Talk Dirty To Me

The increasingly audible moans of audio erotica—and the people who write, voice, and study it

A door opens. Heels on the floor. A sleepy moan. A British accent.

“Hey baby. You have a good time? You can put the light on. It’s fine.

Ohhh okay. I can see we had a very good time.” Warm laughter.

“God, you look so fucking hot. Yeah, you know I like that outfit. But you must be freezing! I bet you got a lot of looks though. You done some heartbreaking tonight?

What time is it? 3 am?! Get into bed, you deviant!

Come here. I’ll warm you up.”¹

I first learned about the erotic audio app Quinn from Melody Thomas’ brilliant podcast the Good Sex Project—definitely give it listen if you haven’t already. I was curious. Practically every night I lull myself to sleep with the Calm app’s perfectly boring sleep stories; would horny audio fulfill a different need? I had already tried Dipsea, a similar app with audios marketed as ‘spicy audiobooks’, but hadn’t found the storytelling especially engaging.

Quinn, on the other hand, turned me on immediately.

Lots of the audios are in second person; a warm-voiced man or woman talking directly to me, the listener. Asking questions, waiting for answers, chuckling at my imagined response. The acting, in general, is much better than I’d expected it to be—more storyful, playful and convincing than any I’ve encountered even in arty, ethical, visual porn, and definitely better than in romantasy graphic audiobooks. Most of the time, the scenes and characters are thoroughly believable. Cosy soundscapes add to the immersion—and my own imagination supplies the rest.

Most are oriented to women, but not all. There are people of various genders speaking to all sorts: men, women and non-binary folk. Some audios aren’t even sexual, mainly kind words of affirmation and encouragement. Others are kinky-as-fuck, but you’re warned about what to expect via the thorough and at times hilarious use of tags.

So if you’re not into [Butt Stuff] [Degradation] [Breeding] or [Daddy], you might instead choose one labelled: [M4F] [Friends] [Romantic] [Adorkable] [Jealousy] [Rain] [Gazebo] [Confession] [Kissing] [Possessive] [Tell Me You Need Me Too] [Finger Sucking] [Fingering] [Check ins] [Eye Contact] [Praise] [Pride & Prejudice Gazebo Scene Vibes]—yes, that’s all one story.

Or maybe you’d prefer this one, tagged [NB4A]²—meaning it’s by a non-binary creator for any listener—[For all genders] [WFH] [Partner Experience] [Lunch Break] [Flirty] [Cutie] [Spanking] [Shower Sex] [Quickie] [Sensual] [Fingering] [Moaning] [Oral].

If you’re feeling adventurous, on the other hand, you can dip your … toe … into some spicier waters than you’re used to, and possibly surprise yourself.

There are historical audios, where you’re seduced in a carriage or ravish the manservant. There are comfy ‘boyfriend’, ‘husband’, or ‘girlfriend’ audios, bad boys and lady bosses, and all the tropes common to romance literature—friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, strangers-to-lovers, infidelity, age differences, office romances.

There are bars and flat couches and hotel mix ups (only one bed!) and mad inventors and witchy moonlight gatherings. There are recurring memes and ‘Easter eggs’ for devoted listeners (like an offstage character referred to as ‘Fucking Greg’ who pops up in multiple audios) and various accents—but no Kiwi ones that I’ve found so far (which is possibly for the best?)

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And there are a handful of flagship, highly-produced, plot-driven, three-part stories that seem tailor-made to draw new listeners to the app. There’s a fairy smut one dripping in BookTok references. One’s voiced by Katherine Moennig—who, as Shane from The L Word, inspired many a Millennial queer awakening. Another features British actor Andrew Scott of hot-priest-Fleabag-fame as Robb the Protector, the guard to a despotic queen in a medieval-ish kingdom.

“If I wasn't already listening to Quinn, I would definitely be a subscriber the minute I found that out,” says researcher Athena Bellas, an Honorary Fellow in the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication. Athena has listened to a *lot* of erotic audio—“untold hundreds of hours”—but she has a good excuse. “It’s for research.”

*

Andrew Scott’s Irish accent. The sound of a sword falling on the floor.

“If we’re going to do this I want to do it right.

Sit on the throne.

Have you forgotten what we used to do in this room?

You heard me, sit down.

I miss this. I’ve been thinking about this since I saw you in the market, remembering the nights we spent sneaking in here…Your scent.

I need to see you. Open your legs.

I have to taste you. Is that all right?

