February 19th, 2026 at 7:00 a.m. EST
(Link) | (Archive)
Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams attend the premiere of "Heated Rivalry" in Toronto in November. (Harold Feng/Getty Images)
By Liam Scott
There are few constants in human history, but people have more or less always been horny.
In ancient Egypt, there was the Turin Erotic Papyrus, while the Greeks and Romans decorated vases with sex acts. In China, there are bas-relief carvings of a fertility ritual that are at least 3,000 years old, making them among the oldest examples of pornography in the world.
“Erotica has been a part of our culture forever,” said Caroline Spiegel, founder of an app called Quinn, which delivers salacious stories to users’ ears. The forms, though, have evolved, from cave drawings to the “Kama Sutra” and “The Joy of Sex” to the rise of internet porn. Now another boom is taking place: audio erotica.
If there were such a thing as a golden age of erotica, Spiegel thinks this is it. “We’re living in the smut renaissance,” she said. Not only is there more out there, but the quality is better, and the genre occupies an increasingly prominent space in culture. The mainstream success of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books and movies was one flash point in the broader erotic storytelling boom; so, too, is the continued popularity of “Bridgerton.”
But perhaps nothing crystallizes smut’s growing mainstream appeal like “Heated Rivalry,” the hugely popular Canadian TV show about a steamy romance between two professional hockey players that’s based on the best-selling book series by Rachel Reid.
Around Thanksgiving, before the show even premiered, Spiegel reached out to co-stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams to pitch them on doing an audio erotica series with Quinn. “They represent this new generation of sex positivity and acceptance and a lack of puritanical shame,” Spiegel said. She initially pitched a sports romance story, which would lean into the “Heated Rivalry” of it all, but the actors wanted to do something more fantastical. The first two episodes of “Ember and Ice” dropped in late December, and the third was released in January.
The enemies-to-lovers story about two fae princes from rival kingdoms quickly became Quinn’s most popular original series to date, which Spiegel says is largely thanks to the success of “Heated Rivalry.” It reached 1.5 million total plays in its first week and has racked up more than 3.2 million so far. “I would love to claim to be some kind of fortune teller, but we just got really lucky,” Spiegel said.
And yet, there’s a pretty clear cause and effect. In Spiegel’s telling, the rise of self-published smut led book publishers to follow suit, publishing books such as Reid’s series, which then opened the gateway for other forms of erotic storytelling, like audio erotica. Independent creators post to sites like Tumblr and Reddit. Besides Quinn, other audio erotica companies have cropped up, such as Bloom Stories and Dipsea.
People listen to erotica for a variety of reasons, according to Dipsea co-founder Faye Keegan. They listen for their personal pleasure, to spice up their sex lives with their partner and to grapple with sexual trauma by seeing what healthy sex can look like.
“The interest in erotica is deeply human because it’s about love and chemistry and connection and life,” Keegan said. “More smut is good for the world.”
Spiegel founded Quinn in 2019, after dropping out of Stanford University during her senior year. The company now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, employing 12 full-time staffers and relying on a network of contractors for writing, acting and directing. Anyone can apply to be part of Quinn’s network of independent creators by submitting a sample audio recording.
It’s hard to estimate just how much the erotic storytelling industry is worth because it encapsulates so many different forms. Romance books are the highest grossing of all book genres, but there’s also audio erotica from companies and independent creators, self-published smut, audiobooks and more. Some content isn’t monetized, but all together, Spiegel estimates the industry could be worth several billion dollars.
Audio erotica, not to be confused with romance audiobooks, tends to be shorter and usually features voice actors and sound design — leaves crunching, doors closing. “It’s designed to be like a movie in your mind,” Spiegel said.
A lot of work goes into making it. There are writers and directors, intimacy coordinators, sound designers and the actors themselves, including Andrew Scott, Jesse Williams and Jamie Campbell Bower. “When Quinn first started, people were really squeamish about it. Now, more and more so, the taboo has gone away,” Spiegel said.
Having well-known actors voice audio erotica “is legitimizing for the genre itself,” said Robert Valentine, a London-based audio drama director who directed “Ember and Ice.” “This isn’t something tawdry or embarrassing.”
Audio sex scenes can, in some ways, be even more vulnerable than physical ones, according to Valentine. “Doing sex scenes just with your voice is a different kind of intimacy and vulnerability, because if you’re not vocalizing it, it doesn’t exist,” he said. “Working with Connor and Hudson was the easiest time I’ve had, because they came from ‘Heated Rivalry’ with their own technical shorthand already. They are no strangers to working together in that kind of scene.”
