A young woman named Serena lies down on a bed, lights some candles, and begins to masturbate. She’s picturing Rihanna, thinking of how the pop star’s nipples look in the “Needed Me” music video.
“I love her ‘don’t fuck with me’ stare,” Serena breathes. She keep touching herself, thinking of her friend Nia. “She has the perfect mouth. Almost like her teeth don’t quite fit, but it’s so cute. I love women with crooked smiles. It’s so… commanding.”
Welcome to the world of audio porn, a medium some insist is the most empowering way to get off. These recordings—half-erotica, half-radio play—have long flourished on Reddit communities like GoneWildAudio or PillowTalkAudio. Now, entrepreneurs bet it can go mainstream—and make money.
Last December, Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan founded Dipsea, which churns out three heavily produced sexy stories a week. (Serena’s scene comes from a Dipsea episode called “Cliterati.”) The app charges $4 a month for a yearlong commitment, or $9 paid month-by-month. In February, the founders announced their app had hit $5.5 million in seed funding.
Though Gutierrez declined to provide The Daily Beast with any details on Dipsea’s reach, its Instagram, which reposts both Gloria Steinem quotes and Timothée Chalamet glamour shots, has around 6,700 followers.
That breadth has yet to rival R/GoneWildAudio’s 270,000 members. However, Dipsea’s professionally acted audios are undoubtedly slicker than the homegrown stuff.
Next week, Dipsea will release its hundredth episode. Anyone looking for the classic tropes—for example, a pizza delivery boy’s romp with a bored housewife, or any sex that starts with “I’m sure we can figure out some form of payment”—should look elsewhere.
Gutierrez prefers to think of Dipsea scenarios as “aspirational reality.” Think a woman hooking up with her hot barista, or two bi-curious friends messing around at a bachelorette party.
The most popular audio to date has been “Hot Vinyasa,” a torrid romance between a yoga student and teacher. The saga has spawned two sports bra-ripping sequels.
“We all go to yoga classes and know what it’s like to be in a hot, crowded room,” Gutierrez explained. “We imagine that kind of thing might happen. Even if it’s really unlikely, it could, and that’s super sexy.”
In “Hot Vinyasa,” yoga student Laura finds herself crushing on Mark, her teacher who also happens to be a former marine. Ninety percent of the first episode is all sexual tension. Only about four minutes are dedicated to the juicy stuff.
Traditional visual porn has been vilified for presenting an unrealistic world where poreless women with no body hair want to sleep with balding, bacne’d taxi drivers.
Again, you will not find that on Dipsea, though the app does traffic a different kind of fantasy made for “The Future is Female” T-shirt set. There, consent is as explicit as Serena’s dirty talk.
In “Hot Vinyasa,” Mark makes a point of asking Laura, “May I?” before putting his hands down her yoga pants. (Equally unreal: Laura’s sweaty spandex “glides right off” her skin with ease.)
“In our stories, people who are hooking up for the first time definitely need to get a condom,” said Kristina Loring, Dipsea’s storytelling lead editor. No ifs, ands, or butts about it—though the team has gotten creative at how to sound-design safer sex.
“It’s not always going to be an A/B dialogue of, ‘Go get a condom,’” Loring explained. “We don’t want to take you out of the moment, but we want you to know it’s safe sex.”
That might mean that the sound comes from unwrapping an actual condom. The team has also played around with ways to reproduce the sound, such as crinkling paper into a microphone.
Leah Raiman, a 26-year-old voice actor from Brooklyn, New York, played Laura in “Hot Vinyasa.” (This is not her real name; she asked The Daily Beast to use an alias.) Before working with Dipsea, Raiman had never listened to audio porn and does not consider herself a fan of the medium. As a working actor in New York, it was just another quirky gig to her.
“I had seen castings for adult content before, but this was the first time I ever submitted,” Raiman said. “I was drawn into stories that were geared toward women, genuine situations people could find themselves in. It’s different from most porn I’d seen.”
The current Dipsea team is all women, though the company’s co-founder said that could change in the future. Raiman feels that the gender make-up of staff helped ease her into the first scene.
“It was not as weird as I thought it would be,” Raiman said. “They were on the phone coaching us, and they made it sound normal when they said, ‘Say, ‘Oh, suck on my tits,’ this way.’” It also helps that Raiman records from the privacy of her home studio, directed by the Dipsea team in San Francisco.
Though she is not currently dating, Raiman has considered sending her story to potential dates as a kind of aural sexting. “I haven’t done it, but it’s been a thought—hey, I could use this in my dating life,” she laughed.
Earlier this month Lauren Speigel—the sister of Snapchat founder Evan—launched Quinn, a free, barebones platform where amateurs can upload short fiction and audio files. Spiegel, 22, told Allure that she founded Quinn after experiencing sexual dysfunction caused by anorexia.
“[I wanted] to make a product that makes sex more chill,” Spiegel told the site. “Why does the tone around sex have to be so weird? It's such a fun, happy part of life. Quinn is a daily dose of pleasure. Wake up, grab your coffee, use Quinn for 20 minutes.”
April Would has always had a distinctive laugh. When she’s out in public and finds something funny, people turn to see where her trill, high-pitched giggles are coming from.
As a child, she assumed people stared because her laugh was so loud. Now 31, a freelance audio porn performer and phone sex operator, Would wonders if people look because they recognize it from her recordings.
Would, who requested The Daily Beast use her performance name as she has not told family about her job, began listening to audio porn in 2017.
“What has always appealed to me the most about explicit material has been the sound over visual,” Would said. “A lot of times, I found audio distracting. So I thought: there is so much porn online, I bet there is a place where I can just listen.”
