When Caroline Spiegel, the 25-year-old sister of Snapchat billionaire Evan, couldn’t find porn that got her going, she created her own erotic audio app. Jane Mulkerrins tries it out.
A colleague is knocking on my door. “I know you said you didn’t want to see me any more but I wanted to come by and say congrats on the promotion,” he says, strolling in – uninvited – and admiring the expansive environs of my new corner office. Was that my husband who came to drop off lunch, he asks. He seems like a nice guy, comments my colleague. He shuts the door.
And that’s pretty much it for the above-board workplace chitchat before things take a rapid turn for the filthy. “You definitely didn’t want me to be a nice guy when I used to f*** you,” he says provocatively. I slap him. And then we’re off – into 26 minutes and 58 seconds of intense, illicit, explicit sex. In my new office. This could present an HR problem.
In reality, it’s a rain-lashed Sunday afternoon and I’m in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie in my kitchen, making a sausage casserole while listening to Your Husband Seems Nice, my first foray into audio erotica. I do hope the neighbours can’t hear.
Once that’s over, and everyone has put their clothes on and returned to their workstations, I click on another story, In the Backseat of a Ford Fiesta, which turns out to be sexier than its title suggests. The narrator is my brother’s best friend, who has dropped by while I’m waiting for a date who has stood me up. She (the voice is female, though androgynously low) offers to take me out instead, which leads to confessions about having always been attracted to one another, which leads to the move to the backseat. You get the idea. This scenario is more tender than the previous story – there’s a lot of praise and positive affirmation in the backseat of that Fiesta.
While washing up I click on We’re All Grown-Up, another male-voiced story, in which the narrator is an old friend who is back in town for the day. The story is tagged “friends to lovers” – no prizes for guessing the outcome here. The build-up in this one is longer, tense and gently thrilling, but the sex itself goes on a bit and gets rather repetitive. It doesn’t quite match the decades of simmering sexual tension that apparently preceded it. In that respect I suppose it is probably highly realistic.
I’ve never been a big fan of traditional porn – and by “traditional”, I’m talking here about the infinite black hole of free online porn, not the prehistoric top-shelf stuff. Like many of my female friends, I find the vast majority of it aggressive, misogynistic and the very opposite of sexy: hard-breasted, hair-free women being thrust into uncomfortable, unerotic positions by angry-looking men. And worse. Happily, I’ve never much needed it, having always found my own imagination a far more effective tool when it comes to arousal.
So I was quietly sceptical about Quinn, the audio erotica app I’ve downloaded today, loaded up with around 3,000 stories, for a subscription fee of £4.99 a month. But I’m surprised to find myself enjoying it so much that I look forward to going to bed so I can road-test a few more short stories. Certainly, it’s a lot more relaxing than Radio’s 4′s Today in Parliament or the US political podcasts I treat myself to most nights.
Launched on the App Store in the summer of 2021, Quinn is not the first of its kind. There’s also Dipsea, another story-based erotica app started by millennials Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan in 2018; Emjoy, a “sexual wellness app”, which has audio stories but also meditation and mindfulness exercises; and Coral, an “intimacy app” centred on information and education, to name but three. Quinn is, however, garnering a particularly high profile thanks to the tech credentials of its founder, 25-year-old Caroline Spiegel, the sister of billionaire Snapchat founder – and Mr Miranda Kerr – Evan Spiegel, 32.
Quinn is also unique in that its stories are “POV” or “point of view” – narrated in the second person so the listener can insert themselves into the story and feel the narrator is speaking directly to them. I see why Spiegel describes the app as closer to Headspace, the meditation app, than Pornhub.
The effect is intimate and immersive rather than performative and voyeuristic. And call me a narcissist, but I’m much more likely to get turned on by someone talking directly about me, to me, than by eavesdropping on others getting frisky.
It’s a Monday morning in her native Los Angeles when I Zoom into Spiegel’s neat white Santa Monica apartment, where she lives with her Bernedoodle, Charles. Spiegel founded the company in 2019 in New York but, since the pandemic, Quinn’s 12 employees work remotely, in New York, LA and Austin, Texas.
