by Taylor Marsh
Looking back through the high-tech lens of today, it’s laughable all the notes I had on how to get into the intricate phone system, learning to log on and get into the right group for my shift. I have no idea how it all works today.
I’d be on the phone with Pepper, Lace and Mona, which I remember, because I recounted the event briefly in the self-published story I wrote. It chronicles my initial three-day phone sex venture, as well as my year in soft-core smut, when I was contemplating compiling all of my experiences about writing and working in the sex and relationship industries into a book, which was all blown away on 9/11.
The average call for me lasted fifteen minutes, which was short compared to the others. The call back then cost $3.95/minute. Frankly, I was awful at this, and longer calls were just torture for me. At first I tried to give guys elaborate fantasies, when all they wanted to do was get off. During this foray, I never got the nerve to actually finesse the conversation to ask them questions about sex, which is why I’d done this in the first place. It didn’t take me long to know that this wasn’t going to happen. That changed the whole experience, because I wasn’t doing it for the money. I needed answers to questions about Jeffrey that only men could provide, and I couldn’t think of a better platform to work it on, because the web didn’t exist, and it wasn’t like talking to my guy friends was going to get to the brutal truth. I was handling my own stuff, but I desperately needed to know why Jeffrey was choosing to play with his pretty paper dolls over me.
One guy actually did call up just to talk. He was having trouble with his relationship and didn’t know what to do. Now, you never know about these things, either back when phone sex was really big, or today in the social media era. What people are telling you may or may not be the truth, unless there is an in-person component and you know the person. Sometimes you can tell when someone is being straight; it’s in their voice and the specifics or in the subject they’ve brought up.
This guy didn’t know what to do because his fiancée kept harping on his small penis. He was devastated to learn what she thought and confused about what he should do about it. What does a man do when the woman he wants to marry says his penis doesn’t satisfy her? There are a lot of ways a woman can be satisfied, with many women not able to orgasm through penetration alone. Besides, women will take passion over size any day. He still felt he had a decision to make on whether to marry her or not, which I sure as hell couldn’t answer for him.
Size isn’t how women pick their mate, but studies have proven the guy had reason to be concerned, especially since the girl he was in love with was vocal about her dissatisfaction. A large penis does affect attractiveness for women. Alert the media!
In April 2013, the National Academy of Sciences released their findings, which NBC News reported: The human male possesses the Italian designer faucet of penises. They’re pretty big, the biggest of any primate’s, relative to body size. And they’re showy, too, right out there, front and center on our upright bodies (i.e., they don’t retract), as if they were meant to be seen as part of the décor. Why? A study released recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers an explanation: Women are attracted to penises, and the bigger the better. “Penis size does affect attractiveness,” lead author Brian Mautz, a University of Ottawa post-doctoral researcher said in an NBCNews.com interview.
Also discussed in the NBC News article is what Emory University neuroscientist Larry Young, co-author with Mautz of the book The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction, discovered: “Young argues that the big human penis evolved into a tool meant to stimulate both the vagina and cervix as a way [to] trigger the release of oxytocin in a woman’s brain, activating bonding circuits. Such bonds provide a survival advantage to offspring.”
Once I dated a man who happened to be a lawyer for the most powerful celebrities in Hollywood. Phillip had a very small penis. I’m talking little-finger tiny. The guy was charming as could be, and it never stopped him. He had women coming and going from his apartment while we were supposed to be “in love,” before I found out that he just wasn’t that into me.
It’s amazing how many times he telegraphed that message to me, but I had never heard it before that, and I just wasn’t listening. His words didn’t make a dent until, reduced to spying on him, sitting in my car one night outside his apartment after he had said he didn’t feel like getting together and added, “You deserve a lot better than me.” I saw him with a blonde through his window. Boy, was his kiss-off an understatement! He had warned me in innumerable ways, but my ego wouldn’t hear it.
Phone sex remains the oddest of the realms I traversed. There’s something very traditional and comforting, safe, about phone sex. Anonymous connection allows for expressing yourself in a way you likely wouldn’t if the person you’re talking to were in front of you. When two people know each other it can open up a safe passageway for exploration. If you have a long-distance relationship, or if you travel for work, phone sex is a perfect way to keep connected. It can be delicious. It can even jump start a relationship that’s stalled, as long as the attraction is still alive. It can give you an avenue to divulge secret fantasies.
When I tried phone sex the second time during the weeks before 9/11, I was scheduled for the barely legal lines, which meant I was supposed to act like I was eighteen. The results were humiliating. I’d get more click-offs per minute than was allowed to keep me working on a shift. I heard, “Okay, you’re done for tonight, see you tomorrow” a lot. Click-offs, as I called them, were guys dropping in to different chat lines to see who was on and if she was worth spending their money on. Some men came on looking for a specific phone sex actress to see if she was working the current shift. When I tried to get my voice to sound younger, I just sucked at it, so I was only put on that exchange if the lines were jammed on a very busy night. Barely legal lines were huge moneymakers, which I doubt I have to explain.
