Season 2, Episode 2: Sex Over the Phone

For years, telephone companies had been encouraging customers to “reach out and touch someone.” In the 1980s, phone sex lines and dial-a-porn transformed the intimacy of phone conversations into a multi-million-dollar sexual enterprise. A simple and relatively cheap phone call could connect you with dial-a-porn, a telephone service offering short erotic recordings. Phone sex lines were more expensive, and featured operators, known as fantasy artists, who would act out sexual fantasies for and with you. Over the course of the 1980s, telephones, credit cards and imaginations brought countless people together to co-create sexual fantasies, and experience new forms of sexual gratification.