Audio Erotica, Virtual Voice, & Gender Hegemony as Modern Myth

The ever-increasing popularity of titles across the romance/steamy romance/erotica spectrum is apparent, evidenced in part by 2024’s explosion in romance and erotica audiobooks narrated by virtual voice. Virtual voice is computer generated narration, a tool that absolves audio publishers of the need to pay human narrators and does away with the production time required to record. This allows for an exponential increase in audiobook production at a fraction of the cost for publishers. As romance and erotica are many publishers’ bread and butter, and fans of the genre spectrum consume these stories voraciously, it comes as no surprise that the most widespread use of virtual voice is across romance and erotica. Virtual voice does more than deliver a pre-existing text, however. It creates a narrative layer of its own, shaping the meaning and experience of the text. The role of the medium is significant enough to warrant consideration of Liv Hausken’s question, “Do new media, genres, and textual formats require new textual theories? Do we have to throw away everything we know about texts and media every time a new medium is invented and start all over again?” 1   

While the foundation of the romance narrative remains intact across mediums, an exploration of the significant effects of this new format are critical to understanding its narrative function. The combination of existing textual theories with special consideration of the role of audio can shed necessary light on this new and increasingly popular form. In this article, I analyze two virtual voice narrated audiobooks, Knocking up the Nanny by Madison Laine and Captivated by a Savage by Jade Jones, to illustrate both the significant role of virtually narrated audiobooks as a medium and the necessity of approaching new textual forms with openness to new and adapted textual theories and cognizance of the hazards of medium blindness.

Romance and erotica audiobooks find their happily-ever-after ending through traditional heterosexual narratives: women find fulfillment and happiness through partnering with a man who is invariably wealthier than and in a position of power over his love interest. He is emotionally cold or distant, though he may warm somewhat with the affection of the right woman. Still, his rough edges remain, reinforcing his masculinity and alluding to the possession of accompanying traits that mark him a worthwhile prize in “patriarchal bargains,” 2   able to provide what is implicitly promised to his love interest in their relationship: protection, financial security, social legitimacy, and companionship. As scholar and romance novelist Catherine Roach notes, one need not be a romance or erotica enthusiast to understand the narrative. “You—we—already are astute and well-informed readers of the romance story,” Roach says. “You know the story inside and out. Even if you don’t read actual romance novels as I do, you sop up this storyline through your daily doses of pop culture and have done so since you were a child.” 3  The romance narrative transcends genres, and even forms of media. Across film, television, and literature, it has become a part of our cultural mythology. As Roland Barthes would say, “it is a message.” 4

Barthes’s conceptualization of cultural myth does much to underscore the function of romance and erotica. These genres, increasingly popular as audiobooks—which, when consumed through headphones, allow for the privacy of Laura Mulvey’s “hermetically sealed world” 5 —naturalize their message: heterosexual love is both the key to happiness and the natural order of things. “The naturalization of the concept is the essential function of myth,” Barthes says, “This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden- if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious- but because they are naturalized . . .Where there is only an equivalence, he [the reader of myth] sees a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship.” 6  The heterosexual pairing has come to signify happiness, fulfillment, and social/cultural success. As a signifier, it is imbued with meaning through the cultural narratives that are reproduced and reinforced ubiquitously. What is left is, analogous to Barthes “passionified roses,” 7  passionified and romanticized compulsory heterosexuality. 

Through romance and erotica narratives, the institution of heterosexuality, with all its attendant imbalances, is mythologized. It is sanitized, depoliticized, and naturalized. Its depoliticization through cultural myth only emphasizes that “Heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution.” 8  Romance and erotica stories are not entirely prescriptive, and are far from without merit. Fans turn to this genre spectrum as an escape and a source of pleasure. Still, no matter how enjoyable or adapted to contemporary milieus, romance-erotica overwhelmingly naturalizes and romanticizes heterosexual partnering. The genre spectrum serves to define success, happiness, and societal, romantic, and sexual fulfillment in heteropatriarchal terms, obscuring possibilities outside of this narrative. The prevalence of the heterosexual romance-erotica narrative contributes to a broad web of normalization that reinforces patriarchal dynamics and a hierarchical gender binary.