When Colleen Scriven was writing “Ember and Ice,” she already knew that Storrie and Williams would be the stars. She had just two weeks to finish the series, so she hunkered down at her home in Los Angeles. “I have a window where I’m frequently waving at the little lady across the street who has no idea what I’m writing,” Scriven said.
Scriven wrote the series knowing that the majority of Quinn’s audience — nearly 80 percent — is female, and skews young, with 60 percent between the ages of 18 and 34. In her work as a screenwriter, Scriven said she often gets notes to broaden what she’s writing to appeal to a wider audience. “Something I really like about working with Quinn is they move so fast and so fearlessly, and I think that’s because they’re really only catering to their audience,” Scriven said.
Another element of successful audio erotica is authenticity. That’s where Jamie Monahan comes in. As an intimacy coordinator whose credits include “Ember and Ice,” part of her job is to make sure the actors are comfortable. But another part is enhancing the intimacy to make it sound sexier.
“What’s missed a lot of times in some of these conversations is the artistic edge,” she said. For instance, a lower vocal range, with sprinkles of whispers, can have the desired effect on listeners. “They also love a growl or a guttural sound,” she said.
On Quinn’s app, users can filter episodes based on dozens of categories — age difference, Australian accent, banter, bisexual, car sex, hate sex, infidelity, threesome — but the “yearning” category was among the most popular from last year.
The yearning is what Danielle Mathias, a 32-year-old based in Washington, loved about both “Ember and Ice” and “Heated Rivalry.” “It reminds you of that feeling of falling in love. It’s one of those really hard feelings to recapture,” she said.
Spiegel thinks the trend reflects that audiences enjoy wanting something and not getting it immediately; in “Ember and Ice” and “Heated Rivalry,” the main characters aren’t officially together until the bitter end.
“Once you eat the slice of cake, you can’t dream about it anymore,” Spiegel said. “There’s something poetic about all of us being in this generation of immediate gratification and constant dopamine, but the stories that are really resonating are ones where there’s a lot of delayed gratification and slow burn and build and yearning and wanting and wishing and hoping.”
(Link) | (Archive)
Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams attend the premiere of "Heated Rivalry" in Toronto in November. (Harold Feng/Getty Images)
By Liam Scott
There are few constants in human history, but people have more or less always been horny.
In ancient Egypt, there was the Turin Erotic Papyrus, while the Greeks and Romans decorated vases with sex acts. In China, there are bas-relief carvings of a fertility ritual that are at least 3,000 years old, making them among the oldest examples of pornography in the world.
“Erotica has been a part of our culture forever,” said Caroline Spiegel, founder of an app called Quinn, which delivers salacious stories to users’ ears. The forms, though, have evolved, from cave drawings to the “Kama Sutra” and “The Joy of Sex” to the rise of internet porn. Now another boom is taking place: audio erotica.
If there were such a thing as a golden age of erotica, Spiegel thinks this is it. “We’re living in the smut renaissance,” she said. Not only is there more out there, but the quality is better, and the genre occupies an increasingly prominent space in culture. The mainstream success of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books and movies was one flash point in the broader erotic storytelling boom; so, too, is the continued popularity of “Bridgerton.”
But perhaps nothing crystallizes smut’s growing mainstream appeal like “Heated Rivalry,” the hugely popular Canadian TV show about a steamy romance between two professional hockey players that’s based on the best-selling book series by Rachel Reid.
Around Thanksgiving, before the show even premiered, Spiegel reached out to co-stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams to pitch them on doing an audio erotica series with Quinn. “They represent this new generation of sex positivity and acceptance and a lack of puritanical shame,” Spiegel said. She initially pitched a sports romance story, which would lean into the “Heated Rivalry” of it all, but the actors wanted to do something more fantastical. The first two episodes of “Ember and Ice” dropped in late December, and the third was released in January.
The enemies-to-lovers story about two fae princes from rival kingdoms quickly became Quinn’s most popular original series to date, which Spiegel says is largely thanks to the success of “Heated Rivalry.” It reached 1.5 million total plays in its first week and has racked up more than 3.2 million so far. “I would love to claim to be some kind of fortune teller, but we just got really lucky,” Spiegel said.
