Fascinating things about r/gonewildaudio

This is me infodumping my current hyperfixation on basically amateur porn, so skip that if you want.

On the other hand it IS fascinating, and it is this blog’s official line that “stuff to jerk off to” is just as real and valid and particular a part of culture as anything else.

r/gonewildaudio is a Subreddit focused around creating, posting, and sharing erotic audio.

[1] The standard format is like somewhere between a radio play and one half of a phone sex conversation - performers will portray one character interacting with another audience-perspective character WHOSE LINES ARE SILENT AND IMPLIED.

This means that the best writers and performers have to craft dialogue really well, use vocal nuance, and diegetic SFX to tell the entire story; median artists tend to use repetition (“What? Y-you want me to take off my shirt and perform this incredibly specific fetish? Okay.”); bad ones basically retreat from inhabiting a character to narrate.

[2] There are, broadly put, 3 types of recordings put out. Ones where the performer wrote the script (or at least conceived the scenario) themselves; “ramblefaps” which is basically someone talking dirty while masturbating with no scenario; and script offer/script fills.

This last category might be the majority, it’s where one writer will compose and post a script that performers then see and pick to record. It is ALMOST-ALWAYS cross-gender, so women will be performing fantasies composed by a straight man for an intended audience of straight men and vice versa.

[4] It is hetero as all hell. There is basically no queer content. SOMEtimes a woman will post a ramblefap marked F4A (“all”) or a scenario where she mentions (to the male audience stand-in) that she’s also into girls but that’s it. Not even any sissification stuff that I could see, which is surprising cause those guys are all about the “girl softly talking nasty to you” format.

(My experience is entirely off F4M performances, because I’m also hetero as all hell.)

[5] A lot more women into Fsub fantasies, and a lot, lot, lot more into rape fantasies, than you might think based on common depiction of “where is American womanhood at in 2019”

Part of it surely is the more forbidden something is the more fetish fuel it is, part of it is surely the result of filtering on people who enjoy offering themselves up as a sexual outlet for strangers, and it’s all just fantasy anyway. But I am reminded of those tube-site stats that showed that female viewers were really strongly drawn to videos with violence against women.

[6] There’s a definite age split in the women performers that has a few effects.

Like half of them I get the vibe they’re late 30s or 40s, that sweet spot in between “biker wife” and “has shelves specifically dedicated to SF/F”. Renaissance faire sex freaks, basically. They mostly just seem to focus on whatever their tastes are.

The other of them are college students or early 20s, they’re more likely to have a Patreon  and do custom commissions and treat it as a side-gig, posting on a regular weekly schedule and listening to other girls as *market research*. They’ll still gravitate to their own kinks, but they seem to have a better sense of their output as product from the audience perspective.

Which is to say more… professional. Talking about it is still tabooed there, but I have the sense this is not the first time many of these girls have acted as erotic artists. This is the fruit of the generation that grew up with AO3, Omegle, Snapchat, Tumblr, ubiquitous and private cellphone cameras. I grew up consuming internet porn sure, they came up as producers - performers or curators. Of all the effects of ubiquitous internet porn on youths I’ve heard speculated, I never heard anyone consider that by the time they’re 22 or so they would come out really *good* at porn. I’m interested what’ll come of that. (We sure wouldn’t have had rock and roll if no one under 18 played guitar.)

[7] It’s adjacent to a lot of things, really. It’s adjacent to camgirling, obviously. It’s adjacent to ASMR, on the “girl pleasing you by talking softly in your ear” beat. It’s adjacent to erotica and h-manga just by being actually plotted, adjacent to podcasting and streaming in that it depends on a boom in prosumer audio recording equipment.

[8] There’s a common pattern where people join, get really intensely involved for 6 months or so and then delete their account and fall away. And several people explain that this came from emotional burnout and intimacy overload. That one of the best ways to bond with someone is share an orgasm with them, and posting a popular audio you’re basically sharing an orgasm with thousands of people.

And some of them reach out to you and there really is something in common, kinks at minimum, and you’ve already exposed your vulnerability and your true inner self and that speeds intimacy along, and you’ll record their scripts and vice versa or you’ll at least message about your days, but after enough of this you’ve accumulated TOO MANY INTIMATES, more than you have the time or emotional labor to service as a co-intimate but they didn’t particularly do anything wrong so you feel bad about letting them down and eventually it builds up too much and…

[9] Of course some that reach out there ISN’T that bond, you hear they get a lot of harassment and whatnot and if even women talking about anodyne stuff on twitter get that you can imagine it for them. I mean, celebrities and porn stars have problems with stalkers and with them it’s at broadly admitted that the characters they portray (at least before gonzo when they portrayed characters), or even the “celebrity” persona (ostentatiously fake porn names!) are not the “real them”, here you don’t even have that distance.

(And of course by now the business model of the old SFV studio porn is you *can* fuck the porn stars, no one makes much money off shoots anymore, it’s advertising for their real career as high-end escorts. This is, incidentally, a similar model [maybe as “sugar baby” or just “trophy wife”] as long prevailed for even non-stripper dancers like ballerinas, cheerleaders, or rap video girls)

At the same time… around twitter and things you see people asking “what could possibly make guys think women want to see their dick pics/breathy texts”. And I mean, “well, for 20 minutes (or if you listen through a whole body of work 4 hours) she masturbated while whispering dirty things about herself in my ear and trying to get me excited by saying she wanted me and loves to be used by men without asking” is probably the most reasonable possible answer there. If someone did that and then scolded you if you pulled your wang out or called her a filthy whore under other circumstances, it would just be odd. And I get that it matters that that wasn’t specifically for you but “oh, she does that for any and every random stranger” does not intuitively suggest more delicacy.