Four Years in Phone Sex

Today marks four years since I took my first professional phone sex call. I’ve officially been a phone sex operator for as long as I was in college. I frequently joke that being a phone sex operator has been my grad school. I’ve learned more about people, relationships, and sexuality than I could have possibly dreamed back before I did this. I would like to write something about how much I’ve learned on the job, especially compared to college and work and personal relationships, but this isn’t that piece. This is just because I had to mark the day somehow.

When I started working in phone sex, I was a struggling writer, enduring the latest in a series of disappointing office jobs that, to say the least, did not utilize my strengths. Though this last office job was undeniably the best of the lot in terms of co-workers and general atmosphere, it was still demoralizing to spend day after day basically failing. I was dealing with then undiagnosed ADHD, “severely exacerbated by an anxiety disorder,” and I knew I was as bad for the job as it was for me.

But every office job I’ve had has always led to two conclusions, despite extensive flaws in other areas: I’m a good writer, and I’m good on the phones. Indeed, I was very nearly promoted to a sales position, even though I’d been hired as an office assistant, because the head salesman thought I was “effective” on the phones. But that wasn’t what I’d been hired for, so it didn’t happen. Same with copywriting. I did a fair bit of copywriting as an office assistant. I kept waiting and trying for my “Miss Olson, you are now a junior copywriter” moment, but again. That wasn’t what I was hired for.

I picked phone sex because I’d been a telemarketer, I had improv training, and I was curious about sex, and it seems to be working out, so far.

I posted my first audio to GWA on February 22,, 2017. Phone sex followed shortly after on March 12th. Even before I knew the two worlds would ever collide, I knew April would straddle them both (she straddles so well).

Because I had no idea my Reddit username would be a long-term professional name, I spent exactly five minutes thinking about it. I’ve always liked the name April. I thought it was pretty. I was a secretary, and there were tax forms on my desk, including W9s, so I named myself like Jan Brady named her imaginary boyfriend: after whatever happened to be in eyesight. So, I became AprilW9.

Less than a year after March 12, 2017, I left the first phone sex line I worked for, and moved to Niteflirt, I decided April needed a last name, and it should probably begin with a W, for consistency. My first thought was Wood (because, you know, boners), but that felt too cheesy. Then my best friend (and now roommate) suggested, “What if you spelled it, ‘Would’? Like ‘your girlfriend won’t do it, but April would.’”

It made me laugh, so that became my name.  

In my first job out of college as a telemarketer, I remember seeing other employees at the company receive gifts to commemorate five, seven, ten, fifteen years. Child that I was, it was impossible to imagine that I could ever be at one job long enough to win that watch or paperweight. Today, especially after so much professional strife, four years in phone sex feels momentous. It feels like a career. I want it to be a career. Because I love this job. Loving your job is a gift I thought I would never get, and to add that gift, I feel good at it, and the work feels valuable.

If you’re reading this, I hope you agree. Thanks for sticking with me.

The Queen's Gambit: An Emotional Gangbang

CW: Sexual assault

This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. Note: this is only about the series, not the novel on which it’s based.

The Queen’s Gambit tells the story of chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, and the struggles she faces as she navigates and conquers the mostly male world of competitive chess in the 1960s. The show caught my interest for several reasons, not the least of which being I’m a sucker for gorgeous period pieces set in mid-20th century America. The chess scenes play out with an almost hypnotic power, and Anya Taylor-Joy is wonderful as Harmon.

Much of the show’s narrative hinges on the relationships Harmon builds with her male competitors, some of whom become mentors, lovers, and most importantly, supporters. Harmon is surrounded, and ultimately, celebrated by men, even as she comes to dominate them one by one in their own field. And this is not a marriage plot. None of these men emerge as her one true love. That role belongs to chess itself. The Queen’s Gambit is a love story between a woman and her craft, and the men in the story exist to encourage that love.  

So, naturally, it made me think about gangbangs.

