In the waning days of 2025, Quinn, one of a few newish wellness-coded apps<\/a> offering subscription access to audio erotica to an audience of mostly zoomer women, scored a huge get. It managed to hire Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the young stars of the HBO breakout hit Heated Rivalry<\/a>, to voice a three-part audio original, Ember & Ice, which hit the $7.99\/month app right as Heated Rivalry psychosis<\/a> was at its zenith. Quinn\u2019s founder, Caroline Spiegel, told Vanity Fair<\/a> that she thought of this story as \u201cBrokeback-otar\u201d\u2014a mashup of Brokeback Mountain and the Sarah J.\u00a0Maas romantasy series A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book fans often abbreviate to ACOTAR. Ember & Ice, much like Heated Rivalry, is about two young men\u2014one serious, careworn, and closeted, the other a charismatic bon vivant\u2014on opposing \u201cteams,\u201d who have sex secretly over the years, before eventually coming out as a couple. You get to hear Williams and Storrie breathing heavily, egging each other on while their characters hook up. \u201cI\u2019ve seen you in battle. I know you can take command,\u201d one prince says to the other. \u201cI\u2019ve seen you in battle. I know you can be brave,\u201d his heated rival later replies.<\/p>\n Storrie and Williams are not the only stars with thirsty parasocial followings to say yes when Quinn came knocking. The company has been around for a while\u2014it was founded in 2019, when Spiegel, the sister of Snapchat\u2019s CEO, was 24 years old, and the mobile app launched in 2021\u2014but this past year, it has honed its strategy of bringing in new earholes particularly well. (Spiegel told the Hollywood Reporter<\/a> late last year that the app has \u201chundreds of thousands\u201d of subscribers.) Quinn finds the guys (mostly guys) in television shows whose characters people fantasize about. It pays those guys to read original scripts that have explicit sex in them\u2014often, as with Ember & Ice, stories that vaguely echo the original source material that the actor became famous for, whether in vibe, plot, or theme. Then, it\u2019s simple to piggyback on the stars\u2019 substantial fan bases, reaching them through TikTok videos promoting the stories, with the goal of ultimately bringing more people to the app.<\/p>\n So far, Quinn counts among its celebrity voice actors Costa D\u2019Angelo, from Hulu\u2019s dark romance thriller Tell Me Lies; Andrew Scott, the Hot Priest from Fleabag; Jamie Campbell Bower, the sharp-cheekboned villain Vecna from Stranger Things; Jesse Williams, Dr.\u00a0Jackson Avery from Grey\u2019s Anatomy; and more. This past week, the app\u2019s TikTok account teased<\/a> a forthcoming project that got everyone guessing (correctly, it turned out) that the next Quinn original celeb would be Tyriq Withers, who starred in last year\u2019s football horror movie Him<\/a> and recently co-starred in the latest Colleen Hoover film adaptation Reminders of Him. It\u2019s a canny idea. \u201cIf you\u2019re a popular \u2018thirst\u2019 celebrity, you\u2019re going to have your voice be haphazardly AI-replicated and have thousands of fan-fiction stories written about you in the depths of the internet, so might as well do it right and do it your way,\u201d Spiegel told the Wall Street Journal, describing her pitch to Hollywood<\/a>.<\/p>\n In hiring these stars, Quinn is also introducing a whole new audience to a different way of consuming romance. Listening to Ember & Ice (a male\/male romance, performed as an audio drama by a duet of actors) is almost like listening to Rachel Reid\u2019s Heated Rivalry audiobook. But there\u2019s a major difference, and it\u2019s not just the addition of more, and more explicit, sound effects (some of which would truly mortify me if they were to accidentally broadcast from my phone in a public place due to a sudden Bluetooth connectivity screwup). As a frequent listener of romance audiobooks, I thought I was used to listening to audio descriptions of intercourse, outercourse, kissing, blow jobs, the works. But with audio erotica, I\u2019m discovering, there\u2019s an element of immersion that is less present in their audiobook counterparts. The key to this medium, as the people using sites like r\/gonewildaudio<\/a> and Literotica<\/a> knew long before Silicon Valley app-ified and celeb-rified this genre, is transporting the listener to the scene, making them as much a participant as an onlooker. It\u2019s the inevitable end point of spicy romance content that, in the current mainstream romance boom, has been increasingly designed and packaged for consumers\u2019 personal pleasure, tagging everything<\/a> with tropes, content warnings, and plot points to suit individual desires. Infinite postmortems on the success of Heated Rivalry have tried to put a finger on what it was about this unlikely show that drew such a rabid audience. What Quinn\u2019s celeb initiative suggests is that the market for content that serves women\u2019s sexual fantasies has barely been tapped.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Take the fact that most Quinn scripts\u2014including the celebrity-voiced stories that don\u2019t star Heated Rivalry\u2019s HudCon<\/a>\u2014are written so that the narrator reads one half of an encounter, leaving space for you, the listener, to insert yourself into the scene. There are no female voices in the stories. The actors say things like \u201cWould you like to come in for a glass of water?