Along with normalising such remote working, the pandemic-fuelled boom in podcasts has also helped paved the way for the mainstreaming of audio erotica, believes Spiegel. Now, she reflects, “We are living in a world that is so audio-driven.”
Billing itself as the “Spotify of porn”, Quinn features stories narrated by around 75 voices – male and female. Users can follow the narrators they like the most.
Like Peloton instructors, I suggest. Yes, exactly like Peloton instructors, Spiegel agrees.
As Quinn is a “creator-driven platform”, she explains, the narrators also write the stories themselves. There are “golden rules: no incest, no minors, no animals, no rape and no non-consent”, and the content is tightly moderated as such.
The most popular categories or “tags”, says Spiegel, are “‘friends to lovers”, which is about that classic thing: you have a friend, there’s a lot of tension building, then someone confesses their love and one thing leads to another. By that same token, " ‘Enemies to lovers’ is also a really popular tag.”
“Boyfriend” and “girlfriend” categories are also very popular, boyfriend being a male voice, girlfriend a female voice. “It’s a catch-all for a lovey, romantic, vanilla-type sex,” says Spiegel. Guided masturbation is another of the most popular categories.
For those so inclined, there are also less “vanilla” stories clearly tagged “degradation”. I notice only later that, with Your Husband Seems Nice, I had accidentally dived head-first deep into degradation on my first listen.
Quinn’s 90,000 subscribers, plus its 100,000 followers on TikTok – the Gen Z social media platform of choice where Quinn’s content receives around 10 million views per month – “skew pretty young”, according to its founder. The largest demographic is aged 25-30, closely followed by the 18-24 age group. And 80 per cent of users are female.
Received wisdom is that women are more aroused by non-visual than visual stimuli. According to a YouGov study in July this year, 36 per cent of British men said they watched pornography at least once a week, compared with just 4 per cent of women. That gender split may be breaking down though, and multiple studies show that women are watching more porn than ever. In the same survey, 35 per cent of women under 30 said they watched porn, compared with just 2 per cent of women aged 60 and older.
For Spiegel, the difference between watching and listening is “like when you read Harry Potter or you listen to the audiobook and the full world exists in your mind’s eye… and then you watch the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s supposed to look. That’s how this was supposed to happen.’ " She thinks, “What a shame. Our imaginations and our minds are so powerful and the most visual experience you can have is the one you create yourself.”
Which is not to say that women don’t enjoy some eye candy, of course. Spiegel cites the “Bridgerton effect” – the huge success of the unashamedly sexy, rompy Regency drama, the first series of which broke Netflix viewing records at the end of 2020 with a third currently in production. The Highlands-set historical drama Outlander – a firm favourite among the members of my book club – is another example of the genre. Women, in particular, like sex wrapped up in more of a story, believes Spiegel. “We call it a wolf in sheep’s clothing. There’s something about a story and context and build-up and tension that make things so much more erotic and make the payoff so much better,” she says. (Men, by contrast, she says, “don’t need as much narrative. They have less of a need for the sheep’s clothing.”)
But in spite of efforts in recent years to channel this desire for story-based erotica into more “female-friendly” or “feminist” porn – with sites such as Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn, where couples can record and upload their real-world sex, and Lust Cinema, porn videos shot by predominantly female directors – the majority of it “uses the same tools and the same paradigm with which porn is always made: through the male gaze, which I feel is pretty misogynistic”, says Spiegel.
The history of the internet – and more recently of its offspring, social media – is entirely indivisible from sex. In the mid to late Nineties, the first boom area of the embryonic internet was, inevitably, porn, first as a means of ordering VHS tapes for home delivery, then, at the turn of the millennium, rudimentary online streaming. The earliest iteration of the first major social media platform – The Facebook, as it was initially titled in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room – was a site that ranked female students based on their attractiveness. And when Spiegel’s brother, Evan, developed Snapchat with a couple of Stanford fraternity brothers – the start-up would make him, at 25, the youngest billionaire in the world – it was unashamedly designed as an app for sexting. It is testament to his sister’s Gen Z credentials that her own app is designed not simply to be arousing but ethically so.