Thank you. It’s even better than I remember. Better than in my dreams.”³

*

Athena and her friend Jodi McAlister, a romance author and romance scholar at Deakin University, are literally writing the book on this stuff—it’s provisionally titled Audio Erotica—and they recently published one of the first ever academic papers about it. Of course this requires a lot of … research. “Anytime my headphones are in, it's audio erotica,” says Athena. Dipsea (founded in 2018) and Quinn (2019) are the main players, but there are half a dozen others as well. Becoming connoisseurs has made Athena and Jodi pretty discerning.

“We’re now really alive to the bad ones,” says Jodi. “You end up with a bit of a hair trigger where you're like, ‘Oh, no. Absolutely not.’ It's a good way of educating yourself about your own icks.” A few audios are just flat out bad, she says. Story matters—at least a bit—and so do production values. “Athena and I have both got some opinions about some really janky background music in some of them.”

Other times, though, they don’t see eye to eye.

Jodi can’t stand one Quinn particular creator. “He says the phrase, “I know," in a way that I just absolutely hate. Like, 🤢🤮.”⁴ There's nothing objectively objectionable about the phrase ‘I know,’ but it makes Jodi’s skin crawl for reasons she can’t exactly articulate. “When he's saying it in my ear I’m just like, take it away!” (She’s cringing and wringing her hands as she says this.) “So Athena has to listen to him for both of us.”

“We've had so many fights about this,” says Athena, “because he’s one of my favourites!” Bickering aside, they do agree that what makes a great erotic audio is a sense of realness, connection and intimacy. The second person point of view can deliver that intimacy, but only if it’s done right, Athena says. The script has to be specific enough to be interesting, but generic enough that you’re not jolted out of it, thinking I’d never say that, or that’s not me. “Audio erotica trades on a fantasy of authenticity, and if the audio cannot produce that and rings untrue, it's an immediate ‘no’ for me,” she says.

Penning a good erotic audio story is definitely an art, says Holly June Smith, a British romance author who also occasionally writes scripts for Quinn creators—she got into it after writing a novel about a woman who is embarrassed to discover the guy her brother’s brought along on a ski holiday is her favourite erotic audio creator.

An audio story has to work at multiple levels, Holly says. Firstly, as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Then there’s crafting the dialogue, which has to make the listener feel like they’re part of the story; she was thrilled to hear from some Quinn listeners that they felt so immersed they accidentally responded out loud to a question while on their commute or in the gym. The most challenging?

“Ultimately, what you are creating is a masturbation guide. So it also has to have this pacing that works for the listener. You are taking them on a literal, physical, intimate journey.”

Sometimes you just need to let the moaning do the talking. Holly’s scripts will frequently say things like: Moaning for approximately thirty seconds. Moaning intensifies. Creators are then free to improvise, and the possibilities are endless. In their academic writing, Athena and Jodi call this kind of thing ‘salacious play’: “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.”⁵

In mainstream visual porn, they write, the “burden of erotic aural performance” generally falls on female actors: “the masculine orgasm is seen, while the feminine is heard.” Erotic M4F audio (heterosexual, performed by men) turns this stereotype on its head.

“Oh yeah, it's mostly moans, groans, and f-bombs,” says British Quinn creator John York. “You're sort of using your breath to guide the pace of the story.” (Quinn have helpfully made an 17-hour+ playlist entitled ‘Male Moans’.)

John found his way to audio erotica via audiobook narration, although the two media are worlds apart, he says. “With audiobooks, you’re reading a manuscript, you're just performing a part. With the Quinn stuff, it's a lot more personal.”

For him, that’s meant gravitating to certain types of stories or characters. “I don’t have a super gruff voice or a gritty bad boy personality. I'm not gonna go and, like, decimate somebody and say awful things to them—it just sounds weird coming from me. So I do a lot of friends-to-lovers, boy-next-door stories,” he says. (Side note: There are plenty of other creators who play more in the decimating bad boy genre if you’d rather get off to that—in your mind, if not actually in real life.)

*

“We really, really deserve this night away—just the two of us.

Plus, I’ve done something incredibly sexy in preparation for tonight.

I stopped off at that car place on the way home, and had it…professionally cleaned.

I did! There is not a crumb or friendship bracelet or broken crayon in sight.”⁶

*

John writes a lot of his own scripts, but Holly penned these catnip-for-parents lines for him, as part of a series they worked on together called Couples Therapy. “It's not just twenty minutes of escapism,” says Holly. She and John wanted it to be almost educational—to help couples work through their own issues, and maybe get some ideas. “This series might just save my marriage,” wrote one commenter.

Couples Therapy fits into a genre of erotic audio Athena and Jodi call husband or ‘boyfriend experience’—and this was the focus of their recent academic paper, Let me take care of you: domestic caretaking fantasies in boyfriend experience audio erotica, published in 2023 in Porn Studies (yep, that’s a real academic journal.)

