The Fantasy Factory: An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry [Paperback]

Amy Flowers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1998 | Series: Feminist Cultural Studies, the Media, and Political Culture

The Fantasy Factory explores the world of women on the other end of the phone sex lines advertised in magazines like Playboy and Hustler. The author's interviews with these women, as well as her own first-hand experiences as an operator, reveal the complex ways operators and callers negotiate the shifting borders between desire and disgust, fantasy and reality, deception and belief. The Fantasy Factory raises provocative questions about the manufacture of artificial intimacy and the technological mediation of intimacy, as well as about the social construction of sexuality and gender.

Flowers discovers that operators—who assume names like Tiffany and Corvette—create a virtual reality in which callers can act out fantasies that operators may find boring, disgusting, or even frightening. She also discovers that even those women who are skilled at keeping their "true self" and their phone sex persona separate find that they have to struggle to protect that self and to maintain the ability to experience real intimacy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A careful, level-headed sifting of the costs and benefits that attend sex work."—Publishers Weekly

"A careful, level-headed sifting of the costs and benefits that attend contemporary forms of sex work. Having spent four months working as a phone-sex operator and having interviewed more experienced operators as well, Flowers lays out the contours of this world with a clarity that resists easy conclusions."—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Amy Flowers is an independent scholar.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (March 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812216431
• ISBN-13: 978-0812216431
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,110,810 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative, fascinating and a little sad, July 6, 2002

By 

janeyb "janeyb" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fantasy Factory: An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry (Paperback)

Amy Flowers delves into one of the growth areas of the sex industry. Phone sex is a $1 Billion/year industry here in the US. And yet, despite its size, it is generally given no more thought than as the punch line of a Monica Lewinsky joke.

Flowers reveals just what a difficult job it is to deal with the gomers, the goobers, the candymen, the turners and the psychos (her amusing and accurate segmentation of the different kinds of callers). Gomers are the lonely, who call "just to talk" - they don't even want "hot chat" from their favorite phone sex operator, they are craving contact since they have so much difficulty connecting with people in other venues. Gomers are the most lucrative clients because their calls are *long*. Once these fellows want hot chat however - some gomers get jealous, knowing that other guys are getting erotic conversation from the same woman that the gomer has been speaking to for hours on end, so some gomers start to want that same treatment - the gomer becomes a goober. Candymen want the phone sex equivalent of a quickie - they're fast and cheap, and not particularly lucrative. Turners are guys who could have been boyfriends or buddies under other circumstances, and are usually charming, with high status jobs. Psychos, however, are the misogynistic freaks who harass the operators and who comprise 15% of all the callers.

Flowers describes how the operators deal with each of these groups, and she describes how performing this kind of an intimate, emotional service can impact the operator.

Her interviews with various operators are insightful and fascinating. And should someone read this book thinking it will be a how-to manual regarding how to succeed in the phone sex industry, they will be sadly mistaken. Instead, it's a startling and accurate depiction of a very difficult business.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is lacking, even as a thesis, July 15, 2005

By 

Longhaired Goddess (East Coast, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fantasy Factory: An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry (Paperback)

On the cover and in the book, Amy Flowers presents herself as an "insider". In fact she only worked as a phone sex operator for a brief period of time as part of her research, and it sounds like she walked away from the experience thoroughly repelled.

In every paragraph she is passing judgments on her respondents for creating the fantasy the customers pay them to create. Where her respondents do not agree with her foregone conclusions, she pronounces them self-delusional. One of the companies mentioned practiced bait-and-switch and other scams with the customers - she blames the operators, and rather than investigating how prevalent it is for companies in the industry, declares it to be universal.

Perhaps she got a grade for this because her advisors also had the same closed-minded view of the industry. She certainly whines about her research not being taken seriously because it was an adult industry she was investigating.

This could have been an important work, but someone else would have had to do it. Ms. Flowers only found what she was looking for.

If you want to learn something about the people who work in phone sex, start with Phone Sex: Aural Thrill and Oral Skills by Miranda Austin or Dirty Talk: Diary of a Phone-Sex "Mistress" by Gary Anthony.

If you want to learn how not to conduct sociological research, read this book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A student looks at phone sex, May 31, 2001

By 

mike johnson (Daytona Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fantasy Factory: An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry (Paperback)

This is a book written by a student who took a job as a phone sex operator in order to write a thesis about the women in the industry. She talked to the operators...actually she was interviewing them for her paper. I think she did a good job of showing what they are like, certainly she doesn't look down on them. She may have done a better job of writing aboout the men who call. She divides them by types...from goobers to candymen to psychos. Very amusing and for a scholar...a good read.