Can sex create world peace?
Cindy Gallop thinks so.
For 12 years, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn has been advocating for better sex.
She is leading the social sex revolution and calling on us all to follow.
BERLINABLE spoke to her about what sex should look like in a post pandemic world.
From our need for physical touch, to the increase in parents buying porn subscriptions for their horny kids.
Cindy Gallop wants us to claim our national sexual identities back and make German love not porn.
Read on to see what that means.
BERLINABLE: So, Cindy Gallop, how did you find your passion for sex and sexuality?
Cindy Gallop: The answer to that is that I didn’t.
I am not doing what I’m doing with MakeLoveNotPorn out of a passion for sex and sexuality.
What I’m doing now was a complete and total accident.
I never consciously and intentionally set out to do anything that I very strangely find myself doing now.
The origin story for MakeLoveNotPorn, is that I date younger men.
I began realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering what happens when two things converge.
I realized I was experiencing what happens when today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex.
When those two things collide, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way.
I didn’t know that, because thirteen years ago nobody was talking about this.
Nobody was writing about this.
So this was me in complete isolation going, “I want to do something about this”.
So purely as a little side venture, I put up a no money, a tiny clunky website at Makelovenotporn.com that in its original version was just words.
The construct was porn world versus real world.
Here’s what happens in the porn world. Here’s what really happens in the real world.
I had the opportunity to launch MakeLoveNotPorn at the TED conference in 2009.
I, Cindy Gallop, became the only TED speaker to say the words “cum on my face” on the TED stage.
So the talk went viral as a result, and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated.
Thousands of people wrote to me from every single country in the world, including Germany.
Everybody, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out.
I realized I’d uncovered a huge global social issue.
So that was what led me to turn MakeLoveNotPorn into Makelovenotporn.tv.
I felt I now had a personal responsibility to take MakeLoveNotPorn forwards, in a way that would make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective.
BERLINABLE: You said that people write to you from around the world, what/why do they write?
Cindy Gallop: I think the thing that most astonished people 12 years ago and what they responded to was that I was the first person to publicly identify that porn was becoming sex education.
I remember one man writing to me 12 years ago.
He poured his heart out about his own issues with porn, his own sex life.
He said at the end of it:
“a measure of how messed up our society is about sex is that I’ve just written all of this to a woman I’ve never met.
She is the first person in my 37 years of life I’ve ever heard speak honestly about all of this”.
Obviously, it’s different now, every day there’s something in the media going, “oh my God, children learning about sex from porn!”
But, 12 years ago, what I said on that TED stage was astonishing to people.
That I think is the first reason.
But the second reason is makelovenotporn.com in its original version, I wrote all the copy.
I think the reason people responded massively to that original website was because it was a manifestation of me.
It was very simple, straightforward, honest, truthful, down to earth, utterly non-judgmental, and it had a sense of humor.
We never get to have conversations about sex within those parameters.
The moment we do, the floodgates open.
That was the same approach I took on to makelovenotporn.tv, because what we are doing is we are socializing and normalizing sex in the real world.
We are bringing it out into the open.
Our website is designed to make it easier to talk openly and honestly about sex.
Everything we design is consciously and intentionally designed to make that happen.
So, for example, when we were building our website, my lead user experience designer said to me “on the Internet, everything to do with sex is dark and black. We’re going to be white”.
So that is why makelovenotporn.tv has a white background on everything.
I want MakeLoveNotPorn to be utterly gender equal and all inclusive.
We are for women, men, trans, non-binary.
Our theme color at MakeLoveNotPorn is orange because that is utterly gender agnostic.
We have a deliberate policy, which is that unless you are actually streaming videos, everything on MakeLoveNotPorn is safe for work.
Our home page is completely safe for work.
That’s because MakeLoveNotPorn is a website where, when anybody sits down next to you, you never have to slam your laptop shut.
That’s part of being social, normal, bringing all of this out into the open.
BERLINABLE: So, it’s like Facebook, if Facebook didn’t ban and censor everything that’s around sex?
Cindy Gallop: ExactIy.
I realized the issue isn’t porn.
The issue is that we don’t talk about sex in the real world.
So I decided to take every dynamic in social media and apply them to this one area no other social network or platform will allow, in order to socialize sex.
At MakeLoveNotPorn our competition isn’t porn it’s Facebook and YouTube.
Or rather, it would be if they allowed you socially, sexually, self-express.
Sex videos on MakeLoveNotPorn, are not about performing for the camera.
