Telephone sex

Phone sex is about satisfying one's sexual desires thanks to a phone call. There is no binding historical data as to exactly when people started practising phone sex. However, due to the distance from one's life partner that was common in the past, one can assume that this method has been around for around 100 years. Whether someone engaged in phone sex or not also depended on personal moral concepts. That telephone sex has played a role for many years is also proven by articles from so-called “etiquette columns” of the 1920s. There, points such as verbal intimacy at physical distance were discussed. Similarly, the question of whether a wife was allowed to talk to her husband on the phone while she was (semi-)naked in bed was discussed. In today's world, however, hardly anyone has a problem discussing even revealing topics and even intimate matters on the phone.

Basically, there are two main types of phone sex: private and commercial.
Private phone sex is about two partners who are in a committed relationship with each other and live out their erotic fantasies through phone conversations. This can be for a variety of reasons, most of which involve physical separation. Due to the situation that direct physical contact is temporarily not possible, one or both partners seek closeness and sexual confirmation in this way. This is the case in long-distance relationships, for example. For example, when one sees each other only rarely, either permanently or temporarily because both parties live or work in different cities or even countries. For many couples, however, phone sex also offers a special attraction as a change from their “normal” sex life. It is an exciting alternative to direct conversation. Many people also dare to talk more about personal inclinations and desires on the phone. Some also really love to sexually “fire up” their partner over the phone during the day. The erotic tension that has built up (often over hours) is then discharged during the personal meeting in the evening and is felt to be particularly intense.

There are also many people who feel the need to act out their sexual drive in a verbal way and who are not in a partnership. Furthermore, It is possible that the respective partner has no desire for or interest in phone sex. Commercial providers of phone sex satisfy this demand with increasing tendency. The isolation during the Corona pandemic has given the industry another huge boom. Mostly it is men who dial the pay phone numbers to get phone sex. The costs range from twelve cents per minute to just under two euros per minute. The latter is the legally permitted maximum rate charged by a large proportion of commercial providers. The women on the other end of the line are usually employees of a service provider, or they dial in for free via an 0800 telephone number. Quite a few companies do not offer real conversations, but play recorded monologues or erotic stories from a tape.
Phone sex hotlines are advertised on all platforms, on TV, on the internet and in magazines and daily newspapers. The stories are mostly about potentially S&M-interested students, hot grannies or sex-starved housewives. In this very direct way, the potential customer is told what to expect. As soon as a customer dials the number, they are typically first asked about their exact sexual desires. Both individual calls and group calls, for example to telephone sex orgies, are possible.

Thanks to increasingly cheap and very fast internet connections, a new variant of phone sex has established itself within a very short time. There are thousands of phone sex sites on the World Wide Web. Many of them offer not only verbal exchange but also the transmission of pictures and videos in real time (webcam). These online service providers mainly work with prepaid credit.

Recently, there have been repeated court cases to clarify whether commercial phone sex is immoral or not. Mostly, the charges were directed against the telephone network providers. The accusation was that they were participating in the business of verbal sex. Meanwhile, the following has been established: The network provider merely enables the service by making the telephone network accessible. Customers, however, enter into their binding contracts directly with the respective phone sex provider. Since the costs for this are stated in advance, the user of sex hotlines must also bear them in full.