On 11 September, 2001, a nurse was texting saucy messages to thousands of strangers across the country. But the nurse was really a 21-year-old man, bored in an office in London. We hear his story.
Sadie was texting a stranger about the enthusiastic act of fellatio she intended to perform on him, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She’d spent the morning idly swapping dirty messages with a steady trickle of men replying to her ad in the back of an adult magazine: ‘Horny London nurse, 21, loves red hot anonymous sex chat while I touch myself’. But as the devastating scenes from New York unfolded on the news, things began to get busy. By the time the towers fell she was fielding sexts from scores, then hundreds, then thousands of men, phones in one hand, now rabidly libidinous and turning to Sadie in urgent pursuit of release from that day’s sudden ruption of fear. She had become a lightning rod for an outbreak of terror-fuelled onanism. The starting gun in a race for one last orgasm at the end of the world.
I know this because Sadie was me.
On a day that is still scoured for abominable truths, this was one of them: on 9/11 I was bringing hundreds of terrified men to climax while pretending to be a masturbating woman. It would be the busiest day the short-lived premium rate sexting industry ever had. And it would make me, a 20-year-old heterosexual male student working a part-time job from a dingy office in King’s Cross, the unlikely conductor of a symphonic transatlantic anxiety wank.
It wasn’t the position I had applied for. In the winter of 1999, I walked into Holborn Jobcentre and replied to an ad for people who could type. A week later, I worked for a company who ran the lonely hearts pages in hundreds of newspapers across the country. My job was to interview lonely people, writing the ad that would help them find love, while the business made money via the cynical mechanisms of premium rate telephone billing. On a preamble-loaded call that cost a pound a minute to make, romantic hopefuls would collect their messages, or discover they had none and learn life remained cruel.
I quickly developed a flair for crafting 30-word come-get-mes. This was before the advent of internet dating kicked the bottom out of the whole endeavour. But my bosses spied opportunity in the turn-of-the-millennium text messaging boom.
Needing to diversify fast, they took a sharp left turn towards those looking for a different kind of companionship all together.
It worked like this. Advertising in the backs of Britain’s illustrious library of jazz mags, and unsettlingly randy newspapers like the Daily Sport, Sadie was one of maybe 30 avatars whose names and occupations – nurse, secretary, police officer and, weirdly, vet – were the only variations on a common theme: they were bored, horny and insatiable for text sex with strangers. Men replied for a quid a throw, and a seedy transaction was done. One enthusiastic early adopter spent £600 in a single day before his phone company cut him off. He reappeared later that afternoon on a different number, undeterred and, in his own way, smitten.
Back then, sexting was a niche interest activity. Texting each other was expensive. Messages were limited to 160 characters. Social media hadn’t yet demolished our sense of reserve, and sending nudes was a subplot from a speculative dystopia. In 2001, the men bombarding Sadie with obscene requests could scarcely have believed they now had the means to communicate directly with a woman who, until recently, would only ever have been the object of their wildest fantasies. A fantasy, though, is all she was.
In real life, Sadie and co were me and a handful of ashen-faced colleagues sitting at a tired bank of computers in a grimy office off York Way that still recalled King’s Cross’s squalid past. Striplights buzzed like trapped insects over drab booths festooned with photos of employees’ smiling children. While we got men off we smoked cigarettes, watched daytime TV and played pool on a wonky table. Nobody would have guessed this was the frontier of interactive pornography, its pioneers peddling maniacal blowjob prose, one eye on lunch.
For the sake of both tumescence and the company’s bottom line, the ruse only functioned if the men responding to Sadie’s ad believed she was real – a genuine horny nurse seeking self-pleasure on a break between bedpans and prostate checks. And they did in great numbers, despite the fact that Sadie didn’t sound like any woman I, or they, had ever met. Her messages were lurid and graphic, bearing no relation to any sexual or sensual reality; she was exactly as you’d imagine a young man pretending to be a masturbating woman might be. Yet it’s what they wanted, these men who wrote to her. In a psychosexual pile-up for the ages, they liked it best when she sounded like them. Not one of them ever allowed their mind to consider she might be a man. They simply couldn’t go there. So we danced our tawdry dance on the floor of a complex, fragile fiction. Us deceiving them, them deceiving themselves.
Occasionally, though, there were suspicions Sadie might be a computer. These guys were easy to spot. They’d ask questions clumsily designed to catch her out. Like, ‘What are you wearing?’, ‘Where are your fingers?’, ‘Who was Coventry City’s FA Cup-winning goalkeeper in 1987?’, ‘Steve Ogrizovic’, she’d respond, two words they’d receive at a cost of a pound with their underpants a hammock between their knees. Convinced then that she was not only a real woman, but one whose desire wasn’t dampened by football trivia, they’d ask if she was still turned on. ‘Yes’ was always the answer. Squint, and it’s a moving testament to the human will to believe.
