Slow-motion porn can look like something totally different than human beings having sex. Individual ripples of flesh look like rolling waves. Fluids fly through the air along gravity-defying trajectories. Ordinary sexual acts look like the zoomed-in, high-def scenes from a nature documentary.

In an age of endless, rapidly streaming online porn, a group of slow-motion porn enthusiasts are going the other way, and getting off on decelerated, hyper-focused erotica. While it remains a niche preference, slow-motion porn has been enjoying a not-so-slow rise to the top. Since 2013, search queries on Pornhub for slow-motion porn have surged by 115 percent. The most popular videos feature cumshots, breasts bouncing extra slowly, high-definition anal penetration, blowjobs, and, of course, squirting.

The emphasis on pleasure is hard to ignore—an orgasm in slow motion can be stretched out ten-fold. In real-time porn, these genuine orgasmic moments are infrequent, says Shaka McGlotten, an anthropologist and associate professor of media at SUNY Purchase. “So people are taking those tiny, super-hot, interesting moments and slowing those down … The moment of reaction to penetration, [or] the slow-motion cumshot.”

Slow-motion porn is made in a variety of ways. Amateurs can use the slo-mo function on their smartphones, filming then uploading their NSFW videos online. The profession porn industry has also taken note; there are a handful of mainstream porn studios, most notably Brazzers, producing slow-motion porn using extremely high-quality cameras.

“Essentially, once we had the ability to film in slow-motion it was a no-brainer to at least experiment with it,” Brazzers senior script writer, Mick M., who has penned multiple slow-motion scenes, told Vocativ over email. “Sometimes viewers (given it is porn) just want to watch an ass shaking in slow motion,” added Ryan Hogan, the company’s production manager.

Amber Chase is a veteran porn actress and former art student who has been creating and uploading slo-mo porn to her six-year-old Pornhub channel for the past year. At first, she used an inexpensive video editing program to slow down old high-performing videos, but since her slo-mo video edits began outperforming her real-time speed porn, she has decided to take it a step further. Chase’s fans had responded so positively to scenes she slowed down, calling them, she recalls, “beautiful” and “intense,” that she decided to invest in a 4K camera capable of shooting extremely high-definition slow-motion porn. She plans on shooting high-definition slow-motion porn in the near future, and will continue editing and reuploading past videos in slo-mo for the time being. Aside from the audio slowing, which turns brief moans of pleasure into 12-second stretches of guttural, low-pitch noise, Chase adores the effect of the format, which she describes as hypnotic. “It triggers intrigue,” she said.

While Chase is investing in technology to help her create slow-motion content, there are plenty of amateurs out there who are doing just fine with what they’ve got. At XHamster, a pornographic video-sharing platform, slow-motion porn videos are uploaded at a rate of nearly seventy per month, up 3,300 percent from eight years ago. What’s driving this extreme uptick? The proliferation of smartphones is doubtlessly a primary factor—since now, most people have the technology to produce a slow-motion porn clip right on their bedside tables.

“The iPhone is just something that’s always on hand,” said one 25-year-old amateur slow-motion porn creator, who asked to remain anonymous. He uses Tumblr to share anonymous video footage of himself and his girlfriend having sex in slow motion. “Most of our videos are snippets that I record with an iPhone … I just reach for the nearest one when I think it would be hot to record something.”

“Carol,” a 28-year-old erotic artist and self-described “kinky girl,” has found slow-motion porn GIFs to be both extremely inspiring for her work and a major turn-on. “I like seeing the seeping of fluids and all the delicate parts of sex that are usually lost in the mashing and banging of typical porn,” she told Vocativ over Twitter DM. “It gives me more time to think about how the person fucking or being fucked might feel—the way their body is reacting to being penetrated, licked, tantalized.”

And it makes sense that the format affects Carol’s art. “Slow-motion is historically used to denote something artistic. You slow something down in a movie to show its impact,” said McGlotten, adding that slow-motion porn can specifically draw attention to women. “It’s very rare, at least in terms of porn culture, to find ways to really demonstrate women’s pleasure. So [taking a] squirting video, slowing it down and making it more visible than it otherwise would be, kind of makes something that has been hidden or kept away even more visible.”

Ultimately, it’s this visibility—this extreme, tantalizing exposure of the intricacies of sex and pleasure—that inspires so many to create and watch. “You get to see way more of what I experienced as a physical being than you do as at regular speed,” said Chase, whose journey making slow-motion porn is only beginning. “It’s pretty fucking hot.”