For her, whether women are turned on or not by visual porn is beside the point. “It is just very, very difficult to make visual erotic content ethically,” she says.
“With Quinn, no one is actually having sex and no one’s being paid to have sex.
“A lot of people in the tech world talk about the ‘modern conscious consumer’,” she continues. “They care about where their food comes from; they care about where their clothing comes from. And then we somehow forgot about this massive part of the consumers’ media diet. We’re trying to become a mainstream erotic content platform that fits within that trend. It’s a missing slice that people don’t have a reliable, shareable, aspirational, erotic content platform.”
Spiegel grew up the youngest of three siblings in the affluent Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, with lawyer parents. She attended the exclusive Crossroads school in Santa Monica; fellow graduates include Gwyneth Paltrow, Liv Tyler and Kate Hudson.
One might assume, given that two out of three siblings have built tech companies in their early twenties, that it was a highly tech-savvy household.
“We weren’t allowed to watch a lot of TV,” reflects Spiegel. “My mum really encouraged us to be creative – if we had an idea, we would always be encouraged to try to make it,” she says, “whether it was building or sewing or baking something. I think that’s very empowering for a child – to have an idea and then see it to fruition.”
After Crossroads, she scored a place to study computer systems at Stanford University – where her brother and their father had also studied. It was competitive and intense. “In one of the first classes, you build an operating system from scratch, which is crazy,” she says.
Aside from the pressures of her studies, Spiegel was also dealing with a severe eating disorder, with which she’d been struggling for years. Even as she started to recover, one of the side-effects was “absent libido and a lack of sexual drive. I had never really struggled with that before, so I was really in need of things that made me feel turned on and like a sexual being,” she says.
She turned, of course, to the internet, “looking for porn for women – or just porn for someone that had the same proclivities as me – but I didn’t like any of it”.
Though she was finally gaining weight again, her anorexia had left her with “this feeling of being detached from my body. And when I would watch visual porn, I didn’t feel more in touch with my body – I felt even further separated from it.
“I actually think that it’s all connected,” she continues. “How many women struggle with eating disorders is connected to how many women are not sexually satisfied, is connected to how many women’s desire is accurately portrayed in media. It’s all one big puzzle that I’m still trying to understand, but I do think mainstream media and certainly porn did not help things when I was struggling.”
She looked to the less obvious sites – Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube – where she discovered audio erotica in “large and flourishing but amateur communities. It was hard to sort through all the content.” And she found “a lot of stuff that was upsetting because the content is unmoderated. I didn’t want to share it with my friends.” But, she says, “I liked the medium itself and it certainly reflected how my desire and arousal operated. I became obsessed.”
She built her own Tumblr blog of favourite audios that she could then share with friends. Their enthusiastic reactions led her to wonder: could this be a company, a product, an app?
“I discovered audio porn in February 2019, and by May I was dropping out of college,” she recalls.
She moved to New York and began pitching to investors. “People assume that my brother opened a lot of doors for me, but he’s never introduced me to an investor or adviser,” she has said. “I’m sure it helped that I was related to him, but I couldn’t ask him to introduce me to a roster of people.”
“He’s always been very encouraging and supportive and kind,” she tells me of Evan’s guidance. “And obviously just watching his journey is inspiring and empowering.” By the end of summer 2019 she’d raised $500,000, enough to begin building Quinn.
