Stories that will make you blush? Erotic audio fiction on the verge between privacy and publicness

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the rapidly growing Swedish market of app-based audio erotic fiction through an analysis of two significant apps and publishers: Blanche Stories and Ava Stories. We explore audio erotica apps as devices of both literature, pleasure and intimate sonic connectivity. First, we discuss the specific affordances of the born-audio format, its flexible and mobile forms of listening and the consequences of this flexibility for audio erotica. Secondly, we move in on the content of these apps by taking a closer look at specific forms of erotization of books and literature present both in paratextual elements surrounding the stories, and in the stories themselves. Thirdly, we shift to a discussion of content regulation, marketing strategies and strategic framing of audio erotica apps as digital and sonic devices of pleasure. These apps and their content may be considered “safe” in a number of ways: They are framed as healthy and wholesome from a particular ethical, feminist standpoint by emphasising consent and disassociating with porn. They create intimate and, in a sense, private and safe spaces of listening. But they also carry interesting, queer potentials for mobile forms of sexuality and for public (or semi-public) sonic erotic experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Audio erotica
• erotic fiction
• sonic intimacy
• bookishness
• digital platforms

[Male voice:] Welcome to Blanche Stories. Press #1 to start your account, press #2 for billing questions, press #3 if you think I have a sexy voice, press #4 for technical problems, press #5 to cancel your subscription, or press #6 to hear the options again.

<pressing #3>

I’m so glad you’re calling. I’ve been walking around with a kind of longing in my body all day. You want to know what I’m thinking about? I’m fantasizing about being at your house. I ring the doorbell and you let me in. We’re both a bit nervous. You’re so sexy it makes me weak at the knees. I reach out to touch you, but I stop myself. Are you married? Do you live with someone? Is anyone else home right now who can’t know I’m here? Press #1. Or are we alone? Press #2. [Female voice:] Or would you rather let me in instead? Press #3.

So begins an unusually steamy customer service experience if you call the answering machine at Blanche Stories, the first Scandinavian app for audio erotica.¹ “You” (the implied female listener) are greeted by a deep, warm male voice with an ever so slight machinic timbre, typical of automated answering services. You are presented with a number of choices (52 dial tone bifurcations in total). Do you want to let “him” in secretly, even if you are not alone? Or would you rather want to let “her” in instead? Are you intrigued by a partly public sexual display by the window, or something more private? Would you want to be blindfolded? The options keep unfolding until the narrative comes to an end, or you simply have received help with your invoice.

This customer service teaser is meant to give the caller a sample of what the company has to offer: hot stories for (hopefully) satisfying customer experiences. While this intermingling of audio fiction and erotic fiction is not new, in the last few years there has been something of an explosion of app-based audio erotica which forges partly new connections between digital devices, sexuality and sound. “Now it’s hot with audible sex”, declares an article in the largest Swedish morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter (Edgren 2021), marking this breakthrough of a range of new digital platforms for erotic narration. Audio erotica creates sonic intimacy through fictional stories for (primarily) female audiences, written specifically for the digital audio format. In spaces “where sexual wellness and desire meet storytelling” (Firth 2020), these audio erotica apps are marketed explicitly to women as tools of sexual empowerment with the promise of challenging “the porn industry” (Yttergren 2021). Porn is never unpacked or defined explicitly within the bounds of these apps, yet remains an unspoken presence as that which these apps, somehow, are not. On their web page, Blanche states that they want to “offer an alternative safe and secure platform that is NOT created for men and stereotypically male preferences”. In this article, we thus use the term erotica, as this is the term strategically used by the publishers themselves as a way of legitimising pornographic representations (cf. Juffer 1998).

Born-audio fiction is an emerging form of fiction, written specifically for the audio format. While riding the wave of the broad popularity of audiobooks, there is also something distinct to a genre which builds on listening, not reading. As these are written, “read-aloud” stories, they are something other than the “spoken” quality of podcasts or others forms of audio narratives. They do, to some extent, have more in common with audio drama than literature as such, as many include music and voice dramatisation. But, as we will see, this kind of audio fiction come to navigate between the bookish world of literature and the logics of listening cultures and other forms of audio content.

The Swedish market is leading in the production and development of this category of texts (Berglund and Tanderup Linkis 2022), which makes Sweden a particularly interesting case. In this article, we zoom in on the rapidly growing Swedish market of app-based erotic audio fiction, using Blanche Stories and Ava Stories as our prime cases. At the intersection of feminist sexual politics, audio fiction and digital platforms, we examine the norms and ideas of sexuality, pleasure and literature that underpin the design, use and promotion of these apps. How are audio erotica apps framed and marketed to users/listeners? What can we learn from approaching audio erotica as audio fiction on the one hand, and as sonic devices for sexual pleasure on the other? And how can audio erotica apps be understood within a larger framework of mobile listening on the verge between privacy and publicness?

