A Short History of the Phone Sex Industry

In the 1990s, even the president was having phone sex. Before the rise of the internet, there was the "dial-a-porn" industry, a multibillion-dollar business that dominated the adult entertainment market for a decade.

For-profit phone sex is an often neglected part of the history of erotica, overshadowed by the explosion of online porn that followed close behind. But for many Americans, their first encounter with sex workers wasn't through a webcam, it was over the phone.

With the advent of dial-a-porn, a direct line was suddenly thrown from the world of sex work into the comfort and privacy of the middle-class family home. With this innovation came lots of new money and just as much backlash.

The birth of the phone sex industry

The origins of the phone sex industry differ depending on who you ask. In the early 1980s, two people, seemingly independent of each other, came up with the idea of selling adult entertainment over the phone.

One of those people was adult actress Gloria Leonard, who was the editor of the porn magazine High Society in the early '80s. According to her obituary, she began using the then-new technology of premium-rate numbers—which could be called from anywhere and charged to your phone bill—to record updates on upcoming issues of her magazine for customers.

The premium service proved popular, sparking another brainstorm for Leonard. She enlisted other adult actresses to record dirty messages the customers could listen to by paying by the minute. The technology was rudimentary—it was a recording, not a real person on the other end of the line—but wildly successful nonetheless, and copycat services followed. By 1988, Americans were paying $2 billion per year to listen to erotic answering machines, according to the New York Times.

The other phone sex pioneer was a man known only as "Richard." His first big idea was selling psychotherapy over the phone, but callers kept hanging up on the male therapist he hired. Allegedly, they wanted to talk to a female therapist with big breasts.

So Richard gave the people what they wanted. He fired the male therapist and hired women willing to listen to clients' problems while vividly describing how big their breasts were.

The '90s: Pay-per-dial boom

New for-profit phone sex lines sprung up as pay-per-dial exploded in popularity over the next decade, reaching its height in the 1990s.

Adult entertainment was the most popular service by far, but premium numbers weren't solely for phone sex. In the same way everything today has a website, nearly every '90s cultural figure—from Freddy Krueger to Miss Cleo to N.W.A—had their own 1-900 pay-per-call line, said Tina Horn, host and co-writer of "Operator," an in-depth podcast on the history of for-profit phone sex and industry leader American TelNet (ATN).

"The idea that you could pay to interact with a stranger or a professional—a real live person that you can have a conversation with—was so novel and exciting for people in a way that I think we take for granted now," she said.

Horn is a former sex worker turned media-maker and writer, as well as the host of the kink-exploring podcast "Why Are People Into That?!" and the creator of the SFSX (Safe Sex) comic series. In the '90s, Horn was a teenager, mesmerized by salacious ads for sex-talk lines in the back of free local bulletins, a world simultaneously one phone call away and totally closed off to minors.

She wasn't alone—this was the first direct contact between many Americans and the sex industry, Horn said. Before pay-per-dial, if you wanted smut (and didn't want it arriving at your front door), you'd often have to travel somewhere to get it, like to an adult bookstore or video store, or a porn theater. More often than not, these adult businesses were found in a part of town some people might call "seedy," or areas that middle-class Americans with families tended to avoid.

For-profit phone sex ushered in a whole new customer base previously cut off from the adult industry. Most customers were men and many were married. America's horny dads proved big business: ATN, as the largest of the phone sex companies, could pull in more than $1 million on a single busy night, according to "Operator."

Backlash and the downfall of ATN

The attention of this new demographic also brought backlash. Federal regulators, politicians, moral crusaders and the media all began to attack ATN and other dial-a-porn companies, whom they accused of advertising to children, scamming customers and violating federal communications laws.

As the biggest name in the biz, ATN drew a lot of the heat. Armed police raided its offices and the Federal Trade Commission hit it with a $2.5 million fine in 1994. The company was even the subject of a "Dateline" TV investigation, which accused the company of fraudulent billing and targeting minors.

Horn is broadly skeptical of the motivation behind anti-porn backlash. "Think of the children" has long been the rallying cry of moral panics, she said. Child exploitation is a real and serious issue, but moral crusaders often use it as a smokescreen for the sexual freedom of adults.

By the early 2000s, phone companies were removing 900 numbers under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, and by 2004, 900 numbers were banned outright. ATN, already weakened from a corporate power struggle, couldn't survive on its less profitable 800 numbers, according to "Operator," and eventually shut down later that year.

Phone sex in the new millennium

Internet connection speeds were increasing, and personal computers—once a shared fixture in family homes—were becoming more personal. However, the internet wasn't the immediate nail in the for-profit phone sex coffin you might expect. In wake of the collapse of giants such as ATN, smaller phone sex companies began cropping up online, building new platforms that allowed operators to make money on their own terms.

Allison, a former phone sex operator who requested her full name not be used, said she began working as an independent contractor for one of these sites in 2006. She liked the work, appreciated the anonymity and loved how much it paid: $2.19 a minute (before taxes and site fees), far more than most of her other job options at the time.

Allison left in 2009 as the adult industry was once again changing. Camming—live, interactive sex shows via webcam—was beginning to become popular, and she felt increasing pressure to reveal her face to clients, which she wasn't interested in.

But Amberly Rothfield, who wrote "How I Made $10K a Month as a Phone Sex Operator" and has been in the business for more than 17 years, respectfully disagrees that camming killed the phone sex star. Phone work still appeals to sex workers who prefer anonymity, and many callers crave the emotional connection.

Rothfield said her work is not unlike that of a bartender: "A sexual bartender. I'm the bartender it's OK to talk [to] about banging."

The legacy of phone sex work

Some aspects of the new landscape of adult entertainment are better, and some are worse, Horn said. With the fall of major companies, sex workers have gone from employees to entrepreneurs, controlling their own intellectual property, connecting directly to clients and setting their own schedules, she said.

“Creator content platforms, like OnlyFans, have made it possible for sex workers to seize the means of production,” Horn said.

Despite the persistent stigma, sex work and phone sex are still big businesses. There will always be a market for the mix of emotional connection and sexual gratification that sex workers sell, whether in person, through a screen or over the phone.