Telephone Eschatology: Types, Symptoms And Characteristics Of This Paraphilia
The phone rings, we run to get it. We pick it up, put it to our ear and wait for them to tell us who he is.
“Say?” we say. “What are you wearing?” a sinister voice tells us. “Excuse me? How does she say?” we reply. “What are you wearing? Are you wearing panties?” We hung up the phone with a look of disgust and a little less faith in humanity.
Telephone eschatology is a paraphilic disorder in which, whoever presents it, likes to call people and make comments that could not exactly be considered romantic, without prior agreement. Below we will look at this paraphilic behavior in more depth.
Telephone eschatology, also called telephone eschatophilia and telephonophilia, is a paraphilia in which the person who has it feels the need to make sexual calls to a victim who has not given consent, both with the private number and with the visible number. This behavior seems to be closely related to other paraphilic disorders, such as voyeurism and exhibitionism.
As with other paraphilias, it is not the act itself that is inappropriate, but the fact that you are doing it with someone who has not consented. Nor is it a simple sexual gamehow could it be that someone called their partner and said phrases like “what are you wearing”, but the caller does not have any type of real relationship with the person who answers the phone and makes sexual comments that she has not asked for .
The call can be very uncomfortable and disturbing for whoever picks up the phone., since the person who is a telephone scatologist can make really unpleasant comments to you, with explicit sexual language and sexual moans. She may even threaten her by telling her that she knows where she lives, even if she doesn’t, and that she is going to rape her. This type of behavior is harassment and can therefore be considered a crime.
Normally, what is recommended to those who receive this type of calls is to simply hang up and report the incident to the telephone company and/or the police, who will have an easier time recognizing where the call is being made from. In any case, many of those who make this type of calls do so from booths or prepaid mobile phones, cases in which it is not possible to identify who made the call with a simple trace.
Diagnostic classification
Currently, telephone eschatology It is included in the category of other specific paraphilic disorders in the DSM-5. Although it does not have an exclusive entry for it, unlike paraphilias such as exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism or sexual masochism, it is considered a more common paraphilic disorder than necrophilia, zoophilia and chlysmaphilia, paraphilias that are included in other paraphilic disorders.
In any case, the possibility that this paraphilic disorder is more common than originally thought has been considered, with the possibility of adding its own diagnostic category in future revisions of the DSM. Proof of them are the surveys made to women in which many of them report having received calls with unwanted sexual content ever in his life, cases being counted in the thousands.
In most cases, the victim is a woman and the harasser is a man. The harasser prefers a heterosexual relationship, although this does not mean that there are no homosexual harassers or that there are women who harass men, although it is quite uncommon.
Prevalence
The prevalence of telephone scatology is unknown. Although research has been done in which men were openly asked if they had practiced it, with the percentages being between 6 and 20%, it should be said that their “confession” is not synonymous with the presence of this paraphilia. On many occasions the calls with sexual content were, in reality, jokes in bad taste or they were made only once, which is not a sufficient criterion to diagnose telephone eschatology.
In cases in which it has been possible to ensure that the patient has this paraphilia, it has been seen that There is a high comorbidity with others such as compulsive masturbation, voyeurism, dependence on telephone sex (calling hot lines) and exhibitionism. In fact, telephone eschatologists would be the people with paraphilic disorders who are diagnosed with the most paraphilias.
It has been suggested that the link between this paraphilia and others, such as exhibitionism, demonstrates the person’s attempts to express aggression, exhibit power and control, or gain recognition. However, unlike classic exhibitionists, telephone eschatologists prefer complete anonymity.
Types of telephone eschatologists
Given that it is a paraphilia that is still being investigated further and that, as of today, does not have its own entry in the DSM-5, the typologies that have been proposed for telephone eschatology are provisional. Likewise, among all of them, that of Dr. BT Mead from 1975, which has been considered one of the references for the disorder. In his original proposal Mead spoke of three types of telephone eschatologists.
Type 1
In this category would be the telephone eschatologists who, When calling, they make indecent propositions from the beginning, being mostly teenagers. Cases can be considered that are not yet pathological, but rather sexually uncontrolled young people who make bad jokes and who in another context would not feel any need to do that to feel aroused.
Type 2
In this group They include eschatologists who, when calling, begin in a friendly and flattering way, presenting themselves to the victim as having a mutual friend. Little by little, the conversation degenerates and they begin to be more offensive and sexually suggestive.
Type 3
This type includes eschatologists who could be considered tricksters, that is, who use some trick at the beginning of the conversation to prevent the victim from hanging up or suspecting anything.
They begin by saying that they are conducting a telephone survey or working on an opinion piece, with the clear intention of being able to talk about personal matters with the victim. As with type 2, those with type 3 make the conversation take on an increasingly sexual, obscene and uncomfortable tone.
Type 4
While Mead’s original typology has three typologies, Ord Matek includes a fourth. Type 4 of telephone eschatologists include those men who call crisis lines, such as the suicide line or the hope line, with the intention of asking female volunteers for help. As with the rest of the categories, they end up talking about sex while masturbating until the person on the other end of the line ends the call.
Theories
It has been argued that the common characteristics among people who make these types of calls are have low self-esteem and feel anger towards women. Telephone scatology has also been associated with brain injuries, intellectual disability, substance intoxication, and psychosis.
Likewise, more sophisticated theories have been proposed to explain why there are people who have such a criminal and not very addictive way of sexually behaving. Among the theories is the one proposed by Kurt Freund, Czech-Canadian sexologist who wrote several articles explaining the behavior of this type of people. Freund claimed that telephone eschatology can be related to courtship disorders.
According to Freund, courtship in the human species occurs in four phases:
It would be in the second phase, that is, that of pretactile interactions, in which alterations would occur in people with this type of paraphilia, which would give rise to the very inappropriate sexual behavior that characterizes it.
