Today’s guest blogger is the fabulous Javi Osei, who blogs over at The Love Script and on Substack as Stranger in Lisbon. She’s here to talk about her experience of phone sex work and the impact it had on her. As she told me in her initial pitch: “The money was real, but so was the emotional burden.” I’m so grateful to her for sharing her experiences, and giving an insight into what it was like for her to work on the phone lines.
Note that this piece contains real (anonymised) quotes from client calls, and as such details some fantasies and obsessions that might be disturbing (and racist).
My Honey Voice: What phone sex work took out of me
“For some reason, my camera isn’t working.” The voice of an older man started our video call.
“It’s OK,” I assured him. “I don’t need to see you, if you don’t want me to.”
“No, I want you to see that I’m a real person.”
“OK” I responded patiently.
There were muffled sounds as he fumbled with the phone and I waited to begin. After a few more moments…
“OK. Let’s just begin. So a little bit about myself. I’m 62 and I’m married.”
I raised my eyebrows.
He continued. “I’m not some creep. It’s just that my wife is sick. She’s lovely, really. But she’s sick and is not able to perform her regular duties.”
I suppressed my scuffing.
“So here I am. I wanted to talk to a beautiful Brown woman. I love your voice and I just wanna, you know, get my needs met.”
I could fill in the blanks and our call began.
I talked about how beautiful his cock was and all the things I wanted to do with it. My voice. The one that slides slow and thick like honey off a spoon, made him cum in just a few minutes.
Too fast. Call done. I’m too good at what I do.
Fortunately, he selected the option for me to be paid for the entire time and it was immediately transferred to my account when we were done.
I was once again intrigued. Really, it was just an acting job and while I calculated my potential future earnings in my head, I immediately strategized on how I could make this gig work for me. I figured I would do this for a year and by then, my financial landscape would look very different from present day.
This was one of my milder calls. My first client was nothing like that.
Honestly, when I first began my phone sex gig, I had no idea what I was in for. My first video client messaged me about having a hard problem and asked if I could help. I replied, “sure”. He ordered a video session and shortly thereafter, we were connected. He was gross. Sitting on a toilet in a filthy bathroom with greasy hair and brown rot on his teeth as he started to tell me that I was beautiful and then, immediately panned the phone down to his penis.
Oh wow! We’re really doing this!
He was already jerking himself off. I was nauseated. We talked a little and he asked if I could lower the camera. I obliged because I was fully dressed so I lowered it so he could see my neck instead of just my face. I’m a bit hazy about what we spoke about on this particular call because I was in shock, and before I had fully accepted what I was a part of, he was cumming on himself and ending the call. As soon as we hung up, the money was in my account and he had written a glowing review of my “work”.
OK, I thought to myself. That wasn’t that bad. Albeit, I didn’t know this was that kind of site.
After that first call, I understood what the platform actually was. It wasn’t about helping people with their relationship problems as advertised—it was about helping men get off. A man would buy a session—video, text, or phone—in 15-minute increments at prices I set. The site took a commission, and if the client came too quickly and was cheap, he’d end the session early and get reimbursed for unused minutes.
It defied my expectations, but the work itself wasn’t demanding, so I kept at it. Single motherhood has taught me a valuable lesson: financial security comes from strategic diversification—building reserves while creating multiple revenue sources. Besides, as a writer, I had an opportunity to get into the psyche of these men. I likened myself to a sociologist taking mental field notes about who they were and what they shared.
A subsequent session was with an older white man who looked nerdy and innocent. He shared that he had one testicle due to an operation and he claimed to feel insecure about it. In short, he was looking for some encouragement that his dick wasn’t so unsightly. I agreed to provide my honest evaluation. The conversation pivoted into a BBC (big black cock) obsession. It was a calm conversation and though it wasn’t as direct as the other two conversations, he managed to get off. I was struck by how harmless and lonely he appeared. He became a regular and always wanted details about my past sexual experience and how big was the biggest Black man I’ve been with.
