“Last time that we talked, you were telling me how things have been feeling very disconnected for you, especially when it comes to pleasure,” a velvety, baritone voice coos.
“You told me about the moments with your partner, how you feel like you’re performing more than participating. How your body doesn’t respond the way you remember it once did.”
Thus begins The Intimacy Therapist, the most popular audio erotica story from US-based voice actor Adam Craves. Tags like “breathing”, “touch yourself”, “consent” and “good girl” hint at how the narrative will unfold.
Adam, who goes by a pseudonym for privacy reasons, began working as an actor with audio erotica platform Quinn last year, and his stories have been played over a million times since. While he also does scripted narratives with other actors, most of Adam’s work is improvised, bearing the gentle warmth and humour that has become his signature.
“I like the spontaneity of it. When I sit down in my booth, I close my eyes and I just start to speak,” he tells this masthead (fittingly, over voice note).
Adam says his most popular stories tend to be established relationships, often involving dynamics of domination, aftercare (what unfolds after a sexual act, like being held) and less narrative-focused audios such as moaning.
The voice actor, for whom audio erotica is just a side hustle, is part of a booming industry putting women and LGBTQ+ people’s pleasure front and centre.
“Women have been neglected in the creation of adult material,” Adam says.
“Particularly with audio erotica, there’s a safety, which is really important, involved with someone being able to push play and use their imagination to be taken away on a story.
“I can’t tell you how many messages I’ve gotten that are just like, ‘Thank you very much. You’ve helped me become more comfortable with my own sexuality because I’ve started listening to things that either I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with, or I learnt something by listening, or I was able to challenge my own self or share it with a partner’.”
What is audio erotica?
So, what makes audio erotica different from audio porn?
Dr Jodi McAlister, a romance academic from Deakin University, recently penned the first book-length study of the topic with Dr Athena Bellas.
She points out that sexually explicit audio content is nothing new.
Some of the earliest iterations of the form were on social media platform Reddit, where free, user-generated content on subcommunities such as r/gonewildaudio emerged in the 2010s (though some of the most prominent creators were women making content for a male audience).
Erotic fiction website Literotica has existed since the 2000s, while Pornhub, the world’s largest adult site, has a growing library of audio content.
But what McAlister is interested in – and what forms the focus of her book – is a new breed, housed on subscription-based apps and couched in the language of self-care and wellness.
‘You’re the subject, not the object’
American audio erotica app Quinn, launched in 2021 by Stanford-dropout Caroline Spiegel (sister of Snapchat billionaire Evan Spiegel, husband to Miranda Kerr), has an audience of over 80 per cent women and targets listeners aged 18 to 24.
“Made by women, for the world,” its tagline spouts.
There’s also Dipsea, an American app partly inspired by a study that found up to 90 per cent of women use their imagination to turn themselves on, Emjoy, an “audio wellcare app” created by sex therapists and Ob-Gyns, and Ferly, designed to help users “increase desire, overcome pain, frequently orgasm and intimately connect with partner(s)”.
In 2024, Australian media company Mamamia launched its own erotic podcast series, Butter, which released 12 episodes before ceasing production early last year.
In many ways, McAlister says the distinction between audio porn and erotica lies in how these platforms market themselves, rather than a meaningful difference in the nature of the content itself.
“They are very deliberately staying away from the word porn, because of its association with really male gaze-y, exploitative, visual pornography,” McAlister says.
In doing so, she argues that companies draw on the legacy of second wave feminism and the anti-porn movement of the ’80s, in which erotica emerged as an alternative to the largely male-produced and predatory mainstream porn industry.
Such apps position themselves as women-made and, given actors are only simulating the sounds of sex, are less prone to the exploitation that visual porn actors can face (Adam Craves and many other voice actors do not consider themselves to be sex workers).
“It’s [the language] a way of signalling safety – the promise is that you are safe here; you are the main character. You’re the subject, not the object,” she says, while flagging that audio erotica isn’t inherently more ethical.
There’s a practical – perhaps cynical – reason for the language choice too.
“If you just market yourself as pornographic, then you find it really hard to get into the app stores [and advertise on social media and, in Australia, skirt the porn ban]. So they use health-based marketing and wellness framing,” McAlister says.
This framing positions audio erotica within the billion-dollar sexual wellness market – as the burgeoning sex toy industry for women does. Indeed, as a kind of “sex tech”, much erotica syncs up with wearable toys.
Sexologist Tanya Koens says audio erotica can be a useful tool for clients, many of whom struggle to orgasm.
“Especially when people are having difficulties in relaxing or need to discover their own body, that’s a really nice way to do it. It can be incorporated in, ‘OK, can you set up your room really nicely? Can you take a bath, a shower?’” she says.
“When they can imagine that lovely partner and there are conversations about consent and what would feel good and all that sort of stuff, it feels so much more gentle.”