Staffing a 24-hour sex text operation is a considerable HR challenge. While the day shift took in a crew of between-jobs actors, the occasional student and a few full-timers perplexed by how the warm world of lonely hearts led here, the long night shifts were forced to draw from the fringes of those deemed employable. Kevin quoted the Bible at the occasional paying masturbator. He was eventually sacked over suspicions he’d eaten Weetabix from a shoe our supervisor had left beneath his desk when he changed into his trainers and jogged home from work.
Julie, though, is the one who squats in my memories now. An actual, real-life woman (her name changed here for reasons that will become horrifyingly clear), Julie had inexplicably become so enamoured by her night-time interactions with one respondent that she’d quit the job and run away to live with him in a caravan in Cornwall. He can only have thought he’d won an insane sex lottery, made a figure of fantasy flesh. It’s impossible to know who was more surprised. Him, opening his caravan door to find not a 22-year-old bored horny junior doctor, but a pack-a-day-voiced 45-year-old, with a gait that always reminded me of the Gruffalo, and no medical qualifications whatsoever. Or Julie’s husband, who called the office one Friday wondering why his wife, the mother of his children, hadn’t yet returned from work.
Desperate for employees who could be relied upon to at least turn up, even if they hadn’t yet been to bed, my bosses agreed to recruit both of my flatmates. With the whole building to ourselves, it was a world-beating student job. Steering men to climax was no impediment to watching Football Focus or having lengthy Mario Kart tournaments. When even they started to drag, we devised games that at the time seemed frivolous, but which, looking back, were experiments in the outer limits of arousal. My favourite involved putting random words and phrases in a hat. Every time our computers beeped, we’d pluck one out and attempt to incorporate it into a sext without killing an erection. ‘Mashed potato.’ ‘Nice weather for ducks.’ ‘Sir Patrick Moore.’ Somewhere in Britain there is a man whose achievements include masturbating to completion while reading the words ‘Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow’.
As much as the job shone light through some cracks in masculinity, it occasionally offered glimpses of more tender human lives. Sadie had regulars. Men with whom she built a rapport. One – Tony – would message her not to hear what she was wearing or where she was touching herself like all the others. He wanted to know exactly how she would smash up his brother’s bedroom. Precisely how would Sadie trash the giant wall map of Australia? What would she do to ruin his box-fresh Nikes? Over months of dialogue, I gently established that Tony’s brother was considered by everyone they knew to be better-looking and more successful. He’d gone travelling and had a girlfriend while Tony remained lonely at home. Pent up with feelings of inferiority, Tony’s life had been lived in his brother’s shadow. Now he could only get his kicks from fantasies about the destruction of everything that represented the gulf between them. His one hope of fleeting fulfilment was a woman who existed only in his imagination, destroying a bedroom that existed only in mine.
Another told me how the moment of his sexual awakening – the first time he saw Grease – had fundamentally shaped and hindered his entire life. Now, when it came to sex, he could think of nothing but the sleeves on the arms of Stockard Channing’s Rizzo, the textural interplay between her shirt and her skin. How her flesh would bulge at the cuff when she clicked her fingers. He wanted Sadie to describe exactly that in forensic detail, angrily admonishing her whenever she strayed off topic to suggest so much as a kiss. I tried my best.
On 9/11, though, there was no time for such specificity. For hours that day, Sadie never had fewer than 20 messages to respond to. An endless queue of men racked with fear, waiting for her to talk them through the only thing that could alleviate it all. I couldn’t have known then that she and I were part of some wider phenomenon. Sexual activity spikes in times of global crisis. Toys in Babeland, a sex store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, close to where the World Trade Center stood, reported a sales increase of 33% in the two months after 9/11. Only ten days after the attack, a Salon article coined the term ‘Terror Sex’, which Manhattanites were apparently having lots of, and which Rachel Baker in New York magazine defined as ‘a kind of urgent, unguarded, end-of-the-world coitus’.
When my shift was over, the dust settling on the rubble, I walked home exhausted and stayed up all night watching the news. I was too dazed by what I had seen and what it meant to think about how I’d spent the day. All I knew is what we all knew. That everything had changed.
The premium rate sex text industry wouldn’t survive much longer. Free texts were coming. Pornography in your pocket. Webcam girls who had something crucial Sadie lacked – physical form. The dirty corners of King’s Cross would be gentrified clean soon; the office transformed into Mark Ronson’s studio within the next few years. I don’t think about those men much now. When I do, it’s to wonder if they’re policemen or postmen. Husbands or fathers. Dead or among us. If they are beside me on the bus. When I think about how the world will end, I worry that I know.