Our analyses of these apps are inspired by the walkthrough method, which explores the app’s “environment of expected use” (Light, Burgess, and Duguay 2018, 883) to form an understanding of how it guides and shapes user experiences. Tracing an imagined user, from subscribing to the app and orienting themselves, to browsing and listening to content, allows us to disentangle how users are guided through expressions of sexual preferences and interests as well as literary genre preferences; how use is intended and users imagined; and how sexual norms and imaginaries structure these apps. We contextualise these in-app pathways and modes of engagement through the app’s vision as expressed in the app as well as on related web pages belonging to the publishers. These platform walkthroughs are further combined with acts of “close listening” (see Hoffmann 2021), a sonic reinterpretation of close reading of stories engaging with what we identify as an “erotic bookishness”. Close listening, here, becomes a matter of paying close attention to selected stories and how they unfold in relation to sexual desire, as much as to how they are brought to life sonically.

After an introductory section on audio fiction and audio erotica as an emerging market and field of research, the article gradually zooms in on its object, from form to content to content regulation (and back). First, we discuss the specificities of the audio fiction format, its temporal and spatial dimensions – the when and where of listening – and its consequences for audio erotica. We focus specifically on how audio erotica mobilises erotic listening experiences as private, yet also potentially mobile and public activities. Secondly, we move in on the content of these apps by taking a closer look at specific forms of erotization of books and literature present both in paratextual elements surrounding the stories as well as in the stories themselves. Thirdly, we shift to a discussion of content regulation, marketing strategies and strategic framing of audio erotica apps, following how these apps are not only framed as audio fiction by the publishers, but also as digital devices of pleasure. We consider their existence within a volatile app economy which discriminates against the sexually explicit, as well as their position in a particular feminist context in which sex and pleasure is wrapped in a language of health and safety. To conclude, we discuss what we can learn from audio erotica, not only about listening as a mobile activity, but equally about sexuality and intimacy as something put in motion between privacy and publicness.

App-based erotic audio fiction: an emerging market and future research field

In 2019, the Swedish market for audio erotic stories took tangible shape as the first app for audio erotica in Scandinavia was launched: Blanche Stories, closely followed by Ava Stories and Oh Cleo in 2021. These apps are subscription-based storytelling platforms for producing, distributing and consuming erotic short stories. The monthly cost for a subscription runs between 69 SEK (Ava) and 79 SEK (Blanche) respectively. Blanche Stories and Ava Stories have editorial control and a network of writers (some pseudonymous) and performing narrators with a lot of material in Swedish, whereas Oh Cleo focuses on an English-speaking audience and, since 2022, runs a creator-driven platform (like the content creator platform OnlyFans, but for audio erotica). As Blanche and Ava are the most similar in terms of production and distribution models, we limit our analysis to them for the purpose of this article. Besides erotic fiction, the apps also contain elements of sex education and relaxation in an overall framework of physical and mental wellbeing, self-knowledge and self-care. Within these bounds of health and well-being, an ethical, sex-positive feminism takes shape, which emphasises diverse content, the importance of sexual consent and, to a varying degree, distance to porn and the porn industry.

As part of a prosperous international landscape of app-based erotic audio fiction, the Swedish apps take inspiration from U.S.-born forerunners like Dipsea (est. 2018) and Quinn (est. 2018). According to an article in The New Yorker, Dipsea is reinventing the genre of erotic storytelling, “managing to avoid the common pitfalls of both erotica and audio drama … with audio details that enhance a sense of pleasure, safety, and calm” (Larson 2019). To give a sense of the target audience and popularity of these apps, the main demographic of Dipsea is women 25–35 years old, and the app was downloaded half a million times during its first two years (with a significant increase during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Swedish audio erotica apps thus relate to international developments, while also emerging within a specific Scandinavian context where the subscription-based model of streaming stories in an audio format is well established, and streaming services for audiobooks and podcasts, such as Storytel or BookBeat, hold dominant positions. These services, which provide access to large catalogues of digitised audio content have paved the way for more specialised platforms, such as those of audio erotica apps. In contrast to these larger platforms, which mainly distribute audiobooks and ebooks published elsewhere, the Swedish audio erotica apps also function as publishers, as they collaborate with authors in producing erotic stories especially for the audio format: so-called born-audio fiction.

The emergence of born-audio fiction follows the general success of audiobooks, which is the fastest growing area in contemporary publishing (Pennlert and Ilshammar 2021; Rubery 2011), and other forms of audio narratives, such as podcasts and audio drama (Bernaerts and Mildorf 2021; Llinares; Fox, and Berry 2018). Both audiobooks and audio drama have long, separate histories tied to the printed book and radio respectively (Rubery 2016). The more recent process of digitalisation, however, marks significant changes in both the content and uses of these formats, as well as a blurring of the boundary between them (as reflected by the example of erotic audio fiction).

Digital technologies and mobile devices integrate literary consumption into the structure of everyday life, leading to new forms of reading as well as new modes of listening (Bull 2007; Have and Stougaard Pedersen 2015; Rubery 2016). Existing research has traced how the affordances of the audio format, including its mobility and the mediation of narrative content through sound, impact the listening experience and result in new kinds of resonant reading and listening (Koepnick 2019; Tanderup Linkis 2020, 2021). Construed through a narrator’s voice, audiobooks as well as podcasts are associated with an intimate experience of human presence (Swiatek 2018; Tanderup Linkis 2021) with obvious potentials for erotica. Yet, the connection between erotic fiction and the digital audio format has hardly been explored in previous research – with the important exception of an article by Athena Bellas and Jodi McAlister (2023) in which they trace the unique affordances and intimacies of this genre, focusing especially on Dipsea and Quinn. This is perhaps surprising given how erotic audio fiction – together with romance – is one of the most popular and expansive genres on audio fiction streaming services (cf. Ahlström 2019).