Gangbangs have always been a conceptual conundrum for me. They have a reputation for being inherently degrading. “Woman as object” in its most literal form. The cultural assumption imagines a lone woman passed around, spat on, covered in ejaculate, called names, and ridiculed.  Even in a controlled fantasy atmosphere that isn’t overtly violent, it can still be unnerving to see a woman at the center of such aggressive male sexual attention. It drives home the idea that sex is not something women do; it’s something done to them by men.

I never thought gangbangs would appeal to me, even as a fantasy, until I started working in phone sex. I had a regular client who liked to imagine that all the other guys I talked to on the line were in a circle around us watching him fuck me. This scenario is more of an inverse gangbang, but it tapped into something I was just becoming aware of: how much time I spent (and continue to spend) consumed in maleness.

It’s odd to think of sex work as a male dominated environment, but what else do you call it when most of the people who do your job are women, but most of the people you interact with on the job are men? The image of a lone woman among men, displaying some sort of power over them, and the men affirming that power without fear or threat, felt appealing—and familiar—to me. I couldn’t put the reason why into words until a scene, late in the series, in which Harmon plays simultaneous games against several men. Then it felt obvious. This was a gangbang. A joyous, metaphorical, emotional gangbang. Not unlike my job.

Chess is sex for Harmon. It’s how she processes and experiences intimacy. I don’t mean to imply that Harmon feels sexual attraction for every man she plays chess with, or that she derives actual sexual pleasure from playing chess, but the show establishes that chess is her gateway to intimacy, with herself, and therefore, with others. It is how she comes to understand herself as a person, and so it’s natural that, as she becomes an adult, it becomes her primary way of communicating with others.

In the episodes the deal with Harmon’s childhood and teenage years, she displays a curiosity about sex that while not especially precocious, is still striking just for its mere existence. I found it refreshing that the show acknowledged that young women do not magically start feeling sexual attraction when a man puts the idea in their heads. Instead, those first inklings are clumsy and ill-formed, and when they arrive, there’s often no immediate place to put them and no one way to feel about them. These things can start at an early age, and then sit waiting until we’re old enough to process. It's telling that during one scene, in which Harmon observes a couple kissing, I interpreted her reaction as excited fascination, while a friend of mine interpreted it as terror. The more I think about it, it was probably both.

When discussing the show with girlfriends, I noticed a few common themes: we were all happy to see a show about a woman succeeding, to see men celebrate her success even when it meant she was succeeding over them, and we were all so fucking grateful there was no sexual assault.

Consider that we all expected assault to happen, at one point or other, and were all surprised that it didn’t. This is how low the bar is for stories about women in media, especially on premium television.

Which brings us back to gangbangs.

My takeaway image from The Queen’s Gambit, is a woman thriving in a male world, dominating individual men through skill and talent, not force. Imagine that scenario in porn: a lone woman in a group of men, smiling, enthusiastic, loving the attention she’s receiving, giving consent every step of the way, victorious in herself. It feels like an almost radical thing, an affirmation that women can and do enjoy being the center of such sexual attention, with their pleasure prioritized and their humanity celebrated; the men are there not to demean or diminish, but to lift up. Support. Pleasure.

The Queen’s Gambit has been criticized for not being realistic (though I’m always intrigued by complaints of ‘unreality’ in works of fiction), and it isn’t a perfect show (its depictions of POC characters and non-cis het sexuality leave a bit to be desired), but it’s a show I appreciated. We have a hard time imagining that men could be so encouraging to a woman. The show has a fairy tale atmosphere that makes it extremely satisfying to watch. Like most fairy tale heroines, Harmon endures more than her fair share of suffering: loss of loved ones, social alienation, addiction issues, but the show never makes a meal of her suffering, as so many stories about women in pain do. Chess is always there to save her, or rather to help her save herself. The men don’t save her, but they do support her, giving me all sorts of ideas about what support and pleasure can look like. In life, in porn, and beyond.  

All Sorts of Costs

Recently, I told a man what I do for a living. This man was neither a potential client nor a potential romantic partner. He was a friend of a friend, who I was meeting for the first time, and who happened to ask what I do.

This is, apparently, a question people ask when they first meet.  

I told him.

