Audio erotica apps like Dipsea and Quinn have captured the popular imagination and sparked a ton of spicy online chatter in recent months — leading to speculation about what is fueling listeners’ enthusiasm for smutty, bite-sized recordings.
Given that these apps primarily target younger women, some commentators have cited Gen Z’s passion for romantasy and adjacent genres as the primary force driving interest. Others have credited Quinn founder Caroline Spiegel for introducing a new fan base to the medium with celebrity collaborations featuring the hunky stars of Heated Rivalry, House of the Dragon, and other hits. The thing that most onlookers seem to agree on, though, is that the popular female-run apps have opened up a whole new market by packaging explicit content in a way that inherently excites women. But is that actually true, or have we just accepted that women only like certain kinds of porn?
Faye Keegan — who launched Dipsea in 2018 with business partner Gina Gutierrez — entered the audio erotica space because, across the porn industry, she saw an overall lack of content featuring the female gaze. Sensing there was a hunger for erotic offerings designed specifically to turn women on, she and Gutierrez combed through studies on the neurobiology of arousal. And these studies told them that, in addition to being less interested in visual pornography, women need a narrative to get turned on.
“Before my co-founder and I started Dipsea, we did a lot of research into what kind of content people consume. And generally speaking, men do consume more visual content than women,” Keegan tells Playgirl, adding that that may have shifted some in the past decade, but she still believes it to be “broadly true.” “The content that is predominantly consumed by women tends to be more narrative. It tends to be less visually focused. It tends to focus more on the story behind the character — versus what the character looks like — the way the sex is described, and the important parts that make it interesting or different.”
Explaining that the goal was to apply those findings to a product, she says, “Audio felt like such an obvious medium for that: It was extremely immersive; we could do really dense storytelling; it could feel really real without crossing into some of the ethical questions that people have with visual pornography. Audio hit all of these things that were proven out on the psychological research side, and it felt like no one had taken a product-thinking approach to that information.”
Although the content has evolved over the past eight years, partly because Dipsea’s audience has gone from 98% women to “98% not men,” Keegan says, the company’s “made by women, for everyone” approach to producing audios remains pretty much the same. Whether it’s through new products like their voyeuristic “overheard audios” or portrayals of group sex and other enduring kinks, the goal is to offer high-quality, safe-feeling content that prioritizes narrative and sparks the imagination. “For most women, when they’re trying to get turned on, they use what you call ‘mental framing,’” she says, defining the term as imagining erotic scenarios to increase arousal. “[The question is,] how can we set the stage for that?”
Audio Erotica
Jodi McAlister, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Victoria, has spent a significant amount of time studying the explosion of apps like Dipsea alongside research partner Athena Bellas. The Australian academics recently authored a book, simply titled Audio Erotica, that focuses on how sexually explicit content is being marketed to women amid the boom. And although their research doesn’t delve into the mechanics of getting turned on, McAlister doesn’t quite buy into the idea that women need to be immersed in a story to get off or that they don’t get visually aroused in the same way as men. “I think that’s probably a little bit reductive, but sometimes perception matters more than reality,” McAlister says, referring to the fact that certain theories about desire get treated as common knowledge regardless of whether they’re accurate.
“We certainly have this idea that men are very visual creatures, and also that men can just look at representations of sex and that will get them off. But even more so than the idea that women are aurally aroused, there is this idea that women need sex to be embedded in some kind of narrative frame for it to be arousing,” she says. “Whether or not that is true is a big question. But certainly that narrative has been perpetuated over and over again, and it’s one that has been folded into the ways that audio erotica apps talk about themselves.”
Based on the existing research, McAlister isn’t ready to draw conclusions about whether or not there’s actually a gender divide when it comes to the importance of mental framing. But she does think that there are a number of other reasons why audio erotica is currently having such a moment. One reason she cites is the fact that, “as a medium, audio is inherently very intimate” and can penetrate the body in a way that images on a screen can’t. Another is that contemporary smut-seekers are particularly drawn to the “headspace but horny” framing that the big apps use to distinguish their offerings from traditional porn.
“If you look at the marketing for a lot of these apps, it’s women listening to this [content] while going about aspects of their day. There’s not this implication that you’re sitting down watching porn and masturbating,” McAlister says, explaining that the companies are attempting to elevate their content above “the merely pornographic” by portraying a different mode of consumption. “This kind of tongue-in-cheek, ‘you’re in the supermarket’ marketing is very funny a lot of the time, and I think it lends itself really well to [platforms like TikTok]. But it’s also entangled with other ideas.”
By other ideas, McAlister means concepts you might come across in the wellness space. As she and Bellas found while researching their book, listening to audio erotica is increasingly being treated as self-care, thanks to companies successfully convincing people the content will make their lives better — in addition to making mundane chores like grocery shopping and dish washing much more fun.
“When you think about the phrase ‘porn for women,’ people have used that in a number of different ways. But we didn’t really anticipate that [in this case] that would be quite so entangled with this idea of becoming more self-actualized,” McAlister says, explaining that the implied promise for listeners is better relationships, better sex, and a better version of themselves.
Citing the fact that Dipsea lists “sleep” and “wellness” in the app’s top categories, and that companies like Emjoy and Ferley offer instructional content to enhance intimacy, she adds, “As far as I’m aware, this is not a feature of a lot of porn dedicated to men. I don’t think anyone is out there saying, ‘Hey, men, porn will improve you as a person.’”
