2019 has been the year of erotic audio for women. This once scarce and largely-unknown porn niche has officially hit the mainstream, with two Silicon Valley startups, Dipsea and Quinn, making the news rounds and popping up in everyone’s social media feeds. There are also a handful of individual creators making some waves on Patreon, Pornhub, and beyond.
For those who are unfamiliar, erotic audio is exactly what it sounds like: it’s recorded, audio-only porn, geared primarily toward women. It can range from an extremely simple, lo-fi recording of a single voice, to more elaborate productions featuring multiple voice actors, foley effects, and high quality sound production. It can be scripted or improvised, an intimate first-person affair, or an entire scene between a fictional couple or group, which the listener is meant to essentially “listen in on”. It ranges from softly romantic to quite hardcore, and is routinely produced with both straight and queer women in mind.
And women are loving it. But why is this? The conventional wisdom is that men are much more visually oriented when it comes to arousal, and that’s why they have typically been the bigger consumers of pornography. This is, generally speaking, true, and it’s certainly one of the underlying factors in the rise of audio porn for women, but it’s far from the…
