Erotica, but Not as You Know It With Carly Pifer
For many of us, especially those who identify as women or vulva owners, Our arousal doesn't get sparked simply by the visual. It's the tease, the setup, the anticipation that gets us going to be intellectually stimulated. Enter erotica, but not as you know it. I'm so excited in this episode to introduce you to Carly Pifer. The founder and editor in chief of Aurore. Aurore is a modern literary erotica site that shares real sex stories written by women and queer people. Aurore is designed to turn you on and help others get turned on through sharing true stories of people's sexual experiences.
Aurore is an inclusive feminist space for modern, relatable, and honest erotica. Carly works one-on-one with the writers to draw out their most intimate experiences through a cathartic, enlightening process that is so much fun to read. In this episode, we explore the fascinating origin story of Aurore, the difference between reading and watching porn, the importance of long-form erotica, the therapeutic benefit of writing your own stories, how reading other's experiences can enhance your own, and so much more.
In this episode, you'll learn:
Origin Story of Aurore
Reading real stories & questioning your conditioning
How Aurore is different from visual porn
Enhancing your own experience through Aurore
This podcast is for YOU, so if you ever have any questions you’d like me to answer on the show, or topics you’d like me to cover – reach out to me on email here or over on instagram @eleanorhadley
Links & Resources
Join the Embodied Course: Waitlist
To work with me 1:1 head to eleanorhadley.com/work-with-me
Read Aurore: https://readaurore.com/
Aurore Erotica IG @readaurore
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Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to Episode 46 of The Sensuality Academy Podcast. I am so happy to have you here. Since we discuss all things Taboo here in The Sensuality Academy Podcast I want to ask you, How do you feel about Porn? If you are anything like me, mainstream porn can feel a little bit too jarring sometimes, too in your face and lacking in real authentic connection. I feel that sometimes visual porn can create unrealistic expectations of what sex looks like of whose pleasure is prioritised and the actual pace of the sexual encounter.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with porn, ethical porn, that is. There is a lot wrong with unethical porn absolutely. Like with everything in life different things will appeal to different people. For many of us, our arousal doesn’t get sparked simply by the visual; often it’s the tease, the setup, the anticipation that gets us going. To be intellectually stimulated and to take your time is what works best for most of us. Especially for those who identify as women or are vulva owners. Enter erotica but not as you know it. I am so excited in this episode to introduce you to Carly Pifer. The founder and editor in chief of Aurore. Aurore is a modern literary erotica site that shares real sex stories written by women and queer people. Aurore is designed to turn you on and help others get turned on through sharing true stories of people's sexual experiences. Which is pretty steamy.
Aurore is an inclusive feminist space for modern, relatable, and honest erotica. Carly works one-on-one with the writers to draw out their most intimate experiences through a cathartic, enlightening process that is so much fun to read. In our chat, in this episode, we explore the fascinating origin story of Aurore, how reading is different to watching porn, the importance of long-form erotica, the therapeutic benefit of writing your own stories, how reading other's experiences can enhance your own, and so much more.
If you are intrigued check out the links in the episode description and the shownotes to learn more or head to https://readaurore.com/ and find them over on Instagram as well @readaurore you will not regret it.
Ok my loves, enjoy today’s episode.
ELEANOR: Welcome to The Sensuality Academy Podcast Carly, it’s such a pleasure to have you here.
CARLY: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
ELEANOR: Tell us all about the inspiration to create Aurore.
CARLY: There are so many different ways to tell how Aurore was conceived. Initially it came out of a trip that I took around Europe, 5 years ago and I had always been a writer focus on sex writing in a lot of different venues and I was unemployed and I wanted to feel purposeful with my travelling. I decided to go on Tinder dates and wanted to interview people about sex & dating in their culture. I didn’t know what to expect. I was very open minded. It was different than dating because I had an agenda. I wasn’t trying to meet somebody to fall in love with. I was trying to get to know people which is different to how a lot of people approach dating normally. What transpired on these dates was really a beautiful thing where we both opened up to each other and escalated intimacy. For our first date we were talking about really intense things and I didn’t tell them before the date that I was going to do this. Once I got this I was like “hey, i’m doing this thing are you willing to participate?” I was dating all straight men and I had to say they were so willing to talk about feelings and their desires and their lives. I think that they don’t get to talk about this enough. Our dates were super intimate, conversation and that inevitably led to sex on a lot of these dates. I wanted to write the story of this but I couldn’t really figure out a place to pitch these stories that would allow me to talk about the conversations we had while also getting into some of the more erotic details. That’s one pathway in, at the same time I live in NYC, so I’m an American citizen and it was the Trump campaign presidency and this was really a difficult thing for every woman in the world to witness. All the allegations, all the things that he has said about women, all the things that he has done to women and watching this person become the most powerful person in the world. Which is so scary and disillusioning. I wanted to create a space online that was celebrating sex because it felt like everything in the new was about how sex is weaponised, sex is assult, rape. All these things are prevalent in our society and I think that it started to seep into a lot of women’s heads and he like aah, I dont feel good about sex, I don’t feel good about having sex with men. I wanted to create a space where we could write the stories that were good and while also acknowledging that it is not always good. Making it relatable to stories because they are real, making the details honest and sincere and talking about insecurities, talking about growth and challenges in our sexuality. Those two moments for me merged into this baby and here we are a couple of years after I initially launched the site. I was one of the first original contributors but since then we have over 70 different writers on the site, from all over the world. It’s super cool.