Romance and erotica act as powerful agents of compulsory heterosexuality. This holds true across narrative mediums, such as literature, television, and film. Audio, however, carries medium-specific immersive qualities that serve to heighten the subtextual messages of these stories. Audiobooks are often consumed as a solitary experience. They are not amplified over loudspeakers in public settings; rather, listeners use headphones or earbuds—on public transportation, while doing housework, at the gym, or while at work (if the nature of their task allows). This immerses listeners in a perceptive state of isolation analogous to the “hermetically sealed world” Laura Mulvey describes in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey explains that this world “unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy.” 9  Though Mulvey was characterizing the movie-going experience, her words are translatable to this newer form of media consumption. The separation that Mulvey describes is profound when using headphones; sensory isolation is the designed function of the device. 

Lucy Bednar highlights this point in “Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality: Walter J. Ong and Others Revisited.” “Audiences remain variable as always, only now we listen alone, not in the company of others,” Bednar says. “Listening to a book is a private experience for the most part.” 10  Bednar references Erik A. Havelock’s study of the shift away from print and towards orality in the twentieth century, noting that “the ‘potential of the oral spell’ is reasserting itself ‘after a long sleep.’” 11  Havelock also asserts that the “technologies of communication as they vary exercise a large measure of control over the content of what is communicated.” 12  The technologies of communication associated with audiobooks are layered: digital distribution of audiobooks makes them easily and immediately accessible, as does the ubiquity of smartphones on which they can be downloaded or streamed; earbuds are small enough to be tucked into a pocket or purse, accessible for discrete listening at any time. The ability of this technology to create an auditory analog to Mulvey’s hermetically sealed world, coupled via audiobooks with Havelock’s oral spell, produce as an effect what we may refer to as an aural spell: a sensory separation from the listener’s physical and social environment and total immersion in oral, narrative, auditory media.

The production of audiobooks involves both active performance (theatrically) and unconscious performativity (as theorized by Judith Butler). 13  Most overtly, narrators perform gender as voice actors; they craft gendered characters for audience enjoyment and enhancement of the text. In addition to their interpretive and theatrical skill, narrators bring with them their foundational understanding of gender, hegemonically developed through, in part, narratives such as those they record. Performance (narration) is thus informed by performativity. Narrators’ performances are forged within their gender paradigm. In a hegemonic cycle, narrators exaggerate the gender norms and ideals they have internalized in life—informed, in part, by ubiquitous romance-erotica narratives—to bring characters to life. In turn, in bringing these characters to life, they continue to reinforce the gender norms they have internalized.

Audiobook narrators add a narrative layer to the story they convey. Speaking more generally of the narrative voice, Liv Hausken notes that “A narrator has a voice, and the voice belongs to a person who mediates the story by way of verbal language.” 14   Narration is both an artistic and commercial enterprise. While narrators bring significant characterization to an audiobook, in genre fiction such as romance and erotica they are unlikely to stray far from typical gender norms, which are foundational to romance-erotica genre conventions. Female passivity and agentic male competence and power scaffold romance and erotica. Consistently in romance, wealthy and powerful men provide respite to women who are struggling emotionally and/or financially. Within this genre convention, a male love interest cannot be emasculated by being out-earned by his partner. He is invariably the bread-winner and rescuer in an inequitable power dynamic. Erotica is often characterized by male agency and female compliance. Inexperienced, self-conscious, and naive women find sexual fulfillment when steered by a self-assured, commanding, experienced man, absolving her of any potential judgement that would accompany proactive desire. In both cases, traditional, patriarchal gender norms underpin genre conventions: men are agentic, dominant, and financially autonomous, while women are passive, selfless, nurturing, dependent, and in need of rescue. Part of the appeal of romance stories to voracious consumers is their predictability; a woman will get her happily-ever-after. In erotica, the promise of a steamy tryst is always made good. While the desire to continuously return to this genre is certainly predicated on variance in details, individual characterizations, and new settings, the foundation of the narrative must remain the same: straight, gender normative men and women finding patriarchal fulfillment together.