Erotic audio fiction is situated in histories of both sonic media and literature, interlinked with the wider domain of what Dominic Pettman (2017) calls sonic erotica, or audio porn. The research on audio porn ranges from 1880s phonograph “smut” played in the male-dominated public settings of American saloons (see J. Smith 2008, 53), to the phone sex industry and dial-up hot lines, to the use of audio on porn sites such as Pornhub. In Sonic Intimacy, Pettman argues that the ear is perhaps the most underacknowledged erotic organ, and asks: “Given the erotic power and potential of the voice, then, what should we make of the dearth of sonic erotica, or ‘audio porn’, on the Internet? Why are so many images sexualised, but so few sound files (especially when we consider the historic popularity of phone sex)?” (2017, 18). While taking into account the phone sex industry, as well as the intimate audio-based experience of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) intended to unwind, soothe or arouse the listener, Pettman does not discuss the place and function of audio and audio files on porn sites, or a deep and popular subreddit like r/audiogonewild “for those aroused by sound” (created in 2012) housing everything from erotic narration to orgasm sound files.

While research on erotic audio fiction is sparse, important work on the interconnections between sound and pornography beyond the realm of fiction include: the significance of sound in audio-visual porn (Mowlabocus and Medhurst 2017); audio-described porn for the visually impaired (Brinkema 2018); audio-erotic ASMR videos (Harper 2020; Kaminski 2018; Waldron 2017); voice over dubbing in porn (Mini 2019), online communities around auralism and sound as sexual fetish (Taylor 2018); and, of course, phone sex (e.g. Flowers 1998; Górska 2016; Mini 2019; Mowlabocus and Medhurst 2017; Selmi 2012; Stadler 2019; Stone 1995). Thus, by exploring the sexual politics and erotic potentials of audio, this article contributes to several research fields in the making. By contributing to research of audio fiction in particular, we hope to show that audio erotica is a specifically interesting case. With an interest in digital modes of intimacy across private and public spaces, erotic audio fiction makes, as we will see, particularly salient how these listening experiences are at once private and public, individual yet shared, in ways that turn supposedly private sexual lives into partly public affairs.

Erotic audio fiction on the go

Audio erotica apps depend on digital devices and digital connectivity in a landscape of accessible and flexible sonic pleasures. On their webpage, Blanche Stories highlights how the digital format is associated with increased availability: “By ensuring that hundreds of top quality short audio stories are always available in your pocket, we incorporate pleasure into women’s lives. Because women need to have more time for pleasure”. This focus on women’s pleasure and, in particular, time for pleasure, is connected to the affordances of the digital audio format, making it possible to offer pleasurable content “when you want it, where you want it”. This flexibility and mobility is also more generally associated with the audio(book) format and a key selling point for app-based streaming services for books and stories. The flexible format in terms of time and space, the “when” and “where”, assumes equally flexible desires to take shape and develop in in-between spaces, the anywhere and nowhere of untapped erotic possibility.

Audiobooks have always been associated with the idea of accessibility: rendering literature accessible to particular groups, such as people with visual impairment or reading disabilities (Rubery 2016), or preliterate children (Steiner 2021). In recent years, digitalisation has paved the way for the format’s increased popularity, and the digital audiobook has become associated with new modes of using and experiencing literature. Through a smartphone and a pair of headphones, audiobook consumption becomes mobile and can be combined with other activities, such as cleaning, exercising, commuting (Have and Stougaard Pedersen 2015) – or masturbating. App-based streaming, furthermore, ensures access to large catalogues of content to be consumed when and where the listener wants. Audiobooks are thus usually marketed as a way to incorporate literary consumption – and pleasure – into everyday life. Rather than focusing on readers who lack the ability to read, streaming services target consumers who do not have time to read printed books, branding their services as a way to enrich everyday activities through literary or bookish experiences.

Reflecting their orientation towards this target group, Blanche offers short stories – currently of no more than 1500 words – specifying how “the format is designed to make it easy to listen to a short story in everyday life without taking up too much time”. The stories are fit for mobile consumption on the go, and easily integrated into the movements and spaces of everyday life. This location-based orientation is intensified by how many of the stories revolve around specific places, like “Clear skies over Barcelona”, “In Tuscany, for the time being”, “Passion in Paris”, “Meet me in Manhattan” and “West coast boating”. This focus on trips to famous vacation spots comes lined with middle-class privilege, connecting the use of audio fiction on the move with the pleasure potentials of affluent travelling. Regardless of whether the locations on offer make the listener’s imagination take flight, this literary format connects with what Lutz Koepnick (2019, 12) calls “resonant reading”, emphasising how audio fiction fosters “half-attentive reading with the ear and on the move”. The emphasis here is on reading/listening to audio fiction as a mobile, multisensorial activity in which texts vibrate through or resonate with bodies, movement and the shifting surroundings of listening.

