When it comes to mainstream porn, the sex depicted frequently fails to mirror real-life: the unrealistic bodies, sounds, and even the moves shown are all pretty out there.

In fact, so much mainstream porn doesn’t even depict women enjoying themselves.

So what happens when you take out the visual and focus on the audio? You get Quinn, the app designed by Caroline Spiegel, sister of Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel.

It’s a feminist enterprise that’s designed specifically with women in mind, and is a no-visuals platform that allows you to listen to porn rather than watch it.

WIRED caught up with Spiegel while she took them through the app:

Spiegel drags her mouse and pulls the audio scrubber from left to right on the screen. The track, “Good Morning,” features 24 minutes of whispers, kisses, and moans. “This is called a snuggle fuck,” she explains. “It’s where people cuddle and fuck.”

The app has been described as “Spotify for audio porn”, although Spiegel says it’s quite different.

It’s true, Quinn is different, despite its obvious similarities to both platforms. First, it’s just for porn and not for music. And it doesn’t traffic in video, only in audio and text. In the last six months, more than 400 people have uploaded recordings of intimate moments to Quinn’s beta site, creating an aural repository of sexual predilections that you can stream through headphones like your favourite album.

The goal is to create the biggest platform for erotic audio on the internet and Spiegel isn’t the only person trying to do it.

The venture-backed Dipsea produces narrative audio stories that people can subscribe to for a monthly fee. Others like the less glossy Literotica get authors to read their erotic literature aloud. Quinn’s biggest competitor is Reddit, where a community of more than 300,000 people upvote erotic audio clips on r/GoneWildAudio.

The appeal lies in the format. For a lot of people listening to erotica feels more “acceptable” than watching porn. You’re being told what to fantasise about, and more able to fill your mind with imagery that’s appealing to you.

Spiegel, and her co-founder Jackie Hanley, came up with the idea for Quinn in college. While she was recovering from an eating disorder she found that she was uncomfortable with many aspects of her sex life.

Masturbating was difficult and not pleasurable. And so much of mainstream porn, with its hyper-objectification of women’s bodies, didn’t feel like the right fit. While searching for porn that she might actually like to watch, she came across a guided-audio masturbation track. “I felt so turned on in a way that I’d never felt by myself before,” Spiegel says. Audio, she learned, allowed her to embrace the cerebral aspect of sexuality.

She figured that she couldn’t be the only person who felt that way, so she decided to create a platform for audio porn.

Quinn invites anyone to upload content, provided it doesn’t violate the company guidelines.

 “Our golden rules are no incest—we allow stepbrother, stepsister—no beastiality, no minors whatsoever, and no nonconsent,” she says. “But you can have consensual nonconsent, so like within the boundaries of fantasy or play.”

Voice-acting in the porn industry is also likely to be less exploitative than physical acting.

Viva la revolución.

[source:wired]