They are just about capturing what goes on in the real world as it happens, spontaneously in all its funny, messy, comical, awkward, wonderful, hilarious, beautiful humanness.
We curate to make sure of that.
This is a very important aspect of what we’re doing, because I designed MakeLoveNotPorn around what everybody else should have.
Our curators watch every single video submitted from beginning to end before we approve it.
Nobody else does that.
We review every single comment on every single video before we approve it.
Nobody else does that.
Part of comment curation on MakeLoveNotPorn, is that we ask each of our Stars what kind of comments they do and don’t want to see on their videos.
We will curate comments individually based on what each Star has said they do not want to see.
Which is why:
MakeLoveNotPorn is the safest place on the Internet.
I think it’s very important to contextualize all of this in the landscape of the tech industry as a whole.
The young, white, male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate our lives today are not the primary targets online and offline of harassment.
They do not, and they did not, proactively design for the prevention of any of this on their platforms.
Those of us who are most at risk every single day, women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, the disabled.
We design safe spaces.
We operate unlike anybody else on the Internet. Full stop.
BERLINABLE: If everybody spoke about sex freely, what impact would that have on society?
Cindy Gallop: When I say to people that our mission at MakeLoveNotPorn is this very simple thing: to make it easier for everybody to talk openly and honestly about sex.
People don’t get how massively, profoundly, societally transformative that would be.
I designed MakeLoveNotPorn around my own beliefs and philosophies, one of which is that everything in life starts with you and your values.
So I readily ask people “what are your sexual values?”
And nobody can ever answer me because we’re not taught to think like that.
Our parents bring us up to have good manners, work ethic, a sense of responsibility, accountability.
Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should.
When I say that nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed, they should because in bed, values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, respect are as important as those values are in every other area of our lives where we are actively taught to exercise them.
This is my vision for a world in which MakeLoveNotPorn, achieves our social mission at scale.
Parents will bring their children up not only to have good sexual values and good sexual behavior in the same way the parents currently bring kids up to have the best behavior in every other area of life.
We will therefore cease to bring up rapists, because the only way that you end rape culture is by embedding in society an openly talked about, understood, promoted and aspired to gold standard of what constitutes good sexual values and good sexual behavior.
Do that, and we also end MeToo, we end sexual harassment, abuse, violence, all areas where currently the perpetrators rely on the fact that we do not talk about sex to ensure their victims will never speak up.
End that, and we massively empower women and girls worldwide.
When we do that, we create a far happier world for everybody, including men.
When we do that, we are one step closer to world peace.
I talk about MakeLoveNotPorn, as my attempt to bring about world peace, and I’m not joking.
BERLINABLE: Where did you learn the values you speak about?
Cindy Gallop: My parents never talked about sex.
Everything I’m talking to you about has been a process of learning and a journey of discovery.
What that means is that for 12 years I have seen first-hand every day the enormous human misery and unhappiness caused by the shame, guilt and embarrassment that we’ve given this universal human experience.
That is what has made me so passionate about growing and scaling MakeLoveNotPorn to change the world through sex and to end rape culture.
We do that by doing something really simple.
What we do at MakeLoveNotPorn is we show you through our social sex videos how wonderful, great consensual communicative sex is in the real world.
We role model good sexual values and behavior, and we make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn.
I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be the global go to hub for how to videos on anything and everything to do with real world sex.
We are education through real world demonstration.
The reason that’s so critically important is because, today in the era of MeToo everybody’s talking about consent, everybody is writing about consent.
Here’s the problem:
Nobody knows what consent actually looks like in bed.
The only way you educate people as to what is great consensual communicative sex, good sexual values, and behavior, is by watching people actually having that kind of sex.
BERLINABLE: Now a lot of companies have discovered that sex or erotica for women is a good way to make money. What do you think about this?
Cindy Gallop: What I’m really, really pleased to see is that the barriers are falling.
When you have a truly world changing start-up, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around.
If reality tells me that I cannot grow Make Love Not Porn the way I want to, I’m going to change reality.
That was why I deliberately began defining, pioneering and championing my own category: sex tech. I literally wrote the definition of sex tech.
Sex tech is any form of technology or tech venture designed to innovate, disrupt and enhance in any area of human sexuality and experience.
I began speaking at tech conferences all around the world on why the next big thing in tech is disrupting sex.
I thought, if I just say this loudly enough, often enough, in enough places, people will start to believe it.
Today sex tech is a legitimately recognized sector.
When you Google sex tech you will see a ton of articles, a ton of research studies.