The actual locations of acts of listening to audio erotica is an open question to be explored elsewhere, as some may prefer the privacy their homes, or even in bed, whereas others may infuse walks in nature or travels on public transport with erotic narration. Consumption of audio fiction has thus been related to a broader tendency of mobile listening, described by Michael Bull as “iPod culture” (2007). According to Bull, mobile listening is characterised by an isolation from the social and geographic surroundings, as people move around in their own separate and isolated “sound bubbles” (2007). Yet, this notion of isolated listening can also be questioned, as listening to audio fiction may imply different forms of social engagement (such as how audio fiction creates a sense of being in good company) or interaction with the surroundings. Even if the headphones are of good quality, these sound bubbles are far from airtight, but rather permeable in so far as they allow for the sounds of the world to seep in as well as fragments of voices (or moans) be heard by other people.

Koepnick’s focus on the pleasures of half-attentive receptivity – of reading/listening at the “edges” of attention – is particularly interesting here, as the sounds of audio fiction might fuse with those of the city, making for a listening experience both embodied and slightly out of focus. Distraction or divided modes of attention here become an important key to a reframing of “reading” in a context of intimate, digital connectivity. Such shifting forms of attention and an experience of being in the body while at the same time being elsewhere makes for an interesting sounding board for erotic experiences. While the purpose of these erotic audio stories may seem linear and straight forward enough, tailored to move the body from arousal to climax to relaxation, a divided as well as a noticeably public form of attention makes for a different, less linear, less private event. Things may shift and start to simmer, but without the clarity of an orgasmic endpoint.

Flirting with literature, or an erotic bookishness

Part of the draw of audio erotica stems from the world of audiobooks and audio fiction. With an interface similar to popular Swedish audiobook streaming services, such as Storytel and BookBeat, Blanche Stories signals a closer connection to the world of publishing and more of a “literary vibe” than Ava (which we return to below). Swept in soft hues of peach and pink, Blanche offers short stories framed by an immediately recognisable chick lit aesthetic, organised into three categories: “romance”, “erotic fiction” (also called “hot romance” or “romotica”) and “pleasure positive entertainment”. While certainly embracing pleasure and relaxation through the motto “a relaxed mind and a more connected body”, Blanche also establishes a clear connection to the sphere of literature and books. Several of their original stories are thematically linked to the world of books and literature – from “Bokcirkeln” (“The Book Club”) and “The book merchant’s mistress”, to “Högläsning på bibliotek” (“A library reading”) and “What happens at Bokmässan” (“What happens and the Book Fair”) – displaying a tendency to connect the idea of pleasure to an almost erotic bookishness. Other series are based on audio versions of love letters from famous male authors (Oscar Wilde and August Strindberg), or extracts from literary classics (such as The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice or Anna Karenina), motivated by a selection of “the hottest, most wonderful and romantic moments of literary history … in a bite-sized format”, reflecting a tongue-in-cheek ambition to enrich the app with cultural capital.

This is a space for stories and storytelling in which the contributors are presented as professional “writers” (some of which are recognised authors) and have a clear presence, reflecting their status within a literary culture. The “Work with us” drop-down menu on Blanche’s website holds information about becoming one of their writers. “Wanted! Writers to help shape the erotica of tomorrow” is spelled out across the hands of a typist playing the keys of a pink, plastic typewriter that completely lacks letters. The aesthetic framing of Blanche, along with its literary allusions and more concrete manifestations of acts of writing, forms a presence of books and literature, not as a mark of quality, but as a sort of fetish. Books, here, are not primarily keys to literary experiences, but rather titillating in and of themselves, as tangible objects possible to touch, hold and display, with pages that can be turned, folded and fondled.

This fetishisation of physical books is nothing new: books have always been objects of fetishisation, and there is a strong tendency to connect the book to the human body, going back to the Middle Ages (Muri 2004). This tendency, does, however, become especially strong in digital culture (Tanderup Linkis 2019). Blanche thus tends towards an “aesthetics of bookishness”, defined by Jessica Pressman (2020, 1) as “creative acts that engage the physicality of the book within digital culture, in modes that may be sentimental, fetishistic, radical”. Pressman describes how the physical book becomes fetishised in a time where it can no longer be taken for granted: in fact, it is especially within the context of digital culture that such bookish fantasies are displayed, for instance on social media. TikTok and its massively popular hashtag #BookTok is brimming with bookish “hot girls” and carefully curated bookshelves that display personal aspirations and attachments in ways that have refuelled the sale of printed books. “Hot girl books” are books to be seen with, as a confirmation that reading is, indeed, hot, while it also makes you look smart (whether it is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Sally Rooney’s Normal People). The book here is object and fetish, as something to pose with, but certainly also to read. Hot girl books (intimately entwined with sad girl books) explores female sexuality and fraught intimacy, but rarely in explicit terms.

