It’s a little-remarked fact that phone sex hasn’t been the same since pagers and cell phones started being equipped to vibrate instead of ringing. (A friend of mine used to tease his wife, by inquiring, in public, whether she’d set her phone to “thrill mode”.) I have long suspected that the incorporation of cameras into telephone devices has only accelerated the evolution of phone sex.

Now, from Pillow Book, we have a sophisticated exposition of what modern phone sex can look like:

I … messaged back that indeed i did have condoms. I also asked why he wanted to know.

put your phone inside the condom

put the phone inside you set to vibrate

i ring you

He was obviously excited by this whole idea. His punctuation was suffering.

I opened one of the Chekmate packets and took out the condom. Like all its brethren it had that familiar rubbery smell. I hoped that the smell wouldn’t linger on my mobile. I placed the reservoir tip on the top of my phone and carefully rolled it down the full ten centimetre length of my Telstra prepaid sex toy. Then I unrolled the condom the rest of the way, squeezed as much air out of it as I could, and knotted it off.

I held the condomed phone up by its knot and considered my handiwork. I was about to begin the task of inserting it when it started to vibrate and ring.

Too quick. En’t that just like a man?

So I pressed the ignore button, to let him know that it would take a while longer to get it inside me.

It occured to me what a great addition to the male anatomy an ignore button would be.