Today, giving someone your phone number barely feels like an event. We exchange numbers through messaging apps, social networks, dating platforms, and contact lists without thinking twice. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, a telephone number could represent something much more significant. Before social media, smartphones, and online dating, the telephone was one of the few technologies that allowed people to communicate privately with someone who was not physically present.…

Today, if someone wants adult entertainment, they can reach for a smartphone and have more options in ten seconds than the average person in 1987 could have imagined. Back then, however, there was no Google, no streaming, no social media, no OnlyFans, and certainly no algorithm that somehow knew what you were interested in before you did. There was a telephone. And remarkably enough, the humble telephone became the center…