In the case of Blanche, bookish fantasies are equally about being hot and clever, but also take on a more explicitly erotic nature, unfolding a world with books at its centre. Bookstores, libraries and book clubs provide backdrops to all kinds of sexy encounters, populated by hot bespectacled authors and naughty librarians. The typewriter may be a plastic toy, utterly useless with its blank keys, but it is a pretty object, functioning as a retro device of the imagination interlinked with the idea of a past in which literary encounters had more obvious physical shape.

The series “What happens at Bokmässan” by Saga Stigsdotter exemplifies this tendency by combining a fetishistic celebration of old-fashioned printed books with erotic content and a self-aware thematisation of the cultural status of romance and erotic fiction. Already the cover image displays an obsession or an intimacy with the physicality of books, displaying printed pages. The story follows Antonia, an editor at Swedish Crime, on her trip to “Bokmässan”, the large Swedish book fair, “where dreams come true”. She meets Freya, a famous writer of erotic fiction, and is invited to join a meeting in the secretive “romance society”. Freya is the author of a bestselling erotic fantasy novel, “Fittkuken” (“The pussy-dick”), a story about erotic fetishisation: a woman, Freya, finds an ancient object, “a tool for female pleasure” at a museum, and “melts together” with it. This emphasis on the erotic object, in the story, parallels the connection to the object of the book itself: Antonia describes her obsession with the novel focusing on its physical qualities: “I remember when I weighed the book in my hand, for the first time, a black cover, the pages edged with gold, old-fashioned and exclusive”. Antonia is also the proud owner of one of the “custom made vibrators” that came with the first 100 copies of the book to be sold – her copy being marked, in careful handwriting, as number 53. The first part of the series concludes as she pleasures herself with the sex toy from the book, thinking of Freya.

“What happens at Bokmässan” thus emphasises a connection, or tension, between the idea of the book as an erotic object – the book turning into a sex toy, or the sex toy sold as literary merchandise – and the idea of books as associated with old-fashioned exclusivity, oddly in contrast with the digital audio medium. Notably, the bookish fantasy of the story is connected to an explicit thematisation of the status of romance and erotic fiction in literary culture. The secret “romance society” is inhabited by authors writing under pseudonym and struggling with gaining recognition. The final erotic encounter between Antonia and Freya is linked to their professional roles as author and editor, as they dream of starting a romance imprint “Swedish romance”, signifying the emergence of a new space for romance and erotic fiction, and thus mirroring the ambition of Blanche itself.

The friction, moreover, between the book as an eroticised object and the medium of audio fiction is perhaps less of a contradiction between text and audio, or between the physical and the digital, and more an expression of a nostalgic longing for an object seemingly lost to audio streaming and thus becomes sexually charged. The book as fetish is key to how it becomes present in its very absence in so far as “the fetish is as much that of a screen as a memorial … it stands in the place of that which cannot be remembered directly” (Krips 1999, 7). The fetish as a site of contradiction helps explain the presence/absence of the book object in digital cultures, perhaps especially for generations of reader-listeners for whom the digital is the primary literary medium.

While celebrating physical books and book culture, Blanche also explicitly develops and markets the sonic dimension of their stories, which separate them from printed texts. “What happens at Bokmässan” is thus, like most of the content on Blanche, accompanied by music, and a composer is credited along with the author. Contrary to traditional audiobooks, which are often kept very neutral without any “extra” sound elements that would draw attention away from the text, music in audio erotica is often used to build atmosphere and create erotic tension embedded in and enhancing the story. In this sense, these stories do come lose to traditional audio drama, yet still with a distinctly audiobookish vibe: rather than dramatisations with a full cast of actors, these are read-aloud stories, usually told from a single perspective and usually in one voice, that of the female narrator. In fact, among the sound elements, the narrator’s voice is perhaps the most important for the erotic audio experience. For example, Blanche’s series offering literary classics in “bite-sized formats” is marketed explicitly by the voices of the performing narrators, some of whom are well known Swedish actors: “Let the caressing voice of Cecilia van der Esch or Linus Wahlgren put you in the mood with a classic!”, thus suggesting that the voice adds a dimension of sensuality, or provides an opening to an intimate moment with these actors.

The voice of the narrator is already central in traditional audiobooks, and many audiobook users report that they choose audiobooks based on preferred voices and indicate that the narrator’s voice adds intimacy and a sense of “human presence” to the experience of the text (Tanderup Linkis 2021; Tanderup Linkis and Pennlert 2022). In audio erotica, this intimacy becomes even more pronounced and erotisized, as the voice carries sexual fantasies, spoken as if in confidence close to the listener’s ear. This sense of intimacy is further enhanced through the ways in which listeners listen to audio erotica, namely through headphones or earbuds. As noted by Bellas and McCallister, the nature of the erotic material and the use of headphones make for exceedingly intimate listening experiences. They refer to other studies of audio fiction and podcasts, since headphones allow a “hyper-intimacy in which the voice you hear is in no way external, but present inside the listener’s body” (Bellas and McAlister 2023, 84). Thus, listening to audio erotica through headphones encourages “an intimate and sonically enveloping encounter” with the erotic content of the stories.

