Spicy sounds: How audio porn is tearing down the patriarchy, one orgasm at a time

Like many modern-day sexual awakenings, this one begins on Tumblr.

Fresh off a break-up in 2017, Laurel Zoff Pelton wasn’t ready to get back out in the dating world right away.

“I was still grieving. I was feeling very lonely, but I was also trying to break bad habits of seeking intimacy with people when I knew it wasn’t real,” the 31-year-old American voice actor tells Euronews Culture.

That’s when they first discovered audio porn.

The concept itself is pretty self-explanatory: take all the elements of erotic storytelling, add some sound effects from mainstream porn and a whole lot of different kinks and fantasies, and you get this new form of non-visual pornography.

“Back in the day, Tumblr’s audio porn was nuts,” Zoff Pelton says. “And what it was for me was like hot porn, first of all. I was like, ‘Wow this is a totally new way to do this.’”

The stories ranged from hyper-realistic to absolutely absurd: “It could be anything from like, I’m just trying to do the laundry… to like, I am a vampire.”

Unlike with visual porn, Zoff Pelton (who, full disclosure, is one of your reporter’s closest friends) says there was an additional layer of intimacy to this type of content. It felt like the speaker was addressing the listener directly, creating an intimate connection between producer and consumer, giver and receiver.

The non-visual nature also struck a chord with them, because there were no visual cues that clashed with their gender identity. (Zoff Pelton identifies as non-binary.)

“Audio porn for me, and porn in general, has been an outlet or an avenue in which I can engage in different parts of my identity,” they say. “It also helped me, as someone who’s in the kink community and a non-binary human, get to learn and explore new