Location, location, location: no, you can’t do phone sex just ANYWHERE
You will never see me doing this and phone sex at the same time.
One of my least favorite tropes from popular depictions of professional phone sex is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, with just about anything else occupying your attention.
Especially the “anywhere” part, fer CRYIN’ OUT LOUD, it gets right up my nose, goddamn! I didn’t like the movie Valentine’s Day for many reasons, but I sat bolt upright on my bed and shook my fist at the screen when the film showed the PSO taking calls in the grocery store, walking down the street, in a restaurant bathroom (on an actual date!), even on the phone lines at her day job–on her boss’ phone line!
No. No, ma’am. That is not the way it works.
Let’s forget about the gross impropriety of trying to do calls at your other job. Oh, man, your ass would deserve to get landed on that proverbial silver platter. I’m going to set aside considerations of specific fetishes, like the combo humiliation/fin-dom (financial domination) calls, where the point is that the operator just doesn’t give a shit about the caller and goes about her everyday life while he’s on the line. She doesn’t have to be sexual, she doesn’t even have to talk to him, just leave him on the phone. We can also leave out of the discussion those independent operators who have developed their clientele and specialties to the point where they could, in fact, just chat with a client for two hours while driving cross-country, wind rushing through the window and fucking up the call quality.
Those operators, and those clients, surely exist, but those are a fraction of the PSO work out there. Most of us take calls at home, or at call centers. We are not banging on in public spaces.
There are many reasons why this is so. Personally, I want to take calls at home so that a) I don’t have to wear nice clothing; b) I can more or less control the sound environment, both what I can do and what sound might be bleeding in from elsewhere; and c) I really don’t enjoy potentially inflicting psycho-sexual drama on non-consenting bystanders. You know? That’s just not nice.
Now, I can’t always get this perfect call-taking scenario. When I’m on tour and doing calls from a billet, well, I don’t know how sound carries in this person’s house, so sound control is a constant issue. But usually I can swing it.
This Thanksgiving Day, though, it was all fucked up. I had to work Thanksgiving Day proper, and always will as long as I’m with this company, because it’s a weekday. At the same time, I was supposed to go over to a family dinner with one of my boyfriends. His family’s dinner, that is. The last two years I had done this, but had arrived two hours late, just so I could work through the end of my shift. All the food gets cold and everyone else is already in the food coma, and it’s not actually that fun.
This year I wanted to do the whole thing. So I asked my lover if there was any way that we could go over early, so I could just do my phone shift there. He talked with his parents, they actually gave the go-ahead, and we got up totally early and packed up my index card box and notebook and the coconut creme pie and the wine, and I did my shift over there, with nary a glitch, except…
- I was actually dressed up, makeup and all. I had my bra on. I never wear my bra for phone work! I think it actually messes up my lung capacity!
- My cell phone didn’t have reception out there. My boyfriend’s phone did. I had to borrow his smart phone for the entire three hours I was on call.
- I got my first call within 20 minutes of our arriving. Hello, Extreme Top, we’re going to have to keep the daddy-daughter torture quiet today!
- I had to do the calls seated at a desk, and not just any desk, but my boyfriend’s stepmom’s desk, with all inspirational posters and family photos, WHOA, that shit is awful and distracting during Extreme Top!
To top it all off, there was a constant stream of people arriving downstairs, just a closed door and a half-flight of stairs away. I had no way to check sound bleed, but I could hear them, so I had to assume they could hear me if I talked at normal levels. How could I be sufficiently domineering? How could I talk normally about molesting small boys? How could I really give a good convincing incest/rape scene. Answer? I cannot.
The callers seemed happy enough, but I was not. That shit was straight out of pop culture’s depiction of phone sex, and trust me: from the inside, it was not funny or fun, and I only got maybe $30 for the stress. Psht. Next time I’m asking for the day off.
What? Social time, uninterrupted by someone’s erection or a kid walking in on accident?
Can’t make a movie out of that.