Dipsea • “James + You: Your Turn”
Like McAlister, artist and audio erotica creator Jess Buie doesn’t see the rise of audio erotica apps as necessarily related to neurobiological truths about what titillates women. She also rejects the idea that men aren’t just as attracted to the medium as women or anyone else. And Buie is uniquely qualified to weigh in, given that she was once the editorial director for Audiodesires and Bloom Stories and now runs her own operation primarily making erotic ASMR, or so-called girlfriend audios, for men.
“There are multiple audiences out there, but I think these big platforms, like Quinn, Dipsea, Bloom, and Femtasy, are all imagining the women on spicy romance BookTok” as their audience, Buie says. “That’s who we were always aiming for, because we knew there were a ton of women who were consuming erotic romance novels at an insane rate, and a lot of women interacting with each other online about this stuff,” she says. “But at the end of the day, I think we had a lot more men caught in our net than we would have liked to admit.”
Even when Buie was at Bloom, she was aware that there were large swathes of the market that weren’t being captured. But her new setup has confirmed just how popular audio erotica, and specifically girlfriend content, is among younger straight men. Operating on YouTube and Patreon, she’s now making most of her income producing affirming, domestic-themed audios that speak directly to male listeners. “One of the main reasons I decided to go solo was that I saw that there was a really hungry male audience. And I know it sounds kind of crazy to say, ‘I chose to leave this feminist porn company to go make porn for men on my own.’ But I just don’t think the picture is as cute and tidy as we like to say it is,” Buie says, referring to the way that audio erotica is often portrayed as a relatively wholesome medium specifically suited to women.
“I always heard it touted as, ‘Women are more imaginative. We need to sit and imagine out a fantasy in order to get off.’ And sure, maybe that’s true for some women, but I do not think that’s across-the-board true. There’s plenty of women who fully enjoy visual pornography,” says Buie, who also makes content targeted at queer women. “I think it’s more of a case of space, of making space for women to explore sexual content. I don’t think it’s necessarily that audio is some kind of pure, morally better pornography. I think it’s just that women are now being given a digital space to get off and explore what makes them get off.”
Dipsea • “The Ticket, Ep.1: Greece”
That audio erotica has opened up new opportunities for connection and sexual exploration is a common point made by people immersed in the space — including Tina Ortiz, a nonprofit professional in her late thirties.
Ortiz, who has been an avid consumer of audio erotica since she was a teenager, wouldn’t frame her hobby as a form of self-help, as McAlister suggests. Though, audio-based smut has certainly enhanced her life with its wide array of offerings designed to appeal to countless sexual preferences and kinks.
“A lot of my friends growing up were queer at the time or they came out as some version of queer later, and so this was always sort of a way of understanding sexuality and being able to explore what it is that you’re into — and in a safe way,” Ortiz says of discovering audio erotica as a homeschooled teen. “That was really how it got started. We were all sharing websites and resources and creators that we enjoyed. And then, as I got older, my understanding of sexuality was really sort of filtered through that queer lens.”
“Where I have this understanding of sexuality as this fluid thing, I’ve noticed that my straight friends, and romantic partners that I’ve had, don’t see it that way. There’s a lot more rules and a lot more rigidity to it. And that strikes me as so weird,” she says, explaining that listening to erotica has enabled her to probe her own desires and encourage curiosity in others.
Although she may not be striving for self-actualization, like the women featured in the TikTok-friendly ads McAlister describes, Ortiz regularly listens to explicit recordings when she’s out and about in the world. But her patronage extends well beyond platforms like Quinn and Dipsea, since she’s retained a taste for less-slick smut from her early days listening to content on Literotica, Soundgasm, and even Tumblr.
Recently, she says, she’s started following more creators on Patreon, though she’s always up to weed through content from less-established voices on Reddit. She does spend time on Quinn but, like her friends, she finds the celebrity collabs a bit off-putting — given that there are plenty of regular creators, like AugustIntheWinter and Lost Tapes, she’d like to see propped up. But whatever platform she’s on, she has a few requirements: She doesn’t want to see the person behind the smut, the sex has to make sense for the story and, most importantly, the audio itself can’t be cringey.
Quinn • “Ember and Ice”
Some creators “decide on the type of sex they want and they build backwards. My favorite creators focus on, ‘What is the relationship between these characters, what sex are they having, and what is that doing to that relationship?’ And that’s way more interesting from a storytelling perspective,” Ortiz says. Then, wrapping up her thoughts, she adds, laughing, “And there are certain moments where the sound effects are warranted and certain moments where they’re not. If [creators] are going to engage in it, they need to pull back from that mic.”
Even though Buie and Keegan are now working in different corners of the industry, and targeting very different audiences, they both understand how important — and sometimes difficult — it is to deliver on both of those points. Buie, who runs a fairly nimble operation these days, says a lot of time and money went into producing audios when she was at Bloom, and there was always the risk she might end up a dud because a writer wasn’t familiar enough with a kink or a voice actor didn’t moan just right. And like Bloom, Dipsea functions as a production studio, which means Keegan’s business is also all about getting the sound and story details as close to perfect as possible.
“The problem in erotica has never been quantity, it’s always been quality,” says Keegan, adding that it’s particularly easy to “get the ick” with explicit audio because of mouth sounds, room sounds, and other potentially off-putting noises. “Most of the internet is erotica in some form, and that’s only more true now than it was when we started. And so, I think what people are really looking for is not just erotica, but good erotica.”