Narrators cannot stray from or subvert gendered auditory cues too significantly; to do so would disrupt a critical component of the myth. As Lucy Bednar suggests,

The crucial difference between reading a book and listening to one is the additional layer of interpretation provided by the performer who reads the text aloud. When we read a book, we interact directly with the words on the page, interpreting for ourselves what those words convey. However, because an audiobook is read to us, it is to some extent interpreted for us. 15  

The active, commercialized performance of gender serves to further codify gender roles. Immersed in an aural spell, the listener is guided to associate romance and eroticism with vividly disparate gender pairings, exaggerated to allow for auditory distinction. As Marie-Laure Ryan explains in Narrative Across Media: The Language of Storytelling, “Even when they seek to make themselves invisible, media are not hollow conduits for the transmission of messages but material supports of information whose materiality, precisely, “matters” for the type of meanings that can be encoded.” 16

The naturalization of traditionally gendered voices, instantly recognized as man’s or woman’s, erases the true breadth of gender variation possible, vocally and otherwise. Voices operate aurally not only along a gender spectrum, but with greater variance than a simple spectrum allows for. The performance of gendered voices, acted out with exaggerated adherence to patriarchal norms both for easy aural distinction and for alignment with the heterosexual romance narrative, suggests a distinct and complementary binary. This aural coding acts as part of a hegemonic web, shaping the scope of cultural conceptions of gender. Barthes’s assertion that “The naturalization of the concept is the essential function of myth” is upheld by the immersive, traditionally gendered experience of listening to romance and erotica audiobooks. 17

The heteronormative patterns audible in traditional, organically narrated romance and erotica are heightened in audiobooks narrated by virtual voice. Gender dynamics predicated on inequity, power imbalances, abuse, and violence are delivered in relative monotone; no prosodic emphasis indicates that the listener should distinguish scenes of coercion, cruelty, dubious consent, and emotional, physical, or sexual abuse from those of friendship, daily workplace banter, family gatherings, leisure, or childcare. They are a matter of course, naturalized as an unremarkable facet of successful romance and the subsequent happiness and fulfillment it affords. In addition to the loss of emotional variation virtual voice yields, so too does it flatten gender into limited token archetypes, obscuring the vast scope of actual vocal differences among human narrators (and speakers more broadly) even within gendered groups. 

Feminine virtual voice archetypes are all credited as “female narrator,” evidencing the distillation of women into one commodity available for purchase. Clicking through virtual voice audio samples on Audible reveals that under this moniker exists four amalgamated voices for a listener’s pleasure: one youthful and bright, likely in her 20s or 30s, one husky and mature, one accented with British sophistication, and one aurally coded African American, also in her 20s or 30s. Women are commodified, dehumanized, and repackaged for consumption, further muting women’s agency and personhood and positioning women, first and foremost, as limited tropes that fit neatly within (and serve to uphold) a patriarchal framework. Male virtual voices are similarly simplified, and further naturalize a stark, false binary when aurally juxtaposed with female virtual voices.

The commodification of women through virtual voice narration is layered. Virtual voice narrators are not spontaneously generated. They arise from AI trained on vast amounts of human speech, much of which has been harvested from professional narrators without their consent.This raises issues not only of intellectual and creative property, but of bodily autonomy. The voice is a deeply embodied part of the self. “Human voices possess a specific quality,” Rodero and Lucas explain in “Synthetic vs human voices in audiobooks: The human emotional intimacy effect.” “The speaker’s body is completely involved in generating it. This means that when we hear it, we listen to the sound and the body that produces it.” 18  The appropriation of something so embodied for resale without consent constitutes a gross breach of bodily autonomy, unethical professional conduct, and egregious, dehumanizing commodification of women and workers. The industry practices behind the creation of virtual voices for romance and erotica audiobooks mirror the audiobooks’ textual content in a dark twist of narratology. Consent is assumed, power is wielded exploitatively, and women are used for whatever purpose is most advantageous.