Given that most audio erotica allows listeners to insert themselves into the story, it can be helpful too for body acceptance, in contrast with mainstream porn, which circulates normative ideas around what women’s bodies and anatomy should look like.
“People look at porn, and they can get really bad complexes and fears from it, going, ‘Oh my God, I have to do that, or I have to be like those women’,” Koens says.
Going mainstream
It’s no coincidence that audio erotica is exploding as romance media booms – drawing the genre out from the shadowy corners of bookstores and streaming services, into the limelight.
“We’re living in a smut renaissance,” Spiegel told The New York Times in March.
Quinn has been particularly savvy at capitalising on the growing thirst for smut, spinning the hype around romance media into popular audio series.
In May, Off Campus actors Mika Abdalla and Stephen Kalyn starred in Rent Free, while Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, of gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry, starred in Ember & Ice, a fantastical romance about fae princes from rival kingdoms.
The Summer I Turned Pretty actor Christopher Briney, Fleabag’s Andrew Scott, former Doctor Who Matt Smith and Emily in Paris′ Lucien Laviscount are among other male actors Quinn has tapped to voice audio series.
McAlister says celebrity names help legitimise the form, as expressions of female pleasure and sexuality become more public and less stigmatised.
Marketing videos for Quinn frequently depict users listening to erotica while grocery shopping, for example, rather than in the privacy of the home.
The intimacy of audio
No doubt the rise and rise of audio erotica has been aided by the broader explosion of audio through mediums such as podcasting.
And the experience of listening to, rather than watching, porn is very different.
Dr Athena Bellas, McAlister’s co-researcher, explains that most people listen using headphones, which “bring[s] the voice of the performer very close to the body of the listener, or in the case of ear buds really inside the ear canal”.
This in turn creates a “cocooning of sound around the listener that in itself is really intimate and close”. Many productions, she adds, use binaural recording, similar to surround sound, that further intensifies the experience.
Like podcasts, audio erotica uses certain communicative strategies to engage the listener. “There’s a lot of telling of jokes, ad libbing, whispering, mumbling or yawning, making [you] feel as a listener that you could almost take part in the conversation,” Bellas says.
As McAlister points out, these stories trade in the promise of authenticity.
“Visual porn is extremely performative. You think about the trappings of visual porn, in particular the visual element of something like the money shot [male orgasm], and the way the woman’s body is often objectified by the camera. This idea of authenticity is coming from a real feeling of connection.”
And while in traditional porn the consumer is usually a voyeur, in audio erotica the listener is often invited into the story as the object of the speaker’s affection.
Tegan Bourke, an Adelaide-based voice actor, audiobook narrator, producer and author, works in more than 20 different dialects and accents – including Australian, American, British and Irish.
Starting in the industry six years ago, most of the demand was for American accents. Today, she does most of her work in her native voice, which Bourke puts down to the growing number of Australian romance authors.
A stay-at-home mum, Bourke says her background as a singer prepared her well.
“It gave me an understanding of how my voice works and the ability to modulate my voice in a way that people will find pleasant and can can listen to … human voices are unique, and they can add so much character to a story,” says Bourke who, like Adam, enjoys a relative degree of freedom when it comes to creating audio erotica.
“Australians have this subtle, unique quality to our voices that is not as overly polished as what we see in the American standard. Most people have this kind of rasp in their voices,” she adds.
The ‘boyfriend experience’
Perhaps the crux of audio erotica’s rise can be found in one of its most popular genres – the “boyfriend experience”. As its name suggests, the narrative revolves around being cared for – whether through cooking, cuddles or cleaning.
“We can think of this as a form of dealing with ‘heteropessimism’,” McAlister says, referring to straight women’s growing disillusionment with romantic and sexual relationships with men.
“The big phrase is, ‘let me take care of you’. It really is addressing this profound fantasy – not just about sex, but about the exhaustion of living in the modern world – and how rare it is to find someone that will take care of you.”
For Koens, this more expansive view of intimacy is helping to change ideas around what sex looks like.
“I’m correcting clients all the time, saying sex is not [just] penetration. That’s 5 per cent of what your sexual menu could be. The word foreplay, for example, indicates something else must come. But it doesn’t have to,” says Koens, who prefers the term “outercourse”.
“Care, basically, is the underlying current of this kind of work,” agrees Bourke, who thinks the genre is contributing to a broader rise in emotional literacy.
“It’s constantly checking in, devotion. Even if the stories veer into heavier or darker themes, they almost always come back to a level of aftercare, or lead into it with consent.”
For Bourke, happily married (“my husband is a typical 40-something Australian who grew up in the country,” she says), her work has changed her relationship for the better.
“All of a sudden, we’re starting to talk more about not just my feelings, but his feelings and what that looks like, and not just my emotional needs getting met, but his too. It becomes very reciprocal.”
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