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A reluctant superhero

I’m saving the world!

That’s what you might think, hearing the way some people talk after seeing Phone Whore. Their comments run something along the lines of, “I’m glad you’re talking with them, keeping them on the phone, rather than them having no one to talk to and just being out there.” One person actually came up to me after a show one time and thanked me “for keeping those guys off the streets.”

There is a lot of coded language happening there, but here’s what I’m guessing these people mean: if I weren’t providing my callers with a vent, keeping them in here, they would be out there, raping women and children and ponies, plundering their way across the landscape with savage glee.

I understand people’s urge to think of my callers that way. It’s a way of othering them, of placing them and their fantasy life firmly on the other side of some shifting line. That’s them, they’re dangerous, people think, and I am nothing like that.

And that way of thinking is a mistake.

It’s a way of scapegoating, of placing real or perceived societal issues on somebody else so that the lines remain clear, so that we don’t have to think about what fantasies could be happening all around us, in anyone’s head, so that we don’t get weirded out by the possibility that we are SURROUNDED by pervs, that we ourselves may fall in that category for someone else.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t believe that my callers would go out and re-enact their fantasies on real people (or real puppies), but for the magical protective power of phone sex. I think, in the vast majority of cases, my callers are just playing around the outer edge of their zone. They’re fiddling with the fringe of sexual fantasy. They want to feel edgy, or they enjoy the adrenaline rush of playing with taboo, and talking about dogs or fishhooks in delicate bits or video store trysts, or entire kindergartens full of giggling little girls, that’s all incredibly taboo, and just thinking about it, if that’s their fantasy, is enough to get A FUCKING RUSH.

If they had someone in their life who they felt comfortable sharing their fantasies with, that would be better. Certainly cheaper. If there were no such thing as phone sex, that would be worse, but not intolerable. Sure, it’d be a sad thing, but they wouldn’t be out there plundering and pillaging.

I don’t worry about my callers. I worry about Weird Uncle Bill at the family reunion, who may or may not be using phone sex. I don’t know, just like I don’t know which, if any, man in this café I’m at right now is a child molester. I have a much keener sense of the range of male sexual fantasy, and I get to sit with that knowledge all the time. If anything, that is my superpower, and that’s not even a power, that’s just the perspective gained from sheer call volume.

So don’t thank me. I’m not the fire department of fantasy land. I’m more like a sexual caretaker, sitting on the sidelines and watching while guys play around in their mental sandbox. I help them out and call out encouragement, get down in the middle of it and play with them, and then help them put it all away again at the end. That’s it. They are the only ones I serve, not society, not the safety of your children, not the structure of your carefully ordered world. And my callers already thank me for services rendered, most of them.

So, you know, I’m all good. Thanks anyway.

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