The audio-erotica industry is doubling down on its WLW offerings. Even Shane from ‘The L Word’ is in on the effort.
Queer, alone, and horny, with no one to booty call? For $3.99/month, you can get off to You actress Victoria Pedretti moaning “good girl” directly into your ear. In the three-part lesbian roleplay series Compromised, Pedretti voices a secret agent hunting down an international hacker. You, the listener, assume the role of a tourist she bumps into at the airport, a minor antagonist turned lover whom she ties up, fucks with a strap-on, and murmurs “I love you” to in bed.
Streamed almost half a million times since its September launch, Compromised is the first WLW (“women loving women,” a category that encompasses bisexuals, pansexuals, and lesbians, used interchangeably with “sapphic”) original by the audio-erotica app Quinn, which has also collaborated with celebrities like “Hot Priest” Andrew Scott. “It’s important for everyone to see that Quinn is not just an app for straight girls,” says Caroline Spiegel, Quinn’s founder and CEO, who notes that the platform had tripled the size of its queer audio library from 2022 to 2023. Next up, it’s got everyone’s favorite shaggy-haired lesbian heartbreaker, Shane from The L Word — real name Kate Moennig — roleplaying a veteran rock star.
As the recent audio boom hit books, journalism, and talk shows, it has also diversified adult content. A decade ago, a young woman with a little free time and a lot of pent-up sexual energy might unwind by thumbing through NSFW Tumblrs or listening to amateur narrations on Literotica. Now, at-home sex workers share kinky fantasies to Fansly and Patreon, YouTubers post pillow-talk ASMR videos, and subscription-based apps supply thousands of professionally (and semi-professionally) made erotic recordings in their catalog. Actual sex isn’t required, making audio-only content cheaper and more convenient to produce than visual porn; creators can pursue wilder story lines, relieved of set and costuming constraints. Online, there is action-packed faerie smut and guided masturbations, slice-of-life simulations of hookups with your favorite pop idol or best friend. And yes, your celebrity crushes might be narrating.
Cropping up within the past five or so years, new-gen companies such as Quinn and Dipsea have helped reframe audio erotica as a more conscientious, female-friendly alternative to mainstream porn. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze,” Spiegel (the sister to Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel) told TechCrunch before Quinn’s launch in 2019, pitching her venture as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women,” though it now services everyone. Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan, the more literary-minded founders of “spicy audiobook” platform Dipsea, saw an untapped market for well-crafted narratives that authentically depict female desire; Dipsea’s slogan is “stories for women, by women.” Couched in wellness rhetoric, a wealth of similar options include Ferly, Bloom, Femtasy, and more. All present themselves as safe spaces for fantasy and self-exploration, encouraging listeners to abandon anxieties and preconceptions about what constitutes “normal” sex.
Which means doubling down on queer content, especially in an era when the buzziest pop stars are out-and-proud lesbians; compulsory heterosexuality, or comphet, is a TikTok buzzword; and LGBTQ+ books and movies have never been more in demand. “We care about telling stories for female gaze, and sapphic stories are obviously a part of that experience as well,” says Dipsea’s editorial lead, Olivia Taylor, who estimates that 40 percent of Dipsea’s new releases each month are queer, the majority of those WLW. This Pride month, 90 percent of new Dipsea releases are sapphic, including The Detour, a new road-trip-themed collaboration written by best-selling romance novelist Meryl Wilsner.
LGBTQ+ erotic-audio offerings have also expanded outside of these venture capital-backed realms. Members of the NSFW subreddit r/GoneWildAudio have created their own WLW offshoot, r/GWASapphic. The legendary sex blogger Girl on the Net, who launched her site’s audio-porn section in 2017, not only narrates her own (mostly heterosexual) sexcapades but commissions, produces, and reads stories from queer and disabled freelancers (like this account of a woman rediscovering how to orgasm after getting fisted by her female physical therapist) and trains writers to read their own material. From the outside, WLW audio erotica is flourishing. Which made me wonder: What is it like to be behind the scenes?
