The Operator podcast documents the phenomenal rise and colossal fall of American TelNet, whose 1-900 numbers revolutionised the sex industry
It’s 1990 in a suburban North American town, and a middle-aged man has just got back from a long, hard day at the office. He unbuttons his shirt, loosens his tie, and says a quick hello to his wife and kids, before heading downstairs to the basement. Once there, he closes the door, settles himself down next to his corded landline phone, and dials 1-900-HOT-CUMM. The phone rings, then clicks, and a sultry woman’s voice pulsates through the speaker: “Welcome baby, to the only phone line where fantasy becomes reality.”
At that exact moment in time, all over the US, “horny dads” like this were dialling in to tailored 1-900 lines (1-900-BIG-TITS, 1-900-WET-FUCK… you get the idea), unloading their fears, fantasies, and, err, bodily fluids onto the operators on the other end of the phone. At the eye-watering cost of $3.99 per minute, these horny dads were making the phone companies millions of dollars, and unwittingly ushering in the tantalising era of phone sex industry.
It began in the early 90s, before the advent of the internet – and therefore ubiquitous porn and 24-hour cam shows. Premium-rate 1-900 numbers had been taking off in the US for the last decade, with people calling up to get therapy, hear their horoscope, or join a fandom hotline. But soon male callers were demanding to speak to psychologists with big boobs or psychics with perky bums. When former New York City nightclub owner and telecommunications entrepreneur Mike Pardes got wind of this, he had a lightbulb moment: why not give the callers what they want? Enter: American TelNet (ATN) – the dominating daddy of the phone sex industry.
Pardes founded the company in 1990, enlisting 20-something tech genius Michael Self to create the groundbreaking technology for the phone systems. Now, 30 years on, the wild story of American TelNet is the subject of a new podcast, aptly-titled Operator. Hosted by writer and author of SfSx: Terms of Service, a graphic novel that grapples with sex work and technology, Tina Horn, the nine-part series documents the phenomenal rise and colossal fall of ATN, guiding listeners through the chaotic, scandalous, almost unbelievable story of one of America’s leading phone sex companies. There’s armed raids, a coup by Self – in which he locks all the employees out of the office and attempts to take over leadership of the company – and an X-rated, immersive insight into what it’s like to be both an operator and a client on ATN’s lines.
Below, Dazed speaks to Horn and Pardes’ daughter and former ATN employee Jill Pardes about what makes ATN’s story so fascinating, what it was like working there in its heyday, and how the company might be different today.
How did the podcast come about? What makes the American TelNet story so fascinating and unique?
Tina Horn: The thing that was so exciting for me – as a non-fiction writer who tells a lot of true stories about sexuality and the sex industry – is that the Operator series was initially being developed as a biopic, sort of like The Social Network meets Boogie Nights. And that movie could have been amazing, but when the executive producers decided to make it a non-fiction podcast, the potential of that is (so great because) truth is stranger than fiction, right? This story has so many fascinating characters and twists and turns that it doesn’t need to be embellished or fictionalised for the structure of a movie.
I’m always more interested in teasing out the real story, rather than trying to graft a bunch of tropes on top of it – especially when it comes to stories about sex work, where there’s so much disinformation and misunderstanding about what the work of sex work really looks like. People get distracted by the sex part and are less interested in, you know, how the sausage is made. The fact that people are so fascinated by it speaks to the fact that people actually do want to know how adult entertainment comes to be what it is.
Jill, what was it like reliving your time at ATN, and reflecting on the years spent working with your father?
Jill Pardes: It was way more emotional than I expected. There were things that came out that I was unaware of. I was about 26 when I started working there – my father offered me a job at $300 a week. I was placing ads in newspapers like The Village Voice and Miami Herald, and other papers all across the United States. It was so antiquated back then, compared to today. Then I did some other special projects – adult magazines and things like that – then after eight years, I was running the (marketing) department and took on the role of accounting. Looking back, working with my dad was the best decision of my life. I learned so much from my father. He was the most brilliant man I know; he was very diligent about our work ethics and habits, which was wonderful, but then I got to spend a lot of time with him outside of work too. It was kind of the best of both worlds.
Can you share any standout anecdotes from your time there?
There’s lots of them! I don’t know which direction to go in… oh, I could tell you about a photoshoot we did. I’d usually buy photos from photographers for the girls to be in the adult magazines, like Hustler, Playboy, and Penthouse, but we did our own shoot with six models, a studio, and a photographer. Of course, my father sent me there, and when I arrived, because I was young, the girls thought I was there to also be in the photoshoot. I was like, ‘No I’m here to pay for the photoshoot’. So, we had to just get racy photos, and it was a full 10-hour day – I had this one girl who worked for me, and by the end I just said to her, ‘Please make this work, I can’t do this anymore’, because I was more prudish. And then one of the heads of the (accounting) department came down to see the girls, and he delivered the cheque, which was quite funny.
The podcast paints Mike as someone who was resilient to media and government pushback against ATN. What was the atmosphere like in the company during this time of frenzied public attention?