The voice and its specific, erotic mediation carry these stories in ways that further intertwine them with histories of phone sex. Writing about prosthetic sociality in early cybercultures through a community of phone sex workers, Sandy Stone (1995) describes phone sex as an intriguing instance of data compression which translates the multisensorial dimensions of sex into an audible form. Then again, this compression of the data of sex, or of sex as data, does not leave the body out of the equation. Quite on the contrary, “what was being sent back and forth over the wires wasn’t just information, it was bodies” (Stone 1995, 7, emphasis in original). In this experiential field brought forward by pleasure and imagination, sound and sound technologies (be they phones and phone lines or audio apps on mobile phones amplified through headphones) set the stage for erotic encounters in which the boundary between bodies and sound becomes unclear.

Risky content, healthy sex?

Audio erotica apps populate a borderland market right at the point where erotic fiction and audio fiction meet devices for sexual pleasure, marketed directly to women through a feminist language of sexual empowerment. In contrast to Blanche Stories and the close connection with the world of books as well as acts of writing and reading, Ava Stories works in more sexually explicit registers which in no uncertain terms spell out the purpose of the app: “download and get wet!” Instead of being framed as literature, or softly embedded in or deferred by romance, these stories are rather explicit tools for sexual enjoyment and as such functioning as an interesting counter example to the “literariness” of Blanche.

Ava’s app interface does not resemble that of a book service, its aesthetic based on a deep purple background bordering on black, accentuated with bright red details to invite the listener in. While being an app for audio erotica, Ava also relies on a visual language as a form of seduction of its listeners, from the opening screen of the app showing the bare back of a woman partly submerged in water, her wet dark hair slick against her back, to how the stories are framed by sexually suggestive photos, yet carefully steering clear from the explicit so as to comply with Apple’s and Google’s app store rules regulating sexual material. With the intent to titillate, these images move on the right side of the algorithm trained to flag so called “objectionable content”, including routine aesthetic and artistic workarounds to show, yet not to show, the ever so contentious female nipple. Then again, given the potential of public browsing and viewing, the visual language of Ava may still be too bold for comfort, as each story in the app is introduced by a picture indicating the category of erotic content, such as a close-up of bound hands, a silhouette of a woman with a whip, or naked bodies barely covered under the sheets.

The ways in which sexual content is increasingly weeded out from social media platforms in the interest of “user safety” has been discussed by scholars and activists alike as a “deplatforming of sex” (Blunt et al. 2021; Molldrem 2019; Paasonen et al. 2023; Tiidenberg 2021). This removal of sexual ways of connecting involves not only a dismissal of sexual and gendered minorities for whom sexual digital connectivity and community is vital, but also a dismissal of the value of sex and pleasure in people’s lives more broadly – a value which in connection with female bodies and sexualities has been at the core of feminist discussions for decades. To run a feminist, sex-positive business in such a sex-negative digital terrain is thus everything but straightforward. To steer away from the term porn then becomes not only part of a feminist marketing tactic, but a way of existing in a volatile app economy which strikes down hard on sexual material.

In the app store review guidelines, much like in the social media content policies of Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, sexual content is explicitly framed as a question of user safety, while certainly also being a matter of playing it safe in relation to advertisers and commercial partnerships. When sex in this way becomes something risky, not least financially, it is thus understood as something best to be avoided, except for displays of acceptable forms of sexiness and desirability (Paasonen and Sundén 2024). The Apple App Store’s “App Review Guidelines” (Paasonen and Sundén 2024) does not allow content which includes “overtly sexual or pornographic material” defined as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings”. Audio erotica apps move in this contentious digital landscape, which delimits the sexually explicit, especially in visual terms, while in interesting ways giving more leeway to sexual content in audio formats. Given the strong connection between porn and visuality, the domain of audio erotica, while not free from regulation in its app-based form, allows for certain sexual expressions to fly under the radar more easily.

When you subscribe to Ava, you need to answer a set of questions which organises the content of the app along the lines of voice preferences (“male”, “female” or “nonbinary”), the amount of “heat” of the stories (on a scale from one to three) as well as sexual preferences linked to the type of stories. These contain sexual identities (“gay”, “straight” and “lesbian”), perspectives (“his” and “hers” respectively) and sexual practices (including “dominance”, “roleplay” and “group” to “fantasy”, “oral” and “single”). The sexual identity politics of the app is one of diversity and to some extent inclusion, given the presence of trans and queer desires, identities and practices. But the point of view, or the point of entrance is clear: “AVA stories is created by women, for women, with women’s health and satisfaction in mind. AVA celebrates and normalises female desire, encouraging women to explore their fantasies in a safe, consensual, and women-built environment”. In contrast to the app store logic of keeping the user safe from sexual or pornographic material, the question of user safety is here rather construed as a safe space for sexual imagination to take shape.

