an
exaggeration.

Callers, like operators, present a persona on the phone.  And
operators, in return, have fantasies they expect the callers to
fulfill.  Callers may blur the line between the fantasy they initially
request and the reality that takes over the call, but operators rarely
acknowledge their own fantasy, their own confusion, or the gullibility
that results.  For example, operators often believe that they can tell
the difference between the real perverts, who truly believe that an
operator exists as described, and the fakes, who know that the call is
make-believe.

Some operators fantasy beliefs seemed every bit as potent as the ones
we commonly call "real."  Valerie, a seasoned expert in many avenues of
the sex business, was far from naive, yet she demonstrated a
gullibility and vulnerability common to many operators.

I got involved with someone who was in the movie business who is very,
very wealthy.  But he would never meet me.  He never said anything,
like, to lead me on, and say, "Well, we'll meet."  it's a very
complicated story, but he started calling, and we just talked, and it
wasn't phone sex anymore.  Well, I found out that he lives with
someone.  He just lied and said he was on and off with somebody, you
know?  He lied about everything.  I found out he had other girls that
he was talking to, getting free phone sex from girls he picked up off
of 900 lines.  I knew I wasn't the only one.

So that's just such a complicated story.  I'm just getting over it
now.

Valerie talked at length about her disappointment at being lied to by
this man who had "put an emotional hook into her soul" over the 900
line.  I never questioned her about the possibility of love with a man
who was essentially unknown, as he had lied to her about 11
everything," but when the theme of lying callers came up a second time,
I began to question her own honesty.

Valffie: These guys, they lie about paying you.  It's not fantasy.
Lying and fantasy is two different things.  If you want to say that
your paw is ten inches long, that's fine.

It's fine for the fantasy, but don't say your credit card number is
somebody else's.  That's not fantasy, that's just fud, you know? 
That's why I am saying this guy lied to me, and I realize that phone
people hide.  They hide behind that phone and that can be very
dangerous.

AF: Well, how do you feel about deceiving them?

Valerie: I feel that if they are not getting emotionally involved, then
they are getting what they paid for.  They ordered a British woman,
they are getting a British woman.

There's no harm done.

Valerie is a part-time topless dancer who often arranged,
clandestinely, private phone sex relationships with her callers; they
would call her at home and mail their payments to her post office box,
thereby skipping the phone sex company that had introduced them.  A
caller developing such a relationship with Valerie might assume that he
could lie to her about details such as whether or not he lives with
someone.  A caller might imagine that his lifestyle is as much a part
of his fantasy as his "ten inch paw."  Despite the fact that Valerie
claims she draws the line at fraudulent credit depictions, the examples
she gives of harmful lies that have hurt her are concerned with lies of
the heart.  She has been hurt by the pretense of love and her imaginary
lover's infidelity, not by false credit card numbers.

"That's not fantasy, that's just fud": I believe Valerie means that the
fantasy at hand is not her fantasy.  This expression illustrates how
important it is to all the participants to draw lines establishing what
is acceptable, and to distinguish truth from fantasy.  Like smokers who
quit again and again, the operators, and presumably callers, draw and
redraw these lines continuously.  Ultimately, from the operators point
of view, the acceptable lies are the ones they tell, and "the fud" is
the lies told by callers.  The legitimate belief is their own, and the
imprudent belief belongs to the callers.

Since the caller's belief is imprudent, the operator's disregard for
his real emotional investment is easily justified.  Valerie's own
jealousy over the caller who broke her heart is just one example of how
operators define and redefine the propriety of belief and the respect
that it commands.  Valerie's jealousy, along with other instances of
ill will, also provides more evidence of something behind the mask. 
Brad also expressed frustration with repeatedly hearing the same
fantastic self-descriptions of his callers.

I get so sick of the stories.  I like them to tell me who they are and
really believe them, you know?  Tell me the truth.  I get off on that.
That's what I enjoy the most.

Posing as a heterosexual woman or a homosexual man (he is neither),
Brad "gets off on" the truth.  Truth is Brad's fantasy.  Although his
job is to "be" what the caller imagines, he does not see the need for
the caller to "be" anything but real.  The caller has not, however,
agreed to fulfill Brad's fantasy.

What matters to him is to imagine himself within his own fantasy.  The
caller may not be a beefcake in real life, but for a few minutes he
wants to think that 11 she," Brad, the operator, thinks he is.
Apparently, even when operators are ready and willing to fulfill part
one of the fantasy, the fabrication of their own identity, they often
have trouble with part two, accepting the caller's fun-house image of
himself.

Desire includes the need to feel desirable.  " [Sex] involves not only
desiring another but also ... involves a desire that one's partner be
aroused by the recognition of one's desire.... Desire is therefore not
merely the perception of a preexisting embodiment of the other, but
ideally a contribution to his further embodiment which in turn enhances
the original subject's sense of himself" (Nagel, quoted in Soble 1980:
84-85).  The rarity of human contact in modern society and the ideology
of male sexuality that must affirm itself through the "enhancement"
offered by women amplifies this need for reciprocity and creates an
industry to fill it.

Several phone sex advertisements proclaim that the operators on their
line work "strictly for pleasure," are "unpaid," or are working "just
for fun."  These advertisements are not seen by the operators as lies,
but as part of the fantasy required by the callers.

A caller uses a phone sex fantasy to experience his own desirability
Thus, through phone sex, pornographers are able to sell the reciprocity
of desire without posing the risks of discovery and disease associated
with more "traditional" forms of prostitution or the emotional risks of
real intimacy.  The operators are paid for their contribution to the
interaction, though apparently not enough to negate their own needs for
reciprocity in interaction.

The Service Being Bartered

Faced with limited economic alternatives, women have long bartered
their so-called enhancement abilities for economic security, social
status, or mere physical survival.  Women's work is a mediation between
the physical, banal, material necessities of life and the more abstract
and intellectual work of men.  A secretary is to a businessman what a
nurse is to a doctor, a clerk to a postmaster, and a woman to a man
(Smith 1978).  Prostitution is a perfectly suitable occupation
therefore, for the traditional woman.  " What is a prostitute?  "asks

William Acton in his classic work on prostitution.  She is a woman who
gives for money that which she ought to give only for love " (quoted in
Dworkin 1979: 204).  For love, or propriety, a woman of Acton's era
gave up reciprocity, demanding neither love nor money in payment for
her services.

prostitutes do accept money, however, and in so doing they make an
underlying symbolism explicit, unlike love relationships, which are
direct but inexplicit.  The exchange of money has the potential to make
love explicit, to call attention to the fact that the prostitute is
only hired to love the client.  But the need for true love is more
compelling than rationality, Prostitutes put the dark fantasies of the
unconscious into words, mediating the worlds of the explicit and the
inexplicit, materiality and love, fantasy and reality.  Phone sex
prostitutes, who specialize in blurring the lines between fantasy and
reality, are selling reciprocity.

A caller's desire to be wanted is inexplicit by necessity.  In
pornography in general, part of the fantasy is always the illusion that
the object of the fantasy enjoys the content as much as the creator.

This is why it is important that the client pay first, so that he can
then forget the mercenary aspects.  He buys his own desirability.

Expressing this need would only call attention to it and expose its
falsity, so a skillful operator responds to the inexplicit, implied
request for reciprocity.

The efforts of those who seek to fill this need for reciprocity are
helped along by the popular media.  A few authors have glamorized the
phone sex industry, exaggerating the amount of money the operators make
(Asakawa 1988) and leading their readers (potential customers of their
publication's advertisers) to believe that the operators enjoy the
sexual exchange as much as the callers do.

Rush Limbaugh, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host known for
his conservative politics, devoted an hour-long show to an attorney who
had worked as a phone sex operator for "kicks."

She had found this occupation so enjoyable and so lucrative that she
gave up a private law practice to devote herself to full-time phone
sex.  Limbaugh and his listeners were intrigued and titillated to hear
a fantasy come to life: the women they pay to tell them they like them
really do like them!  The story is unlikely, though.  Even if this
caller owned her own phone sex company, the information providers
themselves make an average of $35,000 per year (U.S.

Congress 1991 , quite a bit less than the average attorney.  The best
way to make a fortune from phone sex is still to buy stock in AT&T.

It is easy to see how a man might enjoy thinking that women obtain
satisfaction through pleasing and "enhancing" him.  The popular press
has often described phone sex workers as living out their own fantasies
vicariously through their phone sex characters (Asakawa 1988; R. Mead
1989), and prostitutes are generally seen as highly sexual in their
personal lives (Bullough and Bullough 1978).  While they may be highly
aware of the power of their sexual enjoyment to influence the desire of
others that is, their enhancement abilities sex workers may not be
attentive to their own sexuality at that moment.  Producing desire and
feeling desire are two very different things.  When callers appear to
believe they are identical, they may simply be enjoying the reciprocity
they have rented.  When the confusion extends beyond fantasy into
reality, however, a theft is committed of services beyond those which
have been contracted.

