“Good Girl”

This chapter introduces this book and its subject matter and provides a roadmap for the chapters to come. Audio erotica is sexually explicit media which is entirely aural: it has no visual element, which sets it apart from many other forms of pornography. While it has existed for some time, it has recently become very popular and culturally visible with the emergence of dedicated apps like Quinn, Dipsea, Emjoy, and Ferly (the four apps on which this book centres). Notably, these apps are female-founded and -run, and predominantly hail a presumed-female audience, positioning this form of audio erotica as by women, for women. This introduction sets the scene of the contemporary audio erotica landscape, providing an overview of each of the four apps under analysis. These emerge in a period where women are starting to be seen as a significant audience for sex tech, as well as one in which audiobooks and other forms of immersive audio media are achieving substantial popularity, making audio erotica thus a growing market and a subject ripe for scholarly attention.