Why Cindy Gallop Built Make Love Not Porn And What It's Done For Real Couples

0:00So MakeLoveNotPorn is the only platform where people share videos of the sex they have in the real world. And so 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 call our contributors MakeLoveNotPornStars. We have MakeLoveNotPornStars showing people many different ways of being. And I'll give you a couple of examples. at one end of the spectrum okay we have a woman who has has shared some videos on our platform and and our make love not porn stars you know introduce um their videos you know write their own narratives to contextualize them so this woman tells us that she and her husband have an agreement once a year um she is permitted to meet up in a motel room with her old high school sweetheart and fuck his brains out.

0:57Now, 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. 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 hall 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 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 communicated sex born of love, intimacy, and human connection looks like, we're also showing you how people in the real world, you know, operate with each other in a really wonderful way.

2:28And 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 poor souls. 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 and so they all stopped and And they all kind of took account of that and worked through it.

3:19And 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 what can happen and this is how you work through it with empathy and sensitivity and respect is enormously important. Well, you said 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. No, no. I mean, with us, you see the negotiation. the boundary setting, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You see how this shit really works in the real world. So why did you start Make Love Not Porn?

3:53What was the moment when you left your advertising agency and you were like, actually, this is what I want to do? There wasn't. So again, like I said, everything in my life and career happened by accident. So Make Love Not Porn came about because, 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 realising 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.

4:43It'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. No 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.

5:26Porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world. Here's what really happens in the real world. I launched 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. Of 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, men 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.

6:03And 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 all have in the real world.

6:45We are literally sex education through real world demonstration. So how then for women, I'm thinking about women listening to this, 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 so the answer is go to make love not porn.com sign up join us and watch our videos with your partner together we are social sex um 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 um and i cannot tell you the number of people you know in the 14 years we operate as a 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.

8:19She said, my husband and I have 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 Poor and stars. Here's the interesting part. She said, it's not just the sex. We 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. but I'm thinking of people here that are too scared to even go on that platform or have that conversation well I don't know I just think these are the questions that might be coming up right because I think it's it's incredible for the people that are right I'm now downloading we'll put this in the show notes by the way so you can all go on and have a look but to the confidence there's a lot of people that are and I think this isn't just women I think that men have this too that are scared to bring this up with their partner because they live in shame and there might be a whole host of reasons in English culture also we're very kind of like shut down and stigmatized around this thing so how do you give confidence to even kind of approach these conversations and not fill that yep no no I mean again you know because people written to us as I said you know for many many years we just go and and and they tell us that this is what happened you know one husband said you know I said to my wife um he'd come across an article about us he said I said to her look there's this really interesting platform called make love not porn and here's what the, you know, article says about it.

9:44And she went, okay, let's check it out. You know, and so all you do is you go, you know, came across this really interesting idea, heard this woman talking on a podcast about it. You know, why don't we check it out together? And you will find, you know, certainly in our experience, very few people decline to do that, you know. Really? And also, it's worth bearing in mind, at Make Love Not Point, it's not just what we do, it's the way that we do it. we are socializing normalizing and destigmatizing sex every single thing about our platform is consciously intentionally designed to normalize all of this so to give you one seemingly trivial example when we were designing and building make love not porn my lead user experience designer brilliant woman uni chase she said to me everything on the internet to do with sex is dark and black we're going to be white and so at make love porn we have a white background because we are bringing sex out of the shadows and into the sunlight.

10:42Wow. I love that. Clever branding. Well, I do think it's something, I mean, it was interesting. When we've had Laurie Mintz on, we've done 400 episodes. It was the first time we kind of had an episode around female orgasms. We've had a lot of relationships. I think you go online and, oh, my gosh, it's so overwhelming right now if you open Instagram or TikTok, the amount of information and advice that is just thrown at you. I think we're all in just this confusion now in relationship advice like am I dating x y and z is this person x y and z are they right what's the green flags what's the yellow flag what's the red flags there is so much consumption online now about what we should be doing how do you how does one like filter through that how does one know like this is going back to the beginning of trusting your gut how does one know if they're trusting their gut or trusting the information and rhetoric that they're being fed?

11:33Honestly, you know, I absolutely go back to basics. Decide what matters to you. You know, ignore that tidal wave of information. And by the way, what I also recommend is stay away from people and places and things that make you feel bad about yourself. And that includes your Instagram feed. Okay, so shut out all that noise and just, you know, take some time with yourself and go, what really matters to me? and that's a judgment I'm going to operate and how do you not then self-abandon when you're in a relationship because you absolutely have the opposite of that you have this like strong understanding of exactly who you are you don't want a relationship that you don't you're so clear in your path what happens for one that feels very clear and then there's a lot of people get into a relationship and lose that clarity what advice do you have for for not losing that attachment to oneself and staying like cindy gallop does and whatever their values are again it's enormously simple stay away from people places and things make you feel bad about yourself if you're being made to feel bad about yourself get the fuck out it's that simple you feel bad about yourself get the fuck out of that relationship i mean that's the best advice ever but why don't we do it it's that simple it really is that simple it's simple but we don't some a lot of us don't do it we stay.

12:54Well time to start doing it. I think we should just re-press that on repeat when we're in it. So Cindy what is next for you? Desperately trying to raise funding to be able to keep Make Love Not Porn and Make Love Not Porn Academy our sex education extension alive and I literally put it like that because I've fought a battle every single day for the past 17 years not even to grow make love not porn just to keep it going because every piece of business infrastructure any other tech startup gets taken for granted i can't because the small print always says no adult content i can't get funded i can't get banked i'm banned from advertising and so i am always looking for those investors who get it um philanthropic donors who get it because we have a non-profit vehicle we can take tax-deductible donations, grants, etc.

13:48Right now, I desperately need to find funding to be able to keep going. The only thing holding us back is lack of access to funding, to money, to capital. So that's the single thing I'm focused on, because without that, we can't keep going.