You probably won’t find audio porn on the front page of Pornhub, but for many consumers of sexual media, audio is a refreshing (and perhaps necessary) way to get turned on! Engaging with audio in a sexual way can take many forms, from listening to a recorded love story, to tuning into ASMR or enjoying the backing sound of conventional visual porn. Perhaps its versatility is one of the reasons why, according to several news outlets (Vice, The Guardian), audio porn is becoming a booming business and its popularity is only growing. Although sexual soundtracks have existed in the past in various forms (CDs, podcasts, Tumblr blogs, etc.), recently audio porn has developed applications, such as Quinn and Dipsea, are also up and coming, offering romantic audio stories in a variety of tones, lengths, and genres (Forbes, 2019; Taylor, 2018). If we now have apps that cover audio porn, there’s no doubt that the genre is taking off, so let’s take a look at exactly why audio porn can be so appealing, and why for some groups, it might even be a game changer.
A brief introduction to audio activation
According to Jodie Taylor (who wrote an entire book chapter about this stuff!), audio porn has been widely available since the mid-90s in various forms. However, the discussions about Auralism, which is defined as a sexual fetish related to sexual arousal/arousal caused by sound or music, has been largely confined to both in-person and online communities (Taylor, 2018). In online communities focused on Auralism, members discuss sexual arousal with both music (due to its stylistic qualities or links to past sexual encounters) and non-music (dirty talk, narrated fantasies, sounds of sex itself ), showing the variety of ways that sound can elicit sexual arousal (Taylor, 2018). Taylor notes in her chapter that the discovery of these characteristics of Auralism communities came from years of online observation, but now, we can see that discussions of aural pornography and the possibilities of aural stimulation are occurring on popular news sites. Audio porn is now out in the open – so who’s using it and why?
Sound and female sexuality
In an interview with VICE, audio porn app founder Quinn (the one I mentioned above!) said she was motivated to start the app when, in college, she became disillusioned with visual porn and instead discovered audio erotica (Ewe, 2021) . Since conventional pornography traditionally caters to male preferences, her experience may reflect that of many female porn consumers, who turn to audio porn when visual stimulation doesn’t quite cut it. However, the reasons behind this change may vary from woman to woman. For some porn consumers, engaging with audio porn may be a way of controlling their experience with the content. In 2018, authors at the University of Michigan found that among other strategies, listening to only audio from porn videos was a commonly reported strategy used by women to change their porn experience. both to avoid negative porn content and to be able to imagine other scenarios while listening to the audio (Chadwick et al., 2018). This ability to bend one’s imagination while listening to audio porn may be the main attraction to audio porn for other women. Given that women (compared to men) are more likely to report arousal to story-based or mood/emotion-based sexual content (Chung et al., 2013), listening to audio pornography may provide women with an opportunity to create their own scenarios and feelings around the sound. Story-driven erotic audio (which is present in apps like Dipsea and Quinn) directly responds to this desire not only to connect to the sexual acts in porn, but also to the feelings, tension, or mood being shared the characters. Other possible reasons for engaging in audio porn could be that sounds increase one’s immersion in the story – evidenced by a study that found that women perceived sounds within porn to help portray a sense of authentic pleasure and realism on stage (Macleod, 2020). An additional reason mentioned by an interviewee in a Guardian interview about audio porn is that most ‘professional’ audio porn is produced by women (or feminists) and paid for, which means the immoral side of the mainstream industry is avoided. porn. it is always a plus (Noor, 2019).
Sound and accessibility
For the visually impaired, using audio porn may not be a matter of choice or preference but instead a matter of accessibility. To take steps toward more inclusive programming, in 2016 Pornhub created a described video category on its website, which includes audio descriptions for the site’s most popular videos (Pornhub, 2016). While the original audio of these videos is still available, they are presented alongside descriptive video narrations that describe the models, positions, settings and more in each video to give the user full details of the sexy scenarios in the videos (Pornhub , 2016). What’s more exciting is that the research shows that audio-described porn seems to have a similar effect to conventional audio-visual porn in both visually impaired and visually impaired consumers. It was recently found that audiovisual and descriptive audio porn induced sexual arousal and immersion in study participants and that physical measures of arousal were also the same across all types of porn (Lopez et al., 2021). So not only can the visually impaired view and enjoy accessible porn, but those who prefer audio porn overall are apparently not at a “loss” when engaging with their porn of choice.
conclusion
Although visual pornography still dominates in terms of popularity, audio-only pornography is becoming an increasingly popular way to get turned on, especially among certain groups of viewers. As we saw above, audio porn offers a new avenue for exploring sexual media, and it also changes the relationship some people have with porn in general – leading some to have a positive porn experience for the first time. With its accessibility, versatility, and benefit to imagination and fantasy – and with the newly designed apps to promote it – audio porn is just beginning to thrive!
Kate Hunker (she/her)
4th year BAH Psychology, Queen’s University
bibliographical references
Chadwick, SB, Raisanen, JC, Goldey, KL, & van Anders, S. (2018). Strategizing to make pornography worthwhile: A qualitative exploration of women’s agentic engagement with sexual media. Sexual Behavior Files, 47(6), 1853–1868. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1174-y
Chung, WS, Lim, SM, Yoo, JH, & Yoon, H. (2013). Gender difference in brain activation to audiovisual sexual stimulation. do women and men experience the same level of arousal in response to the same video clip? International Journal of Impotence Research, 25(4), 138–142. https://doi.org/10.1038/ijir.2012.47
Provatina, K. (2021, April 29). People tell us why listening to porn is way hotter than watching it. Vice.
Macleod, PJ (2021). How Feminists Choose Porn: Questioning the Relationship Between “Authenticity” and Ethical Production. Sexuality, 24(4), 673–693. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460720936475
Noor, P. (2016, November 7). Porn in my ears: I tried audio erotica – would it turn me on? The guardian.
Pornhub. (2016, June 14). Pornhub launches described video category on the site.
Rojo López, AM, Ramos Caro, M., & Espín López, L. (2021). Described audio versus audiovisual porn: Cortisol, heart rate, and engagement in visually impaired versus visually impaired participants. Frontiers in Psychology, 12661452–661452. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661452
Taylor, J. (2018). Sonic desires: Auralism, the sexual fetish of music. In FE, Maus & S. Whitley (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness. Oxford University Press. 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793525.001.0001