The sexual economy of app stores aside, erotic fiction as an aesthetic category and a marketing strategy has equally been used as a way of marking sexual content apart from pornography. Erotica is a form of what Jane Juffer (1998) calls “domesticated porn”, a genre which since the late 1980s by virtue of its aesthetic qualities and respectable circulation – as well as its depictions of female sexuality and association with female authors and readers – legitimises pornographic representations. A particularly interesting genre when considering audio erotica is what Juffer calls “identity erotica” which operates with a kind of immediate political validation, such as feminist or queer erotica. In tracing the history of pornographic literature in Sweden, Anna Hultman (2022, 429–430) considers the recent development of audio erotica and argues that even if identity erotica is a clear element in the production of these apps, the consumption of erotic audio fiction is conceptualised, not primarily as literature, but in terms of health and pleasure. This is reflected in how the apps combine erotic stories with tutorials and guided self-exploration wrapped in a language of health and wellbeing, as well as how pleasure is key to how these erotic audio experiences are framed and made sense of, such as through Blanche’s “pleasure manifesto” with the promise of “bringing more pleasure into women’s lives”.

Ideas of health and wellbeing have often served as cover stories in marketing of sex toys (Comella 2017; Flore and Pienaar 2020; Lieberman 2017). The very idea of healthy pleasure, or pleasure as health, further resonates with the Swedish ethos of framing sexuality as a form of enjoyment and self-expression crucial to physical and mental wellbeing (Paasonen 2017; Thanem 2010). Sweden is often understood as a sexually liberal nation and was the first country in the world to introduce compulsory public sex education in schools in 1955, based on the premise of sexual health and sexual rights (Zimmerman 2015). In this framework, healthy sexuality is consensual, it is good for you and something that all people should have a right to. Yet, the model of healthy sexuality contains normative assumptions of what counts as good sex, health and healthiness (Kulick 2005; Sundén 2023). “As we stand for a healthy and wholesome approach to eroticism, romance and lust”, Blanche argues on their web page, “it is as obvious as it is important to us that all content is consensual between all characters portrayed”. This interlacing of female sexuality with health and wellbeing accentuates a moral boundary between good, healthy sex on one hand and sex deemed dirty, shameful or perverse on the other (cf. Rubin 1989). For something to be healthy, something else needs to be unhealthy, also in this realm sexual fantasy.

Both Blanche and Ava thus offer what they construe as “safe spaces” for sexual pleasure in a number of ways: For Blanche, safety operates in tandem with sexual consent and appears foundational for author guidelines as well as their curatorial and editing practices. Ava similarly flags safety and consent as part of their ethical backbone, but instead of clearly guiding the literary content, their “safe, consensual … environment” is rather connected to the potential of the audio format, in relation to which listening itself becomes a space for safe sexual exploration and imagination. Blanche thus moves closer to the idea of sexual liberation and sexual health in a Swedish context, as a subscription to the app comes lined with a particular kind of feminism in terms of healthy erotica (not porn), which not only builds on a clear labelling, categorisation and tagging, but also includes a kind of ethical guarantee content-wise. This in turn begs the question, who gets to be safe – and to be turned on – in these spaces?

Sonic intimacy in public

In this article, we have traced the framing of audio erotica apps as devices for both literature, pleasure and intimate sonic connectivity. In literary terms, audio erotica builds on erotic fiction and (the overlapping genre) romance for female audiences. It becomes part of how research in this field has highlighted female readers and their uses of literature, and how a dismissal of these genres has everything to do with its female authors and readers, as well as with how it makes space for women’s sexual fantasies and desire (cf. Abrahamsson 2018; Radway 1984). By moving this genre into a digital landscape of born-audio fiction, audio erotica most concretely takes shape through the affordances of the audio format on a literary market which emphasises flexible and mobile forms of listening.

In comparing the two apps, Blanche moved much closer to the world of books and publishing. This flirtation with books and literature even came with clear erotic undertones, as the book as an object of nostalgia and a fetish had a clear presence, both as a selling point and as a theme in the stories themselves. But while certain books are put on proud displays on #BookTok, as object to flaunt and be seen with, the consumption of audio erotica apps may require more secrecy, especially when it comes to Ava. Even if the sexually suggestive photos framing their stories are not explicit enough to activate app store content regulation, their relatively bold aesthetics may still be too much for public browsing, viewing and listening.

These mobile or even kinetic acts of listening took an interesting turn as audio erotica not merely makes reading or listening into something which can take place “wherever”, but equally mobilises sexuality and intimacy across private and public spaces. As we have seen, these apps and their content may be considered “safe” in a number of ways: They are framed as healthy and wholesome from a particular ethical, feminist standpoint by emphasising consent and disassociating with porn. They create intimate and, in a sense, private and safe spaces of listening. But they also carry interesting potentials for mobile forms of sexuality and for public (or semi-public) sonic erotic experiences.

By following the notion of safety, we disentangled how the feminist framing of audio erotica apps is not merely a political standpoint, but also a business strategy and a way of playing it safe to exist and move in an app economy which censors sexual content. But counter to how app stores frame safety as a question of keeping the user safe from sexual or pornographic material, user safety for Blanche and Ava is instead a matter of using sound and listening to create a safe space for sexual imagination and exploration. Safety, here, coincides with moral boundaries around health and healthiness, which give limited freedom for sexual fantasies that, for example, play with the idea of sexual consent. The emphasis on safety may, by extension, also serve as a way of containing the riskiness of the erotic itself in so far as there is something explosive at heart of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Pleasure, as an issue of central, feminist importance, could even be argued to be essential to liberation. Or, as adrienne maree brown (2019, 3) puts it, pleasure “is a measure of freedom”, given how women, people of colour, queer, trans and nonbinary people have been denied pleasure. Pleasure may thus be volatile and unruly, something difficult to contain within the bounds of an app designed to safely hold it.

