It's been a long time since I've known anybody actively doing this job, but one of my pals who did phone sex at its height in the mid-'90s shared some interesting insights.

Just to begin with, despite the fact that the business was brisk when she was working, it wasn't necessarily hyper-profitable for the workers. Getting $10 an hour was considered a good wage for doing shifts in a call room. Working from home, you would be paid by the call, which offered a higher rate, but also meant you might only get a couple of calls, making it one of those gigs that worked well in conjunction with other home-based freelance sex labour. (Tappity, tap, tap: "Angelica's pussy was a moist grotto of desire." Ring, ring: "Hello? Oh yeah, devour me, you big bad wolf!") Also it was not a bad thing to toss on your resumé if you were looking for street cred as a sexual academic but didn't necessarily want too much direct contact to get it.

You're looking at a dying business, Hanging, and my pal credits a few things for killing it. "From what I witnessed, calls dropped off when the internet started exploding. In the early days, our clients were often already tech types who gave up this more archaic method of getting off in favour of connecting online. It's a lot of work to think about someone on the other end of a phone line; in a way it's a more active way of getting off. Now people want, and can have, their fantasy online with the girl they've had to work to imagine in their head."

There are no longer rows of ads in the back pages of weeklies and the couple of phone sex companies that do advertise are more dating lines, making all the profits themselves by hooking up friends, not pros and clients.

Slutty Canadian Phone Girl (http://sluttycanadianphone.googlepages.com) no longer seems in service and the one company I did manage to reach online (www.85centphonesex.net) was out of the States and had no freelance operators locally. Our conversation went a little like this... Me: "Do you have any Canadian girls?" Operator (clearly gobsmacked over what this wacky fantasy might entail): "Um... no." I would have loved to hear someone in Tennessee try to play that one out, mind you. "Y'all comin' yet, EH?"

The "everyone else I've ever slept with loved it so it must be your fault" line of defence is bullshit. Why? Women lie. Why do they lie? Well, because they don't want to get slapped with the ego-crushing "everyone else I've ever slept with loved it so it must be your fault" line of defence. Moreover, it doesn't matter if they actually did like it. You need something different and you've clearly been approaching the topic with patience and tact—a very difficult state to maintain when you're horny as fuck—so pat yourself on the back for that.

Obviously, you made the decision to buy a house and make this man the father of your kids (and presumably with the knowledge that his sex skills weren't set on thrill) in a worryingly brief period of time under extenuating circumstances, but let's look at the hard facts.

In a year and half, he has not only refused to change his approach but also implies that there is no need to. I'll be honest, it seems utterly impossible that he doesn't already know his technique is sorely lacking—you'd have to be living in a cave not to know that most women like more than just to be rogered raw. There are endless solutions designed to encourage more fulfilling intimacy at www.goodforher.com, www.venusenvy.ca, www.lovecraftsexshop.com and www.comeasyouare.com but I'd like to dust off the old mom truism and turn it on its head, so to speak: he's got one dick and two ears for a reason. As you've realized, his total lack of desire to listen and learn suggests a bigger problem than even the most thorough workshop, book or video can solve. What is he so afraid to hear? I'd figure out what that's all about before I started plunking down cash on tools that aren't even going to leave the shed.