Cera Gibson, a pansexual 28-year-old musician, had attracted Quinn’s attention with her front-facing comedic TikTok impersonations in late 2022. “I would parody popular media like Harry Potter and make it more sensual,” she says. “I’d be like, Ron, no! He’s gonna sacrifice himself! in the sexy voice, and people really glommed onto those.” At the time Quinn reached out, she hadn’t really heard the term audio erotica. But returning from tour a year later, she became dissatisfied with freelance social-media work and decided to give it a try. After a relatively simple process that involved recording on her phone, she signed a six-month contract with Quinn.
Gibson wrote one of her first stories, “Soup in Bed,” while recovering from sickness. In it, she coaches a curious female friend who’s taking care of her through her first lesbian hook-up. “I wrote a rough outline and just started spitballing,” she says. “That was so well received that I knew I could fill a missing niche of real-life queer experiences.” To make her content less intimidating to baby queers, she’ll insert banter, gentle guidance, and reassurances that no one really knows what they’re doing. Now Gibson releases one audio a week — the intended audience alternating between men, women, and everyone — paid on a tiered system based on listener numbers; she estimates that about 70 percent of her income comes from Quinn. Her content ranges from guided masturbations to “succubus audio,” as she describes it, “where the person is experiencing sleep paralysis and has to blink to consent.” For more immersive, authentic-sounding recordings, she sources real-world effects from Splice, like a key turning the door, and recreates sex noises with her hands and mouth.
I knew I could fill a missing niche of real-life queer experiences.
While some erotica readers cross over from audiobooks or animation, many are novices to voice acting, like Gibson. Shava’sha Dickerson, a 39-year-old lesbian artist, had been touring with Ciara as a background singer before starting work with Dipsea the year it was founded, in 2018. “We connected; I went to the studio and just started taking off,” she says. Dipsea sent over a script and vocal tips, including what to eat, and an audio producer coached her as she read. Amanda George, a 29-year-old bisexual content creator, learned about Quinn and Dipsea after her followers started tagging the companies in her videos. After taking a two-month hiatus to care for family, she quit her full-time job at a hospital this January, realizing she could support herself solely through voice acting. She now creates for Quinn “full-time,” a schedule that’s anywhere between eight to 20 hours a week.
George had initially started working with Dipsea, which provides its voice actors stories sourced in-house. These were “three-to-five-minute scenes that were very girly, lots of WLW relationship content,” she says. The scripts helped her get a feel for the narrative and structure of audio erotica, and she eventually transitioned to writing her own material with Quinn. “I did a first-date one, which I was hesitant about, because it didn’t seem really sexy. But everybody was like, ‘Oh my god, we need a part two.’” Listeners tend to care about story line and relationships, not just dirty talk and climax; they want to feel cherished and safe in the voice actor’s hands. So it’s important that creators take time to build up and release sexual tension. “I very seldom start where it’s hot and heavy at the beginning,” George says. Mango Lynx, a 31-year-old nonbinary Quinn creator, has fielded requests to end their audios with aftercare instead of cutting off after orgasm: “I’ve gotten more feedback like, ‘We want to hear you hold us and caress us after we just went through that with you.’”
We care about telling stories for female gaze, and sapphic stories are obviously a part of that experience as well.
