A Montreal woman who worked the phones at one of those old-time sex phone hotlines explains her experience in this exclusive account.
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Montreal is considered the capital of so many things, but no one comes even close to our leads in all things sex.
The late 80s saw the emergence of a new form of safe sex: phone sex lines.
It slowly evolved from the loop lines of the 70s, when someone realized there was coin to be had.
Where the numbers followed a similar order (loop lines ended in 1175/1176), the 80s brought in 1-976, but also many local lines.
Late night TV ads eventually had you believing that hot, sexy young things were waiting for your call, with a languorous voice becoming you to call “(moan)...onnnnnnnne, nine seven six...”.
I can assure you, it was more like the Aerosmith Sweet Emotion video.
It was mostly older, and often very heavyset women on the other end, watching TV, running through a script.
I worked for an outfit often referred to as the top line here, Aphrodite.
The owner was a lovely, but morbidly obese woman who went by the name Emmanuelle, and ran the biz out of a swanky apartment on St Marc.
I was Corrine, as she wanted names that could be either French or English.
We’d take the call, get the guy’s name and credit card info, then check its validity via some number game Emmanuelle figured out to determine if the card was legit.
To her credit, there must have been some merit as I don’t recall every having a chargeback.
Once all the very unsexy stuff out of the way, we’d get to what they wanted, usually straight up “tell me what you’d do if I were there,” or the more expensive calls for domination.
Making someone bark like a dog while I watched the Price is Right was always fitting.
It paid well, and we were given cash weekly.
A normal week was around $500, not shabby for 1989.
Was it sexy for us? No.
Were there big names? Yes.
Did I ever veer off-script? Once.
Some poor bastard whose name I kept forgetting, and I referred to “my cock” instead of “your cock”. It was awkward, and high time I got out of that game. Especially when a known con was trying to track me down for “real life meetings.”