The operator has her own desires.  Often operators expressed their
enjoyment of the callers total trust and belief, and they enjoyed being
complimented on their skill, When these desires are expressed, however,
their fulfillment is impossible.  They need to be understood by the
caller in explicitly because the illusion of volunteerism is all
important.

For example, if an operator asks, "What are you doing tonight?"

and the caller replies, "I'm sitting here in front of a roaring fire
with my two German Shepherds," this could be interpreted as an
inexplicit request for a bestiality fantasy.  That might not occur to
some operators, while others will pick up on the reference.  Sometimes
an inexplicit request might indicate shame, embarrassment, or ambiguity
of desire, giving the operator a choice of reactions: she can ignore
the request by pretending to misinterpret it; she can offer the
bestiality; or she can provide new clues to see how he reacts:

"I'm really a cat person."

When Valerie had her heart broken by a deceptive caller, it was easy to
see how she and her caller got confused about the type of interaction
taking place between them.  Metacommunication signals (Bateson 1956)
help decipher inexplicit requests by providing context Long, pouty
silences are signs of neediness, within which inexplicit requests are
made.

When Valerie fell in love with her caller, she probably sent meta
communicative signals that she wanted to be his only phone sex fantasy
girl.  Explicitly, the signal may have been as direct as "Be honest
with me, darling, am I the only one you call?"

The caller, however, caught up in his own fantasy, may have heard a
different request altogether.  Caught up in the fantasy, he continued
as always, "Yes, my love, there is only you."  There is no fraud here,
only a distortion caused by disembodiment, distance, and time.

Valerie said that the relationship evolved beyond phone sex to a real
relationship.  She stopped billing him at that point, but she neglected
to discontinue his service.  But for the interaction to transcend phone
sex, it would have had to transcend more than the monetary exchange.
Both participants would have had to explicitly and honestly reveal
their true selves.

Types of Contact

The phone sex companies strictly forbid physical contact, even when the
fantasy is of two lovers destined to meet despite all obstacles Many
operators, and callers as well, have told me that they realize the
fantasy is best left un embodied and that real contact, even by voice
alone, is disappointing if not dangerous.  About a fourth of the
operators I interviewed had personally met at least one caller usually
just one and most of my informants had multiple stories about a
discomforting connection, a form of contact, that occurred entirely
over the telephone.

There are three kinds of contact possible in phone sex: material,
intrusive, and accidental.  Material contact occurs when the parties
meet in person, or when they acknowledge and prepare for the
possibility of meeting.  Intrusive contact is when one party knows some
detail of the other's personal life without the consent or knowledge of
the person who is known.

Accidental contact results when either or both parties become engrossed
beyond the level of fantasy, thus exposing and involving their real
selves.

The phone sex process is an unfolding of mutual but different
fantasies, and it often leads to some form of contact.  Almost all the
operators I talked to expressed an initial determination never to meet
with callers, and never to take them seriously as potentially real
relationships.  Even the most determined operators, however, had had at
least one slip.  Brad, for example, while posing as a girl, was talking
to a girl, who seemed "really nice."

I had no intentions of meeting her.  I was just ... I usually write
down the numbers when they tell me, so that if they ask me to repeat
it, I can.  So it happened to be on my book that I was reading.  So
when I went home, I was sitting on my bed, I was reading my book, I saw
the number, and oh , this is a no-no, because it would make you as bad
as them if you called -but I did it.  We talked a couple of times.  She
was nice.  But that was it as far as a relationship goes.

Despite intentions never to meet, multiple interactions leave
participants especially vulnerable to accidental involvement of their
real selves.  Authenticity is all that is required for contact to
occur.  If the interaction continues long enough, the process of phone
sex will lead to slips of authenticity, and the important distinctions
between fantasy and reality will be lost.

Material Contact

A few operators have told me that they have had face-to-face contact
with one or more callers, in the form of a personal relationship, a
brief meeting, or prostitution.  Informants were surprisingly
forthcoming about these meetings, considering the alarming folklore
about meeting callers and the fact that it is strictly forbidden by
every company.  None of the operators I interviewed were attacked or
threatened by a caller they met in person, but all had vowed never to
meet another caller.  All the experiences they described were negative,
with one exception an operator who had had an affair with a married
caller who she said, in retrospect, filled her needs at the time.  Most
operators, including the retrospective one, declared emphatically that
the "fantasy" of the two characters over the phone is best left to
fantasy.

Dallas a preoperative transsexual who had undergone some hormone
therapy-worked entirely on heterosexual phone sex lines.  He
intentionally shunned the transsexual lines because he so enjoyed being
accepted as a "normal woman."  Dallas, as a woman, developed a "love
relationship" with a straight caller who wanted to meet "her" in
person.

Having not disclosed his state of gender transition (which in person
would be obvious), he seriously considered telling the man of his
plight in hope that their love would endure this hardship, and that the
man would help him raise the $20,000 he needed for the sex-change
operation.  Afraid to tell him outright, Dallas hinted around the
subject but encountered cold intolerance at every suggestion.  He
considered proceeding with the meeting, surprising this "lover" with
the news, and hoping that true love would overcome all adversities, but
he eventually decided against it.

Although this love was never consummated -indeed, the lovers never met
-Dallas was hurt and disappointed at the re ection he felt.  This
affair was embodied in the sense that Dallas had extended his real
self, thereby risking real hurt and rejection.  Real contact does occur
when an operator engages herself in the conversation.  A change in the
subjective level of participation is all that is required for intimacy
to take root.

Intrusive Contact

Two operators I interviewed had interacted with callers whom they
recognized and with whom they then took the opportunity to make
intrusive contact.  Because they recognized the caller, they knew, from
the point of recognition, that they would have an effect on the caller
beyond the length of the telephone call.  Anita gradually realized that
the caller she was servicing was an employee of her father's car
dealership.  She recognized some details of a story he was telling, and
she baited him with small hints like "That must have been really hard
with only one phone line," knowing that her father was having trouble
with the phones.  Finally she dropped a clue he recognized , and he
said, "Oh my God" and hung up.

She later reported to her father, "Do you know you have a sales manager
named such-and-such?  Well, he calls phone sex lines."  To which he,
too, allegedly replied, "Oh my God."  Although Anita said that she had
a good relationship with her father, that he was able to deal with her
without prejudice, and that the employee was not fired, she also said
her father no longer "respected" the employee after knowing that he had
been calling the phone sex line and talking dirty to the boss's
daughter.

Anita was delighted over the fact that she could manipulate this caller
so thoroughly and that the balance of power was so tipped in her
direction.  She never said to him, "I am the daughter of your boss,"
because that would have leveled the playing field.  The contact she
made with this caller was unidirectional she managed to touch him
without his ever knowing or touching her.  Had she revealed her
identity, the caller would be able to respond, to defuse the situation,
perhaps speak to his boss himself.  Instead of allowing him these
options, Anita toyed with him until she grew bored, and then exposed
him to his boss.  Such intrusive contact is understandably
uncomfortable for the subject, because the victim does not know the
identity of the intruder and fears his or her power to expose, abuse,
and harass.

Another operator, Molly, recognized the name of her high school nemesis
while taking his credit card information.  Even though she was supposed
to record the credit card number and pass the call to another operator
on shift, she took the call and used her knowledge of this man's
interests and ambitions to create the perfect woman for him.  Once he
had "fallen in love" with her, she turned his own prejudices against
him (having been a victim of those prejudices herself), gradually
altering the fantasies to include acts that she knew he found
repugnant.

Mollyjoyfully described bringing this "small-town redneck" to orgasm
through a scenario in which Desiree , the woman of his dreams, was
"fucked in the ass by a big black motherfucker.  " Molly's pride in her
work was striking, but the story she told was really about her own
effectiveness as an operator and her ability to truly change someone's
life through her skills as a storyteller.

I painted a picture of this girl who had been to high school with him,
who had always adored him, but who had never... It was such a mean
streak, an awful thing I did to him, because I could throw all these
things at him from his own past.

He ended up calling me every day for four or five months, and I never
got tired of it.  I would sit home planning new things to come up
with.

What I ended up doing with him was, of course, I kept feeding his ego,
kept telling him he was even more interesting now than he had been in
high school, and how lucky I was to be getting to know him, and he kept
begging to meet me, and I was always like, "I can't because I had to
sign this contract."

Gradually, though, as the calls went on, I started introducing a little
bit more perversion into it every time.  It was while I was watching,
of course.

It always had to be for me.  I worked it in real slow.  It got to the
point where he would just come, and come over everything.  I was
running out of really sick things to come up with, except necrophilia
-I never got into that and the obvious things children.  But everything
I knew that would be personally offensive to him, he ended up,
apparently, because he was paying for it, loving, and I should feel
guilty about this, but I don't.  Sorry, I don't.

He totally fell in love with me, of course.  He started, toward the
end, telling me he loved me, and ended up asking me to marry him, sight
unseen, because I was unlike any girl he had ever met, and he had never
thought he would ever meet a girl like me.  I ended up teasing him on
and saying I would love to, but not until I knew I was leaving the
company I arranged to meet him, and I told him it was my last day. This
was on a Friday.  He was going to meet me at a restaurant.  I always
enjoyed the concept of him waiting around at this restaurant.  I don't
know, it was just wonderful, and I felt personally very vindicated.

Molly was so articulate that I considered her use of the word
"vindicated" to be accurate.  Vindication is more than revenge; it
carries a sense of defensiveness, an acknowledgment of vulnerability to
criticism and blame.  From what did Molly need vindication?

Ofwhat had she been accused?

Molly, like Anita, talked with relish about the power she experienced ,
the power of knowing yet being unknown.

Recognizing the situation's inherent inequality empowered her, and she
was capable of surprising cruelty.  The circumstances offered Molly an
opportunity to revenge the humiliation of her high school experience.

But her revenge came with ambivalence and guilt, and from that she
sought vindication.

One operator, Jennifer, told me about a caller who swamped her in her
own belief.  The caller faked a heart attack on the phone by gasping
for air and help and Jennifer was fooled.  She had been so completely
fooled that she reported the incident to her supervisor, who called the
man back to check on him.

When he answered the phone in a strong voice, the supervisor knew
Jennifer had been fooled.  This story was not offered in the spirit of
amusement, but with bitterness and loathing.  Jennifer considered
faking a heart attack to be the ultimate in bad taste, insensitivity,
and puerile humor.

Both stories are examples of contact that intrude into real life.

Whether a caller fools an operator or an operator fools a caller, they
share a commonality: one caller is so well fooled that the operator
believes that he believes, and the other caller, by faking a heart
attack, catches the operator in belief.  Both engage the operator in
belief.  Both earn her contempt.  Once an operator is enmeshed in a
call and believes in the details of the interaction, the distinction
between herself, a normal person doing her job, and the caller, a sick
and needy individual, is challenged.

This turnabout damages an operator's ability to distinguish between her
true self and her character.  The mischievous acts performed by her
character, distinct from herself, suddenly become her own.  In such
instances, an operator is forced to recognize that the fantasy and its
effects are real.  This realization puts her in the same category as
her callers, from Goobers to Psychos, a fact that is a source of
anxiety and distress that can easily turn outward to malice.

Operators can be very cruel to those who challenge the distinctions
between operators and callers.  This apparent hostility is really
self-defense, because the caller who entices an operator into belief
attacks her sense of normalcy, her lines and distinctions.  During some
interviews operators grew testy with me when I began to question the
division between self and mask, and the degree of real participation in
the call.

The young, stylishly sarcastic jade taunted, "the real me, the real me,
let's go real deep, to go to the real me."

Accidental Contact

Accidental, like intrusive, contact often leads to one person ending up
victorious, the other humiliated.  Accidental contact is inadvertent
rather than purposeful, however, and the contact is initiated within
the victim's mind rather than the perpetrator's.  Whereas an intrusive
participant purposely invades private territory, the participant who
merely involves the other in contact is often unwitting.

"Suddenly," Charlene said, "it's the other way around, and then you are
the one on the phone."

The midwestern historian who succeeded in contacting my true academic
self was an instance of unwitting accidental contact.

When I returned home one night from my 8 P.m.-4 A.M. shift, I recorded
my impressions of the call.

I spoke to him in the intellectualese he was comfortable with.  But
things got a little too close to reality, talking about my opinions
started to make me feel uncomfortable, traceable.  I got real crabby
and irritable and we argued in strange, familiar ways.  Both nasty like
strangers would never be.  Got rid of him for good.

By revealing too much of my self to this caller, I experienced an
intimacy that threatened my segregation of self from character, and the
caller had to be "gotten rid of"

Accidental contact may not be purposeful, but operators find it
unforgivable nonetheless.

Several of them offered examples of when they had inadvertently gotten
too close to the truth, and it had made them apprehensive and resentful
of the caller for taking them there.  Others noticed that they had to
be careful not to cross that line with a caller, lest they lose him.

Sometimes I feel like I am getting too personal and they get scared.
Like if I refer back to something they said early in the conversation,
it's like

I'm too smart for them, they get threatened by it.

If you refer back to something earlier in the conversation, if you
remember something they told you, a little detail, that gets them
really nervous, like you're getting too close.

They don't want you to get too personal.

Temporal reflection is alarming to a phone sex participant because it
exposes the fact that a shared history is being formed.  It brings
object permanence to the participants.

After they hang up, both the operator and the caller continue to exist,
and therefore their relationship also continues.  When the operator is
off work, at home making dinner, she is wholly real.

Meanwhile, the caller is also at home, making his dinner, and the two
of them are connected through this "fantasy," a relationship that is
both artificial and real.  When participants refer backward through
time, they link

Tuesday's conversation with Wednesday's, and the reality that lies
suspended between them is pulled into the fantasy world.  Distinctions
are lost, and with them, the safety of isolation and difference.

Nancy quit her first phone sex job when she discovered the company
manager was calling her for sex, pretending to be a stranger.

This was a violation of the rules of phone sex, and it left her feeling
exposed and endangered.  Many operators worry that a caller might be
someone they know in real life.  Brad told me that this uncomfortable
feeling followed him home.

I've picked up the phone at home before and thought, "Oh no, they can't
have this number."  The voice on the phone, all of a sudden, you start
to panic, and start to think, "Oh God, I wonder if so and so knows I am
doing this?"  And at work, whoever it is [calling] sounds familiar.

Somebody could set you up very easily, as a friend, and ring up and
just wind you up, you know?  It would be easy.

And itwouldn'thurt in fun, but

I wouldn't like the idea.  I mean, it wouldn't be on.

I am always thinking in the back of my mind, are they having a game
with me?  Is it someone I know?

Both the caller and the operator are anonymous, but danger lurks even
in anonymity.  If Brad only knew who the caller was, he would know that
the caller was unknown, but since he does not know who the caller is,
it could be anyone.

This is eerie for him.  He needs to know that callers are clearly
distinct from non callers  This important distinction would be lost if
the caller turned out to be a known person, or if a known person turned
out to be a caller.  Brad also needs to be able to evaluate the
caller's veracity to determine his own level of commitment and belief.
If the caller engages his belief but proves to be "having a game," Brad
would be caught "playing the fool."  If the caller is someone who is
known, who is an enduring part of Brad's life, that person could make
intrusive contact and expose him and his foolish belief.

Most operators had stories illustrating the disorientation that came
out of the fear of recognition.  If an operator has an emotional stake
in a caller's identity she is herself at risk of being recognized More
important, she will have to deal with the lasting effects of seeing
someone once kindred, a friend or family member, reborn as a caller.
Mimi, like others, found the experience quite unnerving

The human voice is like a fingerprint, they say.  His la caller who
reminded her of her father] voice print sounded so familiar, the
inflection of his voice, the things that he said, I mean, not the
things he wanted, I wouldn't know since I never had sex with my father,
but it sounded so much like him, I could not talk to him.  I was
shaking.  I just could not talk to him.  I remember my supervisor
telling me, "You can't let it get to you like that.  It's not your
dad."

Most operators had experienced recognizing, or thinking they
recognized, some past or present acquaintance.  It is also common for
operators to "recognize" movie stars, politicians, and other
celebrities.  On hearing the familiar voice, the operator's heart
pounds in fear, excitement, and worry.  Even if she comes quickly to
realize that the caller is not the recognized person, the experience of
recognition starts her wondering, "Who are these callers?"  She begins
to see all men as potential callers.

The "Thomas theorem" is a rule of human interaction that states that
any situation which is defined as real at the time has real
consequences The human need for intimacy is real, and relationships,
even when established on the basis of fantasy, have the tendency to be
defined as real.

People who talk with each other run risks of hurt, offense, and
intimacy.

The more they interact, the greater the risks, and the greater the
consequences.