Romance and erotica audiobooks narrated by virtual voice are often on the extreme edges of fetishization. A cursory search of popular selections on Audible reveals titles such as Bro’s Locker Room Secret, Mountain Daddy’s Good Girl (a human-cow fetish story), Shemale Mind Control Sex Cruise, Knocking Up the Nanny (a barely-legal breeding fantasy), and Captivated by a Savage (a story largely predicated on a stoic but violent Black man’s inability to feel pain). I will discuss the latter two in detail, but many reveal that the recent explosion in virtual voice narration has enabled a preponderance of content which uses kink and niche fetishes as excuses to dredge up and eroticize offensive stereotypes. 19

Knocking up the Nanny by Madison Laine (2024) tells the story of Simone, a virginal but naughty college student living with her parents. Simone fantasizes about spicing up her heretofore nonexistent sex life and sets her sight on Jacob, a sexy, forty-something, single father and neighbor who occasionally hires her to babysit his young son, Scott. Simone aggressively but coyly avails herself for seduction, and Jacob does not fail to pursue her as desired. The audiobook is 36 minutes long, intended to be enjoyed in one erotic sitting. Titillation is prioritized over characters’ depth or arcs, and the story is densely packed with erotic taboos.

Throughout the story, Simone’s youth and inexperience are emphasized. These qualities largely serve as a backdrop against which her “naughtiness” can stand out. The first lines of the audiobook describe Simone in the throes of a “naughty dream she shouldn't be having.” She is “inexperienced,” but is plotting to arouse an older man. Simone experiences a thrill at donning a short skirt, but has cold feet about being so uncharacteristically exposed. Simone’s innocence allows her character to typify a classic fantasy: voraciously available for the protagonist’s conquest without the baggage of having been available for anyone else. The male ego is stroked through the narrative that it is him alone who has stirred sexual desire and availability in the girl. She remains a virgin to the world, a whore to him.

This serves as more than flattery to the man; through normative heterosexual sex, he is able to exercise dominance over his partner. Freud speaks to the psychological web at work in male eroticization of degrading women through sex. He positions this degradation as a subconscious tactic in differentiating the immediate sexual object from the man’s true loves and objects of desire formed in infancy, thereby circumventing the incest-barrier: “The principal means of protection used by men against this complaint consists in lowering the sexual object in their own estimation.” 20  Conversely and complementarily, Freud suggests that “Women show little need to degrade the sexual object,” but instead are drawn to what is forbidden, the connection between eroticism and the now taboo incestuous desire formed in infancy inextricable. 21  Simone’s dynamic with Jacob allows them each to fulfill Freud’s theory of desire. Simone’s thrill at the prospect of seducing her off-limits neighbor is rooted in its disallowance. His position of power over her—as a significantly older man, as her boss—and his snide coercion during sex degrade Simone as his object of desire. “As soon as the sexual object fulfills the condition of being degraded,” Freud says, “sensual feeling can have free play, considerable sexual capacity and a high degree of pleasure can be developed.” 22  

The majority of romance and erotica consumers are women; this degradation is served to the population it denigrates. While the theme of degradation could be framed within the context of kink and enjoyment, in Knocking up the Nanny it also serves the subtler purpose of naturalizing degradation as a requisite facet of heterosexual sex and heterosexual eroticism more generally. This is meaningful insofar as it aligns with a pattern of power imbalances in romance and erotic stories, and the cultural heterosexual romance narrative.

The dynamic of virginal whore and instructive, experienced man is expanded in Knocking up the Nanny as the story unfolds. Simone’s revealing outfit and alluring demeanor spark Jacob’s interest, and when she tells him “you can do more than look” upon his return home from a night out, Jacob “wanted to do more than look, but was considering whether that was a good idea considering their age difference.” As he gives in to his arousal, Jacob chastises, “you know this is wrong,” as though the responsibility is hers alone. Simone revels in the exhilaration of her fantasy coming to life, “the thrill of an older man wanting her nubile body.” Simone’s insistent sexual availability in the face of Jacob’s perfunctory protestations enables male prowess and sexual impunity without any ethical culpability. She seduced him, but only with fervent availability, not experience or dominance that would undermine his superiority and authority. Knocking up the Nanny takes an even more troubling turn when Jacob eroticizes his desire to impregnate Simone. “You’re not going to make me wear that, are you? Scott would love a sister,” Jacob says when Simone offers him a condom. “You don’t have to,” Simone responds, again allowing a dismissal of culpability from her adult boss. Simone “felt the shock of getting so excited by his suggestion. He wanted her tight, fertile vagina. It was clear he had a hunger to fill it with his seed . . . She knew she was at his mercy.”

