Customer Reviews

Call Me Mistress: Memoirs of a Phone Sex Performer

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The previous reviewer seems to have been reviewing a different book than the one I read.

Call Me Mistress: Memoirs of a Phone Sex Performer by Natalie Rhys is a memoir of an American woman who is a data processor by day and a phone sex operator by night. Her book was a moderately interesting description of her experiences in phone sex, describing especially well the phone sex world of 1993, when phone sex was a mere 15 year-old business.

Rhys's writing style left much to be desired. Her theories are unsupported by evidence yet presented as fact. The categorization of call-types she received was unclear and poorly presented.

As a phone sex performer myself, however, I was disturbed by many of the attitudes Rhys expresses. It was Rhys's lack of respect for her clients that most bothered me, though this unfortunately seems to be a likely representation of many many (most?) phone sex performers' attitudes toward callers. She wrote, "It is difficult to have much respect for someone when the only contact you have with him is when you're exploiting his neediness. You might have compassion for him but not respect." I think this quote reflects the underlying tone of the book, that anyone who calls phone sex is inherently unhealthy. She develops many personal theories about why people call phone sex and why people have particular fantasies, but all of those reasons are, to her, pathological.

And on top of all of that, she provided a good number of transcripts of parts of calls, and her dialogue was absolutely BORING. Good god, if that is what most people get when they call phone sex lines, no wonder folks are surprised when they find PSOs who are actually good at description and sensual language!

If you are only going to read one book on phone sex, it has to be Miranda Austin's Phone Sex: Aural Thrills and Oral Skills. Austin's style is much more engaging and entertaining.

Natalie Rhys was a poor Welsh child whose father worked in one of the last coal mines in Wales back in the 1970s, the victim of shrinking social resources and also a club foot. She was often lonely, her memoir tells us, and the signal event of her childhood was stumbling across a copy of a lonely hearts club journal to which a kindly school teacher allowed her to subscribe, even though she was obviously underage (12).

By the time she came to write her memoir, "Call Me Mistress," she had figured out not only the obvious ways to hook up with men, Welsh or otherwise, but also some not-so-obvious ones, including talking on an open switchboard and pretending to be all excited to hear men whisper dirty things to her, while doing her nails or whatever on the other side of the phone. If you like intimate descriptions of British people having phone sex in grotty bedsits, this book can't be beat. I couldn't help thinking of our own American Natalie, the starlet Natalie Wood, and thinking of how her life differed in many significant ways from that of Natalie Rhys, and how she never became a phone sex performer at least for pay.

At the end of the book she has passed through the gauntlet of embarrassment and plays in the garden of hope.