To pay her way through college, Lea Grover became a phone sex operator.
She had fantasies of giving her clients the girlfriend experience — of long, intimate and erotic conversations resulting in fat paychecks.
But professional phone sex is no fantasy. Lea quickly found that as far as sexual interactions go, it’s one of the most detached and unrewarding encounters.
She says men reveal their deepest, darkest desires to her, she listens to their pitiful moans as they ejaculate, and then, they hang up without so much as a thank-you.
What’s worse, as a professional phone sex operator, it’s difficult to make a lot of cash. Operators get paid based on how long they can keep clients on the phone. And unlike any other sex act, there’s no slow, dramatic build to climax.
“Most of the time, they’re already masturbating,” Lea explains, “and they just want to hear another person on the line as they finish.”
When Lea answers the phone to a man on the verge of orgasm, only managing to squeeze out two words before he jizzes and ends the call, her paychecks become pathetic.
“Making minimum wage to sit in your house and listen to other people ejaculate is a shitty job,” she admits.
In time, Lea came up with a solution. Instead of answering with a soft, sultry voice, she was all business.
“Hello, thank you so much for calling,” she’d recite. “Please, tell me more about your fantasy so we can pair you with the right girl. We have MILF, barely legal, and dominatrixes. Do you prefer bigger breasts or smaller breasts? Blonde? Redhead? Please, tell me your fantasy girl and we’ll get her on the line.”
This polite business-lady was a real boner-killer. But that was the point.
Business-lady Lea would make the men feel real awkward for jacking off into her ear, put them “on hold” while she fetched this fantasy girl, and once their erection was entirely deflated, answered as a different character. Then, they’d need her help to get their boner back on track.
“My job was to stop them from cumming, talk them down, then start the process all over again from scratch,” she says.
Lea was lucky to have discovered this strategy, because she never maintained any repeat callers. Other phone sex operators depend on repeat customers to pay the bills.
Tammy* is a phone sex professional who makes most of her money from “girlfriend experience” clients. She can keep these men on the phone for far longer than usual, talking about mundane nonsense like the books they’re reading or the TV shows they enjoy.
To establish those relationships, Tammy had to take on phone sex as an almost full-time gig. She’s not chatting for 40 hours a week, necessarily, but she is spending a ton of that time maintaining her “characters.”
Tammy has 24 different characters, and every single one of them requires a unique online presence, including individualized ads, blog posts and Twitter profiles. Every character is based on images of porn actresses who sold their photos to the phone sex company. “Their personalities range from shy, gentle schoolgirl to aggressive crack-whore,” Tammy explains.
Although the endless variety might sound like fun, “role playing all these different people really starts to mess with your psyche,” Tammy says. Eventually, it starts to feel like having multiple personalities, which is stressful.
Even more stressful, when a client calls Tammy’s phone, she has no way of knowing which character the guy is trying to reach. If they don’t immediately mention her name, she’ll have to coax it out of them. This can be difficult and awkward — not knowing which personality to emulate, and not giving any clues that she’s not the woman whose profile they’re jerking off to.
Tammy and Lea have different complications with the job. Tammy struggles to juggle dozens of characters while Lea struggles to keep men on the line, but both face the same bigger problem: phone sex lines are a playground for perverts.
“My phone sex company had a forbidden list of fantasies,” Grover says. “Incest, assault, pedophilia, beastiality. But clients would still demand, ‘Tell me you’re my daughter.’ It was gross … And gross doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Tammy, on the other hand, works for a “no taboo” phone sex service. She has to answer every call, even the ones from sex offenders and pedophiles.
“A huge amount of my calls are pedophilia,” Tammy explains, “and I think that’s because as a pedophile, you can’t get porn. You can’t get a picture or a video legally, but you can call somebody and talk to them about it. It’s not illegal.”
If a couple clients want to fantasize about children, you can’t help but worry that they might be having genuine urges. Of course, it’s possible they’re not. They might simply get off on playing with the taboo. But it’s scary — wondering whether or not they want to take that fantasy to the next level.
Far and away, being exposed to these types of creeps is the hardest part of professional phone sex. As Cathryn Berarovich, a sex work columnist for TheGloss.com, explains in her article, “On Having Phone Sex with Pedophiles”:
“One of the most difficult parts of working in one of the more fantasy-based channels of the sex industry is the way it exposes you to the darkest aspects of male lust. It can be hard, sometimes, to remember that not all men are horrible, that they don’t all want to eat shit or fuck children or ask you if you’ve ever fucked a dog and then try to convince you that you absolutely should fuck a dog. For me, at least, that was the most difficult part of working as a phone sex operator. I was already lonely, isolated, and bitter and this private view into the most secret desires of sick men … wasn’t helping.”
Lea and Tammy have no regrets about their time spent as phone sex operators. In this day and age, anybody can watch some low-res porn video, download explicit pics, or even flip through vintage Playboy Magazines. But these women offer an intimate one-on-one experience.
“People want access to phone sex because they don’t feel like they’re allowed to talk with sex about anyone else,” Lea explains.
Tammy echoes this sentiment. “All too often, people are alone with their fetishes and just need validation and someone to share it with," she says.
That’s likely why the phone sex industry has survived to this day. Even in the golden age of internet porn, there will always be a demand for sexual validation.
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