Participants often shield themselves with the knowledge of the
distinction between reality and fantasy.  The relationship starts out
being explicitly restricted to the realm of fantasy, but eventually, if
the relationship continues beyond the initial surface conversation, it
works its way into reality, with or without the consent of either
party.  Once real, it has consequences that no one even pretends are
fantasy.  The product of phone sex, and of disembodied intimacy, is not
fantasy at all, but rather a tangible result of interaction in a real
life relationship.

Chapter 5

The Real Product of Fantasy

Structural Requirements

Phone sex is a service industry, the service being the operator's
reciprocity of desire.  Phone sex also produces by products, including
a particular fantasy constructed according to the rules of pornographic
precedent.  The individual scenarios are ritualized through repetition
and so phone sex also produces something like a social fact (Durkheim
1893a), an essence of the pornographic fantasy.

These social facts take on lives of their own and go on to influence
the development of new pornographic desires and fulfillments.

Sherry Turkle (1995) describes a culture of simulation where symbols
become objects in themselves simply by being used as objects The
desktop computing environment, for example, uses icons that represent
the files and applications of a program.  When the user is working in
the computer environment, moving and manipulating icons as objects,
they become real in the user's mind.  The disembodiment of intimacy
operates in a culture of simulation where personal characteristics and
descriptions are like icons, representing the desires and underpinnings
of the creator's personality When the descriptions are used in this
way, they become the creator's true self, not for what they appear to
be, but for what they represent.  The self is, after all, a compilation
of desires, ambitions, and values.

The by-products the participants take away from phone sex include
skills in deceit, exploitation, insight, and tolerance, as well as
changes in sexuality, eroticism, and sexual desire.  These by-products
encompass good and bad, but associated as they are with sex,
mercantilism, and fantasy, they are often assumed to be bad.

They are, however, as complex as the desire and fantasy that produces
them.

A central issue of the feminist debate on pornography focuses on the
question whether pornography leads to violent, misogynist, or
objectifying behavior.  The model of process might be useful to this
debate.  A consumer enters the porn fantasy with a conceptual picture
of his desire, and selects a script that helps shape the details using
traditional pornographic images.  The consumer develops, with practice,
a more detailed fantasy and grows to accept the individual details as
being important to his fantasy and they become real to him.  Gradually
the context expands, until the consumer begins to use the details as
tenets of everyday life and even embrace the minutiae as truth.  For
the lovelorn caller, this inspires him to send an airline ticket, while
for the violence-minded caller, it inspires real-life violence.

The feminist sexuality debates about the intertwining relationships
among sexuality, power, violence, and pleasure have created an
us-against-them mentality that has limited the contribution of feminism
to the study of sexuality.  Rather than debating whether sex is good or
bad, vanilla or perverse, I have sought here to describe the
complexities of the phone sex process and the disembodiment of intimacy
with neither hyper-moral nor relativistic pronouncements

These complexities reflect all the participants, their technological
and social environments, and their personal and corporate histories The
process of interaction is abstract, but the mosaic it creates is less
so.  The results of phone sex interactions are real and often
long4asting, and the product, disembodied intimacy, may outlive its
participants as an enduring symbol of our age.

There are good and bad elements inherent in intimacy itself.

Intimacy can be used for manipulation and deceit, for self-centered
fulfillment, for monetary gain.  It can be used for altruistic
fulfillment , connection, discourse, understanding.  The paradoxes and
contradictions amplified in technologically mediated communication
-physicality and disembodiment, fantasy and reality, sex and love,
intimacy and detachment -all become so arbitrary as to lose their
usefulness.  Moraljudgment in social science mocks the complexity of
the human spirit and the variety of social interaction.

Fantasy has an allure, connotations of freedom, imagination, and lack
of constraint.  Limited and constrained by boundaries of reality,
however, fantasy is denounced by many as inferior, impractical, and too
short-lived.  When its visionary qualities are diminished, fantasy is
taken for a sign of idiocy or madness, yet in the psychiatric
literature fantasy is an important mechanism for the fulfillment of
unconscious wishes and the resolution of unconscious conflict Most of
the popular literature that examines fantasy decodes symbolism and
hidden meanings of which the fantasizer is consciously ignorant.  In
the novels of Thomas Pynchon, for example, every plastic spoon, every
postage stamp, every graffiti-covered wall contains a message for the
novel's characters which they are unaware of or powerless to act on
(see Conn 1989).  Norman Mailer's 1965 novel An American Dream depicts
characters who act out deep rooted hostility, "fear that masquerades as
strut" (see Conn 1989:

529).

The mask a person chooses to wear tells much about her or his
underlying self, and operators examine callers personas for clues in
order to decode their true personalities and desires.  As Mimi noted;

It's interesting what guys really fantasize about versus what they
really have.  Every guy wants me in a teddy, black or red.  Every guy
wants me to have this huge bosom.  I can count the times the guy said,
"Well, are your breasts really that large?  I kinda really prefer
smaller ones."  I can count the times.  I found that very interesting,
because as I look around the world, I don't see women who look like
that, who just walk around in a teddy.

Then it explained to me also why there are so many women who get these
operations.  They dye their hair blonde, they get extensions, because
they are trying to live up to the fantasy that most men have.  I think
it just says a lot about where we are as a society and where we place
our sexuality that men fantasize about women who are not real, and
women try to be women who are not real.

Fantasy is unrealistic because it is improbably, though not impossibly
, satisfying.  It is a desertion of the difficulties and realities of
life, a self-indulgence that frees the self from self-reflection.  To
be overcome by fantasy is to be consumed by the reflections cast on
deep pools of contemplation, pleasurable or otherwise.  If the
participants

Mimi described above had doted on the unreality or unnatural qualities
of the images, their fantasies would not be engaging The creator of the
fantasy, while he is thus engrossed, is temporarily disabled, absent
from the real world, and impotent to act in the real world, trapped
within a hallucinatory world of fantasy This vulnerability and
powerlessness is the source of disdain society has for such
"dreamers."

Although fantasy is an escape from reality, the fantasy itself is
partly determined by the particular social and cultural reality it
attempts to transcend.  A common nonsexual fantasy, for example,
involves the achievement of great wealth.  This fantasy, rather than
being a relief from the pressures of modern life, acts internally as a
commercial message, reinforcing the socially constructed value system
and pushing the fantasizer forward in pursuit of materialistic goals.

Because of its base in reality, the controlled use of fantasy is
sometimes recommended as a motivational technique.

"Keep your eyes on the prize.  "

"Visualize your goal."

Even fantasies concerning highly unlikely events can be used as
motivational images, as in the case of the Publisher's Clearinghouse
contest, which offers photographs of expensive houses and cars to fuel
the fire of hope that motivates people to subscribe.  Therapists are
advised that "fantasies and daydreaming can be and often are positive,
life-enriching, stress reducing, creativity4ncreasing human activities
that should be encouraged in many instances" (Morgan and Skovholt
1977:391).

The particular images used in a motivational fantasy are grounded in
the particular goal of the therapy.  A therapeutic fantasy is rarely
moored aboard a spaceship, for example, or in another epoch.  Like most
fantasies, it is almost always set in the creator's natural habitat. In
a study of fantasy, John Caughey (1984) interviewed a variety of people
about their fantasy worlds.  One recent college graduate described her
fantasy of going to graduate school:

"I picture exactly what my office looks like, how my books are arranged
, and my personal items in the office.  I drink coffee from the
department's coffee machine, and I often go out to lunch with other
grad students" (164-65).

Anyone in graduate school would be unlikely to luxuriate in this
fantasy.  An undergraduate fantasizes about grad school, while a
graduate student imagines herself in the faculty lunch room and a ball
player dreams of the pennant.  Our positive professional fantasies are
rooted in our true ambitions they reveal our hopes and desire for the
future and our fearful, violent, or obsessive fantasies are likewise
rooted in real anxiety.  Sexual fantasies reveal much about our true
hopes and desires concerning sex and intimacy.

 Brad described the relationship of the fantasy to reality.  The
callers call for fantasy, but the fantasy is the possibility of a real
meeting, and the trick to keeping a regular caller is to convince him
that he is on the verge of meeting the fantasy in person without
actually meeting him.

You would be amazed at how many people want to believe that they are
talking to some beautiful girl and will actually meet someday.  But you
find out that it is better that they don't.  The idea, the fantasy, is
much better than the reality would ever be.  So you learn to actually
have relationships with these people over a long period of time over
the phone.

But you are careful.

