ABSTRACT
Phone sex is a kind of virtual sex work that entails sexually explicit behaviour where at least one of the participants engage in masturbation or sexual fantasies. This chapter argues that rather than fantasies, what makes phone sex work interaction successful (both in economic and interactional terms) is the operators’ professional ability to discursively mobilize suitable corporeal, sexual and gender resources and make clients feel that the interaction is “real” in the conversational space created through the phone. At the beginning of every call the operators play the role of the “switchboard lady” or answer the phone pretending to be an employee of the phone company in charge of asking the costumer which kind of operator he wants to talk to. Lorber’s theory on gender differences is based on the notion that individuals see the differences between men and women (and therefore consider them real and adequate) because they believe these differences to be biologically real.
