Blog

ASK A PHONE WHORE: how do PSOs learn or improve on their skills?

Psychopathia Sexualis... VOLUME ONE?

Psychopathia Sexualis… VOLUME ONE?

I don’t know about other phone sex operators. I personally started out pretty kinky, but that wasn’t nearly enough. My company had me listen in on two phone calls, and then they threw me in. I have heard about some companies with extensive training periods, and other companies with no eavesdropping period at all; they just put you on the lines straightaway. So I guess my company was somewhere in the middle there.

This (non)approach to training goes a long way toward explaining the high attrition rate in phone sex employment: in the sink-or-swim model, a lot of people just sink. The fact that I was still afloat after that kind of intro meant only that I had just enough skill to float. I had a baseline minimum for being able to work in phone sex, but I quickly found out that basics are not going to get you regulars. I needed to get good, or at the very least, better.

So I found my way to an online industry forum for PSOs. What worked for me there in that community wasn’t so much skill-sharing—I mean, there are lots of tips and tricks about sound effects that are fun, but I just never used them—as much as just normalizing my experiences. From hearing other PSOs’ stories, I got a sense of all the different types of callers that were out there and, at the same time, I got to a quicker understanding that many of the customer archetypes and antics are the same.

Some of my continuing education has taken place on the Internet, specifically FetLife. “Like Facebook, but for kinksters,” is one of the things they float out as a tagline. It’s very little like Facebook, thankfully: one well-chosen picture from Fetlife would shut down Facebook for, like, 12 hours.  They also have pretty well established writing collections, and if you join special-interest groups and behave well, people are generally pretty good with providing you directions for other Internet destinations that you might like. I turned to Fetlife for help with fetishes like cuckolding and race play; these are things that I had heard about, but couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around the attraction on my own.

Everything else that I’ve learned boils down to one thing I’ve learned: how to listen. That is by far the most important skill for a phone sex operator. And that, they don’t really teach at all.

No Comments
Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.