Introducing: Operator

Operator

Wondery

Society & Culture, Exhibit C

4.4 • 877 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2021

⏱️ 2 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During the 1-900 number craze of the Nineties, one company provided the vast majority of phone sex. American Telnet was an empire founded by the man who called himself “The Telephone Pimp.” He ran the company “like General Motors” and got filthy rich doing it. But for the (mostly) women who answered the calls and delivered fantasies 24-7, it was a different story. The powerful stigma against sex work was always lurking just beneath the surface, until it threatened to tear apart the whole company.

Hosted by Tina Horn (Why Are People Into That?), OPERATOR is an eight-part series about big ambitions, Shakespearean-level corporate backstabbing, men and women at the cutting edge of a technological revolution...and on the front lines of a sexual one.

You can binge all episodes of Operator exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Find Wondery+ in the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When I was growing up in the 90s I saw these kinds of ads on late night TV all the time.
0:14.4	Oh, one of the kind options will leave you.
0:17.8	Spent, stick it in.
0:20.6	Your credit card, that is. I didn't have a credit card to stick in, but millions of people did.
0:26.0	And a lot of that money flowed to one company in particular.
0:30.0	Not long ago, we reported on 800 phone numbers that are anything but free.
0:35.0	You see this man Mike Pardis? He controls all of the phone sex in the country.
0:41.0	And like my objective is to be associated with a really large in the The story of the biggest phone sex company in America, their fight against the world.
0:57.0	Somebody come busting in the door and they were saying that MCI worldwide or AT&T they're not happy.
1:04.6	That is the front page of a publication and it is a blown up picture of a vagina.
1:09.7	And the men and women, mostly women, who were behind the scenes.
1:13.8	There was a picture made 50 shades of gray.
1:16.4	If you walk down my room, you would think it's 100 shades of gray.
1:20.3	Dude, you're driving a Mercedes.
1:21.6	You're flying around in a helicopter, and you want to call these ladies a bitch?
1:25.0	Then these were people who were fucking scamming us.
1:28.0	I'm Tina Horn journalist, podcaster, and sex worker.
1:32.0	I thought I'd heard every sexual fantasy and every
1:35.4	behind-the-scenes story under the sun until I heard this one. It was like
1:39.7	ecstasy, cocaine, champagne, millionaires.
1:42.6	The human race, everybody's a freak.
1:45.0	So therefore, me, I'm just the organizer.
	...

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