In the early 2000s Julia Rickert and Derek Erdman were spending their time online suckering “pervos” into calling them by pretending to be a phone sex hotline. More out of curiosity than malice, they decided they wanted to try to get the horny males they been observing from the Internet sex chat rooms they were frequenting to call them for a little closer interaction. They used the name “Kathy McGinty” as their alias. The picture of “Kathy” they used to lure their subjects was “a racy picture of a young girl curled up on a bed with her underwear showing,” which you can see above.
Despite their desire to have horny strangers call them, they tried to think of a way that they could interact with “Kathy” without actually having to interact with them at all. They were luring creepy guys at their creepiest, so quite understandably, they were eager to contrive a safe barrier between the two parties. Erdman eventually came up with the idea of using a sampler to pre-record a bunch of canned statements that they could use to simulate their side of the interaction. Rickert recorded a whole slew of dialogue, including a hot ‘n’ heavy version of orgasm that would get inserted into various points of most every conversation.
The results are something like “DEVO meets the Jerky Boys,” but even that intriguing description doesn’t quite do justice to the bizarre results, as random dudes try to have sexytime with a blocky female voice who starts out saying “You have a sexy voice,” but eventually blurts phrases like “No, I’m only 12,” “Taco Bell tastes sooo good,” and “I might be having a miscarriage!”
Actually, “If Marco Rubio started a robot sex hotline that malfunctioned…” isn’t the worst description.
A bunch of the recordings were passed around as a CDr but eventually, Erdman and Rickerts put out a regular CD you can buy with money.
On his website Derek Erdman provides the clearest explanation of what it’s all about:
If you spent any time in an internet sex chatroom in early 2001, there’s a slight chance that you may have come in contact with Kathy McGinty. Julia and I were getting our laughs by chatting online with horny cretins to see how many ridiculous comments they would tolerate before they would ignore us. We lured them with a fake profile that featured a racy picture of a young girl curled up on a bed with her underwear showing. (The name McGinty came from the song “Pat-Trip Dispenser” by The Fall; I’m not sure why we chose Kathy.) Before long, chatting was not enough. We wanted to hear what these guys sounded like, and so encouraged them to call our house. As neither of us actually wanted to speak to them, “Kathy” told them to leave voicemail messages, promising to call back if they were “sexy enough.” Some of these early callers are on the CD. When this source of amusement had lost its novelty, Julia wished aloud that there was a way to converse with the callers without having to talk to them, and I remembered a Yamaha SU-10 sampler that I had lying around. We rigged a phone to the sampler, came up with a series of phrases, and recorded Julia saying them. It took some time to get it right, but there was no shortage of callers. We’d be chatting with 10-15 callers at once, while 5 would be calling on the phone. The online trap was simple: we’d get chatted-up because of our provocative phone picture, we’d say that we were ready for action and that we wanted to get off over the phone. Sometimes it was 30 seconds tops. I controlled the sampler, which was kind of tricky. I’d listen on a muted cordless phone while pressing the buttons for the appropriate phrases. Sometimes it took a little time to find the right button, so there’s an unnatural pause in conversation. It mattered little though, most of the guys that called were already worked-up. We’d stay up all night robot-talking to pervos. I remember once one of them actually “finished” because I could offend him off of the phone, and it kind of gave me a stomach ache.
A blogger named “Seedy” whose website is regrettably defunct points out that “the sheer ridiculousness and comic value of Kathy’s responses are equally matched by (a) the sheer incredulity of the callers and (b) their inability to admit the obvious, namely that they’ve been had. When Kathy seemingly orgasms into ecstatic oblivion at the slightest provocation (“Hello, is that Kathy?”) or starts conversing in tongues, a whoring hostage to the devil, the game should be up. But these guys are so desperate to get their rocks off that even the knowledge that their liaison is with a burn victim or a minor (‘I’m 12 years old’) doesn’t prevent them from pumping the pork sword (‘I’m not a child molester, but I’ll fuck you’).”
For the record, the relevant verse from the Fall’s “Pat-Trip Dispenser” goes like this:
McGinty thought he could fool the Fall
With his imitation speeds
But he had not accounted for the psychic nose
He did not know there are no big shots on the rock
And even if there were, McGinty would not be among them
Erdman and Rickert get extra points for working Mark E. Smith into their thing.
There are only two clips of Kathy McGinty I could find on the internet, which are included below, but that’s all the more reason to go find the CD.
“Where Do You Want Me To Shoot It”:
“I Have Someone Else In The House”:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Genius prank phone calls made by ‘Melba Jackson,’ a kooky 92-year-old Christian conservative lady