A late night Google search led Would to Reddit’s GoneWildAudio community. In these amateur audios, performers read scripts in the second-person, inviting the listener to visualize they are on the receiving end of every suck, moan, or kiss.
“Everything is left up to the imagination,” Would said. “It makes it a lot of fun, super immersive and really intimate.” After listening to the audios for about six months, Would decided to make her own with a voice recorder saved from her days as a reporter for a college newspaper.
At first, sitting in her apartment bathroom alone, doing one half of a porno, felt silly. “It took some getting used to,” Would explained. “I found a femme-dom, BDSM script, and I thought, ‘you’re acting.’ A switch flipped. After that, it was easy.”
Along the way, Would discovered many hidden talents. As a child, she spoke with a lisp. A speech counselor said that her tongue was too big for her mouth. A preteen Would had reconstructive surgery, which left her producing extra saliva.
“When I’m doing a blowjob sound, I can stick my tongue back and almost choke on my own tongue,” Would said. “I need to be careful, but it’s been my tongue forever so I am used to it.”
When it comes time to bring in props, Would said that “You find things to suck on.”
She once tried to blow a dildo to make gagging noises, but her teeth scraped against the surface and made an unpleasant grinding sound. After more experimenting, Would found a different solution—but refused to divulge what she uses. “It’s a professional secret,” she said.
A former telemarketer, Would “always hated” her phone voice, because it sounded young to her. But on GoneWildAudio, where the freaky fare skews less “Let me grab a condom,” and more “Choke me daddy,” Would’s pleasant, easygoing, girl-next-door lilt drew fans—and paying customers.
After a year of posting for her own enjoyment, Would got a message from a listener. The man had written a script that he did not want to make public, and he offered her money to record it. Would was flattered, so she agreed to do it. He asked for another, and another. “I realized if he would pay me, probably a lot of other people would, too.”
Would began accepting clients who either had pre-written scripts or ideas they wanted her to conceptualize. She first charged $25 to read a story and $50 to write one herself, though she now charges $100 for the latter.
“I’ll get an email from a client with an idea, then we’ll get on the phone to talk,” Would explained. “If I like the script and it doesn’t make me uncomfortable—I have a pretty high threshold—I’ll do it.” It takes her around two and a half weeks to complete a job.
Though Would refrained from speaking about any scenarios that might be on her ‘no’ list, she considers her work “a way to be sexy without getting objectified.”
Would tried juggling her side hustle with a full-time, “dead end” office job for a year. She decided to go freelance when she moved into a cheaper apartment. Now, Would is a one-woman erotica machine, writing, performing, editing, and managing clients all by herself.
“I don’t really think of the material as sexual anymore, because I do it so much,” she said. “One side effect of my job is that I don’t listen to audio porn anymore. When I listen to other people’s posts, I start to feel guilty—‘This person is posting once a week and I’m not posting at all.’ I also wonder, ‘How do they make that sound? How do they do that?’”
Another occupational hazard: “Apparently, [audio porn] has made me a lot chattier during sex,” Would admitted. That said, she tries to compartmentalize what goes on inside her studio with the real stuff. “I never feel like sex is work or masturbation is work. I do all of these recordings standing up, fully clothed, in a dark closet. And the amount of burps I have to edit out of these things—it’s incredible.”
Though Would likes to keep her personal life private for the sake of a fun mystery, she admitted there are some pratfalls when it comes to telling potential partners about her job.
On first dates, she keeps things vague, saying she works in audio production. Once she does divulge, there is always the chance someone will be too excited.
“Sometimes a guy will get way too into it, want to listen and hear every detail,” Would groaned. “Like, dude, this is my day job. This isn’t your porno.”
Though Would is proud of her success and ability to make a living freelancing, she is constantly afraid of her family finding out what she does. “That is the most stressful thing about it. I’m sure I’ll come out eventually, and I’m not scared to tell them because they’re very loving, but it’s awkward. But I want to share my accomplishments with my family.”
One married, 45-year-old performer who requested total anonymity said that she manages motherhood with catering to the deepest desires of her 3,000 subscribers.
“I won’t speak to my children about it, but my husband supports it 100 percent,” the woman said. “I don’t see an end in sight. I’ll keep going as long as I’m having fun and can make the time to do it. It’s a good creative outlet for me.”
Gaelforce, a YouTuber with over 60,000 subscribers, lives and works in west Ireland. He asked The Daily Beast to use his performance name because he “likes to let the listener decide who Gael is.”
Like Would, Gaelforce began performing after feeling “fed up” with visual porn. “I found it too fantastical,” he wrote over email. “So I ran a search for ‘female moans’ on Google, and found a piece by an anonymous user. I was blown away. Without the visual, I was able to create my own scene, create the lady who was moaning [in my head].”
Gaelforce’s voice has a cooing lull, and it does not hurt that he possesses an easy-to-fetishize Irish accent. His close-miked audios rarely register above a soft whisper. The plots feel made-for-Harlequin, with subjects ranging from a sensitive boyfriend “pampering” his menstruating girlfriend to one hour of “rain and snuggle sounds.”
For his more PG-rated “sleep with me” audios, Gaelforce lies down and hits “record” while he slowly breathes in and out. The result is an hour-long performance of him in bed, a sort of white noise for lonely hearts who want to feel like they are going to bed alongside a lover. (Realistic snores, of course, are edited out.)
“I think people find lots of comfort in it,” Gaelforce said. “It frees you from the pitfalls of visual porn. You’re not looking at the body of the actors and comparing yourself. You’re not searching their expressions for sincerity, or bound by the environment, or wardrobe, or positions. A genuine moan is a powerful thing.”