Garson Kanin (1974) describes a legendary Hollywood whorehouse called
Mae's, where a client could live out his fantasy of making love to a
movie star.  Prostitutes were selected for their resemblance to current
movie idols, "dressed and styled," and prompted with information about
the real star's life and background, conversational style, and tone of
voice.  Kanin was directing Carole Lombard in They Knew V'at They
Wanted, and though she was happily married to Clark Gable, Kanin had
developed a "crush" on her.  He fulfilled his fantasies with Lombard's
likeness at Mae's and wrote about the experience.

I took her aside and we talked for a long time.  She loved my ideas.
She told me she was thinking of leaving Clark.  I told her I thought
she was doing the wise the only thing.  She suggested we have supper up
in her suite.  The rest is a Glorious Technicolor, out of focus, slow
motion dream.... I told [Carole] of my visit to Mae's, of my encounter
with "Carole," leaving out nothing.  My account was punctuated by
Carole screaming with laughter, Wait till I tell Clark!  Jesus, no, I
better not.

He'll go there!"

Lombard's fear that Gable might prefer to pay a prostitute to imitate
his wife than enjoy the real thing was not unfounded.  An intimate
relationship between equals has many virtues, but short-term sexual and
even shortterm emotional requirements can be satisfied by paying for
reciprocity of desire.  In comparison with the real thing, it may seem
as bland and greasy as fast food, but manufactured intimacy fulfills a
particular set of needs.  In conjunction with a balanced diet, it can
provide a useful and satisfying experience.

Kanin was able to discuss his fantasy with Lombard, so perhaps he and
she agreed on the utility of fantasy and on a particular defining
distinction from reality.  If Kanin's version of the story is
accurate,

Lombard must have been extraordinarily confident about the stability of
their boundaries and the value of her inner self and its contribution
to their relationship.  Kanin's fantasy was harmless only because he
did not cross the stipulated lines between amusement and obsession,
persona and self, fantasy and reality.  The danger of this situation
lies in the possibility that distinctions might be confused or denied
and that, in the confusion, the sense of the inner self might be
permanently lost.

The fantasy of having both the excitement of a new beginning and the
safety of known comforts is a common theme in cultural folklore.  From
the Greek plays of Aristophanes to Shakespeare's A

Midsummer Night's Dream to the modern cinema (Bob & Carol & Ted &
Alice), a common theme emerges: the accidental or unknown switch of
partners.  Despite variations, the theme remains consistent.

Some, like Freud, think the themes of pornography and erotica emerge
from the unconscious, while others see their source in class interests
(Marx 1909; Foucault 1979).

Some declare that the themes are socially constructed (Garfinkel 1967)
and/or are morally dictated (Sade 1795), but most fantasies are
remarkably similar across continents and time.  Gail, after ten years
as a phone sex operator, had heard them all.

It's just like motion pictures.  I mean, there's not been a movie
that's made that you haven't seen before.

Everything has been done.  You've seen war movies, you've seen peace
movies, you've seen comedies and dramas and violence.  It's not
anything that hasn't been done, but it's how it's executed and who does
it.  That's where it is.  That's the question.

The phone sex fantasy is shaped by the same forces that shape
television and magazine advertisements and other cultural images.

The images are produced in a leveling process that seeks out common
denominators and markets such as lifestyle, age, and class.

Mass-marketing is a beast that preys on the predictable nature of
modern man as distinct from woman, on the idea that groups of people,
held together by demographic interests, are identifiable and can be
reached through common themes.

That is why phone sex works, because a single pornographic image
appeals to a large, identifiable, and reachable segment of the
population.  And because when a caller sees an advertised image he
likes he can convey his expectations to an operator in broad terms, she
can interpret and portray the character without ever having seen the
ad.  As one informant told me, "I give them everything they ever wanted
and they don't even have to ask."

Callers are rarely aware of the source of the fantasy; they, like the
operators, prefer to appreciate the uniqueness of the experience.

The feeling of individuality, that the interaction is qualitatively
linked to the participants, that it is unique and special all that is
included in the price of the call.

Foucault (1979) has suggested that modern social institutions use sex
to manipulate masses of people and that our sex-ubiquitous culture
harnesses the power of erotic energy.  The players in phone sex
interaction include several of the twentieth century's largest
corporations: AT&T, MCI, and the other international exchange carriers.
As discussed in Chapter 1, these corporations do influence the content
and format of the phone sex interactions, and the motivation of the
participants.  If the corporations have an interest in the particular
sexualities of their potential consumer base, it is in amplifying the
aspects that drive them to "reach out and touch someone" and in
providing them with enough satisfaction that they feel they got their
money's worth, yet long for more.  Some call this exploiting the
loneliness of the masses, while others see it as satisfying an existing
need.  The perspective one takes is based more on one's preexisting
political and social bias than on empirical evidence or the experience
of the individual participants.

It seems absurd to accuse Barry Diner, head of QVC, a progressive
communications corporation, of being part of a conspiracy to exploit
the loneliness and isolation.  Yet QVC and other corporations shape
their marketing strategies to maximize such needs and insecurities ,
and they profit by the increasing demand for manufactured intimacy.  As
needs are met, patterns set.  Like laboratory rats, many consumers
learn to push the lever that satiates immediate need, and in the
process they only increase their dependence.

An operator needs some knowledge of particular pornographic scripts to
predict callers expectations and provide the appropriate and expected
fantasy.

The caller needs complementary knowledge so that he can supply cues
about the particular fantasy he wants.

Each service bureau must also have some knowledge of the desired
interaction in order to provide technology that facilitates the
interaction.

The information providers also must know what kind of advertising will
attract callers.

Goffman (1956) noted that certain understandings and common assumptions
are a necessary base for any interaction, and, as in the case of phone
sex, these understandings are crucial to a successful-in this case
satisfying and profitable interaction.  Pornographic images may vary in
intensity, but they are nevertheless pervasive in our culture.  All of
us learn the general images just as we learn other social conventions.
Everyone involved in the phone sex interaction -caller, operator,
information provider, and even exchange carrier-shares common
understandings of the images and process necessary to develop, promote,
and enact these scenarios No special training is required of any
participant, for the symbols and images are pervasive and public.

Like other operators,

Anita dismissed the need for formal training as she described how she
gets her story ideas.  At the same time she described the pervasiveness
of the images she uses.

I watch a lot of talk shows, like Donahue will do something on
transsexualism That's great because a lot of transsexuals call up, and
then I know about all the doctors who do them, how many psychiatry
sessions they have to have, how long it takes, and everything.  So
that's really beneficial.

Not everyone finds the ubiquitous ness of these images beneficial.

Dworkin (1974) and other critics of pornographic symbolism claim that
the pervasiveness of pornographic images depersonalizes sexuality
Participants are the point men in a battle against alienation, in which
the goal is to use the persona as armor and protect the self without
allowing any crossover between reality and fiction.  The fantasy is
constructed of materials that are external to the participants, and
some of the by-products include anger, revenge, alienation from "real"
personal intimacy, and often a climactic vindication.

Despite its advertisement of sexual explicitness and promiscuity,
despite its acceptance of homosexuality, transvestism, and other I,
perversions," the pornography industry is very traditional and
conservative in preserving its view of women as submissive and
dependent (See 1974).  Phone sex workers act out these traditional
power dynamics every day.  Peter offered a unique perspective, being a
heterosexual male posing as a woman and thus having the opportunity to
experience life as a woman.

When I referred to females as "women" during our interview, he
habitually misheard or misunderstood me, confirming and correcting with
"What?  Oh, you mean girls."  Although otherwise sensitive and astute,
he was not particularly hip to feminism.  Still, it appeared that the
experience of being "a girl" was opening his eyes to his own
participation in gender stereotypes.

I honestly don't think men realize how rude they are being to women. To
be honest with you, I don't even think women realize it.  Sometimes, as
a girl, I would get very offended.  I would get offended because they
would be considering me a piece of meat or talking to me that way,
where, the girls would let it fly right by.  I thought, jesus I think
women are numb to some of the things men do.  You know, I am a guy; I
am not use to taking any crap.  I'll throw it right back at them.  The
gay guys are a little more ... some of them are just as rude.  It just
seemed that if you were nice to them, they responded more than the
regular men.

Peter is mistaken in thinking that women don't notice or care about the
rudeness.  All my informants noticed that some men were intensely
abrasive or disrespectful.  Operators expect callers to abide by rules
of civility, as much as they expect civility in personal interactions.
And when callers violate the rules, operators often seek their own
justice within the confines of the script.

Most of the operators I interviewed like callers to take the time to
say "Hello, how are you" before beginning to make requests for a
fantasy.  Even though they realized such small talk was not an effort
to get to know their underlying selves, they still appreciated the
formality and the implicit acceptance that the caller was partaking in
a social interaction with another human being.

