The relationship between the sexes and our epidemic of loneliness are topics we return to again and again at The Free Press. It’s one of the many reasons we chose the legacy of the sexual revolution as the subject of our very first live debate. (Get your tickets here.)
The sexual revolution, combined with the internet, has brought us several hundred dating and sex apps—everything from Tinder to Grindr to Cougar Life (self-explanatory) to the Atlasphere (for Ayn Rand fans)—but also a whole new set of anxieties about dating online.
It’s brought us camgirls and Pornhub and Ivy League sugar babies—but also the reality that young people are having less actual sex.
What gives? How to explain these paradoxes? Has the sexual revolution failed to liberate us? Or is it simply incomplete?
We know many of you won’t be able to make it to the debate, which is September 13 in Los Angeles (don’t worry, we’re going to record it). Meantime, over the coming weeks, we wanted to bring you a few essays that speak to these themes.
Today, we’re happy to publish Jenny Powers on the unexpected realities she encountered as a phone sex operator. —BW
The first time Alec texted me, his attempts at flirtation were the obvious stuff.
“What are you wearing?” he wrote. “What would we be doing if I was there right now?”
I was wearing a pair of ratty sweatpants.
What I typed back was: “It’s what I’m not wearing that’s more interesting.” Then, “I could think of plenty for us to do. The real question is—where should we start?”
A few texts in, he called.
Alec had a Southern accent and his speech was hurried, betraying his anxiety. To put him at ease, I suggested we play a game.
“Tell me something no one knows about you,” I said.
I offered to go first. It was easy. I told the truth.
“No one knows I’m a phone sex operator. Now it’s your turn.”
The silence on the other end made me think we’d been disconnected.
“I’m afraid I’ll be eating my breakfast one morning and choke and I don’t want to die alone,” he answered.
The tiny hairs on my arm stood at attention. I had no naughty reply.
By the time I got on that first call with Alec, I’d been an operator for six months as research for my memoir-in-progress on how the phone sex industry has managed to thrive in a society that uses phones for everything but actual calls. I worked as an operator through NiteFlirt, the largest online phone sex marketplace in the U.S., with tens of thousands of operators.
From the onset, what surprised me most was not the unorthodox requests for things like cuckold confessions or desires to be forced into bisexual submission. It was that so many callers were lonely and turned to me, a stranger, to ease that pain at the cost of $1.99 a minute.
In May, the United States Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, revealed one in every two adults in America has reportedly been impacted by loneliness and isolation. In response to what he said is one of our nation’s most urgent public health concerns, he issued a comprehensive advisory and confessed that after embarking on a cross-country listening tour in 2014, he was surprised to learn how “isolated, invisible, and insignificant” his fellow Americans felt. And that was years before the pandemic.
Long before any listening tour or comprehensive advisory, phone sex operators were well aware of these extreme feelings of detachment. And they’ve—we’ve—made a living by capitalizing on these yearnings for human connection.
According to ZipRecruiter, phone actresses make an average salary of $33,147, although I know a former one who earned over $250,000. While a select few consider this to be their full-time job, most operators have another primary source of income. Some I met work as TSA agents, dental hygienists, ESL teachers, and in the hospitality industry while others were stay-at-home moms. Though I never took calls consistently enough to make significant money, the potential was evident from the start. One of my calls lasted nearly four hours and our conversation covered everything from movies to food to travel to our most embarrassing moments and cost the customer almost $500. My cut was $240. Some afternoons, I made $100 responding to texts.
But I took home more than money. What I really got was a crash course in America’s loneliness epidemic.
Before hitting the phones, I took a virtual training led by Cidney Green, a college dropout who turned to phone sex at the age of 22.
One of the first things Green teaches students is that it’s not horny men but lonely ones who keep the phones ringing. That’s why she strongly recommends working Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Valentine’s Day when loneliness hits peak levels.
“They talk to you like you’re some sort of counselor or unofficial therapist,” Green said. “They don’t seem to have anyone else and if they do, they’re not choosing them, they are choosing us.”
Green, now 33, told me she hit the six-figure mark for the first time in 2015 after a Wall Street guy called her every day for a year, showering her with generous cash tips and lavish gifts on top of her call rates. But while they talked for up to two hours daily, according to Green, phone sex made up only a fraction of their conversation. Most of the time, the calls could be mistaken for the kind of banter two friends might have. He told her he was happily married with kids, and he didn’t care to talk about them. He just enjoyed chatting with her about life—from plans for the weekend to future vacations to current events.
“With the kind of money these guys spend, they could hire an escort if sex was all they were after. And if they wanted to talk dirty, there are profiles explicitly for that. But they intentionally choose profiles with more substance. In this line of work, we call those vanilla profiles ’cause they’re not spicy. I play lots of different characters but the lonely guys almost always go for my vanilla ones,” said Green, who estimates she’s trained about a thousand operators and runs a new phone sex coaching business.