Generally speaking, I never miss a moment to step outside of and judge myself. It’s impossible not to when I think about the life trajectory that carried me from being a little black girl growing up in an artist-dominated highrise in NYC where I fantasized about working in fashion, traveling the world, and owning beautiful clothes, smelling heavenly like my mommy, and owning a stately brownstone, to these moments… where money is the driving force that leads me to talk to complete strangers who are exposing themselves to me and wanting details about my sex life. All the while I was celibate.
In college, when I needed more money to cover my tuition, I had romanticized stripping. Going so far as to develop a routine with a highly skilled and talented male dancer on campus. I was prepared. I would have enough for my tuition and then some. I could do this, I internally pumped myself up. I told myself that money would be easy.
It was not.
When I arrived at the place with a friend, I watched the stripper that was performing. It was depressing right away. It was a quiet place and she didn’t seem like she was getting that much money and I decided that I would be giving too much of myself for too little of a reward. I tipped her and left. There had to be another way for me.
Some boundaries are luxuries we outgrow. The woman who walked out of that strip club in college was working with a different set of variables—no child depending on her, no ex-husband’s child support not covering enough. Phone sex from my bedroom wasn’t stripping. That’s what I told myself. And technically, I was right. In fact, I never showed anything beyond my face.
However, the more men I interacted with, the more the job would grate on my soul. I didn’t want to judge these men or myself, but it was hard not to.
There were the men who just wanted to talk like the older man with one nut. These were the kind of men who wanted to get off, but wanted to interact with someone while they were doing it. There were the married men whose wife either wasn’t sexually available, like the wife with a terminal illness, or wasn’t around. One man said his wife was away for a few weeks and this was the first time he got on a site like this. Sure! There was yet another man who had a micropenis and alleged his wife had cheated on him because of it. He wanted to be degraded—to hear me mock and disrespect him about his size. Our conversations were a mix of small talk, humiliation, and BBC fantasies.
He didn’t come across as a scumbag so it was hard for me to be mean and nasty to him and he was the first client that made me look past the money and question how what I was doing was mentally and energetically impacting me. I knew that I wanted to start dating again, but I also recognized my perspective about men was shifting as a result of these sessions. It was subtle, but present nonetheless. I couldn’t help but wonder how many men have covert obsessions with BBC? How many men would log into a site like this even if they were in a relationship, the moment their partner left town?
Sometimes the clients were disrespectful and gross. A harsh contradiction to the men who start sessions friendly with warm small talk, these men would get straight to their demands. Show me your tit. Or worse, show me your pussy. When I would explain that I don’t show my body, but they are free to show theirs, they would immediately say, “so you want this money or not?”
Then, I would reiterate what I just said and they would disconnect or I would.
Why show myself when I didn’t have to? I’d already discovered I could make the same money with just my voice. That felt like a boundary worth keeping.
One day, I woke up to a man wanting to share a depraved fantasy of his. I responded by saying that I was not the right therapist for him. It was too deviant to even recount. It shook me and was a horrible way to wake up. Later that day, I was at the mall with my son when a man messaged me for a session. I said I wasn’t able to do it at the moment, but perhaps we could schedule something later. At which point, he told me “just go to a bathroom and talk to me so I could bust this nut, right quick”.
Excuse me?!
I had enough. I closed the app, blocked him, and sat in the food court watching my son eat his ice cream.
I spend enormous energy becoming the woman I want my son to see—purposeful, dignified, constantly evolving toward something better. Every single day I logged onto that platform, I betrayed her.
What started as fast money became a daily erosion. I was tired of seeing dicks. Tired of performing empathy for a bunch of lonely, sorry men. Tired of scheduling my own debasement like it was just another task on my to-do list between school pickup and client calls.
The truth that finally penetrated: I was already making money elsewhere – work that used my mind and my expertise. Work I could talk about at dinner parties. I didn’t need this income. What I needed was to stop pouring my finite energy into work that made me feel infinite shades of small, and redirect it toward expanding what actually fed my soul.