Assembly Required

Operators often think that the disembodied quality of phone sex will
provide the freedom to explore unusual or non-stereotypical selves.
Instead, phone sex appears to be utterly dependent on the same old
symbols and visualization rituals that characterize the stereotypical
images provided by traditional pornography and society in general.  The
phone sex worker produces the fantasy's images and manufactures the
script, but she does not create the pornographic ideals.  What she does
is enact the images, following a logical course, often without regard
for their real meaning, merit, or ability to take her to her intended
destination.

When I began working as an operator I used my actual height of 5'9".
This seemed to be too tall, because men often seemed intimidated
(perhaps they were less tall), and several told me directly that they
wanted a shorter girl.  I like being tall, and I tried to maintain my
height for personal and political reasons.

But I was losing callers Reluctantly I began to grow shorter,
eventually settling at 5'?", an acceptable height for a tall fantasy
girl.

During my participant observation I often witnessed operators being
pushed back into the scripted fantasies or advising each other on the
appropriate detail for a particular fantasy.  The consistency of
scripting persists despite the diverse range of storytellers and,
ironically , despite their pride in the individuality of their stories.
The attempts at individuality, including my own compromise of tall but
not too tall, are like religious rituals that absorb the participants
lamentations without requiring any real change in the status quo in
fact they reinforce the ideology.

The reality of the fantasy, its impact, is not dependent on the
individual participants but has an existence of its own.  Each operator
may pride herself on the life she breathes into the stereotype that she
offers green eyes instead of blue, a voluptuous body rather than a
slender one but even the variations are part of the stereotype Of
course the fantasy needs a little life, a little personality within its
own dominion, but these qualities are sacrificial virgins in the
pornographic ritual.  Holding positions of great honor and no power,
symbols of individuality are offered with much fanfare, obscuring more
powerful elements, which, unlike the ephemeral offerings endure.

Most women and men manage to cope with modern society's pervasive
sexist images and ideologies and even create livable environments
within these ideologies.  Phone sex workers spend a great deal of time
acting out the stereotypes of female sexuality.

They develop especially strong and explicit coping mechanisms to
insulate their sense of self in a severe ideological climate, and these
mechanisms have an air of familiarity.  The coping mechanisms used to
nullify the by-products of phone sex are similar to those documented
among other types of service work (Leidner 1993;

Wharton 1993).  They are used by all sorts of women who are service in
a service economy.  Valerie described without irony how she had tracked
down the true identity of a caller with whom she had fallen in love
only to find out that he had been betraying her all along.  She seemed
to view her self as a transcendent being, separate not only from the
fantasies she portrayed on the phone but also from her career in the
sex industry and from her own personal life.  Her sense of self seemed
to be based in a fantasy of its own.

I am judged by my job and that's not fair.  I am not judged on what
kind of person I am, and this happened when I was stripping [too].  If
I tell somebody this is what I do for a living, five minutes ago, I
could have told them that I won a Nobel prize for brain surgery or
something. He doesn't want to talk about the brain surgery.  He wants
to talk about this fascinating subject of sex because that is a man's
primary fantasy.  Sex is on their mind all the time.  The building
could collapse, but if there is sex involved, they will crawl through
the rubble to get to it.  That's the way they are.

But Valerie had not won a Nobel prize for brain surgery.  All of us, it
seems to me, are what we do in the sense that our behavior reveals
truths about our selves, and our selves cannot be abstracted from the
life choices we make.

It is our behavior that reveals the temperament , the character, that
underlies self Ironically, Valerie's sense of self, which she relies on
to distance herself from the fantasies, is based on the very same
images as the fantasies themselves.

Several respondents have discussed how difficult it is to tell a man
what they do for a living because the man often becomes caller-like by
asking lurid questions about phone sex.  Once he does this the operator
often dislikes him, and is further disillusioned by the thought that
all men are potential callers.  The successive actions of individuals
set patterns and expectations for the nature of all men.  My informants
frequently overgeneralized about the nature of men, often with great
enthusiasm, while at the same time they emphatically asserted the
differences between their own selves and the stereotypical phone sex
operator.  La Donna put it:

The other night I met this guy, and the guy said, "What do you do for a
living?"  I said, "I'm a telephone operator," so he said, "Oh, you must
work for 911 emergency Oh, you must be a computer operator or
something" I said, "Something like that."

"Well, what is it that you actually do?"  I said, "Well, you know the
800 and 900 lines you see in your little books like Playgirl,
Penthouse, Hustler, Club, Oui, and all those magazines ?"  I said,
"Well, I'm one of the girls behind those numbers."  He said, "Ooh, talk
dirty to me."  So he blew it right there.  I don't need to talk for him
on my night off, thank you.

When a non-caller puts himself in the position of caller, it sets off a
chain reaction leading to contempt.

La Donna contemptuous reference to men's "little books" reveals her
perspective.  Perhaps she had let her guard down for a moment and
thought she was a civilian conversing voluntarily and non
professionally with another civilian, but the guy, by pushing for the
particulars of her job, by requiring and expecting and insisting on
certain details, revealed himself to be a caller at heart.

When he explicitly asked her to perform a fantasy, he only confirmed
what she had begun to suspect.

When all men are potential callers, no man can be trusted face to face.
Charlene typified this point of view, starting out by classifying all
callers as depraved and then generalizing to include all men.

I've learned private things about people, because you're completely
anonymous, and they are as well, so they pretty much can tell you
anything It's strange how different walks of life and different age
groups and financial classes and stuff, this is all a part of their
life.  [They are] from all different walks of life.  You fall into
thinking it's all these really disgusting old guys sitting on their
couch drinking beer, or young kids joking around, but it's everyone.

By narrowing the field to men, to white men, or to some other segmented
group, operators leave themselves room for the possibility of true love
in real life, one uncomplicated by the fraud and duplicity of phone
sex.  Unfortunately, callers destroy these important distinctions when
they offer clues about their real selves.  Often a caller who begins a
conversation with customary, polite discourse, who sounds refined,
kind, and considerate, will request a fantasy the operator finds
appalling; then, when the fantasy is concluded, he returns to civility,
thanks her for her compassionate and capable attention, and says
good-bye.  Although operators say they prefer this type of caller to
one who starts out violent or rude and stays that way, such
intermittent civility also paves the way for the assumption that all
men are callers at heart.  Terri says,

A lot of people that arc seemingly mundane and maybe normal, whatever
that is, on the outside or in their public life are normally the people
that are the most exotic in their private life.  It seems that the men
who have the more conservative jobs, have families, are married, maybe
live in the Midwest, where you would stereotype them as being mundane,
they're the ones that get really deep, explicit, kinky, and all that.

Usually the men that are more wild and free on the outside are more
normal sexually.  Men that are seemingly the librarian types, the
intellectuals, are the men that scare me.

C. Wright Mills's 1953 study White Collarobserved "salesgirls" in a
finer department store who got prestige from working with the
"intellectuals" and "librarian" types Terri referred to.  These normal
men, respectable members of communities everywhere, are the men an
operator least likes to work with.  The fact that seemingly respectable
men call phone sex lines makes one's respectable neighbors suspect.

Paradoxically, however, the fact that seemingly respectable men call
phone sex lines also neutralizes the stigma of the phone sex worker's
own participation.

In Mills's study, interaction with prestigious customers ultimately
depressed the salesclerks, for many of the same reasons it upset the
phone sex workers I interviewed.  The interaction of unequals only
highlights servitude and powerlessness, and in Mills's study
salespeople often ended up hating their most prestigious customers.

Many of the phone sex workers I interviewed indulged in contempt not
only toward callers, but also toward potential callers, a group that
included all men.  This contempt, rather than setting operators apart
from the callers, only strengthened the effect of her association with
them.

The ritualization of intimacy that an operator performs at work is
necessary for mass-production, but its effects are not limited to the
factory floor.  Unless precautions are taken to control the effects of
their jobs, operators personal lives become little more than pro bono
work.

Redefining the Self

Each phone sex encounter initiates changes in the participants;

who leave the conversation with new ideas and attitudes that affect
their future social interactions (Goffman 1956).  Some of these effects
are adverse; others are more constructive.  Anita elaborated on one of
the more constructive aspects.

Mysex life with my husband has actually gotten better since I started
working Because you hear some stuff and you go, "Wow, that's different,
I've never done that before," and then you end up doing it. My husband
doesn't freak out and go, "Oh my God, where did you learn this from?"

He knows what I do.  He actually has listened to me on the phone,
because he wanted to make sure that it was something that was: a) not
turning me on, or b) I was [not] really involved with the man, or
whatever.  He heard the same thing over an dover again, got bored, and
went to sleep.