These are some of the most popular types of audio on both Quinn and Dipsea, they write—erotic fantasies in which a woman, the implied listener, is being taken care of by “men who take on the burden of domestic labour, and who emotionally comfort and sexually satisfy their partner.” So you have men telling you they’ve done the dishes, showering you with compliments and love, and delightedly, hungrily going down on you. Here’s Athena:

“Boyfriend experience audio, and erotic audio more broadly, is a fantasy world in which women are unburdened from any kind of labour. Labour like taking care of the home, emotional labour, the labour of having to vocally perform [orgasm]. All these things are off her shoulders, and in fact it's the male performer who it all falls on to create this fantasy. That's a very interesting power reversal, and I think that's part of why it's so powerful and so interesting and it feels fresh.”

Could this kind of thing perhaps give us unrealistic expectations, I ask?

Jodi shoots me down. “This is something people say about romance fiction all the time. My answer is, I don't care if women have high expectations. That doesn't seem like a them problem. That seems like a men problem.”

John also gets asked that question a lot. “The preconception of what we do is it’s some bloke saying how great he is, but it's the complete opposite. It's me holding hands with the listener and we're exploring this together. It’s ironic, really, because it’s me doing the talking, but the feedback I get is that people feed heard. They feel listened to, and they feel understood.”

Masculinity is often characterised as taking, he says—“but audio erotica is showing that there’s something deeply masculine about serving—and I don't think a guy listening to their partner is a high target to hit. I think that should be expected as a human being, as a friend, as a boyfriend, as a partner. It's what we all need and crave and want. So I don't think that's necessarily an unrealistic expectation.”

All of which, totally. And yet, maybe it’s a lot to expect anyone to be enthusiastically, devotedly, moanily horny after picking up the kids and doing the dishes and not wanting any care and appreciation for themselves in return. Will listening to too many of these make me greedy, and expect a lover to compliment me continuously and lyrically for thirty minutes while also somehow using their tongue for other things?

This is where we have to give listeners, and ourselves, more credit, says Athena. “These are fantasies, and I think we're all capable of recognising them as fantasies.” Similarly, she points out, there are plenty of scenarios featured in the app that people might never actually want to do in real life—adultery, for instance, or sex with a stranger, or types of rough sex—but get to explore vicariously and safely via these stories.

Arguably, that’s the whole point of erotic content. Jodi and Athena quote another academic, Catherine Roach: “Erotica inhabits the realm of imagination, of exaggeration, of archetype, of fantasy. It explores and plays with possibility.”⁷

In other words, while it has to feel authentic, it’s not supposed to be realistic.

*

Seagulls, the creaking of rigging. A deep, female American voice.

“I saw the way you looked past my crew, and the shift in your eye when you looked at me.

I can see what you truly want.

Oh, interesting. I think you’ve never had it.

I’ll give you what you want. I’ll let you taste what you truly desire…

…and you are going to say, Yes, Captain. Is that clear?”⁸

*

Erotica in this form is incredibly new—less than a decade old. Even as recently as 2017, cultural theorist Dominic Pettman asked: “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?”⁹

Just eight years later, the sticky blue bits have certainly arrived; so what’s changed?

Partly, it’s that women are talking more openly about sex and desire. “Romance fiction has always been popular, but for a long time it was something people consumed furtively or secretly,” says Jodi. “I think some of that culture of shame is changing. There has been a lot more out-and-proud romance consumption in the 21st century.”

The cult novel Fifty Shades of Grey might have kicked things off, she says, and then there’s the romantasy book boom on TikTok, and literary novels like Miranda July’s All Fours—either way, women who previously would’ve been embarrassed to do so are now openly consuming smut.

But there’s something new and experimental and radical about audio erotica in particular, says Athena. “What's captured me from the very beginning has been a certain intensity that feels very personal—the way it can offer something that feels very alternative to what we are accustomed to receiving in sexually explicit media.”

She and Jodi are trying to be cynical academics about it all. They have managed to find some critiques, for instance that some of the apps market themselves as wellness-adjacent, like ‘Headspace—but horny!’ says Jodi, while “some are more like Duolingo—but horny … it's like, "God, you're making sex such hard work!” Over-emphasising health and education risks making us feel that even while masturbating, we have to be somehow optimising ourselves, Athena says. “It begins to kind of suggest that we’re not allowed to just have smut to get off to.”

But it’s also true that for many of the people making and listening to this content, erotic audio can be genuinely transformative. When I speak to Holly and John, they’ve just come from a meetup with other Quinn writers and creators, and are invigoratingly loved-up and excited about the whole thing. Here’s John:

“I've only been doing it a year. But meeting other creators who have been doing this for much longer—they’ve become role models to me. You have these guys who are very masculine, but creative, and they're not afraid to showcase their vulnerable sides. Because the work is so emotional, it needs you to be open with your emotions and in touch with your feelings … and it makes you want to be a better human being.

