Tales from a Quaker Phone Sex Operator

I'd like to republish part of this article from the latest edition of Friends Journal. This will be of particular interest to my feminist readers. Because this is a very emotionally intense article, it carries with it a Trigger Warning.

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A phone-sex operator as a spiritual healer? No, I didn’t start out the work with this intention. But that is where the path led.

“You’re a sweetheart, Karen. Always have been,” the caller tells me in his heavy Appalachian accent.

“Thanks, Wyatt. I try to be,” I reply. “You are, too.”

“I mean it, Karen. You’ve always been a sweetheart.”

I repeat my comment, and try to move the conversation toward something else. Wyatt has a tendency to go on and on with these platitudes. It’s not that he lacks intelligence—far from it. What he does lack are good verbal skills, especially a good emotional vocabulary. He’s an industrial engineer and comes from a family who did not particularly value education or the ability to be articulate.

Nonetheless, my relationship with Wyatt has been among the most intimate of my life. It’s not a relationship between equals; it’s more like a parent-child or therapist-client relationship. I am a phone-sex operator, and Wyatt was one of my customers for over six years, until that relationship reached the limits of usefulness to him and we became “friends,” or at least social acquaintances. Although I still know him only over the phone, I have his real name and address and carry a photo of him in my wallet.

I love him.

To read the entire work, subscribe to Friends Journal.