A man matched with me Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon he was asking for a nude. We had exchanged 14 sentences on the dating app du jour. He knew my first name, my neighborhood, and that I liked a specific kind of bread. He had decided, somewhere between breakfast and his 2pm meeting, that it was time for his penis to enter the conversation.

Reader, it was not time.

There are two kinds of phone sex. Phone sex between people who have already had sex, and whatever men are doing on dating apps, which is not phone sex. It is a dry run for a crime.

With a partner, phone sex is another language. He has seen me naked. On the toilet. Sick. Crying about my father. Eating a burrito in a car. This kind of phone sex is not born from desperation, but of a familiarity and longing. It is correspondence from inside the same life. 

Now, the strangers. Women are fucking horny. I’ll say it twice because men love this fact: Women are horny. We think about sex at the grocery store, in the parking lot, at the dentist. But this horniness almost never translates to wanting to listen to a stranger jerk off on the other end of the phone. There’s nothing tangible here. Unlike with a partner, whose touch I know, whose desires and turn-ons I can reference while teasing him, phone sex with a stranger isn’t flirting, it’s a warning. He is telling me, in plain language, that he can’t be trusted. He is filling out the application and checking every disqualifying box before getting cozy enough to pull off my underwear for them.

I’ve liked guys enough to fuck them, but not enough to type it out. I’m a writer. I hate typing. If you’re within driving distance, get in a car, come over, put your hands all over me. I cannot just start typing “my pussy is so wet” while I’m working on a spreadsheet. I’m a bad liar. Make my pussy wet. Get me going first, so I think it was my idea to get you to turn me on. And this is the problem with phone sex with a stranger. It’s an abrupt, weird request that feels much more for you than for our mutual pleasure. I am not a fluffer for your commute home.

But, how do you know you’re at the point when a sexy text or a call are warranted? Even wanted? Here’s your guide:

DON’T ask for a nude before you’ve earned one. Some women send them ahead of the reveal. That’s their business. Don’t ask. It’s greedy. You’re asking her to put a permanent image of herself in your phone before you’ve proven you can be trusted with a coffee date. Think of a nude as a souvenir. You don’t get one if you haven’t been anywhere.

DO gauge your girl. Is she careful with texts or spontaneous? Flirty on the phone? Does she bring sex up herself, without prompting? Every woman has a frequency. If you haven’t tuned in, you don’t get to transmit. How she writes in daylight tells you everything about how she writes after dark.

DON’T send the unsolicited dick pic. Your dick pic isn’t arriving at your apartment in the flattering light you chose. It’s arriving inside her life, which you do not know the shape of right now. She could be in a staff meeting. She could be at her father’s bedside. There is nothing worse than a dick pic and “thinking of you and so hot” when you’re in checkout at Gelsons. You will have produced the first enduring image of yourself in her mind, and it will be your own genitals next to a display of limes.

DO wait for the invitation. When a woman wants you on the phone that way, you’ll know. She’ll text at 11pm unprovoked. She’ll leave a voice memo that makes you put down whatever you were holding. If you’re squinting at a message trying to decide whether it was a green light, it wasn’t. Ambiguity is a red light. Certainty is the only green light on this road.

Or just ask her if she likes phone sex and listen to her answer. If you balk at asking, stay a phone-cum-virgin.