Aural Sex

Virginia is for listeners

Looking for ways to cut its ballooning phone bill, the state of Virginia ran a computer check on the patterns of its employees' long-distance calls. It turned out that in March alone 2,509 calls went to a single New York City number. What for? A 57-second recorded message that titillates dialers with aural sex, specifically the breathless sounds of an ersatz liaison in which the imaginative caller can pretend that he (or she) is a participant.

Virginia Governor Charles Robb first heard of the decadent direct dialing from his press secretary. "There's some good news and some bad news," George Stoddart told Robb. "The bad news is that state employees from 84 agencies racked up more than $1,000 in telephone calls to a pornographic recording in New York. The good news is that none came from the Governor's mansion." The largest number of dialings, it was learned, came from offices at the University of Virginia and from the department of highways and transportation. There were also a scattering of calls from the department of the visually handicapped and a state geriatric hospital.

Virginia's attorney general says he will try to collect for the calls; a state law forbids personal calls on government phones. There are, however, no federal regulations governing these kinds of telephone conversations, recorded or live. In March a New York federal judge dismissed a suit against High Society, a skin magazine that produces the porno service.

The notion for setting up the erotic phone system came from High Society Publisher Gloria Leonard, a former night club manager and X-rated movie star. Leonard employs the models of the magazine's centerfold, women with names like Serena, Becky and Holly-O, to do the dirty talking. Says she: "While the talk avoids the seven words Comedian George Carlin has said cannot be uttered on TV, the messages are nevertheless highly suggestive."

The operation's messages are changed three times daily, and the producers say their main number gets about 500,000 calls a day. From a take of 7-c- per call, New York Telephone pays High Society $10,000 a day and keeps $25,000 for itself.

The new service is a byproduct of A T & T's recent Government-mandated breakup: the deregulators ordered local telephone companies to give up their monopoly on their sponsored Dial-It services (time, weather, Dial-A-Joke and so on). High Society was one of 21 enterprises picked by lottery to get a piece of the New York Telephone action, and has since bought two more of the numbers from other lottery winners. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.