Agents of Ishq

Two mouthpieces of a telephone, one black and one red, are connected by their cords. The cords are shaped like a heart. There is a woman lying naked and seductively on a table at the bottom of the card. It also contains dollar signs and images of lips.

Text on the card reads:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PHONE SEX OPERATORS

It took humans thousands of years to invent the telephone.

But only about a hundred to start the ‘dial-a-porn’ business.

But, once the chat lines began ringing, it didn’t take long to balloon into a multi-million dollar industry.

The card contains a picture of Gloria Leonard, editor and publisher of the porn magazine ‘High Society’ in the 1980s. The card is structured in the form of a flowchart – one column represents Gloria’s strand of thought, the other represents that of a man who went by the pseudonym ‘Richard.’

Text on the card reads:

The first sexy hellos!

The telephone was a khoobsurat novel instrument. In the 1980s, 1-900 numbers became widely popular in the US.

These were numbers that charged you for the amount of time you stayed on the line.

Among those who cashed in were

Gloria Leonard

(Editor of porn magazine ‘High Society’ in early ‘80s)

“Let’s create hotlines to play hot trailers of upcoming issues.”

The hot story trailers were a runaway hit! (Surprise)

“If the people like this, how wild will they go for sultry recordings by adult actresses?”

Richard (A man who started telephonic therapy services for men)

“Damnit, the men keep hanging up on my male therapists. What they want is women with big boobs to listen to them!”

There’s a woman posing seductively with a telephone landline covering her body.

Text on the card reads:

The big mommy of phone sex ops

In 1990, NYC telecom entrepreneur Mike Pardes got wind of the growing demand for phone sex. He set up American TelNet (ATN).

You could call the ATN pay-per-dial hotlines and have sexy phone chats with their Luscious Lorettes and Blonde Britneys.

At $3. 99 per minute, the prices were huge. (like the boobs)

But customers were qatar mein and how! At their peak, phone sex giants like ATN raked in over $1 million dollars on a single night.

There are images of suggestive phone sex ads. One of them reads, ‘Journey with me into the valleys of torrid passion.’ There is another bespectacled woman saying, ‘I want to be bound to a four-poster bed.’ A man holds a telephone and whispers, ‘I want a dark-skinned girl with gorgeous long legs.’

Text on the card reads:

1-900-HOT-CUM

Smaller phone sex operations quickly got into the hot-talk business. They put up saucy ads in newspapers for lines like 1-900-HOT-CUMM. Their biggest customers were ‘Horny American Dads’ from middle-class families.

Phone sex ops meant people no longer had to go to porn book and video stores in bhare bazaar.

Pay-per-dial adult entertainment threw a line of pleasure right into the American home. Yaniki ghar baithe mazaa – voh bhi interactive!

“The idea that you could pay to interact with a stranger for a service was really exciting” - Tina Horn (podcast host of ‘Operator’ which documented ATN)

But some customers wanted something other than sex.

The card contains different hands holding telephones and their cords. All are in different colours.

Text on the card reads:

Friends with benefits

The phone sex empire was a mix of lust and a thirst for companionship. The telephone operator had an intimate window into callers’ hearts.

Operator 1: “My favorite customer is a guy in his early 40s. We usually talk for a while before we get down to sex. He has a great sense of humor and I think we'd actually make great friends IRL.”

Operator 2: People phoned in to talk about their heartbreaks and how lonely they felt.

Operator 3: One guy called me regularly just to share everyday details about his life.

Operator 4: My regulars wanted to roleplay with kinks that they couldn’t share with their partners

Text on the card reads:

A hotline to gay hearts

It wasn’t long before gay hotlines started too. The most popular of these was Telerotic, started by Mark S. King in the '‘80s.

King created several personae tailored to customers’ fantasies. But it was also the time of AIDS in the US. And the calls gave King deep insights into how much the community was emotionally affected by the epidemic.

“My calls helped me understand how lonely gay men were feeling during the AIDS epidemic.”

Photographs of Raj Kapoor, Nutan, Nargis and Sunil Dutt smiling and talking on the phone. These images are from different Hindi films and songs.

Text on the card reads:

Dialling +91 and beyond

Phone sex operations spread to other parts of the world like the UK, Japan, Taiwan etc.

They also came to India.

But we had tapped into the eroticism of the telephone connection long before phone sex operations began here.

Hindi icons romanced over the phone. Matlab lots of blushing, giggling, chumma-chaati and coyly playing with hair

There are different Indians speaking on the phone and asking for specific fantasies. Meanwhile, an image of Sushma Swaraj looks on with disapproval.

Text on the card reads:

VSNL ki Party

While we don’t know when business really boomed in India, desi people were making domestic and international calls via VSNL by the late 1990s. (At Rs. 70 per minute!)

Operators were based in India and all over the world. Between 1994-95 and 1996-97, VSNL's revenue increased from Rs. 356 crore to Rs 521 crore.

Operators adopted lush accents and became different characters to immerse Indian customers in their carnal dreamlands.

Customer: Bhabhiji ghar pe hain?

Customer: British babe ki aawaaz sunne ke liye mere kaan tadap gaye!

But the industry made our netas squirm. They asked VSNL to shut the party lines.

Sushma Swaraj (Union Minister for Communication): The more these people try to tear open our moral fabric, the firmer will be my resolve.

The same image of a woman lying naked on a table as on Card 1 is present here. However, underneath her the text says, ‘Number does not exist.’

Text on the card reads:

ATN ko bhi mila moral backlash.

By the early 2000s, many 1-900 numbers were banned. While some operators were passionate about their job, others had varied experiences.

“I only get paid .30/min. The money isn’t guaranteed so I can’t quit my day job.”

“I often felt like an imposter, listening to peoples’ deepest secrets, but never revealing anything real about myself.”

“The company policy didn’t protect us. Refusing to roleplay with disrespectful clients puts my job at stake.”

Text on the card reads:

Did Internet Porn kill the Phone Sex Star?

The industry still has clients who prefer its anonymity and intimacy.

Client: “I like the conversation and companionship I get on phone sex”

Operator: “Camming—live, interactive sex shows via webcam – was on the rise. I didn’t want to reveal my face to my clients.”

What is a telephone connection? Unnamed tension, only words to play with with a caller or even your pritam, and a sensuality viscerally experienced.

The ears (and body) tingling with desire, anticipation and more!

(Something to think of in modern-day love languages, perhaps?)

A Brief History of Phone Sex

Edited by Gitanjali Chandrasekharan

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