This man is married, and not in the market for my services. However, as is often the case, knowledge of my job made him more honest than he may have been otherwise, and the conversation quickly turned to porn.

“I hope you’re paying for it,” I said.

He laughed. “Why would I pay for it?”

“Because you should,” I said.

“No, no, no,” he said. “There’s no way.”

“Is it because you’re scared of what your wife will say?”

“She knows I watch porn. It doesn’t bother her.”

“Then why?”

He explained that porn was free. Almost too free. So “free” that the idea of paying for it seemed nonsensical. I’ve heard this before, both from friends, and ironically, from clients who paid to tell me. I gave my usual spiel: that much of the “free” porn available online is actually stolen, how Pornhub is the result of a monopoly on the industry that is hurting porn performers and devaluing the product. He remained unmoved.

Besides, he continued, he had no way of knowing what he’d be in the mood to watch when porn-watching time rolled around. Pornhub was the most practical choice.

“I’ve got a whole process,” he said. “You wanna see?”

His attitude was not that of a man who uses frank sexual language as a means of intimidating women, trying to make them uncomfortable under the guise of “just being honest.” You see this a lot in mixed company, especially when / if the topic of porn or relationships ever comes up. Nor did I get the sense he was flirting. He talked to me as I imagined he would talk to another man—a peer—with no sense of predation, threat, or awe. This is how clients often speak to me, as if we are on the same level, and can be uniquely honest with each other. It made the entire conversation profoundly interesting.

He took out his phone, and opened Pornhub. He started scrolling. He passed at least 50 thumbnails, dismissing each video with automatic : “I don’t like brunettes,” “too skinny,” “not skinny enough,” “nipples are too small,” “breasts are too saggy,” “not enough ass,” “I don’t like seeing her get fucked from behind if she’s facing the camera.”

I was mildly horrified, but also fascinated. If these were all the reasons not to watch a particular video, what did that leave? Every reason he gave was superficial, but also personal. Lived in. Like he had honed these preferences, and this process, after years of porn consumption.

I wanted to ask him more, but it was at this point that our mutual friend came back from the bathroom, and asked what the hell we were doing, shifting the focus of the conversation irrevocably. 

During this whole interaction, I thought of a story a client had told me. Back in the 1970s, when he was still in college, he went to an adult bookstore. There were other men there, looking at things. There were peepshows in the back. At the register, he told the cashier that he was looking for a movie for his friend’s bachelor party, and could the cashier recommend something? In fact, he was not shopping for a bachelor party, but for himself, but he was too nervous to say so and too nervous to look around. The cashier suggested a movie; he bought it, took it home, and watched it, alone, on 8 MM film.

“I’ve tried to find it since, but I can’t,” he told me. “It’d be great to see it again.”

I’ll refrain from saying the title, but I’ve tried to find it also, and I can’t either.

I found this story not just fun and interesting, but actually moving. Buying porn used to require effort. And cost: financial, and social. You used to have to look at and talk to a cashier. There would be other people in the store. There was the anticipation of going, finding something, and getting it home. Surely, I thought, that had to make the ultimate experience of watching the porn better? After all that struggle, how could it not?

Having used tube sites in the past, I do understand the appeal. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it, and with such a wide variety on offer, you’re bound to find things you wouldn’t have otherwise. But I can’t help feeling nostalgia for a time when you had to go to a store, not in the least because admittedly, I’ve never had to. Paying should be a given, no matter what, but the effort it takes to find?

Years ago, I went into an adult bookstore with a platonic male friend to buy a copy of Hustler. We needed it for a play we were performing in. He offered to go without me, but I insisted on joining him. At the register, I noticed how his posture changed, how he never seemed to look directly at the cashier, while I noticeably startled everyone with my abundant enthusiasm. I was so excited to be there, putting down money for Hustler, but my friend had long ago absorbed the second-hand cultural shame. Maybe this was because, for him, paying for porn feels inherently embarrassing when it’s “free” online, maybe not. Maybe it was just the embarrassment of procuring porn at all, but I—a woman, unaccustomed to being acknowledged as a porn consumer—enjoyed the experience. I want more of it.