Now more and more people are starting ventures, especially more and more women.
We are finally owning our sexuality.
We are finding unique ways to leverage it because we get the enormous market that is women’s needs, wants and desires, historically deemed too embarrassing, shameful, taboo, to address.
Tap that huge primary market, you tap a huge secondary market of extremely happy men.
BERLINABLE: how can such a revolution come from the same country (the USA) where we experienced this wave of censorship and conservatism that reduces our culture and goes backward?
Cindy Gallop: My biggest obstacle is the social dynamic of fear of what other people will think.
That operates around sex unlike any other area.
You will never own the future if you care what other people think.
So this is why with MakeLoveNotPorn, I am out to make sex in the real world, and talking about it, socially acceptable.
Ultimately, as shareable as anything else we share on social media.
I talk about MakeLoveNotPorn and what I’m doing in every single environment I find myself in.
So, I will absolutely talk to any corporate audience in any context about MakeLoveNotPorn.
I know that when I speak at a corporate business event, every single person in the room knows exactly what I’m talking about.
What you are talking about is the social veneer of “we do not talk about sex”.
Everybody is desperate to talk about sex and everybody knows everything that we are talking about currently.
That is what should embolden everybody working in the sector to not worry about that.
BERLINABLE: how can we help your mission?
Cindy Gallop: We want you to make German love not porn.
We want to help countries reclaim their national sexual identity because every country has one.
National heritage, culture, traditions, stereotypes exist around sex as much as they do around other forms of behavior.
It’s just we never talk about it.
But anybody who has ever loved their way around the world can testify.
People make love differently based on the culture of the country they come from.
So we put the call out, make German love not porn, make Italian love not porn, make Chinese love not porn, because we want to open up the dialogue at a national level.
We want to instil a sense of national pride in how a country has real world sex.
By the way, wouldn’t mind instilling a sense of national competitiveness as well.
We would love the Olympics of real-world sex, playing out on MakeLoveNotPorn.
We want to showcase and celebrate how you make German love, not porn, at home.
There are two key trends driven by the pandemic that demonstrate how much things are changing around those barriers we put up around sex.
First of all, the pandemic has actually proved that what we all thought for many years is not true.
We’ve gone “the future’s digital AR this, VR that”.
The pandemic has proven that what we are all desperate for on the other side of this is real life; human touch, connection, love, intimacy, sex.
People now say “I would kill for a hug”.
The pandemic has caused a massive mindset shift in in what we really value.
That is very good news for all of us building sexual ventures.
The second trend is, the pandemic is global.
Everything we’re talking about is global.
The world has been in global lockdown.
When you are a family in lockdown, you’ve got to face up to the fact that behind that closed bedroom door, your teenage son is wanking to PornHub.
If you’re the kids you’ve got to face the fact your parents are having sex behind their closed bedroom.
In the past year, we’ve heard from many more parents writing to us, telling us that they are taking out MakeLoveNotPorn subscriptions, for their 18 and over 20-something children.
They want their kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sex relations look like.
Those barriers are falling, the pandemic has accelerated all of that.
BERLINABLE: What do you know about German sex, what do you think?
Cindy Gallop: I’ll be honest, I have not to date had a German lover.
But I have had many European lovers.
I’m generalizing wildly, but European lovers are more attuned to the art and the power of making love than American lovers are, it’s a fact of life.
I am very open about the fact that I date younger men casually, I’m a big fan of radical simplicity.
I like to keep things very, very simple.
The single biggest turn-on in the entire world is to be in bed with somebody and to know they’re having an amazing time because of you.
That is not something that porn teaches you.
Porn is like every other industry in popular culture, male dominated.
Mass-market mainstream porn is shot through the male lens by men for men.
Yet when we don’t talk about sex in the real world, that is where everybody, men, women, LGBTQ alike learn from.
I am very selective about whom I date.
I only date utterly lovely young men.
They have all the right values in the world broadly.
I see them unconsciously modeling the behavior porn has taught them, which is that my dick is the center of the universe.
They have internalized the male lens that says that sex is all about you.
The European culture of making love is absolutely about emotion, absolutely about romance.
I’ve experienced that myself.
That’s what I mean when I say I want to help countries reclaim their national sexual identity.
Germany absolutely has a national sexual identity which has been lost.
I would love us to pay tribute, to make German love, not porn, to celebrate how Germany has real world sex and to open up that dialogue at a national level.
Finding Cindy Gallop
www.cindygallop.com
IG: @cindygallop
TW: @cindygallop
