PARTY LINE

This was said with such a sidelong look of knowingness that I was sure blurting out “What’s phone sex?” (and, after all, it’s not so hard to guess) would be the wrong response. So I gave her a jiggly up-and-down nod of the head as if to say, “Of course! Of course you did! Who wouldn’t?”

She also said it so loudly that everyone else at the table, about a dozen people, turned to listen, which is just what she wanted. “And one time . . .” she continued with a mock cringe,” . . . one time he got my mother on the phone and thought it was me!”

I remember gasps everywhere and a woman saying, “Oh. My. Gawd.”

But in the weeks that followed, I heard the same story about three other couples. That was enough to allow me to dismiss it as an urban myth, into which my dinner-party interlocutor had been crass enough to introduce her mother for mere dramatic effect.

I drew two conclusions: first, that all the gasps and oh-my-gawds were meant to mask the ignorance of my fellow diners, prisoners like me of the Will to Chic; and therefore that “phone sex” existed only as a pretext for telling this rather entertaining dinner-party story.

But something’s happened in the past decade. Nowadays, you’d have to be an utter naif not to have heard of the practice. The evidence keeps pouring in: anecdotes, the Starr Report, the pages and pages of ads in the back of tabloids, and even, in other countries, television.

Last fall in Berlin, I kept seeing the same commercial over and over again on television: a bunch of blonde girls propped up on their elbows on a bed, chirping a jingle catchy enough that I remember it six months later:

 

Null-hundert-neun, vier-zwei-zwei, vier-zwei-zwei

Einundachtzig pfennig,

Wir sind dabei!

Vier-zwei-zwei, vier-zwei-zwei!

It’s a little less romantic in English:

 

0109-422-422

81c

Here we are!

0109-422-422

So phone sex does exist — but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. This is just another instance of society’s tendency to evolve in the direction of Monty Python skits.

On a compact disc that I’ve worn paper-thin there’s a parody of the BBC’s Election Night Special, in which a radical candidate called Tarquin Fin Tin Limbim Fatang Fatang Ole Biscuit Barrel gets no votes. (“Not a sausage. Bugger all.”) Does that bother him? “Not at all,” he replies. “I always say, Climb every mountain — ford every stream.”

I used to laugh and laugh at the utter absurdity of this skit, which was written in 1970. But within ten years, “spin” was a verb here, and today, even Britain has this kind of politics. As in all great Monty Python routines — The Olympic Being Eaten by a Crocodile Event, Argument Lessons, The All-England Recapitulate Proust Contest, The Department of Silly Walks — the humor resides in using sensible means to pursue ridiculous ends.

In this light, the innovation of “phone sex” would seem to be Monty Python’s way of resolving a heated and running argument I keep having with one of my colleagues. We belong to the same generation and agree on most of our premises, but we’re irreconcilable on one point.

My colleague argues that the country has gone off the rails sexually in the past decade and foundered in a sink of hedonism and decadence. I argue that we’ve just passed through the most puritanical decade of the century, and that people are now about as likely to seek personal fulfillment through sex as they are to seek it through chain-smoking.

Now I see that we’re both right. The twenty-somethings I know are not hedonists, let alone deviants. And yet they’ll talk about anything — anything! Presumably they’ll even dial null-hundert-neun, vier-zwei-zwei, vier-zwei-zwei and pay for the privilege.

Sex is all over the public discourse, to the point where it’s becoming like racial prejudice: The harder it gets to find, the more people tend to talk about it. Popular songs now raise what used to be thought the most private practices. So do articles! Ten years ago, I’d rather have had a root canal than see my byline below an article on this topic.

Which, I suppose, makes me another creative spirit liberated by the Lewinsky affair.

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL