Let me take care of you: domestic caretaking fantasies in boyfriend experience audio erotica

ABSTRACT

Audio erotica is an increasingly significant sector of the porn industry, yet it has heretofore received little scholarly attention. This article presents research aimed at bridging this gap in the literature. We explore some of the unique affordances of audio erotica through an analysis of Dipsea and Quinn, two of the most popular contemporary apps that host this content. In particular, we present a reading of one of audio erotica's most popular genres: the male-for-female (M4F) boyfriend experience (BFE). The BFE's codes and conventions immerse the implied female listener in an eroticized domestic fantasy in which she is being taken care of by a man. The BFE cocoons listeners in an intimate audio encounter with a fantasy man who is defined by his capacity to engage in eroticized caretaking practices. We argue that these sonic scenes of eroticized masculine care and domesticity present an opportunity to understand contemporary notions of (and trends in) ‘porn for women’. More broadly, drawing from research on porn, erotica, the audio medium, and headphone technology, we offer a framework for understanding some of the alternative pleasures and intimacies specific to audio erotica.

KEYWORDS:

• Audio erotica
• boyfriend experience
• intimacy
• porn for women
• sound
• voice

Introduction

In Sonic Intimacy, Dominic Pettman asks:

Given the erotic power and potential of the voice, then, what should we make of the dearth of sonic erotica, or ‘audio porn,’ on the Internet? Why are so many images sexualised but so few sound files (especially when we consider the historic popularity of phone sex)? Why does the erotic voice lack ‘stickiness’ when it comes to the World Wide Web, given the power of the voice to summon seductive ghosts, quicken the heart, and whisper promises of bliss? Why, in other words, are modems awash in pink pixels but not blue bits? (2017, 18)

Pettman wrote this in 2017. Writing now, in 2023, this hardly seems like the distant past; however, there has been a significant development in the pornographic landscape in the interim. There has been a distinct rise in what Pettman calls ‘sonic erotica’ and ‘audio porn’, and what we will be describing primarily as ‘audio erotica’, especially as targeted towards female listeners (a term we have chosen as it is the one primarily used by the apps which host this content).

This is notably driven by the emergence of dedicated audio erotica apps; principally Dipsea and Quinn, which will be the focus of this article, although there are several others. It is certainly not a phenomenon contained by apps, and dedicated audio erotica spaces can be found in many places across the internet, including social networking platforms like Reddit. However, we are particularly interested in Dipsea and Quinn because both foreground discourses of caretaking and intimacy in their erotic content, claiming explicitly feminist agendas in their marketing material to change the landscape of pornography for women and non-binary people – Dipsea (n.d.), for example, claims that ‘[t]apping into your sexual powers is a step on the journey to asserting that power everywhere’, while Quinn’s (n.d.) Apple app store description notes that ‘[w]omen have historically been underserved when it comes to erotic content, and we want to change that’. In this article, we focus predominantly on audio erotica which positions the listener as a heterosexual ciswoman; however, it is certainly worth noting that there is a wide range of material available on these apps targeted to a wide range of implied listeners,¹ with enormous scope for further research.

A great deal has been written about the place of women in pornography and erotica, as both consumers and figures within the text. This discourse is often highly fraught, with debates centred on whether or not pornography is inherently misogynist, whether or not women can participate in and consume pornography in an agentic manner, and whether or not pornography has a harmful effect on the way men relate to women (Attwood 2018; Williams 1999; Goldstein 2021; Attwood, Smith, and Barker 2021). In this article, we do not wish to assess, or make definitive claims about, the extent to which these apps are ‘progressive’ or ‘feminist’, but rather to explore the particular affordances of the medium and some of the alternative pleasures and forms of sonic intimacy that these affordances give rise to.

There is a great deal of scholarship about visual and text-based porn and erotica, but pornographic sound is less well-explored terrain. Some important work has been done in relation to phone sex (Mowlabocus and Medhurst 2017; Selmi 2018), audio-described porn (Rojo López, Caro, and López 2021), explicit content in podcasting (Spinelli and Dann 2019; Korfmacher 2020), erotic ASMR videos (Waldron 2017; Harper 2020), music soundtracks in porn videos (Mowlabocus and Medhurst 2017), the gendering of orgasmic sounds in porn videos (Corbett and Kapsalis 1996; Frischherz 2018; Lebedíková 2022), and orgasmic vocal performances in popular music (Corbett and Kapsalis 1996; Stratton 2014). However, audio erotica is yet to be attended to in much depth in the literature as a rapidly growing and increasingly significant sector of the industry (Cookney 2019; Lipski 2021).

In this article, we explore the emergence of audio erotica apps, and theorize their pleasures for the implied female listener (here, a heterosexual cisgendered listener; although as noted earlier, this is not the only listener these apps cater to). We focus on the two most prominent audio erotica apps, Dipsea and Quinn, and combine a paratextual analysis of the apps with close textual analysis of some of their content. In particular, we concentrate on ‘boyfriend experience’ (BFE) audios; that is, audio stories which feature two characters in an established romantic relationship, where the implied listener is the ‘you’ that the solo male performer addresses throughout the story. Dipsea categorizes these under a ‘Him + You’ umbrella, while Quinn tags them as ‘M4F’ (male for female) stories. These are not the only kind of stories featured on the apps – there is a considerable amount of narrative variety – but they are among the most popular,² making them especially worthy of attention in this hitherto largely unexplored space.

Audio erotica apps: about Dipsea and Quinn

While it became markedly more visible in the late 2010s, audio erotica is not a new phenomenon. Audio-described porn targeted towards vision-impaired people has existed for many years – see, for instance, the now-defunct website pornfortheblind.org, which was founded in 2006 and at one point boasted 150,000 visitors per month (Rojo López, Caro, and López 2021, 2). Similarly, after blind users in 2017 mentioned that the effect of their erotica was tamped when read aloud in the robotic voice of a screen-reader, sex blogger Girl On The Net began recording audio versions of some of her work (Baah 2019; Hot Octopuss n.d.). This is now the most popular material on her site, which signals the appeal of audio erotica to a broad audience – an audience on which audio erotica apps have capitalized.

Dipsea and Quinn are the most prominent of these apps, although several others also exist, such as Ferly, Emjoy, and Audiodesires. Dipsea, founded by Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan in 2018, attracted $5.5 million in venture capital seed funding in 2019 (CrunchBase 2019); while Quinn, founded by Caroline Spiegel (sister of Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel) in 2019, attracted $3.2 million in 2022 (Crunchbase 2022), after raising close to a million dollars when it first launched (Wilkinson 2020). Since their founding, both platforms have maintained strong audience bases. In 2021, Dipsea recorded 4.9 million listens (Dipsea 2021); while as of January 2022, Quinn had 300,000 subscribers (Zilber 2022).

Both apps are founded by women, and emphasize this in their marketing. Dipsea’s stories are nominally ‘for us [co-founders Gutierrez and Keegan], for our friends, and for all of the women who felt like erotica didn’t really connect with their lives and experiences’ (Dipsea n.d.), while Quinn (n.d.) is ‘made by women, for the world’. They also express relatively similar core beliefs in their marketing, rooted in self-knowledge and empowerment: Dipsea (n.d.) imagines erotica as ‘an empowering experience that leaves room for your imagination’, while Quinn (n.d.) is ‘a place to get to know yourself outside of conventional pornography’. An implicit undercurrent in both is an assumption that mainstream visual porn is often misogynistic, exploitative, and unfriendly – if not actively hostile – to women. Part of Dipsea’s origin story was a discussion between its co-founders around the sex scenes in Outlander and their appeal to a female audience, functioning as what Gutierrez called ‘many women’s stand-in for erotic content’ (Ho 2019). In a different, but related, vein, Spiegel claims to have conceived of Quinn when suffering sexual dysfunction as a result of an eating disorder, finding that ‘visual porn didn’t work’ for her as ‘it was too voyeuristic’ (Meltzer 2019).

However, the two platforms are by no means identical. Dipsea is often discussed – including by Gutierrez – as an erotic take on the meditation and mindfulness app Headspace (Ho 2019; Backwell 2021; Borges and Miller 2022). It has a stronger emphasis on wellness (unlike Quinn, it has a dedicated wellness section), positioning itself as a form of self-care. As Gutierrez reportedly told one of their investors, Dipsea are ‘not interested in creating an erotic utility, we’re interested in empowering women with content designed for their pleasure’ (Griffith 2019) – in other words, it is not just about getting women off, but building them up. Quinn, however, is more frankly interested in the former: in Spiegel’s words, they’re ‘about having fun and feeling good’ (Iovine 2019).

In terms of visual language, both apps, while different from each other, are clearly distinct from visual porn platforms. As Em Odesser notes in her discussion of several audio erotica apps:

Upon browsing the apps, it’s easy to forget you’re searching for something to get off to: their interfaces are smutty but sleek, with minimalist flat character illustrations, bold typefaces, and witty titles. Compared to the gritty and simplistic interfaces of say, Pornhub, your browsing experience on an audio app is more likely to evoke imagery of sensuality, candlelit rooms and velvet, rather than sweat, artificial lighting, and local MILFS in your area. (Odesser 2022)

However, while they might look reasonably similar on the surface, there are key infrastructural differences between the apps. The production of Dipsea stories is centralized, and they work directly with writers and actors. Quinn, by contrast, has a YouTube-esque user-upload model, operating as a hosting platform for a variety of creators. Quinn also has an accompanying comments section, which Dipsea does not. Both apps have a robust and detailed tagging system, allowing listeners to find the stories they like. However, the kinds of stories on each app vary. On Dipsea, third-person stories (tagged her + him, her + her, or similar) are more prevalent than second-person stories (tagged him + you, her + you, etc.), although the latter (often called ‘pillowtalks’ in-app) are still very present. Most stories are about 10 minutes long; and series with recurring characters (especially ‘hunks’) are common. On Quinn, however, second-person stories dominate. Because of the user-upload model, there is far less serialization and no consistency in length, with stories ranging anywhere from 30 seconds to over an hour.

While it would be temptingly simple to position these two apps simply as competitors, given their strong common core, the key differences between them show that – at least in part – they serve different needs. This said, it is remarkable that two apps as similar as Dipsea and Quinn emerged, attracted significant funding, and became popular at approximately the same time, particularly when we note that they are hardly the only two players in what was only recently a very uncrowded field. This raises an important question: why now?

Understanding audio media

In this section, we seek to locate Dipsea, Quinn, and other audio erotica apps in their broader context by exploring the backdrop against which they arose: the audio culture of the twenty-first century. From there, we will move to theorizing the affordances of the audio medium for generating a feeling of intimacy for the listener – something fundamental to the appeal of audio erotica.

The radio star reborn: twenty-first-century audio culture

While the mid to late twentieth century saw much lamentation about the displacement of oral storytelling cultures and audio media by print and video, the twenty-first century has seen a resurgence in audio media. Podcasts began to emerge during the 2000s, abetted first by technology like the iPod, and later by Apple launching a dedicated podcast app and the publication of the immensely popular serialized true crime podcast Serial (McHugh 2016, 65). Audiobooks similarly enjoyed a resurgence, new technology making them more accessible and portable than ever before, no longer beholden to cassettes or CDs but, like podcasts, able to be downloaded to a device (Philips 2007). The audiobook market continues to grow exponentially: at the time of writing, the Audio Publishers Association had recently announced a double-digit increase in audiobook sales for the 10th straight year, with an estimated sales total of $1.6 billion in 2021 representing a revenue gain of 25% (Maughan 2022).

These forms of modern audio media are distinct, both from previous forms of audio media and from other modern media. In terms of the former: unlike radio, the twentieth-century locus of audio storytelling, podcasts, and audiobooks is on-demand rather than live. Audiences can much more easily specifically seek out and access niche content; and are able to pause, rewind, fast forward, and scroll through content, which is not possible with live broadcast radio (Dowling 2019, 126; Russo 2010, 59). These audiences are also much more likely to be listening through headphones, making the encounter between the media and the audience member much more individual and intimate, as we will discuss further in the next section (Llinares, Fox, and Berry 2018, 2; Korfmacher 2020, 2; Rodero and Lucas 2021, 2). Similarly, in terms of the latter: unlike many other primarily digital modern media, the spoken word and the voice are at the heart of the podcast and the audiobook, a phenomenon which, as David Dowling argues, ‘[undermines] stereotypes of online culture as dominated by images and videos to the exclusion of language-driven narrative’ (2019, 119). This is likewise true of modern audio media’s relationship to print, especially in the case of the audiobook. As Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen contend, ‘[t]he sonification of written text offers radically different affordances […] from that of visually embedded e-books’ (2016, 8). In particular, it fundamentally alters the act of reading, because it allows for multitasking. It would be extremely difficult to read a print book while exercising, commuting, or doing housework, but an audiobook frees up both the eyes and the hands for other tasks (Knox 2011, 139; Have and Pedersen 2013, 125; 2016, 8).

These factors all have implications for audio erotica. Like podcasts and audiobooks, audio erotica stories must be deliberately sought out, often on apps like Dipsea or Quinn. Both apps have metadata which allow audiences to search for the particular type of content they want, and both allow the listener to pause, scroll through, and skip audio: Dipsea, notably, includes a marker in all its audio indicating where the sex (as opposed to narrative set-up) begins, denoted by a flame emoji, so the listener can skip straight to it if they wish. Porn has long been considered a resolutely visual medium: as Sharif Mowlabocus and Andy Medhurst write, ‘[w]hile directors are keen to show sex in ever increasing detail, they appear less interested in capturing the sounds of sex’ (2017, 211). There are exceptions to this: audio-described porn targeted to vision-impaired people, for instance, has existed for some time (Rojo López, Caro, and López 2021); and in the broader erotic sphere, there are phenomena like phone sex lines, where ‘the interaction with the customers has to be translated into a narrative that can rely only on the voice and the mobilization of a shared cultural imaginary of sex, sexuality and gender between the interlocutors’ (Selmi 2018, 577). However, neither of these are quite the same as audio erotica, which is audio first,³ designed specifically for the oral/aural medium; unlike audio-described porn. It is also not directly participatory in the way that phone sex is: the audience member may imagine themselves as a participant, but formally they are a listener rather than an interlocutor. This means that, in theory, a listener may consume audio erotica in the way that many listeners of podcasts and audiobooks do – while also doing something else – which runs counter to many understandings of how pornography is typically consumed. Indeed, both Dipsea and Quinn’s social media marketing push this idea, featuring numerous videos of listeners consuming audio erotica while going for a walk, working at their computer, sitting in a cafe, vacuuming, or brushing their teeth.⁴

This said, we should not assume this means that the experience of consuming audio erotica is somehow less intense than with other media. There is significant evidence to suggest that listening to a human voice narrate stories can be powerfully intimate – a phenomenon Emma Rodero and Ignacio Lucas (2021) dubbed the ‘human emotional intimacy effect’ in their study of human versus synthetic audio narration. It is to this effect that we turn in the next section, as we explore the peculiar intimate affordances of audio media, and the way they are mobilized in audio erotica.

Audio intimacy: defining audio erotica

Sound plays a vital role in generating intimacy in, with, and through pornographic and erotic texts. In audio erotica, sounds can be simulated or ambient, carefully scripted or spontaneous, highly produced or recorded using rudimentary amateur equipment. Despite these aesthetic differences, this media form often engenders a sense of closeness between speakers and listeners through its formal and technological affordances. Indeed, Dipsea markets its audio erotica as ‘a form of storytelling that harnesses the inherent intimacy of sound to […] immerse the listener’ (Schlichte 2020). They describe erotic sounds as ‘visceral, primal, carnal’, and the act of listening to these sounds as an experience of envelopment: ‘it’s all around you – you’re in it’ (Schlichte 2020). Similarly, in her seminal text Hard Core, Linda Williams points out that pornographic sound ‘seeks an effect of closeness and intimacy rather than spatial reality’ (1999, 124). While these features of intimate immersion and envelopment are certainly present in many forms of audio media, they are particularly intensified by the unique codes and conventions often deployed in audio erotica. Perhaps the most obvious way in which audio erotica elicits a sense of intimacy is that it tells stories about intimate, emotionally charged sexual encounters. But in addition to this, intimacy is generated by pleasure-filled soundscapes and personal modes of address, as well as the very formats and technologies through which these stories are told and received. We argue that audio erotica can cocoon the listener in an intimate encounter with another (or others) in both imaginative and tangible ways.

Audio erotica often features familiar and confessional modes of speech that heighten the sense of closeness between speaker and listener. In BFEs, for example, the implied female listener is frequently referred to using terms of endearment like ‘baby’, ‘dearest’, ‘sweetheart’, and ‘my good girl’. For example, in Dipsea’s ‘Tender Worship’, Patrick’s breath tremulously hitches in his throat as he confesses to the listener ‘I feel so connected with you’; and Quinn’s ‘Quiet Night in Our New House’ features This Guy Eli repeatedly declaring, between passionate kisses, needy whimpers, and deep moans, ‘I love you so much, baby.’ In addition to this, the audios also create a casual, familiar tone when performers tell jokes, chuckle, mumble, yawn, or trip over their words. This phenomenon has been noted as an important dimension of the parasocial intimacy generated by contemporary podcasts, particularly those that belong to the informal ‘chumcast’ genre, which features hosts who chat with one another in a familiar, casual manner (McHugh 2016). As Alyn Euritt and Anne Korfmacher comment in their article on the podcast ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno’, audio intimacy can be created in podcasts through a ‘chatty style’ of speech that includes banter, laughter, and interruptions, all of which ‘makes it sound like listeners can take part in the conversation’ (2022, 192). Indeed, many erotic audios make this potential even more explicit, by providing time and space for the listener to imagine or even articulate their own response within the conversation. BFE audios often feature a performer asking the listener a question, followed by a stretch of quiet, and then a response from the performer. For instance, in Quinn’s ‘Busy Mind’, a story in which a loving, passionate boyfriend helps his stressed girlfriend relax and fall asleep, Anonyfun asks the listener what is on her mind. After a few beats, he sighs, ‘I know, baby. It’s so frustrating. So what’re you gonna do?’ Another few quiet beats pass, after which he warmly replies ‘that’s a good idea’. While the listener’s response is obviously not heard by the performer who asks the question, this conversational style means that the erotic story is not simply told to listeners, but provides room for them to imagine themselves as part of the intimate encounter.

Intimacy is also generated through the ways in which listeners are encouraged to listen to the sounds of audio erotica, namely through headphones or earbuds, as well as binaural recording techniques.⁵ The explicit nature of the material, and the use of recording techniques designed for headphones, orients users to private listening practices. Additionally, both Dipsea and Quinn frequently present images of listeners wearing headphones in their marketing, which functions as another way to encourage this form of listening. In these ways, both Dipsea and Quinn emphasize the idea of listening to their erotic content with headphones, thus encouraging an intimate and sonically enveloping encounter with it. In his fascinating account of the history of headphone technologies, Charles Stankievech notes that this technology allows the boundary or distance between ‘the contained and container’ to dissolve (2007, 59). He explains that headphones allow for ‘“in-head” acoustic imaging’ that can transmit sound in such a way that remaps ‘one body onto another’ (Stankievech 2007, 55–56). Building on Stankievech’s work in their discussion of eroticism in podcasting, Spinelli and Dann write that because earbuds are placed in the opening of the ear canal, they ‘allow for a hyper-intimacy in which the voice you hear is in no way external, but present inside’ the listener’s body (2019, 84). Dipsea’s production team similarly note that ‘audio erotica allows us to simulate somebody actually whispering in your ear and makes it feel like it’s beaming into your body versus the distance of the page or screen’ (Schlichte 2020). Sound can thus envelop the listener (Bull and Back 2003), cocooning them in sounds that are ‘poured into the ears without disruptions from the exterior world’ (Madsen and Potts 2010, 45), and even create a kind of penetrating proximity between the ear and the speaker (Harper 2020). Madsen and Potts, in their discussion of explicit content in podcasting, argue that sonic ‘salacious play’ is made possible in the relationship between ‘private voice [and] private ear’ (2010, 40). In audio erotica, salacious play can be found in the minutia of pornographic sound that is made available in close-up through these technologies – one can hear saliva being drawn through teeth, the wet sounds of jerking off, the whoosh of a hefty exhale, and even in some instances the sound of someone’s heartbeat when the recording device is placed on the performer’s chest. Through the technology of headphones and earbuds, these intimate sounds are brought quite literally in contact with the listener’s body. Thus, we argue that the sense of intimacy generated by audio erotica can be both imaginative as well as concretely physical.

Thresholds of wanting: how to find audio erotica

Dipsea and Quinn are both subscription-based apps. This has not always been the case – Quinn began life as a free website – and it is not the case for all audio erotica, which proliferates in spaces like Reddit; however, it has become the dominant model in the field. Potential listeners may listen to a few stories for free, but to access the bulk of the content on Dipsea, Quinn, or several other of the major audio erotica apps, they must create a paid account. This makes the apps ‘walled garden[s]’, which David Dowling argues encourages a sense of presence: writing about dedicated podcast apps, he argues that these allow users to ‘receive audio content through a distraction-free medium that encourages their absorption in it; there is no portal to the open web via hyperlinks or other visual incentives to leave it’ (2019, 130). Many of the apps Dowling is writing about are free; however, this effect is only enhanced by the fact Dipsea and Quinn require a paid subscription. Their stories are not something which can simply be stumbled across – rather, users must actively work to enter the walled garden, a space ‘designed to maintain user attention’ and which ‘provide[s] a cognitive container that concentrates attention within the enclosed environment’ (2019, 129).

We might thus think about the subscription as a kind of threshold the listener must pass. Gerard Genette ([1987] 1997) theorizes that paratexts – all the materials around a text that are not in fact the text – operate as thresholds of interpretation, spaces that textual consumers must pass through to access the text, which indelibly affect the ways in which the text is read. For example, a book’s cover creates expectations in a reader which will shape their reading of it – we regularly do judge books by their cover. To access the audio erotica stories in Dipsea and Quinn, listeners must likewise pass through several paratextual thresholds; but these are specifically thresholds of wanting. They must want to access the material enough to pay for it – and from there, must use the app’s infrastructure to navigate to the material they desire.

Both apps have detailed tagging systems which enable users to find this material with relative ease. There are a wide variety of tags which users can sort by. On Dipsea, for instance, the BFE story ‘Killian: In The Bath’ is tagged ‘Him + You’, ‘Hookup’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Irish Accent’, ‘Dirty Talk’, ‘Oral’, ‘Sensual’, and ‘Passionate’. We might roughly sort these tags into categories like focalization (‘Him + You’ indicates that this is a second-person story with one voice actor addressing the listener, as opposed to something like ‘Her + Him’, which would feature two voice actors addressing each other); overall tone (‘Romantic’, which the app describes as ‘dynamics that lean more sweet than spicy’); type of interaction (‘Hookup’); specific sex act (‘Dirty Talk’, ‘Oral’); tone of sex act (‘Passionate’, which the app describes as ‘intense emotions and pent up desires’; and ‘Sensual’ described as ‘slower sex with plenty of body worship’); and voice actor characteristic (‘Irish Accent’). Users might also find this story if they have followed the series to which it belongs, ‘The Local’, which is itself tagged ‘Her + Him’, ‘Enemies to Lovers’, and ‘Irish Accent’. If a user has become invested in the series this way, they may have become invested in the overarching narrative, which evolves over their ‘Him + Her’ encounters in the series. However, if their interest has been piqued by Killian in particular, they may have found the series by sorting via ‘hunk’. While there are female hunks, they come from ‘Her + Her’ series. Killian – ‘a cocky pub owner with a secret sentimental side’ – is clearly positioned as the locus of desire here, not female heroine Sabrina. The ‘Him + You’ stories take place outside the narrative continuity of ‘The Local’, and are not marked with episode numbers. While the listener might like to imagine themselves as Sabrina, they are not required to. These stories, as with all the second-person ‘+ You’ stories, are marked in the app as ‘pillowtalks’, positioning them as specifically very intimate in a way that the third-person stories might not necessarily be.

Quinn has a similarly detailed tagging system through which the user can navigate to find the material they want. However, because of the decentralized infrastructure of the app – that is, it operates as a repository, rather than a generator, of content – this tagging system has different emphases. One key way in which users can access content is searching by voice actor. The ‘voices’ tab allows users to sort by male or female voices, with a regularly cycling ‘featured voices’ spot at the top highlighting some of their more popular creators. Clicking through to a creator’s profile will allow a user to see a brief bio and some topline tags. For instance, clicking through to the profile of This Guy Eli, one of the more popular male voice actors, shows his bio (‘M 28 – A guy, This Guy in particular, who makes audio stories’), and gives ‘storytelling’ as a general tag for his work. Drilling down into his audios (which can be sorted by ‘most recent’ or ‘most plays’) gives a topline tag for each of them as well. For his three most popular audios at the time of writing (‘I Can’t Wait, Pull Over Baby’, ‘Switching Up Your Roommate Fantasy’, and ‘Taking a Ride On My Tongue’), the topline tags are ‘boyfriend’, ‘friends to lovers’, and ‘oral’, respectively.

This is the other way in which listeners can search for content. The ‘categories’ tab allows for searching from a wide variety of tags. While there are broadly the same tag categories as on Dipsea, there is less emphasis on tone-related tags and more on dynamic (‘boyfriend’, ‘MDom’, ‘wlw’ [women loving women], and ‘friends to lovers’ are all in the top 10 most popular) and sex act (‘dirty talk’, ‘praise’, ‘oral’, and ‘moaning’ are similarly in the top 10). The creator-centric model of Quinn means that – unlike on Dipsea – second-person stories are the default, which may account for some of these differences in tagging practices. There is broad overlap, but the two apps invite their listeners to pass through slightly different thresholds of wanting in order to find the material they are looking for.

The boyfriend experience

Some of the most popular material on both Dipsea and Quinn are BFE audios, featuring male performers narrating immersive stories in which they are the listener’s boyfriend. BFE audios present an erotic fantasy in which a woman – the implied listener – is being taken care of by a man. This caretaking is specifically grounded in domestic spaces, and usually involves stories about men who take on the burden of domestic labour, and who emotionally comfort and sexually satisfy their partner. The BFE sees male characters taking on the burden of domestic tasks and practices that continue to be culturally coded as ‘feminine’ or women’s work (Erickson 2011; Fraiman 2017), instead turning the space of the home into a mise-en-scène of masculine care and intimacy. The boyfriend character of the BFE narrative, then, is defined by his capacity to engage in eroticized caretaking practices. As we have seen, audio erotica engages in a particular set of technological and aesthetic practices that can generate a sense of intimacy between speaker and listener. This is enhanced further in the BFE, where eroticized caretaking fantasies unfold against warm, cosy, and familiar domestic soundscapes. What is of particular interest is the ways in which these audios – some of the most popular on both apps – provide an alternative representation of the gendered space of the home and the many forms of domestic, intimate, and erotic caretaking contained within it.

In the BFE audio, the burden of domestic and emotional work is taken on by the male character. Thus, these narratives usually begin with this character folding laundry, cooking a meal, brewing tea, listening to his partner’s troubles, or bringing her breakfast in bed. A significant amount of time is often devoted to establishing the domestic scene, with the male character explicitly telling the listener that he has taken care of the housework, and all the other ways he intends to take care of her. For example, in Quinn’s ‘Boyfriend Cheers You Up’, James welcomes his partner home after a hard day by reassuring her: ‘I already did the dishes and the laundry, so you don’t have to worry about either of those. And dinner is on its way; I ordered your favourite.’ Having taken care of his partner through domestic labour, James then soothes her by stroking her hair and resting with her on the couch, and then finally initiates a sexual encounter by inviting her to sit on his face. In this BFE audio, as in many others, an erotic scenario unfolds in the space of the home, which is represented as a site of meticulous masculine caretaking and intimacy.

The domestic soundscape is also carefully crafted to generate a sense of warm, cosy, eroticized domestic intimacy. Plush, enveloping sounds often include the soft ruffling of bed linens, bodies falling back onto mattresses, running showers, wood crackling in a fireplace, kettles whistling, vegetables being chopped, rain against window panes, sleepy yawns, and sock-clad feet padding across floorboards. These everyday domestic details are not merely window dressing for the sexual scenario; instead, they form a significant part of the aural seduction and generate a sense of closeness with the male character. For instance, the domestic fantasy of Dipsea’s ‘Killian: In the Bath’ involves Killian preparing a warm bath, massaging his partner’s shoulders, and going down on her. The gentle sounds of the tap running, clothes being shed, bodies moving through water, and water dripping from limbs create a tranquil and gentle atmosphere designed to immerse the listener in the intimate space of the bathtub. Against this sonic soundscape, Killian whispers: ‘lean back and just relax; let me pamper you now. Close your eyes, beautiful. You deserve this.’ The soft, everyday sounds of the domestic are sustained throughout the entire audio, including during the sexual encounter, aurally linking this space of tender care with the erotic scenario. These aural techniques of sonic envelopment and direct address create a space for listeners to inhabit an erotic fantasy in which they are being taken care of in intimate ways.

In addition to taking on the burden of domestic and emotional work, a key role that the boyfriend character of the BFE audio also plays is to provide sexual pleasure. In the intimate space of the home, then, the boyfriend character provides a range of pleasures as a caretaker and lover for the implied female listener. The audio format is particularly interesting in this respect; because audio is not reliant upon the codes and conventions that ordinarily signify pleasure and satisfaction in mainstream visual porn, possibilities for alternative representations open up. In particular, in the BFE, the male character’s pleasure is de-prioritized, giving way to a fantasy scenario in which he is single-mindedly focused on his female partner’s pleasure. For example, many BFEs do not include any penetrative sex, and standard markers such as the ‘money shot’ that signify satisfaction and closure in mainstream visual pornography are absent, and replaced with romantic declarations of love. Indeed, as McAlister argues via Roach, in romance texts, the ‘final declaration of love is a money shot, a moment where emotion appears to make itself real and spectacular’ (Roach 2016, 101; McAlister 2018, 646). In an example that typifies the genre, Axolotl begins his audio by telling the listener in Quinn’s ‘Just Relax for Me’ that ‘I just kinda wanna focus on you tonight, if that’s ok’, and the climax is signalled not by his orgasm but by his repeated declarations of tender emotion and adoration. In another Quinn audio entitled ‘Netflix and Chill’, Anonyfun narrates an immersive, highly detailed 41-minute-long BFE that emphasizes the male character’s role as intimate caretaker. It begins by setting a homely scene with the enveloping sounds of linens being ruffled, bodies falling back onto a mattress, and the hushed, rhythmic, whispering tone of the performer’s voice as he tells the listener ‘I just wanna hold you; it’s just you and me.’ Like ‘Killian: In the Bath’, ‘Netflix and Chill’ cocoons the listener in an intimate sonic fantasy space of eroticized caretaking. In this audio, erotic caretaking manifests in praise, body worship, and a sustained focus on the implied female listener’s pleasure. The male character’s orgasm occurs early in the story, and does not signal closure by any means. Rather, it is one small part of a larger fantasy about a man taking care of a woman. Indeed, the climax of the story is delivered through 6 minutes of pillowtalk after the female character’s orgasm, in which Anonyfun uses a towel to tenderly clean up his partner, telling the listener: ‘I love taking care of you.’ Thus, these audio narratives stage their erotic scenes within the familiar, relational setting of the home to engineer intimate access to a fantasy of masculine caretaking and domesticity.

As we have seen, the work of domestic, emotional, and sexual seduction is borne entirely by the fantasy boyfriend of the BFE. In addition to this, the solo male performer undertakes the work of aural seduction. Because the M4F audio is a solo male performance with no fixed representation of the female partner, these scenes provide a space to imagine a range of alternative erotic roles and pleasures for both women and men. The burden of erotic aural performance is shouldered entirely by the male actor, shifting the terms in which pornography has often been produced. A number of scholars have noted that in mainstream heterosexual porn videos, male actors frequently remain quiet, while their female counterparts shoulder the burden of aural performance (Corbett and Kapsalis 1996). The woman’s moans and screams function as ‘proof’ that she is experiencing pleasure and has had an orgasm (Frischherz 2018; Lebedíková 2022), as well as ‘proof’ of her male partner’s sexual prowess (Corbett and Kapsalis 1996). This gendered division of orgasmic performance relegates sound to the ‘domain of the feminine’, reaffirming the stereotype that ‘the masculine orgasm is seen, [while] the feminine is heard’ (Mowlabocus and Medhurst 2017, 214). However, in M4F audio erotica, male aurality is placed centre stage: we hear the male performer talking, of course, but he also moans, groans, sighs, grunts, laughs, shivers, whimpers, growls, spits, jerks off, and even simulates sounds of kissing, fingering, cunnilingus, spanking, and penetrative sex. It is him, and him alone, who takes on the task of vocal performance to arouse and please the implied female listener. Conversely, as there is no female performer or fixed depiction of a female character, there is space for the listener to imagine the woman’s role, pleasures, and responses. As Roach writes, ‘[e]rotica inhabits the realm of imagination, of exaggeration, of archetype, of fantasy. It explores and plays with possibility, with “what if?” scenarios. Herein lies the real freedom offered by erotica, the deep source of its liberating potential’ (2018, 111). The intimate affordances of the BFE audio format allow for some of these potentials to be imagined, particularly by disrupting closure and enveloping the implied female listener into a fantasy narrative of domestic, emotional, and sexual care.

Conclusion

In Modern Love, David Shumway argues that ideas of intimacy became fundamental to our understandings of romantic love in the twentieth century. The popularization of the idea of intimacy – which Shumway defines as ‘deep communication, friendship, and sharing that will last beyond the passion of new love’ (2003, 27) – had narrative repercussions: instead of focusing on the process of falling in love, it allowed for the exploration of the pre-existing love between a couple, and the work it takes to maintain that loving relationship (2003, 21–25; see also McAlister 2022, 123).

This is the intimacy that is central to the BFE audio, where, notably, it is the male speaker who takes on the bulk of the work in order to prioritize the pleasure of his implied (usually) female partner, the textual placeholder for the listener. In these audios, the physical and emotional work of intimacy is taken off her shoulders: unlike, perhaps, in reality, where women taking on a ‘second shift’ of unrecognized domestic and emotional labour is a well-documented phenomenon. The fantasy is of intimacy, of emotional closeness – but also of being cared for rather than being placed in the (often maternal) position of carer.

This is perhaps not a groundbreaking observation, nor is this the first art form to do it (popular romance fiction, for instance, features this kind of narrative often). However, the affordances of audio media – that ‘human emotional intimacy effect’ (Rodero and Lucas 2021) that comes from aural human communication, redoubled by again by headphones – offer a fascinating intensification of this emotional experience in audio erotica: especially in BFEs, but also more broadly. In this article, we have only scratched the surface of all the things there are to say about audio erotica, but it is our view that in future studies, ideas of intimacy should be foregrounded, as it is clearly foundational to, and a key pleasure of, the form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Dipsea, for instance, notes in their FAQ that ‘Dipsea was designed with women in mind because they were so clearly underserved in a space defined by and for the male gaze. But the app is a safe space for all perspectives, preferences, and genders.’

2 As judged by metrics like Quinn’s ‘most audios’ sorting feature, where ‘boyfriend’ is the number one rated category.

3 Unlike other forms of audio media broadly directed towards women with potentially similar (albeit secondary) affordances – for example, romance fiction available in audio – which is, for the most part, print/e-book first.

4 See, for example: dipseastories on TikTok, 6 January 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@dipseastories/video/7185328126266936622?lang=en; and tryquinn on TikTok, 20 March 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@tryquinn/video/7212331234192821550?lang=en.

5 A recording technique that uses two separate microphones, which creates a surround-sound effect for listeners.