Friday Goldman might have been a singer or an actress. Even on the phone, her silky voice has a way of drawing you in. She's smooth, intelligent, winning. You want to keep talking with her. Which explains why she is such a spectacularly successful phone sex operator. She keeps her average customer on the line for 32 minutes. At $2.99 a minute, that adds up.
But it's not just talent. Goldman, 23, says there's a formula for good dirty talk, an algorithm of desire that she's documented in her electronic guide, Phonesexatron. For now, she's using it to boost the revenue of the company she co-owns. But she imagines selling Web access to the rest of the billion-dollar industry. "Most people could be phone sex operators," she says during a long phone conversation (no charge!) from her office in Cleveland. "You just have to tap into what's human about you."
Phonesexatron, also known as the Phone Sex Matrix, includes a treatise on the art of telephonic titillation. ("Just take something in your everyday life and pervert it.") The guide also enumerates tips on breaking the ice, pacing calls, and providing convincing moans and other sound effects. And there's a lengthy thesaurus to help operators avoid repetition and cliché. (Among the 210 syn- onyms for male genitalia: night crawler in a turtleneck sweater and master of ceremonies.)
But all that is a warm-up for Phone-sexatron's main attraction - the keywords, phrases, scenarios, and scripts that operators can search midcall. The basic formula involves picking an item from each of three columns - Setting, Sex Act, Character - and putting them together into an arousing narrative. As the guide puts it: "car wash + hot blow job + muscle-bound hunk = hot car wash blow job story!"
Goldman has also written detailed crib sheets for 60 sexual proclivities - from standard-issue bondage and discipline to specialties like "female giant" and "humané ashtray." Each category comes with suggested vocabulary, "story starters," and links to related Web sites. Using these guides, operators can give demanding fetishistsé - the most consistent and lucrative return customers - what they desire.
Goldman started learning about the sex trade at 14 after befriending a mohawked dominatrix at a riot grrrl gathering. She was intrigued that someone could make big money beating men. At 17, she began working for the dominatrix as a receptionist. She would greet clients, blindfold them, and lead them to the dungeon. The job exposed her to some of the fetishes she'd later document in Phonesexatron. The rest she researched online. "I was a computer nerd, and that made everything very accessibleé," she says. "It had nothing to do with my sex life - just my brain."
When Goldman turned 18, she got a job as a phone sex operator. Her first year in the business, she racked up $150,000 for her employer. (She took home about $30,000.) She began keeping track of the techniques that proved effective and passed them around to her coworkers. Before long, she was writing rough scripts and methodically organizing the material. "I always had a thing for the Dewey decimal system," she says.
Her tips and tricks eventually morphed into a sophisticated digital guide that operators could quickly search. It worked. Phonesexatron stretched the length of the average call from 14.47 minutes to 24.2 minutes within six months - nearly double the industry average - boosting her employer's profits by 42 percent.
This spring, Goldman took a break from getting a women's studies degree at Cleveland State to launch her own phone sex company, which now employs about 30 people. By the end of the summer, she expects to have Phonesexatron.com up and running. Firms - some from as far away as Bangalore - will be able to buy access, allowingé operators to log on with a password. If someone calls wanting a party for his master of ceremonies, Goldman wants nothing lost in translation.
- Brian Lam
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Best. Phone. Sex. Ever.
