Audio Smut

From Vectorstock

It happens that a lot of the material I'm looking at right now is audio, so I thought I would just go with that and focus on audio smut for the next few blogposts. 

There's a proliferation of smutty short stories online. Maybe Roland Barthes was wrong when he proclaimed 'the death of the author'. However, the playful interaction between listener and writer on audio stories reveals what Barthes meant by this provocative statement.

Barthes intended to show us how the author does not have ultimate control of the text. Each reader brings their own understanding to a story, and Barthes argued that the reader was more the 'author' than the person writing a story. Audio stories seem to offer a step on for that interactive poststructuralist way of creating fiction. 


There are more traditional online audio stories which are written and read by a single person in the classic way, many of which can be found on sites like Literotica (click on the label 'audio' in the cloud to your right to find some). 

Gone Wild Audio, on reddit.com, goes further. Gone Wild Audio offers writerly participants the chance to put a scenario up online and have readerly participants voice the story. (GoneWildAudio is here. Guidelines to orienteering around this erotic audio world are here.)

An article in Playboy comments on the opportunities this provides to experiment without having sex. In a thread on Gone Wild, participants talk about gaining understanding of sexuality while remaining virgin by posting and reading stories with people they will never meet in real life. Participants are sweetly supportive to each other in the thread, sharing the annoyance at being judged for not yet having kissed or got down and dirty 'for real'. 

GWA is a great place to play and find yourself sexually 
before you become intimate with someone, a safety net of sorts.

One girl actually routinely calls one of my other virgin friends because she has 

no idea what she's doing and the virgin friend actually knows more about 
sex and sexuality than the friend that is having sex with her coworkers 
in the parking lot of the fast food chain they work at.

Truly, what could be safer sex than writing, voicing and hearing sexiness, all under cover of pseudonyms, with people who may not even be on the same continent as you.

First off, hearing a story read with breathy tones in your very ear is already a deeply erotic experience. "I can have a hands-free orgasm from the right sound and the right voice," confesses TheRavenFox in the Playboy article. Nona Willis Aronowitz, author of the article, finds many of her friends overwhelmed by the realism of audio, it's "too much", "too real". 

Plus, hearing someone read your words back to you as if they are the ideal character you fantasize in your own story, adds considerably to the intimacy. I guess there is a bit of pride if a number of people are willing to pick up and read your story, and from what I have seen so far people's egos are gently boosted on the site with writers and readers mutually complimenting each other's efforts and listeners enjoying a good vibe too. On Literotica there is less of a connection although affectionately intimate messages to fans in the introductions to stories rather than in comments suggest there is a closer connection than between textual writers and fans. 

If you want to get into audio stories, then you can find out how to make recordings in a blogpost I wrote here. I should start on Literotica, where you have more distance and control and can get good feedback, or perhaps put up something less naughty on Soundcloud where they are stricter about smut (not in that way!), then go and have an explore of GoneWildAudio. You may find people want to commission private readings from you, and why not get paid for something which you enjoy doing - although you will have to figure out safe ways to get the money. I'm not aware of sites through which you could sell erotic tracks in the way you can sell text stories on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle. (Smashwords used to allow sales of audio but have stopped doing so.) Correct me (wink) if I'm wrong, I don't think apple itunes allows smut. Perhaps someone will set up firstbiteofthecherry.com in order to offer erotic audio artistes an outlet, LOL.