\u201d or \u201cDon\u2019t move, there\u2019s a rattlesnake by that log!,\u201d then pause for you to imagine a reply. During sex scenes, these actors\u2014who work with the benefit of an on-set intimacy coordinator, Spiegel has said\u2014gasp and grunt and groan, heroic one-sided participants in each encounter. Some of the celebrity stories have transcripts on the app, so you can see what it was that new Quinn star Rob Rausch, a snake wrangler and reality-TV contestant who recently won the latest American season of The Traitors, said, word for word, while he was pretending to be a worker at a reptile rescue, having sex with a girl whose car broke down nearby: \u201cHoly shit. That\u2019s it, baby. You\u2019re doing so good. Easy. Yeah. Oh, shit. God, you\u2019re incredible. Oh, holy shit. Good girl. Fuck. Keep rolling your hips like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, I typed that all out from the transcript. Yes, I\u2019m beyond mortified to admit that I listened to a person born in 1998, whose claim to fame I didn\u2019t even watch, say these things in his Southern drawl\u2014and, even worse, that I kind of liked it. That\u2019s core to the whole experience of consuming this kind of audio erotica: It feels embarrassing, secret, private. Although people online say they use Quinn stories like other audio\u2014they report listening at work, while doing dishes, or while working out\u2014I find I have just enough Puritan in me to think, I could only listen to this when I\u2019m alone. I mean, come on: \u201cHow does it feel when I rub right there at the top of your thigh? Is that good? Tucking my fingers inside, just like that. Oh. You feeling needy? I can tell. It\u2019s been building for a while, huh? I know exactly how you feel,\u201d said Chris Briney, who plays the sensitive, pining Conrad from Prime Video\u2019s smash hit The Summer I Turned Pretty<\/a>, into my right ear. (I said, \u201cOh, Lord, save us,\u201d to my empty office.) Briney fans seemed to like it: \u201cHe\u2019s such a champion for this,\u201d one wrote on Reddit, calling the actor \u201ceither incredibly generous, or a freak, or both.\u201d But I couldn\u2019t help but feel as if I\u2019d crossed the Rubicon\u2014as if I were prompting an A.I. chatbot to talk dirty to me like Conrad from TSITP might, and the A.I. was doing its best.<\/p>\n As explicit as the celeb originals are, they\u2019re nothing compared to the rest of Quinn. After listening to far too many actors talk dirty to me, I asked around in real life, looked around on Reddit, made a little list of people\u2019s favorite non-celeb voice artists, and gave some of those a try. Like this TikTokker, who posted a shocked video<\/a> about moving on to the regular Quinn voice artists after listening to Ember & Ice, I feel like begging everyone to be patient with me. The experienced VAs, many of whom post anonymously, and not all of whom are male (shoutout \u201cSweets\u201d), sound utterly fearless. Only while listening to some die-hard favorites (shoutout \u201cNaudio,\u201d \u201cAnonyfun,\u201d and \u201cMilo\u201d) did I realize how stilted the celebrities sound when they perform the sex scenes. Part of it is that the non-celeb content has less plot; most stories I sampled got right to the sex. Part of it is that the VAs are not trying to continue careers in film or television. Through their utter commitment, they can make squishes, whacks, sighs, and thrusts creep in underneath your suspension of disbelief, eventually neatly lifting it away, like the skin off a pudding.<\/p>\n This level of visceral immersion isn\u2019t what every female consumer of romance content wants, even if some romance readers\u2019 strong emergent preference<\/a> for first-person narration in their love stories may suggest otherwise. On Reddit, fans of Heated Rivalry<\/a> debating whether to pay for Ember & Ice access, and discussing most Quinn stories\u2019 self-insert mode, agreed that they probably wouldn\u2019t enjoy it. \u201cI want to get caught up in someone else\u2019s love story. I don\u2019t want to be part of it or involved at all,\u201d one wrote. That\u2019s far from the experience you have when you listen to Andrew Scott saying: \u201cGive in to me. I can feel how close you are. Have you been dreaming about this too? Are you going to give me what\u2019s mine? That\u2019s it, good girl. That\u2019s it. Give in. Give in. Let go. Let me hear you. You still take my directions so well\u201d up close and personal, an experience that feels even stranger when you recall that Scott is a gay man who probably isn\u2019t going around looking for \u201cgood girls.\u201d A third-person book like Heated Rivalry, about two men falling in love, is the right level of uninvolvement for some audiences.<\/p>\n The First Season Was Absolutely Bonkers. Its Follow-Up Is Here\u2014and It Somehow Does the Impossible. One of 2019\u2019s Biggest Sleeper Hits Finally Has a Sequel. It\u2019s a Bit Different. People vaguely aware of romance\u2019s resurgence may have broad, often dismissive, ideas about why women seek out love stories and sex scenes. (I\u2019ve seen Maas\u2019 ACOTAR described, not kindly, as \u201cfairy porn,\u201d for example.) What my time with Quinn taught me is that picking a trope is just the beginning of the personalization a female consumer of romance content can now set out to do. Maybe you like to read prose, first person or third person, M\/F, M\/M, F\/F, or M\/M\/F. Or maybe you like prose of any of those types, read aloud by an audiobook narrator who\u2019s female\u2014or one who\u2019s male. Maybe you like to watch celebs on-screen, going at it on a movie or TV show like Babygirl<\/a> or Bridgerton<\/a>. Maybe you like the slightly illicit thrill of hearing celebs pretend to have sex in your ear. Or perhaps you try a Quinn VA, like the growl in their voice, and become a devotee of an anonymous person making sex sounds into a microphone, somewhere out there in the world. Hollywood and book publishers know that romance sells. But what kind of romance turns women on? We\u2019re really just getting started.<\/span><\/p>\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/compote.slate.com\/images\/84e643bc-cbe1-4951-b468-f5648f410461.jpeg?crop=1560%2C1040%2Cx0%2Cy0&width=140\")
\n <\/div>\nLuke Winkie<\/h4>\n
Readers Are Embracing a Shift in Perspective in Books. It Could Reshape Literary Culture.<\/h3>\n
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