Fantasy Factory: An Insider's View of the Phone Sex Industry

The Fantasy Factory explores the world of women on the other end of the phone sex lines advertised in magazines like Playboy and Hustler. The author's interviews with these women, as well as her own first-hand experiences as an operator, reveal the complex ways operators and callers negotiate the shifting borders between desire and disgust, fantasy and reality, deception and belief. The Fantasy Factory raises provocative questions about the manufacture of artificial intimacy and the technological mediation of intimacy, as well as about the social construction of sexuality and gender.

Flowers discovers that operators--who assume names like Tiffany and Corvette--create a virtual reality in which callers can act out fantasies that operators may find boring, disgusting, or even frightening. She also discovers that even those women who are skilled at keeping their "true self" and their phone sex persona separate find that they have to struggle to protect that self and to maintain the ability to experience real intimacy.

Author: Amy Flowers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 03/01/1998
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780812216431

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/02/1998 pg. 49