And yet, there’s a pretty clear cause and effect. In Spiegel’s telling, the rise of self-published smut led book publishers to follow suit, publishing books such as Reid’s series, which then opened the gateway for other forms of erotic storytelling, like audio erotica. Independent creators post to sites like Tumblr and Reddit. Besides Quinn, other audio erotica companies have cropped up, such as Bloom Stories and Dipsea.
People listen to erotica for a variety of reasons, according to Dipsea co-founder Faye Keegan. They listen for their personal pleasure, to spice up their sex lives with their partner and to grapple with sexual trauma by seeing what healthy sex can look like.
“The interest in erotica is deeply human because it’s about love and chemistry and connection and life,” Keegan said. “More smut is good for the world.”
Spiegel founded Quinn in 2019, after dropping out of Stanford University during her senior year. The company now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, employing 12 full-time staffers and relying on a network of contractors for writing, acting and directing. Anyone can apply to be part of Quinn’s network of independent creators by submitting a sample audio recording.
It’s hard to estimate just how much the erotic storytelling industry is worth because it encapsulates so many different forms. Romance books are the highest grossing of all book genres, but there’s also audio erotica from companies and independent creators, self-published smut, audiobooks and more. Some content isn’t monetized, but all together, Spiegel estimates the industry could be worth several billion dollars.
Audio erotica, not to be confused with romance audiobooks, tends to be shorter and usually features voice actors and sound design — leaves crunching, doors closing. “It’s designed to be like a movie in your mind,” Spiegel said.
A lot of work goes into making it. There are writers and directors, intimacy coordinators, sound designers and the actors themselves, including Andrew Scott, Jesse Williams and Jamie Campbell Bower. “When Quinn first started, people were really squeamish about it. Now, more and more so, the taboo has gone away,” Spiegel said.
Having well-known actors voice audio erotica “is legitimizing for the genre itself,” said Robert Valentine, a London-based audio drama director who directed “Ember and Ice.” “This isn’t something tawdry or embarrassing.”
Audio sex scenes can, in some ways, be even more vulnerable than physical ones, according to Valentine. “Doing sex scenes just with your voice is a different kind of intimacy and vulnerability, because if you’re not vocalizing it, it doesn’t exist,” he said. “Working with Connor and Hudson was the easiest time I’ve had, because they came from ‘Heated Rivalry’ with their own technical shorthand already. They are no strangers to working together in that kind of scene.”
When Colleen Scriven was writing “Ember and Ice,” she already knew that Storrie and Williams would be the stars. She had just two weeks to finish the series, so she hunkered down at her home in Los Angeles. “I have a window where I’m frequently waving at the little lady across the street who has no idea what I’m writing,” Scriven said.
Scriven wrote the series knowing that the majority of Quinn’s audience — nearly 80 percent — is female, and skews young, with 60 percent between the ages of 18 and 34. In her work as a screenwriter, Scriven said she often gets notes to broaden what she’s writing to appeal to a wider audience. “Something I really like about working with Quinn is they move so fast and so fearlessly, and I think that’s because they’re really only catering to their audience,” Scriven said.
Another element of successful audio erotica is authenticity. That’s where Jamie Monahan comes in. As an intimacy coordinator whose credits include “Ember and Ice,” part of her job is to make sure the actors are comfortable. But another part is enhancing the intimacy to make it sound sexier.
“What’s missed a lot of times in some of these conversations is the artistic edge,” she said. For instance, a lower vocal range, with sprinkles of whispers, can have the desired effect on listeners. “They also love a growl or a guttural sound,” she said.
On Quinn’s app, users can filter episodes based on dozens of categories — age difference, Australian accent, banter, bisexual, car sex, hate sex, infidelity, threesome — but the “yearning” category was among the most popular from last year.
The yearning is what Danielle Mathias, a 32-year-old based in Washington, loved about both “Ember and Ice” and “Heated Rivalry.” “It reminds you of that feeling of falling in love. It’s one of those really hard feelings to recapture,” she said.
Spiegel thinks the trend reflects that audiences enjoy wanting something and not getting it immediately; in “Ember and Ice” and “Heated Rivalry,” the main characters aren’t officially together until the bitter end.
“Once you eat the slice of cake, you can’t dream about it anymore,” Spiegel said. “There’s something poetic about all of us being in this generation of immediate gratification and constant dopamine, but the stories that are really resonating are ones where there’s a lot of delayed gratification and slow burn and build and yearning and wanting and wishing and hoping.”
