Trust Your Gut, Date Differently & Why Make Love Not P*rn Exists | Cindy Gallop

0:00Always trust your gut. Your gut is telling you what you need to know. Your instinct is telling you what you need to know. Always trust your gut. So talk me through this vetting process. So basically, this is the Cindy Gallop three-step filter for successful online dating. And I only refined this literally decades ago, and I've advised many friends on it. And what is guaranteed if you operate this vetting process is you are guaranteed a perfectly pleasant first date.

0:34So, and this applies, as I said, you know, I'm meeting, I mean, I don't meet all the young men I date online. I meet some of them IRL. But in an online context, whatever the dating website app, et cetera, filter number one is photographic. okay so this is where either they've reached out to you or you've reached out to them and they have this one photo on their profile it could be that really great photo that's taken of them 10 years ago okay so whether you know um whether it's you reaching out or them reaching out to you what you do is you say very nicely please send me several up-to-date photographs of yourself one of which must be full length now it's absolutely fine to ask this because everybody knows why you are asking that this is online dating etiquette everybody wants to know that the person they're talking to looks like what they say they do okay and also you want to know that you genuinely like the look of them if anybody refuses this request off the list immediately okay and by the way i've i've absolutely past advised friends who disregarded this filter and boy oh boy did they ever regret it when they actually met the person wow okay so you know Filter number one is absolutely you need to know they look like what they say they do and you like the look of that person as they are.

1:52So when they pass that filter, filter number two is written. And by the way, I am very specific in this process because I prefer to communicate on email. I'm not going to text. I'm not going to WhatsApp because this is where you find out whether you have chemistry in writing. okay in communication and and incidentally um again speaking as a straight woman this is the filter where you cut the guys some slack because men have no idea how to approach a woman online as much as they have no idea how to approach a woman offline so so maybe a bit of bumbling and you know etc but you know again you decide your criteria i mean this is just me but illiteracy misspelling off the list okay i i know i know we are not going to get on gosh you would not go out with me because i'm dyslexic you know well well in that case no no the key thing there is explain that you are dyslexic would you know what i have um my sign up expect creative thinking creative writing okay well when you explain that that's fine okay great you know okay um but but uh but this is really just message back and forth enough to see whether you have chemistry within that form of communication yeah then the third filter this is really important and this is again you know um It could be deemed old school, but the third field is absolutely the phone.

3:13And I'm not talking, you know, WhatsApp call or video call, whatever. I'm talking good old-fashioned phone call. You take his number. You do not give him yours. You block it. You know, all the usual precautions, obviously. This is where you find out whether you have phone chemistry. Because first of all, you can tell a lot about somebody from the sound of their voice. And secondly, if you can't maintain a conversation with them on the phone, you sure as hell can't over a drink or a coffee in Starbucks. And again, you've taken their number. They don't have yours. And if you are not getting a good vibe of the conversation, it's absolutely fine to go, listen, it's been great talking to you.

3:50I don't feel, you know, we're going to mesh, you know, and we're going to click, you know, goodbye. Put the phone down. That's it. So, however, if you have a lovely conversation on the phone, then and only then do you agree to meet IRL. And by the way, these three steps can all happen in 24 hours. They don't have to be protracted. But what I can tell you is that I've been doing this for 20-something years, and I have never, ever had a bad first date. I've absolutely met people with whom I had no chemistry. It didn't progress any further. But what this filter ensures is that you will have a perfectly pleasant first encounter as opposed to an awkward, embarrassing, uncomfortable one, which none of us has any time for.

4:32No, we don't. I also think dating is so timely. It's so timely. The thing I love about that was your email. I mean, I think the worst is when you're constantly glued to WhatsApp and you're expecting immediate responses and all of those things. And also abbreviated communication. I'm not into that either. But I think actually then you're taking time to sit down and write something to one another. Yeah. Which I love that. Do you have a good opening line that you can share? No, because I don't treat it like that. You know, you engage with each person on their own terms, you know, based on how you've been developing, you know, whatever chemistry you have between you.