ELEANOR: That is probably one of the most interesting founding stories. I am so intrigued about these dates that you went on. I’m so happy to hear that these men were open to sharing their experiences, that’s so incredible. Can you share with us some of the questions that you asked to get this going?
CARLY: ALot of my questions were lifted from the 36 Questions that Lead to Love.
ELEANOR: I’ve done that on a second date before.
CARLY: How did it go?
ELEANOR: I came really close to falling in love with him, it’s incredibly intimate and it’s really a powerful thing to do. I recommend it to every single one of my clients.
CARLY: It really is. That is something that I borrow in intimacy workshops. Asking people about their most recent relationship, what went wrong, how they have been hurt by people. There were questions that were related to their emotional life and also sexual interest - have you experimented with the same sex, do you indentify as straight, what time of day is your favourite to have sex and another one i was curious about especially in Europe I had a fantasy of French women without shaving their armpits then they don’t worry too much about body hair but the one thing that was consistent throughout every person I asked was that they preferred hairless. I was disappointed to hear that to be honest.
ELEANOR: Dam, my research didn’t go in my favour.
CARLY: I hope that you don’t mind because you are going to experience the opposite.
ELEANOR: My opinion, if you have the opportunity to be in the territory you should really laugh it up.
CARLY: 100%, I agree. This brings me back to what is so important about Aurore is that we are all so conditioned by what we have seen as what’s beautiful and sexy. In the 70s a full bush was sexy and attractive on women because that was the style at the time. I really challenge people, do you know what you really like or do you like what you’ve been told?
ELEANOR: That’s a huge one for me as well in my work. I always talk about questioning your conditioning and I have recently been talking with my students about performative vs embodied femininity and are we doing things like shaving our armpits, or waxing or wearing makeup, all these things. Are we doing these things because it’s a place of desire or actually enjoying that which is absolutely possible or are we doing it because there is this expectation that’s how we are meant to be presenting especially in order to be desired? So many people crave being desired but under what sort of conditions?
CARLY: Yeah, it’s both ways. People involved in relationships are bringing all of that expectation and insecurity to it and it’s no wonder there are so many missed connections, misunderstandings.
ELEANOR: Absolutely. Tell us how is Aurore different to Porn?
CARLY: Just like we are talking about right now, thinking about the type of bodies that you see in pornography specifically for women. I think that it’s super challenging to go into a space where you are hoping to be turned on and not a whole lot of bodies that you can relate to. You can put yourself into that space, into that story. I assume that some people are watching porn to insert themselves, while some people are just wanting to observe, that gives you more room. With Aurore stories, we really strive to tell stories from diverse voices and that means body types, everything and I think that with pornography to you can’t always know or control what you are going to see. I personally have had a few moments where I have seen things where I didn’t want to see and couldn’t unsee. There’s a separation with Aurore, everything is really built in your imagination. It’s easy to put a face on one of these characters in a story that belongs to somebody you are attracted to. Whether that is a famous person or somebody in your everyday life or a completely new character. So I think there’s so much possibility with written erotica to exercise your imagination and I think that we all do that when we fanticise about sex. I think that reading erotica is a way to work that muscle of erotica fantasizing which is a really healthy thing. Even on porn sites, the Ads on the side bars, I find those things so terrifying.
ELEANOR: So intense. Oh my gosh, I know I’m on a porn site but far out.
CARLY: Yeah. It can really kill the mood for me. When I'm in a sexy mood I want to go into a space that is more elevated, where I feel like beautiful places, and beautiful things. I want that feeling around me. I want a website that can cater to that desire. I think that alot of women agree, it doesn’t feel like visual pornography isn’t built for women. Of course there are a lot of women who do enjoy it and I think that is great too but I think that there should be more options for different interests that stray from that extremely graphic porn that is popularised.