More than one man would come on the lines to explain a sexual scenario that included a fantasy with a fourteen-year-old or some age near or even under puberty. I couldn’t do it, so I simply didn’t indulge him, making sure he clicked off and went to another line, because the natural intonation of my voice revealed a woman who was anything but barely legal. “Barely legal” meant just that, and some callers wished we didn’t even meet that standard. One guy talked about a scenario where he was in the living room of his house watching a young teenage girl play outside his window, with his fantasy never resulting in anything but his lust being quenched by his own actions.
I’m in no way naive to the ways teenage girls manipulate men of their own free will, ignoring their underage status to flirt, tease and titillate, while completely underestimating the possible ramifications of their actions if they meet an immoral man with no impulse control. Rarely do we make allowances for the willful indulgence teen girls allow men who are older, even if they don’t know what they’re unleashing.
Back when I delved into phone sex, we had monitors who would pop onto the lines and listen in to make sure we were doing our job. But when you’re new, they also make sure you’re getting the hang of keeping the caller on the line. A big part of it is getting a sense of the caller as quickly as you can. Some guys call in already hot and ready, so it’s quick no matter what you do. They may have gotten just about to blow on another line, clicking over to hear another voice.
It seems like a lifetime ago.
But the goal I had when I was a phone sex actress wasn’t focused on keeping the guy on the line to make the phone sex company money or to keep the job, which I knew I would. They always needed people, and I was good enough from the get-go and showed up for my shift, so I knew I’d pull it off and wouldn’t get fired. There was one girl who kept tabs on me, and we came close to verbal blows a couple of times, because she didn’t like that I’d distract the men by asking them questions about women and sex instead of just talking sex. She threatened to fire me continually, but what did she
care that the guys liked talking about sex even if it wasn’t the normal call? The money still rang up.
The goal for me was to get guys to talking about what I wanted to know. I knew I’d also have to talk dirty to get them off, but the tricky part was getting information on each caller so I could get a clue about who these men were — were they dating a girl, married or not, and why did they enjoy phone sex if they had a woman at home? What kind of man was calling, and what did he do for a living? What did he think about women?
I talked to business professionals, blue-collar workers, lawyers and lots of truckers, according to what they said. Most of the callers had a wife or steady girlfriend, with none of the men thinking that phone sex remotely harmed their marriages or other monogamous relationships. Having talked to women for years about any number of sexual topics, I knew this was bullshit as far as most women were concerned.
If Jeffrey had preferred phone sex to porn magazines, would it have made a difference? The problem for me wasn’t the pornography; it was that he wasn’t having sex with me.
There were the phone sex pros, the supervisors who ran the shifts at the phone sex call center and were very kind to me when they monitored a particularly rough — meaning long — call, and came on the line to soothe my nerves. When, after my initiation into the phone sex actress scene, I began getting talkers who would stay on the call for an hour, the pros started treating me differently.
After about a week, I was left pretty much alone on my calls. The first three days were as bad as it gets, because I couldn’t keep anyone on the line for long. I wondered if I’d just have to bail on the idea in the first place. But phone sex was the only avenue I hadn’t fully excavated, my first stint ending way too quickly to really learn anything substantive. I couldn’t give up yet.
One of the things the guys loved to talk about, which I always initiated through what became a logical and easy ice-breaker, was why they were calling in the first place. The majority of the men called the lines to get what they couldn’t get at home. They wanted a fantasy their girlfriends or wives wouldn’t provide. Sometimes the guy admitted he hadn’t even asked her to try. He was sure she’d say no. That says a lot, now, doesn’t it? The biggest complaint was the lack of variety in their sex lives. This was a common and regular refrain.
Oddly, it actually didn’t take much to get the guys to open up and talk about their lives and how lonely they were in their relationships. They slid from sex to their emotional lives in a stroke, feeling safe, for whatever reasons, opening up on a phone sex line to a woman they didn’t know. That’s the nucleus of anonymous connection, however it happens. The fake intimacy and lack of required reciprocation allowed the formation of a weird attachment, a bond from the caller to the phone sex actress, if only for the short time we were on the call. For both sides on the phone sex line, when the caller hung up or clicked off, it was over. There was no trace of evidence the call had occurred, except, of course, on the guy’s phone bill, though there are ways to get around that, too. The bill didn’t hint that the call was for phone sex.
One hilarious call came from a man who said he was a trader on the Chicago Exchange. I recalled this conversation and the others in my one-woman show, Weeping for JFK, which dealt with President Kennedy and the sexy ’60s when he reigned. The guy had called in to encourage, then teach me how to pierce my genitalia. He became a regular for a week or so, as we went through the histrionics of why I should pierce my labia and the benefits sexually if I did.
At one point, when I had convinced him I was ready to do it, he took me through all of the steps, one at a time, after guiding me in previous calls what I’d need to accomplish piercing my genitalia, something that didn’t remotely interest me. Once I launched into the effort it was an acting performance that would have had my friends screaming with laughter if they’d been on the line listening:
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be, I’m right here with you, baby.”
