Page 73 - Marie Claire Australia (January 2020)

SEX
’m in the kitchen, slicing eggplant
and listening to Tulum, a story
being broadcast from my iPhone
about Cee Cee and Noah, an
IAmerican couple who’ve just
arrived at their Mexican hotel.
“This place is insane,” declares the
actress playing Cee Cee, who is raspy
and slightly smug-sounding. “Noah
walked ahead of me into a giant room,
absently dropping his bag off his
shoulders to the floor. It was a tree
house on the beach with dark-wood
floors and furniture made with what
In Silicon Valley, looked like twisted driftwood.”
Wait, where’s the pause button? I’m
erotic podcasts listening to Dipsea, a new app that –
specifically aimed according to the blurb – delivers “sexy
at women are audio stories that set the mood”. But
this is more like a travel brochure
the latest hot than the smut I was hoping for.
I press play again and, while
investment. But searching for coriander, listen to Cee
can they really Cee rave about the hot tub on the deck
take a cut of the overlooking the white-sand beach.
$141 billion porn Finally Noah starts running his fingers
up and down Cee Cee’s spine under her
industry? Julia T-shirt. This is a bit more like it. He
Llewellyn Smith carries her to “our palatial bed”. Hooray!
But then … fade out. Next thing I
gets hot under know, Cee Cee is waking up. By now,
her headphones I’m stir-frying paneer and
to find out thinking I’d find more filth THE STEAMY
if I switched over to ABC
Radio National. Still, I SEX SCENES
persist as she explains OF TV DRAMA
they’ve chosen a resort OUTLANDER
with a nudist beach. Oh, INSPIRED THE
hello! Cee Cee has a naked DIPSEA APP
swim during which she
spots the man staying in
the neighbouring cabin, who’s “ripped
like a Brazilian soccer player” and has
a “Penélope Cruz look-alike” girlfriend.
By the time I’m putting on the rice, all
four are in the tub, drinking champagne
and getting frisky. “I watched Noah’s
eyes close in pleasure as she lowered
her mouth onto his ...” “Mum!” bawls
my 12-year-old, marching into the
room, oblivious to my frantic attempts
to turn down the volume. “I need $2
for casual clothes day.”
In Silicon Valley, audio porn
specifically aimed at women is the
phenomenon du jour, with a range
of apps harnessing the ever-rocketing
podcast craze to seize their portion of
the $141 billion global porn industry.
In April, 22-year-old Caroline
Spiegel, the sister of Snapchat CEO
Evan Spiegel, launched audio platform
Quinn in the US, intended, in her
words, to be a “much less gross, more
fun Pornhub for women”. From France
comes Voxxx, a podcast collaboration
between feminist pornographer
Olympe de G and porn star Lélé O,
who writes and voices many of the
episodes (some in English). With
names such as Tendre Gang-Bang,
they’ve each been listened to upwards
of 15,000 times. Meanwhile, in late
2017, Audible launched romance
audiobooks that allow listeners
to skip straight to the dirty bits.
But for now, the leader of the pack
is Dipsea. Its founders, Gina Gutierrez
and Faye Keegan, both 29, won’t say
how many visitors the site’s attracted
since its US launch in December 2018
(it’s since arrived in Australia), but
they’ve raised an impressive
$8 million from investors.
The app’s origins lie in a late-
night, giggly conversation around
Keegan’s kitchen table, where
her and Gutierrez’s gang of
twentysomething girlfriends began
discussing the time-travel TV drama
Outlander, whose steamy sex
scenes have a cult following.
“It struck us that
Outlander was the only
piece of erotica that our
friends were able to bring
to the table,” Gutierrez
tells me from her home in
San Francisco. “It’s such
a different conversation
when you’re asking
someone about a vibrator
– then they say, ‘Oh, I have one I love,’
or, ‘I wouldn’t recommend this one.’
But when it came to sexy content,
you might hear about a book you
picked up in high school and still have
on your nightstand, but generally the
pickings were very slim.”
During the next few months,
Gutierrez, then working as a designer,
came to several more realisations
about how women might be able to
enjoy more erotica in their everyday
lives. (The friends avoid the word
“porn”, which doesn’t go down so well
with conservative investors, although
Gutierrez says, “If people want to use
that term, that’s OK.”) “I was listening
to the meditation app Headspace and
was really struck by what a powerful
medium audio was for storytelling,
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