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ASK A PHONE WHORE: Do you ever get any female callers?

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: Do you ever get any female callers?

No. I have a box full of caller index cards, 11 inches deep, and none of those cards has a female name on the top. Three times I have spoken with a woman on a call; on all three occasions, they were there because their husband or boyfriend had brought them into the call, and twice those calls were abnormally hideous, so those don’t count in my book. I have heard anecdotally of women calling other PSOs, but those are exceptions that prove the rule: on the whole, women interested in sex with other women do not use phone sex lines.

Before you ask, gentlemen: nor is there any demand for male PSOs to talk with women.

Oh yes, I have some theories about why that is. Mind you, I’m not a psychologist or sexologist or sociologist or anything like that, but I have had four and half years of active duty, and three and a half of touring Phone Whore and discussing this question with audiences, so actually, my guess is at least as good as yours, if not better. I have so many educated guesses that I’m handling this question in two parts. (I might add a 2b if necessary.)

Before I get started, here is my one assumption about why men turn to phone sex:

They have sexual needs that, for whatever reason, they cannot get met. It could be a temporary lack, like, the wife is away for week, but in many cases we are talking about experiences or language or fantasies that they cannot get in their lives, and would like to explore.

PART 1: WOMEN CAN GET THOSE NEEDS MET MORE EASILY.
I don’t mean we all do, always, or that our fantasies or desires or what we might be lacking in our face-to-face sex are so different from men’s, either in content or intensity. I mean, we have more outlets for exploring that stuff, and talking about it with others.

Let’s face it, women have been pushing the envelope for decades around sexual awareness. I’m thinking of consciousness-raising groups in the 60s, and checking out each other’s cervixes in the 70s. Activists are out there, raising a ruckus about enthusiastic consent. However much we are constricted in other ways, there is space in our world for women to ask questions, to try things out, to kiss other girls, to openly admire other women’s bodies, to read Cosmo sex tips and avidly discuss them with our friends, or just talk with each other. Women are socialized to talk more freely about emotions and all that gooey inner stuff; we are given strokes for caretaking around relationships, and that includes sex.

Now, all of this may be considered girl talk or gossip, and therefore not taken seriously, or given research funding. We still tend to be the best (worst!) policers of each other’s sexual behavior. There is a fairly set range of sexual talk and behavior that is acceptable, and any seemingly “free” or “liberated” behavior that we do in public is very, very difficult to disentangle from the problematic societal dynamics that support that behavior for reasons that may in fact be directly opposed to our own reasons for taking back our sex (i.e. girls kissing on girls in clubs to feel good, while guys will encourage that because they like to watch). But at least we have some channels for communicating with each other around sex, and exploring it. For whatever reasons, we have some latitude, and we have found and are finding ways to ways to move about in this space. We don’t generally need to pay someone for that.

But men do. Stay tuned for the next installment for my reasons why.