Yahoo Movies Inside the Shady Billion-Dollar Phone Sex Industry
In 2019, when I was asked by three award-winning filmmakers to host and co-write a podcast called Operator, which would explore phone sex in the 1990s, of course I responded, “Yes! Yes! YES!” As soon as I learned the basics about American Telnet, a company that made billions off of adult pay-per-call lines, I was chomping at the bit to fly down to Florida to interview everyone involved. What I found is that the more sex work changes, the more it stays the same.
1-900 ads on late-night cable and in the back of weekly newspapers represented some of my earliest fascination with sexual pleasure. When I close my eyes, I can still hear the alluring purrs of the models, see their sweaty flesh busting out of bodacious lingerie. To a queer teen in a small town, these professional dirty talkers seemed like horniness unleashed. And they were potentially just a phone call away. Like most hormonal young people, I was drawn to anything to do with naked bodies; unlike my peers, I wanted even more than just intimate experience. I was obsessed with erotic performance and storytelling, art and culture, politics and activism.
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Those obsessions led me, when I became an adult, to pursue a career as a professional dominatrix and pornographer, and later a podcaster, reporter, and sci-fi writer covering topics like BDSM subcultures and adult entertainment labor rights. The Operator producers were smart enough to bring in the voice of someone with a background both in the sex industry and in covering that industry as a journalist. As the show’s host, I’m a 21st-century sex worker exploring the industry that changed my life in the era right before I became a part of it.
The people who built and ran American Telnet (or ATN), and their relationships with one another, have that stranger-than-fiction shine to them. A fast-talking, charismatic CEO who wielded impressive powers of persuasion and took enormous pleasure in his business. A young woman who became the smiling company mascot partying hard at porn conventions. A former Marine who managed the phone room like a den mother. The nerdy head of technology, who innovated the professional use of voice recognition and automated phone menus: his ambivalence about putting his talents to the use of satisfying “horny dads” and other phone-sex customers would have a catastrophic effect on the company. There’s family drama, self-loathing, drugs, backstabbing, police raids, and corporate power play.
Beneath all that excitement and emotion are the fundamentals of what made ATN wildly successful. What ATN did that had never been done before was bring all the elements of phone sex—advertising, computer programming, finance, advertising—under the roof of one service bureau. If that sounds boring, imagine a time when you couldn’t interact with strangers through technology all day and every day. Now, imagine you dial a 1-900 number, and your call is routed to a menu where you get to select your personal fantasy—press one for co-ed, press two for threesome, press three for gender-play, many of the same words you see in online porn tabs to this day. From there, your call is routed to a real live girl who knows exactly what you want to hear. To you, it might seem like magic. But behind the scenes, a complex telecommunications system is functioning in tandem with multiple departments and hundreds of employees.
And then there were the actual phone operators. We managed to track down a few operators, but for the most part, we had to honor their work by writing about the nature of their absence.
In some ways, ATN gave sex workers something extraordinarily rare in the industry, then and now: They had dependable hours and wages, commissions based on keeping callers on the line, total anonymity and zero physical contact with clients, and health insurance. Unlike most modern cam models, they didn’t have to promote images of themselves in a cult of personality-based marketplace. With employment status and benefits, they showed up to call center shifts, sat at cubicles, and answered phones. If callers were abusive, or used FCC-banned language, they were allowed to simply hang up. If a job like that was available now, I’d apply in a heartbeat.
Still, turnover was high, which is part of the reason it was so hard to find operators to interview. ATN didn’t define their lives like it did for so many of the executives and other employees. And everyone from ATN we interviewed confirmed that the operators were treated as second-class citizens by the company. Once the company really started taking off, the phone room was even moved to a different building than the other departments. The room where the dirty talk happened was either gawked at like a freak show or avoided like the plague. The people who got rich off of what those workers provided in that room saw that work and the people who did it as beneath them. That sex-work stigma is as strong today as it was then, and it contributes to criminalization, alienation, and violence, as well as housing and banking discrimination.
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Based on the interviews we did with the few operators we could track down, and based on the training manuals the founders had held on to, I got a good sense of what a typical shift in that room would have been like. More than anything else, that’s the thing that struck me: human desire has some constants no matter what the technology or era. The simple need for someone to talk to, the fantasies of domination and submission, the shitty clients who used the anonymity of the phone to squander all the fun they could have by being abusive.
Online interactive content platforms like OnlyFans, Niteflirt, and MyFreeCams are the technological evolution of the phone sex that ATN facilitated. In some ways, this development has put way more control in the hands of the sex workers: the cam models and custom fetish porn-makers and girlfriend-experience experts who are the modern-day Operators.
Sex workers today have to be entrepreneurs. This means more freedom to control our image and cut out managers, but it also means we can’t just show up and sit down and do our work. We’re our own service bureaus. And when we encounter the exact same problems that ATN battled—like the arbitrary regulations from the government, corporations, and anti-porn religious crusaders—we have to manage them all ourselves. My hope is that thirty years from now, when someone is making a documentary about this era of adult entertainment technology, there will be a lot more sex workers ready to tell our stories our way.
The first episodes of the new Wondery podcast Operator are available here.
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