The first real lesson art school taught me was that sometimes you've just gotta pay the bills. At 19 years old, I had very little real world experience that could help me make rent, but I had one skill that I found out I could depend on for an almost steady income. By day, I studied post-impressionism portraiture. By night, I worked as a phone sex operator.
The rules for doing phone sex were more complicated than I had expected. I was allowed to pretend to be just about anybody or anything, but for the things I wasn't allowed to pretend to be, I was allowed to pretend to be a person pretending to be that thing. Confused? For example, a guy might call in wanting to have phone sex with a poodle. I could tell him I could pretend to be a poodle, and he could have phone sex with a girl pretending to be a poodle. There are a lot of semantics that go into enacting taboo fantasies.
The biggest surprise was that, more often than not, men just wanted some feminine-voiced person to listen to them jack off over the phone. They didn't want to chat, they didn't want to ask what I was wearing or how big my boobs were, they just wanted me to listen to them come. I had always assumed phone sex was about the excitement of talking dirty with a stranger, but it's really not. It's a form of exhibitionism, men who want witnesses to their orgasms.
My phone sex work was never a secret. When I told my parents, they seemed a little relieved that I'd found a way to pay my bills. When I told my roommate, he took to sitting in the hall outside my door with his boyfriend, giggling at my half of the conversations, occasionally hissing suggestions through the door when I came up short for a particularly odd request. I was pleased with myself for coming up with something in my skill set that was so entertaining and gave me so much insight into human nature, and I didn't see it as being shameful.
I was working from home, in my pajamas, while watching TV and eating home cooked meals. It seemed a million times better than waiting tables at a greasy spoon, relying on tips and dealing with in-person sexual harassment. I thought my job was safer than my friends' waitressing jobs, and to top it off my feet didn't hurt all the time. I thought I had the system gamed.
But after a few months, I started to feel depressed each time I logged my phone onto the call network. I dreaded the phone ringing, and I went from eating healthy as I worked to binging on ice cream and cookies, pretending to find strangers' masturbation fascinating.
It took a long time to figure out what was bothering me about my job, but after listening to some restaurant industry friends complain about their patrons, it struck me. Nobody, not a single caller, had ever said, "Thank you."
And none of them had ever said, "Goodbye."
They were so thoroughly wrapped up in their exhibitionism, in themselves, that I might as well have been a pre-recorded moaning device. And while I didn't exactly expect callers to care about me as a human being, night after night filled with dozens of people hanging up on me mid-sentence as though I didn't exist started to really hurt my self esteem and self confidence.
So I stopped doing phone sex and got a job working retail, like a "normal" college student.
I have no regrets about my time working phone sex. It taught me about the importance of intimacy, of being an attentive and present lover. Most of all, it taught me the importance of recognizing the humanity of the people around you, no matter how insubstantial their impact on your life. Since then, I always try to look people in the eye, to call them by their names, to say, "Thank you," and to let them know I recognize that although, yes, we're all just doing our jobs, we're also all human beings deserving of recognition.
It doesn't matter if you're ringing someone up at a cafeteria or listening to them come on the phone–you're a person, and you deserve to be treated like one.