Meaghan, a 30-year-old “erotic money coach” and NiteFlirt operator, also noticed an interest in vanilla conversations after joining the site in 2020, when she began detecting a sense of sadness and need for compassion in her client’s text messages.
“When I first joined, a client requested we roleplay a scene where we meet at a neighbor’s barbecue and find ourselves alone in the kitchen. I kept expecting the fantasy to turn sexual but it never did. Instead, he directed me to take on this soft, nurturing tone and use certain empathetic phrases during our conversation like ‘That must be hard for you’ and ‘How did that make you feel?’ ” According to Meaghan, it was clear that plenty of customers like this one felt unheard and were seeking validation in their lives.
This prompted her to add a dedicated vanilla profile to her NiteFlirt offerings, advertising “enlightened and encouraging conversations of a non-sexual nature for those interested in getting things off their chest that their wives wouldn’t understand.”
Soon, the texts came rolling in.
When I became an operator, I noticed the same thing.
As Robert, one of my married callers from London, once explained, “It’s a completely different experience having a live, flesh and blood woman on the other end of the line compared to a two-dimensional image on a computer monitor. I’m paying for the human connection because that’s what I really crave. Phone sex is a billion-dollar industry, so clearly I’m not the only one.”
This is what the phone sex industry—which includes platforms like NiteFlirt, Talk To Me, and SextPanther—relies on, as do the operators who are single-handedly responsible for advertising their own services, mostly by promoting their listings on Twitter and Reddit.
When the pandemic hit, the majority of the population experienced heightened isolation, keeping them apart from their usual support systems. That’s when, according to Erin Martinez, a NiteFlirt representative who I spoke to at the time, two things happened: calls and texts grew by 10 percent, and new operator sign-ups experienced a 35–40 percent increase.
Martinez credited these increases to being “uniquely positioned to meet the human need for intimacy. Unlike pornography, NiteFlirt involves a live interaction with a real human.”
During my time as an operator, I was constantly amazed by some of the unlikely turns these live interactions took.
Take Joel, a widower in his late 70s from Minnesota, who wanted to tell me all about his dead wife, Peggy, who he’d lost to breast cancer.
“I miss my girl real bad, but it’s been more than a year now and I can tell by people’s faces they’re tired of me talking about her all the time. Even our own kids change the subject when they call to check in on me, but I’m just not ready to move on,” he once confided.
As the minutes and the dollars added up, he’d laugh as he told me Peggy’s favorite jokes and confess how much he missed her casseroles and now mostly ate microwavable meals since he’d gone through everything she’d made and left behind for him in the freezer. He told me how their kids assumed they’d done him a favor by donating all her clothing to the local Goodwill where—unbeknownst to them—he’d returned the next day and taken them all back.
He confessed that once a month, he had a standing date with Brenda, a local escort from two towns away who’d come over and sit in his dead wife’s recliner alongside him, where they’d hold hands and watch game show reruns. Sometimes they’d split a beer. Once in a blue moon, when he was feeling particularly low, they might cuddle on the sofa.
“We always told each other when our time came, we’d want the other to be happy. The closest I am to being happy is talking about her and you’re the only one who’ll really listen,” he’d say.
But it was Alec—my caller whose fear of choking and dying while eating by himself—who stuck in my mind long after I gave up the phone lines.
Alec told me he worked at a restaurant where he ate lunch and dinner. Each morning he’d taken to calling the chatline as he ate his breakfast at home.
As a kid, one morning after his parents left for work, he found himself alone. In a rush to catch the school bus, he wolfed down his breakfast, only to begin choking.
“I remember thinking, That’s it. This is how I die. All alone. Ain’t nothing sadder,” he told me one morning while I kept him company on the phone. No sooner did he have the thought than his mother walked through the front door, having forgotten her umbrella. She took one look at him, bent him over a chair in a makeshift Heimlich, dislodged the piece of Pop-Tart that had gotten stuck in his throat, and saved his life.
But while having someone on the other end of the phone was a comfort to Alec, I was panic-stricken, knowing that if he did choke, I didn’t know his location to send help.
When I pointed this out, he laughed and said, “Listen, my mama’s long gone. Ain’t nobody left to save me, plus no ambulance is gonna get to me fast enough anyway, so don’t worry your pretty little head. Dying doesn’t scare me, dying alone does. If I’m taking my last breath, I just want someone there telling me it’ll all be okay in my ear. For those few moments when I’m leaving the earth and going to meet my maker, just knowing you’re here with me, I’ll go in peace. You can’t put a price on that.”
This is Jenny Powers’ first piece for The Free Press. She is a journalist currently working on her memoir: “Smooth Operator: Confessions of an Accidental Phone Sex Vixen.”
To support more of our work, become a Free Press subscriber today:
