San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
AUDIO EROTICA IS HAVING A MOMENT
Erotic story provider sees subscriptions boom amid pandemic
An inevitable trope of the teenage dramedy is being caught masturbating by your parents. There’s the quick slamming of the laptop, the fuss, the general embarrassment.
With many people adopting new workfromhome routines and houses packed with remotelearning kids or bored roommates, COVID19 has potentially turned all of us into that hapless adolescent cliche. Privacy is hard to come by during a pandemic, and solitude — unless you live alone — is a luxury. It’s no coincidence that subscriptions for Dipsea, the San Francisco erotic audio content service, have doubled since shelterinplace started in March.
Focused on prerecorded, realistically acted stories meant to stoke listeners’ imaginations, audio erotica is like porn’s tasteful, Millennial cousin. Since launching in 2018, Dipsea has been a key player in the growing niche, paving the way for websites like Quinn, where usergenerated audio porn is grouped into playlists like Quarantine Edition and Boyfriend Energy, and erotic podcasts like Demi Moore’s new scripted project “Dirty Diana,” in which the “Indecent Proposal” star voiceacts as a woman who runs a secret website documenting female fantasies.
“Audio is the fantasy medium,” says Gina Gutierrez, who cofounded Dipsea with Faye Keegan. “In our minds we aren’t confined by our studio apartments or our current sexual partners.”
With an array of erotic short stories under catergories like Vacation, BDSM and Her + You, Dipsea whispers arousing tales into your ear. The content varies from romantic and borderline cheesy to explicit and experimental, but never too crude. The platform, available as an app, releases 12 to 15 pieces of content a month, with new stories every Sunday written by a team of content creators and recorded by voice actors.
We caught up with Gutierrez to find out how the pandemic has changed the way people view intimacy and what listeners are tuning into while steamy strangers are mostly offlimits.
“Audio is the fantasy medium. In our minds we aren’t confined by our studio apartments or our current sexual partners.”
Gina Gutierrez, Dipsea cofounder
Q: How do you explain the growth since the pandemic started?
A: I think a lot of people realized how much we take intimacy and pleasure for granted as it relates to our mental wellbeing. Being homebound as a single person, or with a partner who started feeling more like a roommate than a lover, are equally challenging situations. We love providing our listeners a way to check in with themselves, soothe stress and remember how worthy they are of joy. Every so often someone will leave us a review that says, “How have I gone without this for so long?” or “I didn’t know I needed this until now.” That’s the kind of new normal we’re actually excited about.
Q: Who is your audience?
A: The majority of our listeners identify as women ages 2535, but 1824 is our fastestgrowing age demographic. Listeners are both single (41%) and in a relationship (54%), and 33% identify as queer while 67% identify as straight. Dipsea was designed with women in mind but welcomes listeners of all gender identities. Research shows that women are very likely to use their imaginations to get aroused and often report experiencing a block when trying to access their feelings of arousal and desire. It propelled our desire to create better erotic content for women.
Q: Have you considered COVID-19-theme content?
A: We talked a little bit about whether or not to create content that spoke to the era we’re all experiencing, but ultimately we decided that catching the eye of that cutie across a sweaty, crowded room is exactly the vibe we’re all missing in 2020.
Q: What have listeners been gravitating toward during the pandemic?
A: People are loving our “Get Intimate With” series, where we let listeners have intense and intimate selfinsert experiences with their favorite characters, like Freddie from the “Secret Rooms” series and Mark from the “Hot Vinyasa” series, who are fan favorites. We wanted to give listeners a chance to “get into bed” with those characters. The series are intimate, sexy and make you feel like you’re inside the story.
Q: Is there any San Francisco or Bay Area-specific content on Dipsea?
A: The series “Les Rebound” is an awesome ode to being queer in San Francisco.
Q: Why is erotic audio well suited to shelter-in-place?
A: Audio is the fantasy medium. It inspires us to grow our erotic imaginations and offers us endless possibilities. In our minds we aren’t confined by our studio apartments or our current sexual partners. We can imagine bodies in all shapes and sizes, and every character can become our type. It’s incredibly liberating when we recognize our own power to mentally design the scenes that turn us on.
Q: How do you go about consent and “forbidden” words or phrases?
A: We strive to create content that is fundamentally consensual, sexpositive and feminist. Those constraints encourage creativity. We touch a huge range of plotlines and fantasies and reimagine them in ways that feel onbrand for our platform. We work hard to create moments of consent that don’t kill the vibe, to make safe sex between strangers the default, to showcase women as empowered in their relationships, and to represent sexual and ethnic diversity in ways that don’t tokenize those experiences. The one word you’ll never hear is “shame/shaming.”
Q: Looking forward, how will the pandemic shape the way we view sex and intimacy?
A: In this strange new normal of social distancing and isolation, we’re all being reminded how important connection and intimacy are to making us feel human and alive. Pleasure is an opportunity to check in with yourself and your body, a way to selfsoothe and a reminder that you’re worthy of joy. Awareness that pleasure is important to wellness is growing faster than ever, and I don’t think that will disappear once the world returns to normal. A silver lining of this universally challenging moment is that it's helped us to understand how to better and more holistically care for ourselves.