Telephone Temptations
By Jason Feifer
Zink Magazine - Sept., 2003 issue, page 52

Like most female telemarketers, Alex Hill gets hit on almost daily, sometimes to the point of customers offering e-mail addresses or a rendezvous point, practically begging to keep in touch. She works in the middle of the day, meaning that most of her customers are unemployed or retired, the kind of people with time to spare. Women who work the weekend shifts rarely experience these types of advances because their calls always reach men when families are in earshot. This day, Hill is resisting the advances of a man who claims he's a psychic -- a man she envisions in his sixties, retired and lonely with a face nearing expiration. Hill has learned to play off these men, allowing herself to momentarily become the flawless woman these men envision. They hear her voice -- attentive and feminine, with an endearing laugh and a whisper of southern belle -- and believe their own fantasy. She is a buxom blonde, a busty brunette, their bright-eyed beauty. Hill allows it because oftentimes, it's the easiest way to make a sale. And every sale boosts a paycheck.

As Hill weathers the psychic's storm of eerie charm, she slowly moves business along. He says he wants to meet her, that he'll leave his wife at home. She laughs, acts impressed and talks up a time share. Finally, mercifully, he offers his credit card information -- the final piece of the puzzle, her release from his fantasies -- and she transfers him to a manager for confirmation. "It ends with me laughing and giggling a lot, trying to keep it on a sale, and I don't know what he's trying to do, really," she says. "He ended up telling me that he loved me, and if I could ever e-mail him some time, that would be great. And I said, oh, maybe. Sometime."

In a forest of temptations, female telemarketers are the trees. They are a constant presence, inviting but resilient, a captive audience with many uses. Along with bitter hang-ups and screaming customers, their calls are met with absurd advances and raging hormones from men the disregard that seemingly statistical certainty that a woman's face is not nearly as beautiful as her voice. When men hit on telemarketers, they are the human bufo marinus toad -- a giant blob of a creature that terrorizes points around the globe with its unmatched, indiscriminate libido, including a propensity for courting roadkill and humping tennis shoes. As countless survivors of blind dates and Internet romances can attest to, a nice voice can be an empty promise, the reddest of herrings, the cheese on a mousetrap.

But yet, the mere presence of a woman's voice on the phone will completely change a man's agenda. Ada Pobar answers calls for an enhanced 411 service, and spends less than a minute with each customer as she looks up phone numbersand movie times for them. Unlike Hill, who must spend up to 20 minutes with some customers, Pobar's callers have an agenda and a destination. And still, she is hit on once or twice a day, she says, and the men inevitably end their advances with charmers like, "Call me if you're lonely."

"I don't think they're calling to hit on somebody. I think they're calling to get information, but that's just a bonus," Pobar says. "There's really nothing you can do about it. I just think guys will just hit on anybody anywhere."

The men are so persistent that Pobar's manager warned her about them before she began working. The manager said an employee once ended up taking a man up on his offer, and the couple met after she got off work. Besides the obvious danger this woman was in, Pobar heard that she was promptly fired.

But perhaps, against all logical odds, these men are actually sensing something deeper than their own desire. A team of British researchers conducted a study that may suggest a biological connection between a woman's appearance and her voice, meaning that men could be hardwired to actually hear beauty. If that's the case, beauty is indeed way more than skin-deep -- it's literally lodged in our throats.

In the study "Vocal and visual attractiveness are related in women," published recently in the science journal Animal Behavior, a group of 30 men was asked to rate the attractiveness of 30 women's voices by listening to recordings of them speaking four vowels. The men were then shown headshots of the women and asked to rate the women based on physical attractiveness. Almost without fail, the attractive faces and voices matched up. "The results imply that different measures of attractiveness are in agreement and signal similar qualities, such as female age, body size and possibly hormonal profile," the study says.

Similar previous studies have reached the same result, but they all used recordings of women speaking full sentences. This would have given the men more to judge -- vocal inflection, accent -- and could have tainted their judgments, according to the study. With this new research, it seems as if every "oh" and "ah" from a woman's mouth may actually betray her beauty, and every word is worth a thousand pictures.

Does Toucan Sam have it all wrong? Should we ditch the nose, and follow our ears?

Maybe, but voice is hardly a constant variable. A woman's voice may be a tweaked tool, the researchers admit, and there just might be credence behind the ol' bimbo act and seductive sigh. Women with smaller bodies might unconsciously speak with a higher voice "because of differences in their self-perceived attractiveness, personality differences or social expectation," the study says. If that's the case, a pretty body doesn't simply create a sexy voice; it inspires it.

A sexy female voice is inherited as much as it is attained. Take Jamie Fenton, a transgender woman in San Jose, California, with the jolly, baritone voice of her original life as a man, who can almost instantaneously switch to sound like an unassuming, delightful woman. Fenton admits she can only carry the voice for a few minutes before slipping back down a couple octaves, but that's only because she hasn't devoted much time to practicing. For most men, she says, one year of work will turn their vocal chords into those of a flawless female. "What it comes down to is, female impersonation is pretty easy," Fenton says. "Any given criteria that someone uses to tell the difference can be fooled."

The female and male vocal range overlap, and creating a believable female voice is only a matter of finding the right pitch and incorporating female speaking nuances, she says. That includes remembering to do stereotypical things, like ending statements with a question -- "I feel well, do you?" -- and keeping the voice steady and not strained. In fact, she has it down to a science: "220 hertz is a good pitch for me," she says.

At Hill's job, the women are all women, but they are rarely who the male customers think they are. Most of her co-workers are middle-aged, in all shapes and sizes, the normal smattering of people who fill a typical office. But the men never consider that. They just plug ahead, blindly searching for a date as the women seek a sale.

After 11 months, Hill decided to quit. It wasn't the men that drove her from those drab cubicles, but the mind-numbing routine that brought their voices to her ear. if anything, she says, she never felt taken advantage of by the men. She used them more than they knew, because her job depended on it. They got their jollies, but she got paid.

"The pressure that's put on you is big. You need this sale, otherwise you won't have a job," she says. "You will do what you can in the little amount of space that you have to get that sale. If that's becoming that person that they think you are, then you try to do it."

Fat or slim, beautiful or hideous, Hill and her co-workers get their sales. The men are none the wiser.