5:14And by the way, you know, bear in mind, I'm an older woman dating younger men. You know, men in their 20s, you know, aren't always up for this. Some will go, I'm not doing all that. I go, fine, bye, off the list. You have filtered yourself out accordingly. What have you learned from dating younger men? um I'll tell you um let me explain how I started dating younger men because because everything in my life and career has happened by accident you know make up was a complete accident dating younger men happened by complete accident I did not set out to do this so 20 gosh 24 years ago I was running an ad agency in New York and we were asked to pitch for an online dating brand which was coming out of the UK and want to launch in the US and take on Match which was the market leader at the time and when in in the advertising so this brand asked number of ad agencies including mine to pitch for its business to do its launch campaign and in the advertising industry when you pitch for a client's account you have to experience the client's product and the entire competitive landscape so we all had to online date and this was 24 years ago and none of us at the agency ever had because it wasn't a thing back then it was very much an emerging sector so the rest of my team and my pitch team were all already you know married dating in relationships so they all went online as fake personas you know they created you know false profiles I was single I thought okay I have to do this for business reasons why not do it for real why not find out what this whole online dating thing is all about so I posted my profile on our client's site a number of sites very honest about everything including my age I got a ton of responses very good for the ego but much to my surprise because I had not thought about this as a dating strategy 75 % of those responses were from younger men and the majority of those were from much younger men and I went wow you know had not thought of this as dating strategy works for me and I've been dating younger men very happily ever since and incidentally we won the business um i'd like to think that my my my you know personal experience has contributed to our strategy and all of that um uh developed a great campaign which never ran because then match acquired them great outcome for them it's very sad for us we lost a wonderful client the campaign did not run we ended up working match instead they weren't they weren't as nice as our client and we parted amicably a year later um but the result is i am online dating's biggest ambassador i bloody love it i think it's amazing and i especially love it because and this has been the case for me you know i have met people that i would never have met in my normal course of life okay and i have met and dated younger men from across the entire demographic spectrum and i have dated really impressive younger men you know i've dated younger men who are the first person in the family ever to go to college i've dated younger men who are supporting their entire family with their first job and their first paycheck.

8:18I've dated, I remember dating one young man who was in the US Army. He was only in his early 20s. He was in intelligence. And because of particular language skills he had, he was doing an incredibly dangerous job at this incredibly young age. You know, I've just dated a ton of really impressive younger men that I would never have met, all from very different backgrounds in my normal course of life. And, you know, But extrapolating out of that, what I love is you get to meet people you never would have met otherwise. Wow. How do you not get attached in that moment? I'm not interested in getting attached.

8:52Is there no part of your brain that ever forms a... No, but by the way, I am attached just in a completely different way. As I said, I have lovely relationships with, in fact, many, many of these younger men are still very good friends today. I'm still seeing a number of them today and I met them many, many years ago. And we really like each other. So again, you know, there are many more relationships in this world than the ones you see in popular culture. And by the way, what I find very interesting is that my own business attests to that. So MakeLoveNotPorn is the only platform where, you know, people share videos of the sex they have in the real world.

9:37and so um what we also do is we showcase the way people design their own relationships in the real world and i think that's a very good thing because we have we call our contributors make love not porn stars we have make love not porn stars showing people many different ways of being you know and i'll give you a couple examples um at one end of the spectrum okay we have a woman who has shared some videos on our platform. And our Make Love Not Porn stars introduce their videos and write their own narratives to contextualize them. So this woman tells us that she and her husband have an agreement.

10:17Once a year, she is permitted to meet up in a motel room with her old high school sweetheart and fuck his brains out. Now, we assume this agreement is reciprocal, and we don't know because those are the videos she shares on make love not porn you know the husband isn't sharing anything we haven't heard from him but i think that's a very interesting demonstration for anybody who might be thinking about opening up their relationship or their marriage because it's kind of baby steps okay it is known quantity okay your old high school boyfriend from your past so long over you know um it's once a year so it's like the whole pass you know for this one occasion and and so for any anyone going you know we want to kind of explore this you know a bit nervous about it how about starting in this very circumscribed way and seeing how you get on now obviously at make love not porn we you know our make love not porn stars span the full spectrum you know we have polyamorous make love porn stars we have throuples but again what you're seeing is the real world version you are seeing the negotiation the respect the empathy the sensitivity the setting of boundaries and you know those are all things that need to be role modeled in in the real world we're not just showing you what great amazing real world consensual communicative sex born of love, intimacy and human connection looks like, we're also showing you how people in the real world operate with each other in a really wonderful way.

