Abby Moss writes about how the phone sex business works, using the experience of her mother who needed money and had failed at many attempts to get a ‘normal’ job. Moss explains a puzzle, and that is how these paid services survive in an era of free pornography on the internet.
I was confused about how phone sex lines still get business. Sex lines are expensive; lots and lots of porn is available for free. It turns out that making sure the experience is realistic is key: If you can make it feel real, really real, suddenly you’re offering something PornHub can’t.
…Cheryl runs her own sex line company, Hushes. She asked me not to use her last name, but said that she started the business after over a decade of phone sex experience and now employs a team of other women. And she’s not doing it for pocket change, either.
“The rule of thumb in the adult industry is that if you aren’t making at least $100,000 in a year then you’re wasting your time,” she told me. She pays her employees around 60 percent of the per minute call charge-more than double what they’d expect to earn working for a big company.
Moss’s mother and other older women tend to make better phone-sex operators perhaps because they’ve seen and heard pretty much everything and little shocks them anymore. While the women who answer the phones tend not to see anything wrong with what they do, society’s taboos still hold them back from being open about their jobs.
While most of the women I spoke to were proud of their work and happy to discuss all the dirty details with me, they weren’t about to let me publish their name. It’s easy to see why: Whether it helps to pay the gas bill or finances your dream home, the taboo around any kind of sex work is still there. Mistress Susan told me she’d never reveal her second job to her work colleagues, for fear of being fired. “It’s seen as no different to being a prostitute,” she said.
For Miller, this taboo is the only thing stopping more women her age from making a great living. Society still has a problem with women expressing sexual autonomy-even more so if they’ve got the gall to be paid for it-and people get even more squeamish if the person involved is a 40-something-year-old mother who picks her kids up from school.
…As for my mom, she quit phone sex once she’d fixed her finances, preferring her current job at a charity that supports recovering drug addicts. Does she regret her time as a phone sex operator? “Of course not,” she told me. “You know, I wish I’d thought of it years ago.”
It is a fascinating article.
It works for the same reason that bartenders listen to sad drunks. A friend of mine used to do the phone sex chat; she did very well at it. Her regulars were mostly people who were unhappy with their lives, seeking intimacy.
Perhaps if our society had better avenues for psychological talk therapy, or was more embracing of the week and sad and scared, sex chat workers would be respected more than they are.
The most shocking thing about that article to me was realizing that when they say “older women”, they’re talking about women in their 40s…
This reminded me of the movie Irina Palm. in which Marianne Faithfull plays “Maggie, a 50-year-old widow, who desperately needs some money to pay for a medical treatment for her sick grandson”.
I want to say that doing a phone sex job is not a bad thing. That’s a different way to make money for those who can do that easily. Consider the fact that some people and spealy men need to have sex on the phone to feel better and becaus they are seeking self esteem and reason to live. People want to life the way they way they want, that’s all.
Laura