In Knocking up the Nanny, Simone is attractive because she encapsulates so many feminine roles concurrently. She is childlike, sexually available, submissive, and potentially childbearing. Significantly, the use of virtual voice in the audiobook underscores Simone’s lack of real personhood. The story is delivered in a not-quite human monotone, lacking the prosody that clarifies intent and meaning. Without the aspect of language that deals with the rhythm, stress, and intonation of words in a sentence, Simone (and by association, all women) is dehumanized. Virtual voice narration emphasizes that Simone is composed only of roles of feminine service. She has no other human experience or interiority that Jacob or the listener need concern themselves with. 

Emma Rodero and Ignacio Lucas address AI narration’s lack of prosody in their 2023 article “Synthetic versus human voices in audiobooks: The human emotional intimacy effect.” They note that “synthetic voices are not yet as expressive as human voices,” which are “more suitable for emotional communication.” 23  What does it mean that virtual voice erotica such as Knocking up the Nanny are unsuitable for communicating emotion by design? Knocking up the Nanny relays sex acts, submissive feminine behavior, and male dominance without any emotional context or repercussions. Indeed, while romance and erotica are specifically well suited for audiobook adaptation, virtual voice narration is well suited to lessen the emotional impact of ethically dubious material while still acting as an agent of gender hegemony. The medium here cannot be dismissed as an unimportant vehicle by which to deliver a fantasy. The dark twist of narratology, industry, and production mirroring content is evident. Both virtual voice narration and the textual content of Knocking up the Nanny rely on naturalized dehumanization to normalize the sexual and bodily subservience of a teenage girl to her adult boss. 

In “Coda: Textual Theory and blind Spots in Media Studies,” Hausken cautions against medium blindness: “A text exists by necessity in a particular medium. A specific text analysis shouldn’t therefore neglect the medium in question. The analytical challenge is thus to develop an acute sense of the difference between textual and medial conditions.” 24  The medial conditions of Knocking up the Nanny are a crucial factor in its narrative, layering elements to optimize erotic pleasure and minimize ethical or humanizing concerns. While Knocking up the Nanny’s textual content would remain the same across any medium, the ideological emphasis—the dehumanization of women and the numbing of emotional or ethical response—is heightened through delivery via prosodically neutral virtual voice. This highlights the need to pay special attention to virtual voice audiobooks as an emerging form. The insidiousness and subtlety with which emotional and ethical concerns are muted distinguish virtual voice audiobooks from those that are organically narrated. Virtual voice’s increasing usage enables the depoliticization and naturalization of misogynistic tropes and patriarchal power imbalances, among other ideological signifiers.

Jade Jones’ Captivated by a Savage (2024), also narrated by virtual voice, similarly obscures personhood and ethical complexities. The hot and heavy love affair between Hollywood starlet Evelyn Fairchild and bad boy assassin-cum-nightclub owner Savage takes place in a context of extreme violence. Though both aspirationally wealthy, Evelyn and Savage are enmeshed in rough and tumble subcultures. Neither come from money—she’s achieved celebrity as an actress, and he’s made his fortune as an entrepreneur and assassin—and the charmed glamour of their lives is belied by the chaos in which they are still enmeshed. 

Violence against women is commonplace in the book, as is gruesome murder. Savage is portrayed in exaggerated accordance with black male stereotypes: he is strong, but animalistically unfeeling. This is evidenced through his lack of emotional commitment to Evelyn, as well as through congenital analgesia, an inability to feel physical pain. Savage’s analgesia allows him to endure fistfights and take bullets in stride, but also calls back to a history of dehumanizing characterizations of black men in both popular fiction and popular media. Savage exemplifies the Buck trope, which Donald Boggle summarizes as “aggressive, pistol-packing, sexually-charged urban cowboys.” 25  He notes that in the 1970s, “old stereotypes resurfaced, simply dressed in new garb to look modern, hip, provocative, and politically ‘relevant.’” 26  In a continuation of this pattern, Savage serves as a Buck stylistically updated for the 21st century. 

