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ASK A PHONE WHORE: “what is a misconception people have about your job?”

ASK A PHONE WHORE is a semi-regular feature, appearing whenever I get a good question. Anything you want to know about my phone work, ask away! Make sure to read through the archives here to see if I’ve already addressed your question in a previous post, or to see if I’ve written about something already and you have follow-up questions. I may set up a separate page here to solicit questions, or maybe just put a widget up, but for now I’ll be running my mail bag over on Facebook.

Q. What is a misconception people have about your job?

Oh, god. I’m going to do a Top-5 list, and maybe later I’ll tackle each one in a separate post, because there are so many it’s tough to know where to start.

These misconceptions have spread pretty freely, owing to how phone sex operators and the work that we do are depicted in popular culture: films, TV, music videos, etc. And they aren’t easily stopped because not a lot of phone sex operators talk about the work publicly. Phone sex is the most anonymous of jobs in the general category of sex work, which means that we can choose to not talk about it if we want to.

I choose to talk about it. Lucky you.

Before I go into the list, though, I want to point out that the real problem with misconceptions and stereotypes is not that they aren’t true. Because they often are, for some PSOs. The problem is that they are taken for truth, for all PSOs everywhere.

So here is my Top-5 list of Misconceptions People Have About Professional Phone Sex.

5) We do other things while talking on the phone. I pretty thoroughly discussed this here. This is me and the way my mind works or doesn’t work. I am sure there are other PSOs who can multitask, but I can’t. (This also doesn’t include the category of calls where the client wants the operator to be doing other things and ignoring them. It’s a kind of low-impact humiliation thing, I think.)

4) We get off while doing calls. I am sure that some PSOs do, but I do not. I just can’t  keep track of my own turn-on and the callers at the same time (see above). And really, I can count on three fingers the callers I’ve had whose phone presence and fantasies mesh and/or intersect with mine enough to get me off.

3) We can take our calls anywhere. In the awful movie Valentine’s Day, the phone-sex-operator character gets into laugh-a-minute hijinks because she keeps getting calls at awkward moments, in awkward places. Once, when I was talking about how touring cuts down on my availability, a fellow operator asked why I didn’t take calls while I was driving. To which I answered, I can’t multitask like that (see above). I think that for some independent operators, the ones who specialize in long-format domination or Girlfrend Experience calls, the talking-while-driving could be an option. But for me, not. As far as taking the calls anywhere, I would never want to run the risk of inflicting my side of the conversation on an unsuspecting eavesdropper. You’ve read my Call of the Day posts, right?

2) We are too ugly and/or fat to do in-person sex work. Ugly is a relative term, and I know plenty of fatties who do, in fact, do in-person sex work. While phone sex, like any phone-based work, is a good place for women with great voices and bodies that don’t fit into conventional notions of attractiveness, we cover the entire range of body types. And who cares what the person on the other end looks like, anyway? It’s a voice and a fantasy.

1) We wear pajamas all day. Okay, I do that. But I know other PSOs who shower and get dressed and sit down at their desks in their separate phone-sex offices, and take lunch breaks, the works. These operators tend to be the ones with more control over their work flow, that is, they are independents or working for a combination company, where they need to be putting out blog posts or do podcasts or troll chat rooms to boost their call volume, so they’ve got tasks other than waiting for the phone to ring. They’ve set up their work environment to support that level of productivity, in a way that works for them.

Me? I figure I can just as easily write this post in my kitty pajama bottoms and thin t-shirt and no bra.

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If you liked this post, be sure to browse around some more. I’ve been blogging about my work in phone sex for almost four years, since six months after I started in April 2009. And if you live in the UK, you’ll have a chance this year to hang out with me while I’m on call! Okay, not really, but that’s what my award-winning solo play Phone Whore feels like, and I’m bringing it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Aug. 1-25, and then to five other UK cities through mid-September. Follow those links to read all about the tour and my show, and if you do make it out, come up and say hi!