The fantasy factory
Subtitle: an insider's view of the phone sex industry
By: Amy Flowers.
Series: Feminist cultural studies, the media, and political culture
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Philadelphia, PA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 144
Subjects: Telephone sex -- United States.; Intimacy (Psychology); Feminist theory -- United States.; Technology and civilization -- United States.
Description: 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.

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.

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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [125]-139) and index.