Likewise, Evelyn and her friends exemplify a variety of denigrating cultural stereotypes of black women: superficial, gold-digging, and hyper-sexual. David Pilgrim explains the lasting Jezebel stereotype and the ways in which it differentiates black femininity from white: “The portrayal of black women as lascivious by nature is an enduring stereotype . . . Historically, white women, as a category, were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty—even sexual purity, but black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory. This depiction of black women is signified by the name Jezebel.” 27  Evelyn and her close group of girlfriends are all similarly painted in contrast to contemporary genteel whiteness; their wealth is new, their sexual appetites voracious, their behavior wild, and their tempers hot. Referencing 17th century European travelers, Pilgrim goes on to observe that “The genesis of anti-black sexual archetypes emerged from the writings of these and other Europeans: the black male as brute and potential rapist; the black woman, as Jezebel whore,” 28  stereotypes that are naturalized as vividly in Captivated by a Savage as they were at their inception.

All of this (in addition to the dominant/submissive and childlike woman/adult male dynamics also seen in Knocking up the Nanny) is relayed by virtual voice with no inflection, differentiation, or emphasis. Sex, abuse, and ultra-violence are communicated as depersonalized. This muting of emotional and ethical variation serves to further dehumanize the characters, reducing them to their exaggerated gender roles. Adrienne Rich describes the messaging of similar dynamics in heterosexual pornography, noting that in such texts

enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually ‘normal,’ while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is ‘queer," ‘sick,"’ and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage. Pornography does not simply create a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable; it widens the range of behavior considered acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse… 29

The pornography Rich references includes real, human actors. Captivated by a Savage takes the eroticization of violence Rich describes to the extreme, and layers-in additional dehumanization. The subtly inhuman narration registers no shock at the increasingly gruesome scenes, nor communicates any criticism of the consistently abusive heterosexual relationships. The romantic and erotic narrative, as Rich asserts, widens the range of behavior considered acceptable on the part of men to include murder, manipulation, abuse of all kinds, and utter commodification of women; the vehicle of virtual voice’s monotone for delivery communicates that not only should this behavior be acceptable, it should warrant no emotional reaction at all.

The implications of increasing virtual voice narration in erotica become chillingly clear through the lens of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulations.” Baudrillard explains that when simulacra precede the real, “it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there.” 30  Virtual voice narration, being digitally manufactured, serves as even more literal simulacra than organically performed and produced audiobooks. Certainly, the gendered blueprints upon which human narrators base their performances are internalized unconsciously. But the subsequent crafting of exaggeratedly gendered voices to deliver and enhance romance-erotica narratives echoes Baudrillard’s characterization of Disneyland: “This imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation.” 31  The Disneyland version of heteropatriarchal dynamics romance-erotica audiobooks present, marketed as escapist, aspirational fantasies, obscure the fact that compulsory heterosexuality, replete with the need for the patriarchal bargains described by Deniz Kandiyoti and cited earlier in this article, are in fact the cultural law of the land. 

To explore this analogy further: Disney’s song “It’s a Small World” presents a paradigm of uncomplicated multicultural unity. Its lyrics obscure realities of systemic oppression, war, and exploitation. But it is the ride “It’s a Small World” that is so fantastical, so sensorily over the top that it “functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral).” 32  Analogous to the song, romance-erotica texts hold up a sanitized and simplified framing of heteropatriarchy that serves as a hegemonic tool; these books affirm romantic, sexual, heterosexual bonding as both aspirational and normal. It is romance-erotica audiobooks, with their manufactured sensory overlay of aurally gendered caricatures, that, just as Disneyland does, hide the realities they present so openly. Through romance-erotica audiobooks, with their attendant hyper-normative aural gendering, the heteropatriarchal narrative “makes itself look neutral and innocent.” 33  This supposed innocence is further implied through virtual voice narration. Removal of the human element affirms the illusion of the absence of a bad actor; the computer generated lack of prosody reads as objective and neutral. Though often less enjoyable to listen to than organic narration, the heightened neutrality and innocence of virtual voice makes it a uniquely insidious agent of heteropatriarchal hegemony; its effects are hidden behind a veil of innocence, even as it helps shape our cultural understanding of gender.

