Phillip Toledano's Phonesex
A few weeks ago I found Phillip Toledano’s images and narratives of real phone sex operators through a post over at Mighty Girl. Her favorite post was one in which a man boasts about his superhuman strength.
Compelling, yes, but not nearly as fascinating as the 60-year-old phone sex operator with a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She’s been married 25 years, too. Kills all those sweeping generalizations about who sex operators are, doesn’t it?
She says:
It’s not sex; it’s a cocktail
of testosterone, fueled by
addiction to pornography,
loneliness, and the need
to hear a woman’s voice.
Pretty compelling ethnographic research, non?
What I love most about the website is that all these people are presented as real human beings. While a couple border ever so slightly on the “cheesy” side (I’m looking at you Taco Bell man), in most cases the people are strikingly normal. Their profession is simply a (somewhat) natural career progression–or a well-paid, flexible mid-term gig–leveraging telephone customer service skills into a somewhat more lucrative gig. Says another:
All those years
doing customer service,
my customers would comment
on my sexy voice.
…This work is customer service.
It’s just your customers
Though I’m not featuring the full images here*, the images are mostly safe for work and are a nice accompaniment to the narratives.
For those interested, the book Phonesex
* Graham reminds me his mother reads this blog, and he wasn’t crazy about a post on phone sex to begin with.
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