The Forgotten History of the Phone Sex Industry

Way Before We Had Any Kind of Internet Porn, There Were Phone Sex Hotlines

When we think about sex, we typically think about bodies — penises, vaginas, anuses, mouths, hands, breasts, and so forth — intertwined in a given space. But did you know there are ways to excite the brain, our body’s biggest sex organ, that don’t involve very much at all?

That’s the beauty of phone sex, a practice that’s been with us for about as long as the phone has that bypasses visual and tactile stimuli for oral ones: dirty talk, sensual breathing, sexy role-play. In the 1990s, developing phone technology lead to a surge in the phone sex industry where people called hotlines in order to speak to professional dirty talkers.

It was a great way to have a one-on-one erotic experience with a sex worker without all the trickiness of meeting someone in person and touching them with your body. You could do it according to a schedule that suited you, from a place that was convenient, and it also cost a lot less. Then internet porn came along, and instead of people wanting to listen to see, they wanted to see sex (and doing so was easier than ever before).

So what happened to this lucrative business model that paved the way for online porn as we know it? Well, we’re going to get into that.

In order to better understand phone sex, history of the phone sex industry, and their relationship it has to our contemporary erotic lives, AskMen spoke with Tina Horn, a former sex worker and host of the Operator”podcast.

Briefly, how would you define phone sex as it occurs in a sex work context?

Tina Horn: Professional phone sex is when adults exchange money or anything of value for an interactive live erotic service over the phone.

Those services could be dirty talk, fantasy talk, romantic talk, [or] anything the caller is interested in and the operator/worker consents to (and that federal and corporate regulations allow). As all sex workers know, the pretense of erotic services often come with the expectation of emotional labor and companionship.

The term is a little complicated now as we consider how our “phones” now contain a multitude of communication platforms that can include texting, images, video. But in the context of the 1990’s setting of Operator, “phone” meant a landline, and phone sex meant a worker in a call center talking to a paying caller on a physical phone, with a cord and everything!

Phone sex is sex work, but it’s a very disembodied kind. How does that affect what it’s like/who participates/etc.?

You could say it’s disembodied, or you could say a worker is influencing a client’s body using technology, and potentially vice versa. I’m not trying to be contrary, but the mechanics of a voice and an ear are part of the body! It’s the same with pre-recorded videos, or live cam shows. And something I can tell you for sure is that all kinds of people do all kinds of sex work.

I do think that when it comes to explaining the influence that American Tellnet (ATN) had on the sex industry, there were likely middle-class clients who patronized a sex worker for the first time because they felt calling a phone sex line from the relative safety and comfort of their home.

Maybe these same people had felt uncomfortable going to a strip club or the back room of a video store because they had preconceived notions of those places being seedy or dangerous.

Can you sketch out a brief history of the phone sex industry for us?

Pay-per-call as a new commercial technology was all the rage in the early ’90s. Anything that would have a social media account now had a pay-per-call line back then: pop music, fictional characters, psychics. And of course, adult entertainment.

The thing that made ATN so successful was that they took phone sex seriously as a business, investing in technology that made calls more efficient. So clients as big as Playboy or as small as some guy who was lucky enough to own 1-900-HOT-TITS could use the technology and business acumen and sexual labor that ATN provided.

They were wildly successful for about a decade; to hear about the melodramatic rise and fall of the business you’ll have to listen to the podcast!

The sex industry has a fascinating relationship to technology, historically, often being at the forefront of new digital/communications tech. Are there any instances of the phone sex industry adopting or otherwise being involved in new phone technology or payment technology as it was being developed?

Absolutely. ATN’s technology department was on the cutting edge of things we take for granted today, like phone menus, voice recognition, even artificial intelligence. And a lot of the things that came up with had to do with getting around business issues that emerge in a sex-phobic society.

For example, clients of adult entertainment have long had success with claiming fraud for services they genuinely received (because they get embarrassed or caught lying after the fact), because credit card companies don’t want to even talk about porn. These are called “chargebacks” and they cost the sex industry a lot of money. ATN used collect-call loopholes and a bunch of other automated programming to side step these scammers; it’s part of what made them so rich.

What forms of sex work/online sex culture today can trace their roots back to phone sex history/culture, and how?

Basically everything on the internet, especially anything interactive. By the early ’00s, most telecommunication technology was moving online. Nowadays, sex workers are able to use online content creation platforms to connect with customers, [meaning] they have more control as entrepreneurs, but it also means they don’t have rich employers like ATN to take on the brunt of ever-shifting anti-porn federal and corporate regulations.

In the past two decades, internet porn has taken center stage. But what does phone sex look like today, and what do you think it might look like in the future?

There are online platforms that facilitate phone sex, as well as text chatting. I’m glad you asked about the future because my other big project right now is a science fiction comic book series called SfSx: Terms of Service, which is a cyber-thriller about sex work in the future, so I think about this quite a lot!

I think we could see immersive cyberspace experiences like Star Trek’s Holodeck, and we could have sex robots at elaborate brothels like in Westworld. But there’s a lot of tech that needs to be developed, a lot of criminalization we need to address, and a lot of ethical philosophy we need to work out in our culture before interactive sci-fi tech becomes commonplace.

Dirty Emojis and How to Use Them
The Best Sexting Apps
How to Have Cybersex

Source: AskMen