Maura Hehir downplays the news that desperate moms are resorting to phone sex to make money while at home with the kids:
So after watching Elisabeth Hasselbeck's hard-hitting investigative report on this issue, I learned that because of the economy, the number of moms with young children becoming phone-sex operators has increased 400% in the last eighteen months. Except Hasselbeck never explicitly says how many that is: a bold, italicized "400" looks a lot scarier gliding across the TV screen than saying there are something like fifty phone-sex-operator moms now as opposed to ten.
J. Bryan Lowder wonders whether who actually still pays for phone sex in the era of internet porn:
[A]fter having spent some time looking through operator recruitment materials, I can report that phone sex is no longer based on a model of call centers and those infamous 1-900-numbers. Instead, the current model is much more entrepreneurial: while most actresses work for companies that facilitate payment processing and the necessary telephonic infrastructure, the women themselves are responsible for maintaining websites, blogging, self-promotion and, in some cases, even “trolling” online chat rooms for potential clients. In that sense, phone sex in 2011 is basically just an extension of other sorts of semi-interactive online porn.
The Dish 