There is equally something unruly or interestingly leaky to the audio format itself of erotic audio fiction in the sense that it makes space for public eroticism. Reading, for the past century, has been depicted as a private activity, as opposed to earlier, pre-20^th century reading cultures based on the tradition of reading aloud. Even public reading spaces, such as libraries or bookstores, or reading on public transportation, usually frame reading as something private: something you do alone and in relative silence. Reading books in public has, however, also often worked as a public display of literary interest, as indicated by several of the Blanche stories (where the romantic counterparts often meet in public spaces, such as cafés and bookstores, and recognise each other as potential love interests by the books they read), or by reading as such (see, for instance, the Passion in Paris series by Bianca Grandi at Blanche). Digitalisation has to some extent transformed ideas and acts of public reading, as digital devices turn the previous public displays of books into something far more for discrete. Anonymous reading is perhaps particularly useful for readers of traditionally low-status genres – such as romance and erotic fiction – in relation to which the ebook has risen to popularity. Writing for The Guardian, Allison Flood (2011) muses: “No longer are they forced to conceal the covers of their latest purchases … from fellow commuters. Instead, they can follow their heroine’s romantic adventures with impunity, safely protected by the anonymity of their e-readers”. Safety here thus becomes associated with anonymous reading, made possible by the digital format.

Audio adds another twist to the tale by making acts of reading in public mobile. The whenever and wherever of the audio fiction infuses everyday movements and spaces with erotic potentials and possibilities, allowing for desire at a low frequency to reverberate through the body in in-between spaces; on public transport, in line at the supermarket, while doing the dishes. The seemingly unsexy or non-sexual may appear in a different light, as mundane activities become slightly more exciting. Then again, a story that does not strike a chord, a voice which does not resonate will have the opposite effect as desire and imagination is cut short. Nonetheless, public consumption of pornographic material has its own thrill, perhaps especially for those who rarely figure as porn consumers in mainstream discussions of porn (e.g. Attwood; Smith, and Barker 2021; C. Smith 2007). These stories may not make you blush in the bedroom, but what about on the bus? Are your headphones tight enough? Are you comfortable browsing through the app if someone glances over your shoulder?

The understanding of reading as something private is here further paralleled by how intimacy, too, is often understood as a private matter. In their classic “Sex in Public” based in the U.S. context, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) discuss the idea of privacy in constructions of intimacy and sexuality. They show how intimacy has become a private matter, together with the kind of sex that such intimacy legitimises. This was not always so, but as the modern public sphere developed (in a Habermasian sense), so did an understanding of intimacy as closely related to privacy. The idea of intimacy as something private has come to protect heteronormative sexual acts through a separation of the marital bedroom from the sphere of public politics (Berlant and Warner 1998, 555). Intimacy conceived of as a private matter is thus a quite particular construct. It builds on heteronormative distinctions between the private and the public in ways that never applied in the same way to non-normative of queer intimacies and sexualities. Queer intimacy, by contrast, always had a certain sense of publicness to it (voluntary or involuntary) by being linked to queer cultures organised around particular sexual practices and identities (cf. Sundén 2020).

Public intimacy, then, is a decidedly queer concept, which moves the discussion of audio erotica in an interesting direction. As Bellas and McAlister (2023, 7) argue in their study of audio erotica apps, “the explicit nature of the material, and the use of recording techniques designed for headphones, orients users to private listening practices”. They discuss how sound is vital for creating intimacy in audio erotica in ways that envelop or “cocoon” the listener. The intimacy of audio erotica and of someone talking, or whispering, or moaning close to the listener’s ear is certainly at the very core of these listening experiences. These are stories that seem to enter directly into the listener’s body, or to somehow already exist as part of the body and how it moves, shifts and changes. But intimate listening practices do not necessarily equal private listening practices, as the audio format potentially dislodges the intimate from the private and make for public or partially public sonic intimacies. No matter how healthy, wholesome (or predominantly straight) their content may be, there is something intriguing about how audio erotica apps make room for (pre-)orgasmic, intimate and rather queer connections and sonic experiences, from the sheets and into the streets.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [2021-01927].

Notes on contributors

Jenny Sundén

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her work is situated at the intersection of digital media studies, gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory and affect theory. She is currently working on digital intimacy and queerness; sextech and the politics of pleasure; and the geopolitics of digital sexual cultures across Nordic, Baltic, and Anglo-American contexts.

Sara Tanderup Linkis

Sara Tanderup Linkis is Senior Lecturer in Publishing Studies and Digital Cultures at Lund University. Her research centers on audiobooks, digital book culture and media-oriented literary studies, and she has published extensively on these subjects, including the monographs Serialization in Literature across Media and Markets (Routledge 2021) and Memory, Intermediality and Literature (Routledge 2019).

Notes

1. Their customer service awarded them with The Golden Egg Award 2023 (Guldägget) in the category “audio” at the annual award ceremony for the Swedish advertising industry. The excerpt is translated by us from Swedish.