Dipsea founder Gina Gutierrez asked a 1,500-person live audience to close their eyes and imagine a scenario while she played background audio.
Stacie McChesney / TED
For decades, porn has dominated our cultural perception of sex and turn-ons. Arousal seemed to require seeing explicit, and at times crude and unrealistic, depictions of people doing it.
That shouldn't be the case, according to Gina Gutierrez, the founder of audio erotica startup Dipsea, who believes that using sounds and imagination can expand our sexual horizons and lead to more satisfying sex for women.
Dipsea is a content studio that produces short, sexy audio stories. But you don't need stories to get started, Gutierrez says.
Last week, in a key note speech at the TED2022 conference, Gutierrez trained an audience of 1,500 people to get in touch with their sensual side by listening to a 5-second clip of ocean waves crashing onto a beach.
"Were those not the sounds you were imagining I'd play?" Gutierrez said as the audience laughed. "I bet that every person in this room is imagining something a little different, but filled with also sorts of distinct details about the surroundings about the circumstances. Audio is incredible."
Gutierrez uses sounds to create a "blueprint" where the mind can fill in the blanks characters and plots that resonate with them. When creating a sexy scenario, Gutierrez said to "reach back into your memory" to imagine a comfortable, sensory-heavy environment.
Even as the world has made strides towards gender equality in the last century, men still orgasm more often than women. The pandemic may have led to increased interest in solo sex among women, as Emjoy, an audio app that helps women learn about their bodies, saw a 160% increase in 2020.
Gutierrez founded Dipsea in 2018 to help people use their imaginations to get turned on. The Dipsea content studio writes, produces, and distributes hundreds of short, sexy audio stories for a $13 monthly subscription.
The audio erotica on Dipsea differs from run-of-the-mill erotica by going beyond just storytelling, instead using other sounds and inflections to create an environment for personal intimacy.
"f you're listening to something, it's all around you—you're in it," one Dipsea creator wrote. "It's like being in an ocean or a body of water where you're quite literally, in this analogy, immersed, versus being splashed in the face with water or being hosed down."
Orgasms have a variety of health benefits in all people, from reducing anxiety to improving cognitive health. Female orgasms can strengthen the pelvic floor and counteract post-menopausal side effects.
Once a taboo, sexual wellness products have become mainstream through retailers like Sephora and Bloomingdales. The sexual wellness industry is poised to explode in the next few years, but founders say stigma around women's pleasure can stymie growth.
"It is not a betrayal to use your imagination to bring you more pleasure," Gutierrez said. "Fantasy is a safe space, and it's time we bust the myth that what you fantasize about and what you want to happen in reality are always the same thing."