11:57And I think that's enormously important. I mean, we have a ton of threesome videos. And so we have a wonderful couple of Make Love and Pauls. They're a married couple. And they've shared some videos where they decided to have their first ever threesome with another man, the husband and wife and another man because the husband was bi-curious and wanted to explore that. So they've shared these videos. And in one of these videos, they explain in the narrative that everything was going great and then something triggered the husband because he had been sexually abused in his youth. And so something triggered him.

12:43and so they all stopped and they all kind of you know took account of that and worked through it and that's fantastic this is the real world and that's going to happen and the fact that people are able to see on our platform that this is this is what can happen and this is how you work through it with empathy and sensitivity and respect is enormously important well you say because it's not glorified is it because otherwise all these things can look so like everyone's doing it and it's all fine and no one has any fears yeah no no no I mean with us you see the negotiation the boundary setting you know etc etc you see how this this shit really works in the real world so why did you start make love not porn what was the moment when you left your advertising agency and you were like actually this is what I want to do um there wasn't you know so so again like I said everything in my life and career happened happened by accident you know so make love not porn came about because you know as I said I date younger men they tend to be in their 20s and 18 19 years ago long before anybody else identified this I began realizing through my direct personal experience having sex with younger men that I was encountering what happens when two things converge and I stress the dual convergence because most people think it's only one thing 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 it's when those two factors converge that porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way so I found myself encountered a number of sexual behavioral memes in bed I went whoa I know where that behavior is coming from I thought gosh if I'm experiencing this other people must be as well I didn't know that because 18 years ago, no one was talking about this.

14:34No one was writing about it. This is me in isolation as a naturally action-oriented person going, I'm going to do something about this. So 17 years ago, at the time, purely as a little side venture, I put up on No Money a tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com. That in its original version was kind of a public service announcement. Porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world. here's what really happens in the real world. I launched it at TED, became the only TED speaker to utter the words come on my face on the TED stage several times. The talk went viral as a result.

15:11Of course. And it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny clunky website that I had never anticipated. Thousands of people wrote to me from all around the world, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they'd never told anyone before and I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue and so I felt I had a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that would make it much more far-reaching helpful and effective and so that is when I turned into a business designed to do good and make money simultaneously and I turned it into the world's first and only user-generated importantly 100 % human curated social sex video sharing platform so if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie make love not porn is the badly needed documentary we are a unique window onto the funny messy loving wonderful sex we will have in the real world we are literally sex education through real world demonstration so how then for women i'm thinking about women listening to this okay who have maybe been in that situation where you were saying am i the only one experiencing this how can women be more confident with speaking about this in a relationship because i think men maybe are i don't know men maybe also aren't maybe men are terrified but how can we have better communication and how can women brings you back to the original feel more confident in this and talking about this That's precisely why I built Make Love Not Porn.

16:46So the answer is go to makelovenotporn.com, sign up, join us and watch our videos with your partner together. We are social sex. I brought every dynamic in social media to this one area of universal human experience that no other social network platform allows. and so our videos are designed to inspire communications breakthroughs for couples and I cannot tell you the number of people you know in the 14 years we operated the business who've written to us saying thank you you saved my marriage you saved my relationship one one couple said you know watching when we watch your videos it feels as natural normal to talk about what we see in them as if we're watching something on tv or netflix and from there it's just one step further to talking about our own sex life in a way that means it is now so much better and and I'll tell you what's also interesting um a woman wrote to us last year and she said oh my god the best ten dollars a month I've ever spent you know which is our lowest subscription level she said my husband and I've been married for 20 years and sex had dwindled to a few times a year she said we discovered make love not poor we've had sex eight times in the first month you know love the videos love to make love not porn stars here's the interesting part she said it's not just the sex.

18:03We now feel closer, more intimate, more connected and more in love than at any previous point in our marriage. And she literally ended an email with, thank you for saving my marriage. That's what we can do.