Phone Sex: Aural Thrills and Oral Skills
- by Miranda Austin

Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(01/22/03)

Professional friend, counselor, method actor, storyteller, and moaner supreme Miranda Austin has been facilitating male orgasms for almost a decade as a self-described "phone slut." With Phone Sex, she rivals Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis in cataloguing the prevailing fantasies and fetishes that dominate today's het male sexual imagination.

For the guys paying Austin $1.99 per minute just to hear her voice, collaborative oral fiction is more compelling than the female flesh they could hire for what they're spending. And paid phone sex is safe, legal, and may be argued not to count as infidelity. (Though Austin wishes that callers weren't so afraid of revealing their secret desires to their partners: "I always encourage them to go to their wives. I push them to tell their wives about their fantasies. I can't help it. I approve of happy marriages.")

As much as the opportunity to act out their fantasies over the wires, the callers are seeking absolution. A phone sex operator gives them permission and -- more than that -- she's the rare woman who, rather than walk out the door in horror when they confess what turns them on, pulls up a chair and says, "Wow, that's really interesting. Tell me more. Hey, you know, I could get into that!"

And Austin often does get into it. A graduate degree holder with a sexy voice who took the job to pay off some debt, she offers a high degree of empathy especially when her clients' fantasies match her own submissive desires for rough sex. Having once taken courses to become a therapist, her non-judgmental attitude is key to her success:

These guys feel comfortable enough around me to play with their deeper, darker fantasies. And it's amusing to know that I've been creating these lusty kink-monsters all over the country."

Austin recounts actually performing, rather than simulating, the requests of some simpatico customers, like the ice-dominant:

Ladies, if you've never felt an ice-cold silicon dildo inside you, let me just warn you that this is quite an experience. Especially if you have to leave the dildo inside while you use your vibrator...The funniest thing was he had to ask me if I'd come or not. None of the guys have ever had to ask before. I guess my fake orgasms sound realer than my real ones.

The catalogue of turn-ons is mind-boggling in its variety and outlandishness. However jaded you think you are, you'll find people here who eroticize things you've never thought of in such a context. Like the guy who gets off on holding his breath while Austin times him and cheers him on, or the guys who want to send incriminating photos to the operators (who have their real names and addresses for credit card verification) so they can be blackmailed. Or the guy who turns Austin into the Incredible Shrinking Woman in a pages-long fantasy session that makes a dandy piece of science fiction erotica.

In contrast to the unusual fantasies are the old standards, the requests that she gets time after time. Most popular sex act: anal. Most popular theme: domination. Most popular fantasy lover: Catholic schoolgirl. Most popular sex accessory for submissive men: high heels. The second most common query after "What are you wearing?" is "Describe your pussy," which always baffles Austin: "How many attributes does a pussy have? I can talk about the color of the hair; I can talk about its state of wetness and then I'm pretty much stumped."