Though creators occasionally struggle to enforce boundaries with well-meaning followers—George has turned off Instagram Story replies to protect herself from parasocial relationships—they make contracting for the big audio-erotica apps seem pleasant and cushy overall. Michelle Hy, the 31-year-old bisexual founder of the Instagram account Polyamorous While Asian, disclosed that Dipsea paid her $200 an hour for her recording sessions, though this comprises a small portion of her income, given that she still works full-time in social media at a real-estate company. Last year, Dickerson signed a five-year contract allowing Dipsea to automate her voice with A.I., so she rarely has to go into the studio. (Though she won’t discuss numbers, she assures me that financially, “I am definitely taken care of.” ) The economic reality is more challenging for independent NSFW audio creators, who have fewer resources and must maneuver around tech platforms’ changing search priorities and terms of service. “It’s much easier to get funding for something that you can frame as wellness,” says Girl on the Net, whose site is funded by Patreon subscribers, advertising, and sex-toy affiliate marketing. She’s deliberate about labeling her content “porn,” not “erotica,” explaining: “I worry that often with the audio erotica industry, there’s almost a line being drawn that says, ‘What we’re doing is very narrative, and it’s soft and gentle, it’s for women’—all these things that are supposed to code this as morally better than porn.”
Still, Girl on the Net sympathizes with companies like Quinn and Dipsea, or really any adult-content provider entangled with uptight payment processes. To avoid censure from Patreon, which bans porn — though it defines porn as visual media — she begrudgingly IDs her services there as “audio erotica” and has removed consensual nonconsent (or ravishment or rape fantasy) audio. “Obviously, it should be framed responsibly,” she says. “But one of the reasons I think nonconsensual consent should be allowed is that women have been shamed for acknowledging that we like sex, and because of that, our desires can come out in fantasies of being forced.” At the moment, Girl On the Net has just enough funding to pay her writers and narrators, so she can’t afford to upgrade her website’s functionality. Consequently, WLW stories are much trickier to locate there than on the app-based platforms: “A nonbinary person was interviewing me for something, and they said they got trapped in the ‘dick vortex’ and struggled to find the queer stuff.”
Girl in Dungarees, an anonymous queer creator in the Midwest, distributes her NSFW roleplay audio via Patreon, Pornhub, and the OnlyFans alternative Fansly. In 2018, after poking around online for porn, she came across the subreddit r/GoneWildAudio, where horny amateurs have been uploading sexual recordings and scripts since 2012. She started reading scripts others had posted, then tried out writing her own racy stories. By December 2020, she had been spending so much time making audio outside of her regular nine-to-five in a STEM job — “I have ADHD, and this is my longest-standing hyperfocus,” she says — that she created her Patreon. Initially, her subscribers were 90 percent men, but a six-month-long partnership with Quinn in 2022 exposed her to a female audience, empowering her to create more WLW content.
One of Dungarees’s early WLW audios, from 2020, was requested by a fellow Redditor, a man whose wife had been exploring her bisexuality; in the scenario, a consensual-nonconsent fantasy, Dungarees enters the wife’s bedroom after her husband is finished with her and eats her out, among other things. Daunted, Dungarees at that point had no experience hooking up with women. “I’m a late-blooming person. I was raised Catholic in the Midwest, so I was very repressed,” she says. She asked a male creator for assistance emulating cunnilingus sound effects, learning how to create a fist with the knuckle of her index finger representing the clit. For dialogue, she just said what came naturally. The ultimate recording was well received, both by the couple and the r/GoneWildAudio community. “I was starting to be like, Wait, maybe I’m not straight,” she says. “Being in this space has really helped me understand that I am queer.” (She now shares her WLW audios directly to r/GWASapphic.)
This turns out to be a common story among WLW audio creators: Not only do they receive grateful messages from fans questioning their sexualities, they’ve also noticed transformations themselves. Hy, whose most common character is a high-powered lawyer named Isa, has enjoyed inhabiting a commanding persona. “One of my partners, who is more submissive, was very happy to hear the femme-dom audios,” she says. Dickerson adds that voice acting helped her connect with her wife and explore her femininity as a masculine-presenting lesbian. “And it’s definitely helped me explore what it actually means to be pleased and to give pleasure.” But it’s Amanda George who has experienced the most surprising shift: She has become unintentionally celibate. “What I realized is the audios that I make and their incorporation of consent and aftercare gave me almost unrealistic expectations of what I want in intimacy,” she reflects. “I’m getting my needs fulfilled in a different way now.”
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