One of my few criticisms of the app, and I’d say one of the potential barriers to its growth on this side of the Pond, is that the majority of stories are voiced by American actors. This is less jarring for me than it might be for others; having lived in the US for a decade, I am used to the explicit terminology of Americans – which is surprisingly different from our own, and which took me several years to get completely comfortable with. Spiegel points me to a couple of the British-accented narrators on the site (“British accents are really popular and people are always demanding more,” she says) but, call me picky, they sadly do little for me. Even the French-accented narrator doesn’t really get me going. Were there a suggestions box, I’d be making a personal bid for a few Glaswegian and Scouse narrators. I can see that there might be issues with comprehension by a largely US audience, but I’d argue that understanding every word is unnecessary when it comes to erotica. One of my favourite Peloton instructors, Erik, conducts his classes in his native German. I understand very little of his chat beyond the numbers, but with arms like Erik’s, there’s not a lot more I need to understand.
For her part, Spiegel, who is in a relationship these days, reports happily that her own libido “is back with a bang”.
She still uses her own app though. “And that’s something that makes me happy: that I created a product that I genuinely want to use every day.”
Three years after dropping out of Stanford to focus on her start-up, Quinn has raised US$3.2 million to date and, after a year on the App Store, has hit US$4 million in annual revenue. But Spiegel’s ambitions for her app are not modest. “The goal is really to have all people in the 20-30 age bracket in America using Quinn.”
The real tech bros (and sisters)
Keeping it in the family – the siblings who have made billions.
Oliver Kent and Alexander Kent-Braham, 30, Marshmallow
These identical twins played tennis for Great Britain at under-16 level when they were growing up in Surrey, before abandoning plans to turn tennis pro and going into business instead. They worked from a Virgin Active gym lobby for ten months while trying to get their car insurance start-up off the ground in 2016. Last year, their company, Marshmallow, became Britain’s second black-owned “unicorn” – a company worth more than US$1 billion.
John and Patrick Collison, 32 and 34, Stripe
Brothers from a rural Irish village near Limerick who have conquered Silicon Valley and are worth US$8 billion each. They hatched the idea for Stripe while they were studying at Harvard and MIT in 2010. Today, giants like Asos, Apple, Amazon, Etsy and Waitrose all use Stripe to process their credit card payments, and three out of four of us in the UK have used Stripe in the past year. Elon Musk is a backer, and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney sits on the board.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, 41, Gemini
Played by the actor Armie Hammer in the 2010 film The Social Network, the identical Winklevoss twins might be former US Olympic rowers, but they are best known for accusing Mark Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for a social network when they were all at Harvard. They used some of their US$65 million legal settlement with the Facebook CEO to start stockpiling bitcoin. The cryptocurrency exchange they founded in 2014, Gemini, now processes about US$200 million a day in trades, and the brothers are worth US$2.1 billion each.
Anne Wojcicki, 49, 23andMe, and Susan Wojcicki, 54, YouTube
Who are my ancestors? Which health conditions will I inherit? These questions can be answered by 23andMe, the ancestry company Anne Wojcicki founded in 2006 to analyse at-home DNA spit test kits. She took the company public last year – it was valued at US$3.5 billion – and has a net worth of US$300 million. Anne is divorced from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who developed the search engine in Susan’s California garage when she was his sister-in-law. Susan was hired as Google employee no 16 in 1999, later becoming its senior vice president. She has been CEO of YouTube since 2014, and has a net worth of US$765 million.
Elon Musk, 51, Tesla, SpaceX, and Tosca Musk, 48, Passionflix
The surname Musk might be synonymous with wealth, but the Musk siblings had a difficult childhood growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Elon claims their mother suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of their father. Elon was the wealthiest person on the planet, at one point worth an estimated US$340 billion – although after buying Twitter last year his fortune is estimated to have dropped to US$137 billion. He made headlines after taking over the platform, giving his employees an ultimatum to work “long hours at high intensity” or leave, and putting his CEO status to a public vote.
The tech mogul’s first winning idea was PayPal, using funds from its sale to start the rocket-developer SpaceX and electric car company Tesla, now valued at US$400 billion. His younger sister, Tosca, is co-founder and chief executive of Passionflix, a streaming service which adapts popular romance and erotic novels into movies. Since launching in 2017, Passionflix has raised US$24 million in funding and is available in 150 countries.
- By Georgina Roberts
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London