August 26th, 2009
Nature or Nurture? or, how to raise a phone whore
One thing about training for phone sex work is that mostly, it doesn’t exist. They toss some supposed transcripts of calls at us, maybe a few lists of synonyms for “vagina” and “penis”, and throw us in. My current company let me listen to three or four phone calls before I started, and I could ask questions of the operator after. At the time I thought that was … insufficient, but after hanging out on a PSO forum and reading about the experiences of other PSOs, I realized my good fortune.
A couple of different schools of thought emerged in this thread about training. One was that just about anybody could learn to be a decent PSO, if they had proper training. The other camp basically believe in survival of the fittest; throw your candidates into the deep end of this really scary, dank pond, they say, and see who resurfaces.
It sounds harsh, but I’m starting to appreciate the sink-or-swim approach. I mean, look at the skill set needed for PSO work: outgoing, talkative, mentally flexible, sexually open, unflappable. It’s not even a skill set, is it? It’s a personality profile, emerging from life experience in a way that is difficult to trace and impossible to replicate. Like morel mushrooms or edible acorns, they show up where they show up. You can’t grow them, you just appreciate them when you find them.
So actually, I don’t know how to raise a PSO. (That’s just as well; I don’t think there’s a lot of call for that parenting manual.) But the folks who would try to train people for the lines, their “training packets” are not helpful, either…. “Be yourself.” “Follow their lead.” “Keep ‘em talking.” How? HOW?? If the rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of conversation with strangers doesn’t come naturally to you already, it sure as shit isn’t going to suddenly happen when you’re talking about shoving a dirty dildo into someone’s mouth.
The truth is, every decent-to-good PSO needs those traits, but we all get there in different ways. Me? I got my go-get-’em chops and assertive voice from being raised in a big family, doing activism, living through a sequence of unlikely personal choices that blew the doors off my sexuality. Someone else might come to it after a lonely childhood, two marriages, and four years of telesales. There’s no pattern to it, no sequence of learnings that can be recorded and slipped into a training module.
So we stumble into the deep end, all of us newbies, and some of us, somehow, get our heads above water and breathe. It’s a messy way to recruit, but it might be the only way.