Today, we think of phone sex is what will often happen when you and a partner are on your phones and feeling horny. But that’s not how it was when phone sex was an actual industry. To understand what phone sex was, you need to dial back in time to when phones were wired to the wall (AKA land lines), and when using a phone was limited to what you said and heard as opposed to what you could see or text. Phone sex was in it’s full glory in the 1980s and early ‘90s, when horny men paid between $1.99 and $5.00 a minute to talk with phone sex operators who would work with a caller to create his favorite role-playing fantasy, often something he was too embarrassed to act out with a real-life partner. A big element that helped make phone sex possible was the invention of 976- and 900- calls, which allowed the phone sex operator to bill the caller by the minute. Some men want(ed) the phone sex operator to be a dominatrix, giving him orders or even pretending to kick the man in the testicles; others want(ed) the phone sex operator to be a schoolgirl, or to fart, or to laugh–whatever kink could be acted out over a phone, and some men just wanted the emotional connection with a real live human being while they jerked off. The key for the phone operator was to keep the man aroused and interested but to delay letting him masturbate to orgasm because the longer they could keep him on the line, the more money they would make. This was before porn started to fully blossom on the Internet and cam sex sites became popular. However, with Covid shutdowns, there was an uptick in phone sex demand as well as a supply-side increase in phone sex operators due to the number of women who had worked in strip clubs and other adult venues suddenly being out of work. Even today, sites like Niteflirt continue to do a brisk phone sex business, providing customers with hundreds of phone sex operators. At one time, phone sex was massive source of income for phone companies as well as companies that provided phone sex operators, until Congress started passing laws that made certain aspects of phone sex illegal. These laws would ping-pong back and forth between Congress and the Courts, who often ruled that the puritanical prohibitions were too broad and infringed on first amendment rights. In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled against 900 numbers being used for phone sex.