Anita was not alone in citing the personal benefits of being a phone
sex operator.  She was, however, unique among my interviewees for
maintaining a stable relationship while working.  One benefit of phone
sex is that a sex worker can learn to value her own sexuality.  In a
society where women's sexuality is devalued and denigrated , a sense of
sexual worth is a valuable asset.

Phone sex operators experience a constant pressure to change the
boundaries of their sexuality.  Many operators reported that their
definitions of harm and obscenity grew continually broader as they
worked in the industry.  Some operators said that they had become more
sexually "aggressive,"
"demanding," "kinky," or "open.  " They also said that they were more
willing to explore new, previously uncharted sexual routes.  Although I
never asked whether an operator had real orgasms or arousal while
taking calls, several of my informants volunteered that they had.  Most
of them said that they "knew" I wanted to know, putting me in the
position of the caller voyeur.  All the operators who brought it up
said that "of course" there were callers who hit an appealing nerve,
that it was a natural part of the experience.

Mimi was very happy with her phone sex occupation.  She was studying
music and was able to work around her class schedule.  She said the
money was good, the hours great, and the work interesting.

Mimi's criticism of the industry was reserved for the sex workers who
were less secure than she in their own identity, and who succumbed to
occupational hazards.

Most of the girls don't need training on how to do it.  They usually
need training in how to handle it.  Most people know what hot lunches
are, and they know what it is you have to get into, "Come on, ooh baby,
shit on me now," or whatever.  They need to know how to phrase it, they
need to be able to describe something over the phone.  The other person
has to be able to see.  You've got to be able to portray the scene.

Mimi may be mistaken that "most people" know what hot lunches are in
this context, but it is true that "handling skills" are essential for
surviving in this service industry.  Little formal training exists,
however, and the only reference I have ever seen was a phone sex
operator training manual reprinted in the December 1990 Harper's.

Under the category of "professionalism" it advises: "Remember, you are
not your character on the phone."  This is sound advice, but following
it may be more complicated than it would indicate, and no mention is
made of the consequences of breaking this important rule.  When an
operator drops the distinction between her self and her character, she
is confronted by her own acts of manipulation and deceit, formerly
fantasy, and often ends up seeking vindication in the form of
retaliation against the callers who engendered the transformation,

In addition to the research on the evils of prostitution, a great deal
of research has defined negative characteristics of people who do sex
work, beginning with Duchatelet's 1830 study of Parisian prostitutes.
Duchatelet found prostitutes to be mostly illiterate and poor, and
often illegitimate by birth; he also found they were dissatisfied with
sex work and looking for something better (see Bullough 1965).  In
addition to being characterized as "desperate women, prostitutes have
also been interpreted as being highly sexual (Freud), oedipally
conflicted (Glover 1945), frigid (Abraham 1942), and hostile toward men
(Glover 1945).  In a modern society that glamorizes both sex and
profitability, the most glamorous sex workers are not the prostitutes
themselves but the madams such as

Heidi Fleiss or Sydney Biddle Barrows who are able to distance
themselves from the empiricism of the sex acts.

Social scientists, seeing themselves as protectors and reformers of the
weak or misdirected, tend to ask "What went wrong in the life of a
prostitute?"  Equally important, but missing, is research that looks
more neutrally at sex work and asks, "What makes a good worker,"
"What purpose does sex work serve?"  or even "VMat goes right when it
works?"  My data and experience indicate that the separation of the
personal self from the professional self is essential to answering
those questions.

Identity is the basis of the character one presents in a disembodied
relationship, no matter how hard one tries to escape it.  The character
always incorporates one's core interests and basic nature, an emotional
foundation that is rarely counterfeit.  Despite the link between them,
character and identity are disassociated by both callers and operators
when it serves their needs to do so.  When I simply asked Valerie
whether the phone sex job had an effect on her personal life, she
responded with a torrent of speech that emphasized

"It's not me."

it did for a while, but I learned how to separate it.  I have to remind
myself, though, sometimes, "It's not me, it's not me, it's not me,"
because when they get really abusive, I have to think, "It's not to me,
it's to women in general, and it's not me personally, and the man is
sick, and he needs help."  We have to remember that.

Anita made the distinction between her own participation in the call
and her character's to the caller, but she failed to see the caller's
self as separate from the character he presented.  Yet callers and
operators are in the same boat, both characters in a fantasy while
remaining themselves.  It is useful for everyone engaged in the
disembodiment of intimacy to center a real self in the physical world
and fantasize that their online persona is nothing but a figment of
imagination.  The post modernists who might suggest that the real world
is a fake are engaged in a game of semantics: reality lies in the
acceptance of all worlds, all realities, as based in perception.

Operators distinctions between selves and characters were spontaneous
and inconsistent, but such distinctions are consequential, however, and
serve four functions.  First, the distinction between self and
character enables the participant to feel powerful in a situation in
which one is essentially powerless.  Second, the distinction protects a
participant's anonymity by implying that personality and identity are
controlled substances she can withhold or offer according to her own
perception of the situation.  Third, the distinction between self and
character offers justification for the way an operator uses a caller
for her own ends, taking payment in exchange for a product she often
believes to be counterfeit, and offering hopes she knows are false. And
last, but most important, the illusion of a separate self protects the
participants from the stigma of both prostitution and the ultimate
blind date.

I don't see a conflict in that because in my mind it's not me.  They're
doing this to this object of a woman who's not real, who's a Barbie.
It's not me, it's a Barbie.

The "looking glass self" was Cooley's (1902) answer to the questions
raised by the separation of self from persona and fantasy from reality.
Identity reflects environment, and the self is little more than a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

This leaves Anita, and other participants in the disembodiment of
intimacy, guilty of manipulating false differences between self and
persona in order to rationalize lapses of moral judgment.  Each
participant supplies nothing more than

J what the other expects and requires, what has been socially
preprogrammed

Most companies have boxes to which callers can mail gifts, letters, and
photos.  Operators often hinted at the moral ambiguity of gifts given
under false pretenses, but they also unselfconsciously rationalized
their decisions to take the gifts.

"I guess he really likes me" or "Apparently I made a really strong
impression on him."

These rationales were based on the supposition that the caller knew
them that they had offered some real part of themselves and had given
the caller something he needed so that a real exchange had taken place.
Throughout the interviews the same operators who were flattered by
being so well liked continued to assert that it was not they who
participated in the exchange.  When it was flattering or useful,
however, they did acknowledge real participation in the phone sex
interaction.

These layers of separation and denial are sedimentary evidence that we
all manufacture selves in accordance with what the circumstances
require.  When circumstances dictate that the self be salable, the
distances between real selves and manufactured ones are carefully
measured and assigned value in terms of profit and loss.  Still, there
is a need to fight for dignity within the work, a need to maintain
distance from the callers even and perhaps especially -while invoking
intimacy.  This ambivalence is not unique to sex workers, but has also
been observed between musicians and their audience, physicians and
their patients, and in many other fields as well (Hughes 1951).  Nancy
emphasized the importance of being able to separate self from
performance.

I could never do something like that with my actual self.  It's like,
when

I'm on the phone, I can separate it from my body, and my first instinct
is,

"This is where I stay."

When you're actually there, there's no way you can do it.  I guess
that's what prostitutes have to do.  They separate their body from
their self also.

I'm usually watching TV or reading.  Lots of times I don't even want to
hear them.  I do the thing down and just sit there talking.

The self is a manifestation of motivations.  One of the primary ways
of understanding a person other than through a self-description is to
examine the actions of the person apart from his or her statements.

True self is often sought as the director of the various selves, the
motivation behind the movement.

If the motivation of the participants shapes the selves they bring to
the interaction, the motivation instilled into the format of
interaction by the phone companies has a strong shaping influence on
the selves they create.  In the case of phone sex the string is
obvious.

The caller who pays by the minute has a different motivation than the
one who pays by the call.  If contact occurs the relationship sometimes
goes gratis, and in cyberspace neither party pays, but the medium still
influences the interaction they have.  It affects the information they
have about each other and the ambiance of their interaction, whether
they meet in a group or one on one.  Direct human contact is possible,
but the medium shapes the message, and human contact must travel
through the medium, or process, of disembodiment.

Mademoiselle's Barbara Harrison wrote that if "one has always suspected
that some men have regarded their sexual partners as a necessary evil,
this dial-a-fantasy reinforces the suspicion.  No mind, no heart, no
love."  The same suspicion cast by operators on all men is often cast
by observers on all disembodied intimacy.  To one who looks closely,
however, there is mind, heart, and love in some, certainly not all,
phone sex interactions.  There are moments of compassion and
satisfaction, gems among the rubble, which the serious miner will find.
Nancy was one of many operators who expressed valuable lessons she had
learned, and taught, through phone sex.