ELEANOR: Absolutely. I think that so often we see the world, especially pornography and sexuality through the lens of the male gaze, men tends to be more visual. Where women tend to be, I know this is not the rule but we think more in our head, we visualise and create that narrative which is important to get us aroused, our arousal does take time. I noticed in your submission requirements for Aurore that you say that you would like them to be 1000 - 3000 words. Can you explain your reasoning behind that?
CARLY: I think that even 1000 words feels a little abrupt, it doesn’t really get you in the zone. I don’t know how people are using these stories, i imagine that they use them as a warm up for intimacy with themself or self intimacy. Once you are in the zone, you don’t want it to end too soon so there’s a window which I think is around 2000 - 3000 words where you are getting a lot of back story and getting a lot of good stuff but you are not getting bored yet, also feeling that it is not too short. Of course novelling erotica is very popular but I don’t know if there's a way to do that with non-fiction writing. I feel like most full length novels are romance or erotica, eg: Fifty Shades of Gray, that is a super unrelatable fantasy and there's definitely something to be said for wanting that escape in this amazing life that you can never have but can dream about. Aurore stories are really meant to feel more like one of your friends did this thing and is retelling it to you. Or there’s an investigation, a turn on if a woman wants to understand where that is coming from and maybe she is uncomfortable with it but also sharing that interest with her. I think that there is a sweet spot for length for sure.
ELEANOR: It’s so interesting to compare. I know that visual porn is created with the algorithm in mind. They set it up scene by scene based on the history of people scrolling. BUffering until they skip ahead to the right bit where the action is happening. Again, it’s visually in your face, it’s quite horrific but in my work with a lot of women they often express to me that it takes them so long and they feel frustrated. I just had a call with some students last week and quite a few of them were getting frustrated because it takes me so long and with their male partners it’s so quick for them to be aroused and so quick to orgasm. The problem I think is that we make ourselves wrong for not coming really soon like our male counterparts. I think that we see that mirrored in visual porn and I think that it’s so important to be creating something that does take that time into consideration, we can warm up, we can gently move into our arousal and not see it as something that doesn’t need to be rushed.
CARLY: Absolutely, I think that some of our Queer stories on this site, having additional sexual scripts or how to enter into foreplay, insertion is not always the end goal in alot of these stories and we talk in the beginning. Is there anything off limits, anything TMI? My partner who is a great man who is a reader or Aurore of course I put out this Queer story a few months, it was this intensive oral stimulation story, cunnilingus story, that the way she was moving her hands, was super specific, so well outlined in this story in a lovely way to read of course. Later after that story came outI realised that he was actually following these stats from this story. I thought that it was hilarious. I was like ‘where are you doing what was in the story?’ he said ‘yeah’. More importantly these stories are giving actual education of how to please another person which is something you don’t get in porn. You can see, like you said, you get a glimpse of how some things might look but you don’t get the descriptions of how it’s happening which I think I can be so helpful for people.
ELEANOR: That’s such a good point, I love that, you are so right, so many people vilafile porn because it’s not Sex Education but because we aren’t getting adequate sex education there are using that. I love that reading about an experience, a description, that provides us with almost this template , a blueprint of ideas that we can try ourselves but also the stories talk about how it feels as well. When you are looking at visual porn you don’t really know besides the noises that they make, the faces that they make and you can assume that that they feel good but it’s a lot of acting. This is real stories talking about how things really feel.
CARLY: Yeah and I would say another difference between Aurore and a lot of visual porn is that you can rest assured that a lot of the participants in an Aurore story are enthusiastically consenting to this experience because they are based on true stories and positive stories. I think that ethically that’s always a feeling that I’ve had with visual porn. Do the people on this video want to be there? Are they enjoying this? This doesn’t put me in the mood thinking about people not wanting to participate in this video. I think there is a power knowing what you are consuming is ethical and all the writers wanted to share this with the world. It’s a beautiful thing.
ELEANOR: You are incredibly right. I have such fear about the porn industry because it seems to be getting more extreme and there’s a lot more awareness now that a lot of porn is unethical. To be able to have access to something that we know is consensual, is ethical, that is honest. People are really realising now how important that is because in the past it wasn’t in our awareness at all. There is something I would like to ask you as well. I’m sure you get quite a lot of submissions - have you noticed any themes in particular that come up, what can you take from these themes and submissions that you can see that is happening within peoples sex lives at large. Is there anything in particular that comes up?