The immediacy of audiobook production made possible by virtual voice narration allows for exponential growth and popularity of this format, increasingly normalizing the dehumanization of women, erasing gender variance, and perpetuating compulsory heterosexuality. The role of the medium in this case is critical; it is one with the narrative, shaping the meaning and the experience of the text. Analysis here requires an interdisciplinary approach; existing media and literary studies as well as feminist and gender theory scholarship prove valuable when turning a critical eye towards this rapidly popularizing form. Hausken’s warning against medium blindness and Barthes’s conceptualization of myth are both usefully cautionary: “Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message.” 34  As this article has argued, virtual voice narrated romance and erotic audiobooks convey patriarchal norms dressed in palatably modernized settings with inhuman detachment, invisibly limiting perceived possibilities outside of normative heterosexuality and a gender binary. No medium has full control of the consumer; an audiobook listener is not passively or immediately indoctrinated into the ideologies underscored by the medium. Still, the heteropatriarchal romance narrative is a powerful one that has long acted as a cultural cornerstone. Virtual voice holds the power to contribute to the normalization of heteropatriarchal power imbalances and a rigidly constructed gender binary. Active analysis of virtual voice audiobooks is critical to understanding their potential impact and acknowledging their role as a new medium.

Footnotes

• 1

  Liv Hausken, “Coda: Textual Theory and blind Spots in Media Studies” in Narrative across Media: The Language of Storytelling, Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 391.

• 2

  Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society, vol. 2, no. 3 (1988): 274.

• 3

  Catherine Roach, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 2016), 10.

• 4

  Roland Barthes, “Myth Today” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Edited by John Story (Pearson Education Limited, 2006), 293.

• 5

  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford UP, 1999), 806.

• 6

  Barthes, “Myth Today,” 300.

• 7

  Barthes, “Myth Today,” 295.

• 8

  Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Journal of Women's History, Volume 15, Number 3 (2003).

• 9

  Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 806.

• 10

  Lucy Bednar, “Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality: Walter J. Ong and Others Revisited,” CEA Critic, vol. 73, no. 1 (2010), 76.

• 11

  Bednar, “Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality,” 74.

• 12

  Bednar, “Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality,” 74.

• 13

   See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990). 

• 14

   Hausken, “Coda: Textual Theory and blind Spots in Media Studies,” 394.

• 15

   Bednar, “Audiobooks and the Reassertion of Orality,” 77.

• 16

  Marie-Laure Ryan, “Introduction” in Narrative across Media: The Language of Storytelling, Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 1.

• 17

  Barthes, “Myth Today,” 300.

• 18

  E. Rodero & I Lucas, “Synthetic versus human voices in audiobooks: The human emotional intimacy effect.” New Media & Society, 25 (2023). 

• 19

  While the true possible scope of kink and sexual interests is vast, many of these virtual voice audiobooks skew specifically towards framings that align with racist, misogynistic, and transphobic stereotypes. Rather than healthfully explore the scope of human sexual experience, these texts pathologize and co-opt kink for the purposes of maintaining a status quo. Stereotypes in the works are so exaggerated that subtler, more everyday biases seem harmless in comparison.

• 20

  Sigmund Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” Translated by Joan Riviere, First published in Jahrbuch, Bd. IV (1912), 4. 

• 21

   Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.” 4.

• 22

  Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.” 4.

• 23

  Rodero and Lucas, “Synthetic versus human voices in audiobooks: The human emotional intimacy effect.”

   

• 24

  Hausken, “Coda: Textual Theory and blind Spots in Media Studies,” 397.

• 25

  Donald Boggle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1973), 232.

• 26

  Boggle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks, 232.

• 27

  David Halperin, “The Jezebel Stereotype,” Jim Crow Museum, https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/jezebel/index.htm.

• 28

  Halperin, “The Jezebel Stereotype.”

• 29

  Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 31, italics in original.

• 30

  Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations” in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford University Press, 1988), 170.

• 31

  Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation,” 170.

• 32

  Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation,” 170.

• 33

  Barthes, “Myth Today,” 298.

• 34

  Barthes,. “Myth Today,” 293.