This job] makes me look at myself and my opinion of things.  It makes
me more understanding of other situations.  I seem on equal level to
people that I might not necessarily normally put myself.

The redeeming features of disembodied intimacy are hidden behind the
blatant self-interested ness that the process engenders.

The most obvious advantages are the advantages of manipulation and
deceit.  The virtues of phone sex and other forms of disembodied
intimacy easily pass unnoticed and are ignored or denied by those who
cling to traditional ideas of what love and sex "should" be.  Those who
are unwilling or unable to recognize new forms of intimacy see its
disembodiment as twisted, disfigured, and unsatisfactory

New instruments of disembodiment such as telephones and computers have
been heralded for their dissemination of information and channels of
communication.

People can communicate on a personal level beyond class, race,
cultural, and even language boundaries.  Yet other boundaries abound.
The operators I interviewed were very proud that they could immediately
sense the class, race, and cultural cues.  They could assess fields of
expertise and quiz their callers knowledge of vernacular in a wide
range of areas.

The disembodiment of intimacy does not change the important elements of
communication that detail identity.

All men and women are trained in the skills of phone sex.  Ordinary
conversational skills include both misrepresentations and
prevarications , evaluations of others honesty and accuracy, the
separation of an internal self from one's presentation of self, and
many judgments about the validity and consistency of the presentations
of others.

The technological advances that make phone sex possible have also made
clothing, music, entertainment, and food homogeneous virtually
worldwide.  The average urban American sees hundreds of people daily
whom she or he does not know on a personal basis.  She or he goes home
to familiar faces on television, and conducts imagined relationships
with media personalities.  David Letterman and

Oprah Winfrey are as familiar as old friends, and phantom relationships
can fulfill some of the needs traditionally met by friends and family.
Although one may prefer real intimate relationships, in their absence
these shadow bonds can be valuable connections to the world.

Further permutations of disembodied intimacy will accompany new
developments of technology.

Passing moral judgment on such forms is irrelevant.  The disembodiment
of intimacy does not affect just the phone sex participant or the
cyberspace user: it affects all who live in the modern world.

Disembodiment does not destroy real intimacy, nor does it destroy
reality or the important distinctions between real self and fantasy it
merely challenges the human spirit to rise above the limitations and
possibilities of both reality and fantasy.  The question whether we are
up to the challenge will be one of the more interesting issues of the
twenty-first century.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Cyril Feldstein, who showed me the adventurous side of
intellectual pursuits, to Ann and Jill, who showed me the darker side,
and to jane Feldstein, who demonstrated the benefits of tenacity.

This book could not have been finished without Rick Flowers,

who pushed and pulled me along through many discouraging and tedious
moments, and joshua who challenged me to prove that it can be done.

Barrie Thorne was instrumental in helping navigate through academic
ideas and bureaucracies, and I am grateful for her patient,

consistent guidance.

Patricia Smith offered great encouragement and hope, along with
glimpses into the opportunities and freedom of post-student writing.
The anonymous reviewers thoughtful and frank comments also helped shape
this project in its journey from manuscript to book.

Index

Advertising: for actresses, 15-16; for informants

, 23, 26-28, 69; for phone

sex consumers, 8-10, 61, 65-67, 72,

77,94, 111-113; for phone sex entrepreneurs

, 4

alienation, 1-3, 10-11, 89, 112

AT&T, 3-4,95,"2

Barrows, Sydney Biddle, 120

bestiality, 24, 32, 57, 64, 96

bilingual, 28

billing: credit card, 4-6, 72-73, 92-93,

99-100; fraudulent, 4-7, 46-48, 73;

methods, 4-7; usurious, 5-8, 15, 4648,52,94

career advancement, 14-16, 30-31

communication: between operators,

18-21, 38, 43, 45-48, 50, 53, 63; inexplicit

, 95-97, 108, 112-113; self protective

, 1-3, 30-31, 101-102

compensation: bonuses, 30, 32, 47-48;

hourly vs.  per call payment, 4-5, 15;

management's punitive withholding

of pay, 47-48; non monetary 55-57,

64, 95-96, 100-101, 122; pay, 14-15,

29-31, 47,59, 72-73, 95

Cooley, Charles Horton, 121-122

deception in research, 19-22

defecation, 14, 75, 119

demographics of informants, 28-29

Diner, Barry, 112 domination, 18, 37-38, 44, 55-57, 6769,90

Dowjones & Company, 7 drugs, 16,18, 55

Durkheim, Emile, 2,106

Dworkin, Andrea, 94,"3

Economist, 4, 8 emotional labor, 59, 100 employee turnover, 29
ethnography, 12-14, 32 exchange carrier, 4-10, 91, 112-113

fantasy: frequency of particular fantasy, 24,37,90-91,109; origins in
self, 2-3, 34-41,106,"2,"5,120-123; social origins,
3,15,41-42,90,108,"1-115;

therapeutic value, 49-50,108-109

31;&@d

FCC, 4, 8, 17, 47, 70

fetish, 19, 23, 24-25, 44, 82-83, 84

First Amendment, 8, 24

Fleiss, Heidi, 120

Foucault, 112

Freud, 111, 120

FrC, 4

gifts, 30, 32, 122

Coffman, Erving, 47,82-83,91,"3, 118 grounded theory, 31-33

Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 58, 89-90

Hughes, Everett, 42, 50,122 human subjects:

protection of, 20-23, informants: demographics of, 28-29;

payment of, 26; use of pseudonyms, 29-30 information providers,
410,"2-113

Leidner, Robin, 48-49, 58-59, 115-116

Limbaugh, Rush, 95-96 looking glass self, 121

Mademoiselle, 123

MCI, 3-4,7-8,"2

media accounts of phone sex, 95-96 meeting: of callers and operators,
43, 48, 64, 97-99,"6

Mills, C. Wright, 48,"8 moral boundaries:

operators lines of demarcation, 7576,"9,122-123

National Association for Information

Services (NAIS), 6-7 note taking, 62

Pacific Bell, 3, 7

PBX systems.  See technology: phone systems personal relationships,
54-57, 59-60, 74-75,92-93,96,"6-117 phone companies, 3-9, 17, 73, 123
phone sex industry.  See information providers pornography:

accessibility of, 24-25; industry , 3, 11, 25, 113;

magazines, 810 , 23-25, 44, 5556,"6-117; operators use of, 45-46, 55;

stores, 23-25 postmodern: view of self, 3,36,89-90,121 profit:
information providers , 10, 95;

phone companies , 49,95,126,134,prostitutes:

characteristics of, 96, 120 prostitution: operators involvement in, 16,
28, 57, 98;

similarity to phone sex, 19, 40, 50, 90-91, 94-95, 122 pseudonyms:
callers' use of, 91; in research, 20-21, 29-30; operators use

Mw of, 17, 45-46, 78 psychotherapist: operator as, 47-50

race: ability to transcend, 2, 124; bias in social science research,
13; elements in fantasy, 29, 40-42; of callers, 65; of operators, 39-42
recognition: of callers, 68, 99-101, 104;

of celebrities, 104; of detail in fantasy, 102-104; operators fear of,
64-65, 67-68, 82,103-104

Rubin, Gayle, 14, 24

script development, 15, 25-26, 45-46, 84,100,109,"5 self-description,
10, 34-37,40-42,93,108 self-disclosure, 13-14,19-20, 31 service bureau,
4, 7-9, 112-113 sexuality: operators personal, 54-57, 59-61, 116-119

Simmel, Georg, 2, 11 skills: callers , 67, 91; development, 2, 44-47,
85, 96, 107, 111-113; formal training, 17, 44, 113, 119-120; lack of,
17, 29, 44,124; necessary, 15-16, 45-46, 48, 50, 59; personality as a
source of, 45-46, 90-91 social construction: of reality, 11, 104105 ,
113; of self, 2-3, 11, 121-123 social fact, 106 stigma of sex work
13-14,30,42,"6-117 supervision of operators, 16-20, 47-48, 50, 73-74,
76,104 symbols of interaction, 11, 26, 106

technology: age of, 1-4,", 123-124;

phone systems, 4-8,124

T6nnies, Ferdinand, 2 transsexualism, 23, 28, 37, 55-56, 75, 98-99

Turkle, Sherry, 3, 106

U.S. Congress, 7-8, 15, 65, 73, 95 underage callers, 18, 52-53

JA

violence: against children, 24-25,71, 73,76