Jill Pardes: My father’s words were just, ‘Keep going as long as we can’. If we said the wrong thing in ad copy or during the phone preamble, they could shut us down. So everything was constantly changing. But my father’s resilience helped the company get stronger and better each time there was a modification.
“This story has so many fascinating characters and twists and turns that it doesn’t need to be embellished or fictionalised” – Tina Horn, host
Do you think anything has changed when it comes to the press and public’s attitude towards sex work?
Tina Horn: There is generally more of an openness to discussions, and an acknowledgement of the mere existence of sexuality outside of heteronormative standards since American TelNet’s heyday in the 90s. But, in a lot of ways, the stigma against sex workers is the same as it ever was. What contemporary sex workers have to fight against is very similar to what American TelNet and its workers had to fight against as a company and sexual labourers. The antagonists that ATN had to fight against – the press, Dateline, religious and political anti-porn crusaders – are still there, and they still have political power and a very strong and insidious influence over policy and culture.
And then, of course, there were corporate regulations. Back in the ATN days, you had to navigate phone companies’ regulations, but today it’s more about the tech industry: the platforms that workers rely upon to advertise, publish, and sell their content, like adult content sites and social media. Also the financial sector – American TelNet had to fight against financial regulations from banks, credit cards, and payment processors, who are inherently sex phobic (you can look to 2020’s OnlyFans controversy to see how nothing has changed when it comes to financial discrimination against sex workers).
The big difference today is that sex workers themselves are able to sieze the means of production, and access platforms created by these tech companies (which are therefore susceptible to regulations) to market themselves, set their own boundaries when it comes to what services they offer or what content they create, and manage their own money. In some ways, that puts the power back in the hands of the labourers. Also because of the internet, sex workers have more opportunities to create community – both to advocate for the labour conditions they want, and have support in an industry that’s often marginalised and vilified. However, that means there isn’t a multi-billion dollar company like ATN absorbing the pressures on behalf of the labourers, so now the sex workers themselves are more directly dealing with the repercussions of corporate and financial regulations and political pressure.
Having worked alongside the phone operators, or having interviewed them for the podcast, what impression did you both get of what it was like working in that department?
Jill Pardes: I actually bumped into a friend of a friend who worked for (ATN’s operator department manager) Victoria. When I talked to her, she had very positive things to say about it. Also, (they weren’t just working in the operator room), once we had the capabilities, the operators started working from home.
Tina Horn: (For the podcast), we did talk to one operator who worked from home, who said how different working from home was in the 90s. This is a great example of how Michael Self (who created ATN’s groundbreaking phone system) was on the cutting edge of so much communication technology. The fact that he could set it up so that when a phone sex customer sees one of ATN’s ads and calls up the number, he’s rerouted not only to the physical phone room where there were operators working in a company office, but also to someone’s home where they could pick up and accept the call. (This was amazing technologically, but also because it gave sex workers) standard employment status, health insurance benefits, and paid time off – these things are rarely offered in the sex industry today.
Jill Pardes: Yeah, and everybody there was a big family. The operators had their own company picnics and Christmas parties. It really was a family for them.
The teams also fought like families: Victoria was seemingly arbitrarily and abruptly fired, and Michael Self co-ordinated a coup within the company, attempting to overthrow Mike Pardes’ leadership.
Tina Horn: In my opinion, the reason that Michael Self did what he did, with regards to the coup, has everything to do with his internalised stigma about the fact that all of his talents were being put towards the sex industry. That stigma and shame is something I see so much in my work, and is the subject of what I’m trying to help people work through, so it was very meaningful to me to see Michael Self work through that by telling his story. The deepest satisfaction and closure that I have is seeing him come around to a different way of thinking about his work, which makes it more possible for him to feel proud of what he accomplished.
Jill Pardes: After (the coup) happened, I remember my father being not only angry with Michael Self, but hugely disappointed in him. But, as they started speaking again and becoming more friendly, my father still respected him and forgave him. And (like a family), they moved on. That was a big part of everything.
Before we end the call, can I just tell you how the podcast started for my father?
Of course, please do!
Jill Pardes: Around 10 years ago, my father would come to my house and we’d work in my office and then go for lunch a couple of times a week. One time he said to me, ‘I want to write my memoir’, and I sort of chuckled. And he said to me, ‘If you don’t want to type it, I’ll get someone else to do it’. I laughed and said, ‘God, of course I’ll type it for you’. He had about two pages of handwritten notes. As I typed it and we sat together, it became two pages on the computer, then 13 pages, and then he started bringing me all these different stories and I would pop them in where they needed to be. (Then eventually) I looked at him, and we both shuddered, practically at the same time, and I was like, ‘This could be a movie’. And he said, ‘I was thinking the same thing’. Then by accident, we met (Operator executive producer) Daryl Freimark through one of my father’s friends – and that’s how (the podcast) started... just with my father sending some notes, saying he wrote his memoir.
You can listen to all nine episodes of Operator here.