CARLY: One thing that has been pointed out when i bring in interns I ask them to read through the catalog and is there anything that feels redundant, do we have too many stories of a certain thing? Lately, my intern pointed out that a lot of the stories were about you meet somebody that is a stranger, one night stand type thing or you don’t know each other and then we have this amazing sex. I think that often is what people think of when I say your best sex stories. It’s like these stories that happened with people that you never formed a relationship with. You had this intense connection, you had a little affair and it was that. Those are the ones that people look back on in a very wistful way. Enough to write about them. Other than that, I wouldn’t say I notice any particular trends other than when we do get submissions from straight men there are always really bad. We only have one story that is written by a straight man and it’s called Quick & Quiet and it’s actually about his wife after she has given birth, how sexy and in love with her he is. It’s really beautiful. That’s the kind of story that I aim to tell on Aurore. Pregnant and Postpartum women are still sexy, sexual beings and desirable and I want to show that. That is not something you will get in alot of pornography.
ELEANOR: That’s so beautiful, I know that a lot of my listeners are those that have had children. I think that is such a beautiful thing for them to see themselves in erotica because I can imagine they could be left out so much in that conversation of that area. So many women are made to feel like they are no longer sexual beings despite the fact that they have have had sex to create a human. That’s the Madonna-Whore complex isn’t it?
CARLY: Yeah, I think that the power in Aurore is being able to tell our own stories and change those ideas at least within our own world because you can write something into being and all the stories are meant to based on true stories, real events but I always tell people that they can write a story that they wish have gone differently, you can rewrite the ending to another story, what they wish they had done or write a fantasy. If a fantasy is real then it’s a fantasy that’s possible to have in the world then by all means tell that story of how it would go and maybe that helps people develop their fantasies and pursue them in more real ways as well.
ELEANOR: Yeah, I think that is really powerful. Instead of looking outwards, thinking that this is something that couldn’t happen or only happens to people who look like this or that, really upsetting yourself, feeling like there’s a possibility to have these types of experiences. What do you think is the impact of reading vs watching erotica?
CARLY: I feel like we touched on similar ideas earlier but the encouragement to try new things and try them on yourself there are also several masterbation scenes in stories, there’s new ways to do that. I feel like more than reading it the ability to write erotica and your sexual experiences is truly pivotal and really altering for so many aspects of your sexual life, for instance, communication. The ability to put down in words, describing your own body, how things are moving and navigating in bed with another person. It makes it easier to say those things in real life , to say what you want. In so many ways you write that into being and when you are writing an erotic scene you have this memory of how it went but you start to really think about the mechanics, how your body moves, what are you doing when that happened. I think to really break it down like that, it makes you a more focused lover when you are having sex later, you are focusing on these details and you are thinking how you’re can make a better story, every sexual experience becomes this possiblity to make it into an epic if you wish. It makes you more connected to your body and to your pleasure and more intune with how your partner is responding and engaging with you.
ELEANOR: I love that, I love the idea of writing about your experiences being therapeutic and being educational in a way. I know that you host writing workshops. Is this what it really is about, getting in tune with your own desires?
CARLY: Absolutely. One of the workshop exercises we do every time is this visualisation where you put yourself in front of a mirror and describe your own body in a loving way, as you are looking at yourself from a lover, seeing yourself as sexy and desirable. It’s a challenge for people to do that but i think it’s a really good way to get in touch with yourself and appreciate your body and sexuality and putting that down in writing makes it real. You write loving things to yourself, that’s in the universe now, it sticks.
ELEANOR: So beautiful. It’s interesting because recently I was working 1-on-1 with a client and throughout our sessions she was reminiscing about past sexual experiences that she had, she also at another point mentioned that she really missed writing. I often give my clients homework and the first thing that came to mind is how about you start writing and if you are feeling really good about it send it to Aurore.
CARLY: Did she submit it yet?
ELEANOR: I don’t think she submitted it yet but I am going to keep on top of it to see how it’s going.
CARLY: I think that it really is better to know that there are people reading your story, that’s really affirming and knowing people are using your experiences to inspire their own. It’s great, I can’t wait. You will have to let me know when she submits it so I can get specialised.
ELEANOR: I absolutely love it, she will be stocked. I really love what Aurore is all about and it’s been such a pleasure to have you on. You are doing incredible work and it’s such a beautiful space. Thank you so much for sharing.
CARLY: SO are you. I am so happy to be here. This has been a really nice conversation. Thank you so much for your time in doing the work that you do.
ELEANOR: My absolute pleasure. I will put some links in the show notes, the episode description so that people can find Aurore, start reading, start feeling super sexy and maybe even come to one of your workshops and submit themselves.
CARLY: I hope so.
ELEANOR: Thank you so much Carly.
