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ISBN-10: 0738846252
ISBN-13: 9780738846255
Edition: 1999
List price: $24.99
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Description:
Party Line: Love, Sex, and Anger in America is 466 nonfiction pages of social dynamite: well-researched analytical text offers psychological, sociological, and demographic insight into human sexuality, dating, and singles life in the year 2000. Party Line takes an in-depth, front line look at the phenomenally successful party line juggernaut: the telephone takes center stage as the novel introductory mechanism through which millions of contemporary singles search for partners. Sparks fly off every page as real-life, excerpted, on-phone conversations (interspersed with social analysis, narrative commentary, first-person case studies, phone sex encounters, true dating episodes, and… action-packed parties) thrust us into the sexual and emotional domestic heart of darkness. Our dangerous, real-life excursion into a phone cult traces the sensational rise, hegemony, and fall of the 643-9292 party line, with startling side trips onto fantasy, bondage and discipline, large and lovely, voice personals, and confession lines. The book chronicles the ongoing telephone relationships and adventures of three main characters; a close-knit calling clique of fifty recurring characters; and a vivid, complementing cast of hundreds of episodic, transient dialers who drift in and out of the line. Lively, humorous uninhibited dialogue propels the story forward as we observe the continuous social activities--and frequently abnormal social behavior--that callers become involved in as a direct result of talking on the telephone. As an active, eager telephone participant, the reader goes on an intriguing, illicit journey into a secret telephone hacker/terrorist/singles lifestyle and subculture that most people can only dream about.Party Line chronicles the precipitous breakdown and cessation of the heterosexual dating process in the United States of America in the period subsequent to the 1960s sexual revolution. The dissolution of the nuclear family, high divorce rates, the loss of traditional values and community consensus, the breakdown of law and order, and sex role ambiguities have created widespread loneliness and social dislocation. The party line has stepped in to form a quasi-familial support network and safety valve/lifeline for the legions of unloved, bitter, isolated Americans and garden variety psychopaths/chronic malcontents that our deracinated society has unwittingly spawned. The telephone exchanges sell this clientele a social life, friendship, fun, a fictive family, blind dates, sex talk, sex partners--and the hope of finding love. Millions of diverse, single individuals--who now increasingly remain alone, unstable, unfulfilled, and adolescent well into middle age--come together on the line to form a viable community and to find what they cannot find in real life. The reader becomes a fascinated, integral part of this charming, oddball, party line inner sanctum. We learn that this wildly popular, strange new dating phenomenon sprang not only out of deep societal changes, but out of deadly epidemiological concerns: party lines and phone sex arose as a safe sex response and direct adaptation to the AIDS crisis.The party line is an excruciatingly honest, accurate barometer of American culture and public opinion: this book paints a devastating social portrait of both contemporary singles life and the national psyche. We see a society convulsed by thwarted sexual desires, fear of contagion, racial and religious hatred, wracked by epidemic dishonesty, and enveloped in a growing climate of anger and ill-will. The crux of the party line's appeal is fantasy and escape, but its single most important function is as an anonymous forum for venting primal rage and frustration. Readers experience cataclysmic verbal altercations, continual threats of violence and aggression, and a willful campaign of disruptive, militaristic attacks against the line it