“I've learned so much about myself from doing this, and I’ve never felt fulfillment like it. It sort of bulldozed my life, took it over completely, and I feel very grateful for that.”

This is a whole new industry that didn’t exist a decade ago, Holly points out. The people who make it tend not to be the same people that make other types of pornography, and it allows for a kind of anonymity that’s not possible in visual media. “It's fascinating to think that there are people out there, men and women and nonbinary people too, who may have this skill that they haven't really identified in themselves yet—and that this could also be work that they do.” Maybe that’s you, or someone else you know that hasn’t yet discovered that audio erotica exists. “It's actually still very, very niche,” says Holly. “Most people aren't having day-to-day conversations about sex and desire and masturbation.”

Erotic audio can change listeners’ lives, too, says Holly—she gets lots of feedback telling her so. Some people come to the app to listen to a certain male creator, and are surprised to discover that they rather like female voices. Others discover kinks they never knew they had. After childbirth, menopause, or divorce, the app can also be a tool for cautiously reconnecting with desire and sexuality—and very often, Holly says, it becomes a Pandora’s Box situation (pun partially intended): “They listen to one or two audios, and then it’s like a dam breaking. They're like, oh, no. I need this every minute of the day now!” (Fear not—the addiction eventually plateaus, she says.)

Many other people have told her that listening to audio erotica has helped them and their partners to “rediscover something that might have been lost.” And for those not in relationships, an intimate voice in one’s ear can bring a certain kind of comfort unavailable anywhere else. Take this comment I saw below one of the Quinn stories: “I recently moved out on my own for the first time and listening to your audios are the only thing that have made me feel like I’m not alone, and they’ve helped me prevent some mental health spirals. Thank you.”

Even though erotic audio is essentially professional dirty talk—and some of it is indeed extremely dirty—there’s also something I find deeply wholesome about it. Like Athena, I’ve been arrested by this form of storytelling that feels experimental, new, and a bit radical. I don’t listen all that often—and certainly not in the kitchen, though I have played it when I’m alone in the car, hoping no cops pull me over—but I’m so glad it exists. It’s made me more aware of the vast and diverse array of human turn-ons. I’m clearer on my own icks, and I’ve followed my curiosity down some surprising rabbit holes. (Lol)

I also happily pay for it. It’s not just about compensating the creators; it also means no ads, no pop-ups, and no distractions. To access the stories inside apps like Quinn and Dipsea, listeners must cross what Athena and Jodi call ‘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.”

On Quinn, for instance, users navigate mainly via the use of tags—all those [Car Sex] [Single Parent x Babysitter] [We Shouldn’t] and whatnot. Based on the comments left under various stories, tags seem to function for many listeners as turn-ons in themselves, a kind of textual foreplay that teases at what will be found within.

Together, these attributes make erotic audio apps into “walled gardens”, Athena and Jodi write—private-feeling spaces that encourage absorption and concentration.¹⁰ And I suspect these flowery, flourishing, filthy, secret-ish places might also help to foster what Dan Savage calls a “zone of erotic autonomy”—the private eroticism and mental sexual freedom we can all enjoy even within a monogamous relationship—and an enhanced intimacy with oneself and one’s desires.

This SexStack, we hope, might become something of a walled garden of its own. We look forward to tending it and watching it grow—though we may or may not trim the bushes.

If you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear in the comments if you’ve tried audio erotica or other forms of literary smut, what you’ve discovered about yourself in doing so, what you think works and what doesn’t, and any recommendations for your favourite stories or creators. If you could order your own bespoke erotic story, what would it be about?

---

1. Quinn: Tipsy Temptation

2. Quinn provides a glossary of terms like these here: https://www.tryquinn.com/blog/the-quinn-glossary

3. Quinn, The Queen’s Guard, Episode Two: The Resistance

4. These emojis are visual representations of the sound effects Jodi made during our interview

5. Athena Bellas and Jodi McAlister, "Let me take care of you: domestic caretaking fantasies in boyfriend experience audio erotica”, Porn Studies, Volume 10, 2023 - Issue 3

6. Quinn: Couples Therapy, Episode 3

7. Roach, Catherine M. 2018. ‘Erotica.’ In The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality, edited by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood and Brian McNair, 107–116. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, in Bellas and McAlister, 2023

8. Quinn: Yes, Captain

9. Pettman, Dominic. 2017. Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World). Stanford: Stanford University Press, in Bellas and McAlister, 2023

10. Bellas and McAlister, 2023