“It’s going to hurt, right?”
“It will be worth it, trust me.”
Ditsy now had a new definition in my mind, which included this character I conjured up so I could ask the guy with the piercing genitalia fetish about his love life. Like most of my callers, he was married. His wife had no clue he called the lines. He also claimed to be faithful to her. Phone sex wasn’t actual sex to him. It also allowed him to feel free to mess around on the phone without hurting anyone, at least in his mind, and it was safe.
One man who became a regular with me alleged he was a computer programmer from South Carolina. The guy, whom I’ll call Carl, was a cross-dresser whose wife had known about it since they’d gotten married and had said she was okay with it. Carl liked to wear women’s clothing when not at work, and did so almost exclusively in his life outside his job, including when he and his wife went out. However, he’d just learned that his wife was having an affair with another man. He was devastated.
Carl called regularly, three to four times a week for a month to chat. That’s all, just chat. A caller would click on and, like clockwork, eventually I heard, “Taylor?” He’d called looking for me, seeing if I was on this shift.
If Carl missed a day or two, when he’d finally call in, he was a basket case and filled with all sorts of news. One call was particularly entertaining, which came shortly after he called to say he’d gotten over losing his wife. The euphoria he exuded on the phone was the high before the crash, but it was almost enjoyable. The entire conversation was about the shopping spree he’d done once he’d come to grips that one upside of it all was not having to work so hard to balance a marriage with a lifestyle he wanted to enjoy fully, but couldn’t. He also ended up admitting that his wife had shown signs of weariness for his choices much earlier than he wanted to acknowledge.
Isn’t that the way it always is. We know in our hearts something is off, but we can’t accept it, so we deny it until we’re ready to face it.
Now, I’m not an expert on sexual choices in life or in what a person is driven to own because of biology. I’m just talking about the interaction I had with an individual who actually chose phone sex lines to express his feelings, and perhaps seek some sort of solace, regarding his lifestyle choices and how they impacted his marriage.
Eventually Carl crashed.
After the exuberance subsided, Carl called and we talked and talked about why it had gone so wrong. He’d been honest with her and she’d accepted and married him, so why the betrayal? Why had it ended so badly? I listened mostly, but also felt I did have some knowledge that he should consider. The most obvious observation was that she had once loved him very much or she wouldn’t have made the compromise to be with him in the first place. They didn’t have children, so it wasn’t like that was an issue. They’d discussed it, but that’s not where either of them was focused at the time. People change, especially when the two of them had such wide differences at the start.
The other issue was that what seemed like a good idea at first had become too much for her in marriage. Theories about how a relationship will work in close quarters are one thing. How you actually navigate it once you’re in it are another. Clearly, his wife wanted something else now, maybe because the years had added up and she just wanted out.
Then Carl called one day to say his wife had asked him for a divorce, ending their marriage for good. He barely got the words out when he burst into tears. I had once questioned whether the scenario I was listening to was real, but now, suddenly, there could be no doubt. Of course, the tears didn’t prove Carl was a cross-dresser, but they did signal definite trouble in a life where a man was lonely enough to reach out to a phone sex operator, even if he was using some sort of code to talk through his crisis.
That’s the thing about phone sex. It’s this surreal world where men phone in and have an anonymous, drive-by, sexual collision with a woman, which sometimes becomes a regular thing. I tried to take all sorts of different shifts, because the calls were different in every time
zone.
Sam sounded elderly and called very late at night. He used a variety of different names, but because he called so often, I could recognize his voice. I talked to him whenever they scheduled me in the wee hours of the morning. The calls Sam and I had were always long and included a host of characters as wide as I could think up. He’d say things like, “Who’s that over there?” and I’d have to come up with a scenario. It was ludicrous at times. He’d throw in all sorts of descriptions that created roles for a menagerie cast of six or more types of sexual partners, everything from buxom twins to a gorgeous transvestite to animals, which quickly caused me to jettison out of the conversation. It may have been his dime, but that was simply a bridge too far for Miss Missouri.
Sam had a wife, but she went to bed early, he said, which enabled him to play on the phone sex lines late into the night. He would invariably reintroduce his favorite farm animals, but I never played along. Bestiality is something I just can’t get my head around at all, not even on the phone. I don’t even like “furries,” those people who dress up in animal costumes and have sex, sometimes with another costumed person, sometimes with a partner who’s naked.
As many calls as I did in the six weeks or so I was a phone sex actress, it still amazes me all of the time I spent just talking to the guys. Invariably, the conversation would begin with asking me what I looked like. If I wasn’t quick and direct about it, they’d click off. The illusion of the fantasy being real was critical, even if the whole dance was in his head. Big boobs you’d think would be the big thing, but it wasn’t. It was making the picture real and being real while making it. The voice was a very big deal, too, and one reason the barely legal lines, which were the busiest, were a bust for me.