Prompt Word: Smut
DISCLAIMER: This is not fiction, it’s history. My real history.
It was the 90s. Phone entertainment lines were at their peak. Celebrities shilled for psychic readings on mainstream outlets. Chat lines were shilled in the back of magazines. Microsoft had product support at the end of a 900 number.
The backbone of it all was smut for lonely men. Gay men, straight men, there was a line to cater to what lonely men wanted.
Party like it’s 1999, but that’s when the backbone of the phone entertainment business was effectively outlawed in the US.
It didn’t go away, not at all. It just moved to Carribian island nations that didn’t bother regulating businesses that brought in money from Americans, but still had access to the North American Numbering Plan (+1).
No, phone smut didn’t die until around 2005, when broadband internet became more widely available, and one-on-one video chat became a sustainable business model.
With video-chat, the business came back to the US, as this time it wasn’t using FCC regulated telephone transmissions and billing. Suddenly, there were even less rules than the phone business had. FCC said you couldn’t actually say certain words. Agents were trained to say, and I quote, “Slide your hot-dog between my buns” because the FCC was very clear about what a business could and could not say, and what they could say did not include obvious smut.
Here’s the thing they don’t talk about, that nobody wants to talk about. Phone entertainment agents, the ones hired to do one-on-one chats with lonely men, were a very diverse group. All one needed was a decent voice, and a good grasp of English or Spanish. In a room of 30 agents, there was a good chance to see 4 or 5 wheelchairs. Lots of folks with unfortunate scars, birth marks, or tatoos that meant finding work was hard, and phone entertainment didn’t care.
None of those people are welcome in the internet-video model. I worked in that industry from June 1993 through December 1998. Software developer, UNIX systems administrator, and one time, my voice was recorded to answer a “gay line”. It was replaced within 2 days, because I was a computer jockey, not pro-voice talent.
Link to First Post: https://wandering.shop/deck/@vollink/116869663416825072