Audio stories are redefining pleasure for women

Liz laughs and responds, “Well, there’s some other things I’m imagining too. …”

Liz and Sevyn are characters in “Open Floor Plan,” a series on the audio erotica app Dipsea. Like mini podcasts but spicier, these stories detailing sexy scenarios fill the space between audio romance novels and visual pornography.

Since Dipsea began publishing at the end of 2018, a handful of similar apps have hit the market. While Dipsea’s stories are narrated by voice actors and written in-house, Quinn, another popular platform that was introduced in 2019, hires mostly content creators to produce the app’s stories. Other platforms such as OhCleo and Bloom use a combination of those formats.

“There’s clearly this gap between what erotic content has traditionally meant and what women are looking for,” said Quinn founder Caroline Spiegel (sister of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel). “Now, there’s a growing opportunity to give women products and services that fill their sexual needs, because they have their own money to spend.”

Designed in sleek modern packages, these apps can easily be confused with those used for meditation, yoga or therapy — an intentional marketing plan. Situating pleasure in a wellness wrapper has allowed them to exist on Apple’s app store and Spotify, as well as advertise on Facebook and Instagram.

On average, subscribers for Dipsea are women ages 18-34, the company said, while Quinn’s are women ages 18-24. Dipsea said its revenue grew 40% last year, although the app declined to provide specific figures. Quinn said the average listenership for the past three months had been 14 million minutes each month. (“For context, in all of 2021, we saw 3.2 million minutes listened,” Caroline Spiegel said.)

A Market for Romantic Content

Hannah Albertshauser and her husband, Michael, are co-founders of Bloom, an erotic audio platform based in Germany. According to a survey they recently conducted, Bloom found that there were just as many users who enjoy romantic content as were interested in stories involving different kinks, partner sharing and bondage. The Albertshausers started Bloom to create more guided sex options for couples, but 40% of its listeners are single women and more than half are ages 18-34, according to the same survey.

Experts say that the biggest benefits of audio erotica are its ability for listeners to imagine and be in control of their own story.

“I tell clients and students, if you’re constantly watching something, you’re never getting to create your own fantasies, explore your erotic imagination and know what your boundaries are,” said Mal Harrison, executive director of the Center for Erotic Intelligence, a collective of researchers and educators who study human connection and sexuality. Audio erotica, she said, is a response to power imbalances and sexual domination often seen in visual pornography.

Before these apps existed, Reddit threads and the back alleys of Tumblr were often used to create erotic audio content particularly made by and for women.

“It felt like when you wanted accessibility to pleasure, it was in a brown paper bag down a dark alley,” said Dominnique Karetsos, a co-founder and the CEO of Healthy Pleasure Group, which invests in sexual health and technology companies, including Dipsea. When she started investing in the space nearly 10 years ago, the market was limited, she added.

But by the early 2010s, Karetsos said, products made for women’s pleasure were marketed through partnerships with retailers such as Selfridges and Sephora. The accessibility to and demand for these items created “social permission,” she said, for women to talk about pleasure openly.

‘It’s Actually Like a Wellness Practice’

Liv Trexler downloaded Dipsea in 2021 after seeing its advertisement on social media. “It was weird at first,” she said. “But when I actually tried it, things went well, very well.”

She now uses Dipsea regularly and said the $12.99 monthly subscriber fee was worth the cost. “It’s not harmful to those who make it, and it’s not a harmful thing to those who hear it,” said Trexler, a 29-year-old project manager who lives in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. “It’s actually like a wellness practice.”

Angela Sarakan, a senior audio producer at Dipsea, said the dialogue featured in its podcasts could provide listeners the tools to set healthy boundaries. “You’re listening in on the private worlds of these characters and, in that way, learning more about yourself and the way you might want to communicate or do things differently.”

Olivia Taylor, editorial lead of Dipsea, said the app’s goal was to capture the “texture of life and the texture of sex.” Dirty talk, moans and the ruffling of sheets are just some of the sounds you may hear on the app. Dipsea’s characters are often written with enough specificity for listeners to relate to, but vague enough for them to imagine themselves inside the story.

Although sexual wellness is a growing industry, research on the subject is still met with skepticism.

“It’s just highly stigmatized, more so than drugs,” said Dr. Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist who studies how pleasure can be used as a treatment for chronic pain, anxiety, sleep disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. “I almost lost my graduate funding.” She said she no longer used the word “sexual” in research proposals.

Prause hopes audio erotica will help raise awareness of the positive, if not therapeutic, outcomes of sexual wellness, although she recognizes its limitations.

Taylor believes that the format can at least offer an alternative. “We’re showing much more than a snapshot of sex,” she said. “It’s the whole story of how people connect.”

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