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Interview with Cindy Gallop

Make Love Not Porn

We seem hell bent on supporting youth and sex through banning, censoring, ‘protecting’, blocking, editing, ignoring and conversion therapying.

Society is obsessed with sex, yet we seem only capable of making it more fake and contrived as people seek the authentic, more commodified as the web gets ruined, dehumanized as we get lonelier, and more toxic as we fail to grapple with consent, truth and safety both on and off line.

To find out what’s happening in sex, we spoke with one woman who is single-handedly trying to fix it for the rest of us.

We checked in with Cindy Gallop of Make Love Not Porn… and she’s got a vision and a plan, when the rest of us are ready to talk about it. 

F&F: Thank you so much Cindy for taking the time to help us understand what the hell is happening.

First off, I wanted to pick your brain about the state of sex and the state of sex for young people, what they’re dealing with, and how we got to this place?

CG: Well, what the youth are grappling with, Brian…it’s precisely why I started to Make Love Not Porn, based on my own direct personal experience. So I date younger men. They tend to be in their twenties, and about 16 years ago now, I began realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering an issue that would never have crossed my mind if I had not encountered it very intimately.

Impulsively, I realized that I was experiencing what happens when two things converge. And I stress the dual convergence because most people think it’s only one thing. I realized I was experiencing for myself 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 encountering a number of sexual behaviors in bed, unaware of where these behaviors coming from. I thought, gosh, if I’m experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn’t know, because six years ago nobody was talking about this. Nobody was writing about it. This was me in isolation as a naturally actualized person going, I’m going to do something about this.

So 15 years ago, I put up a crappy website as a side venture. 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 launched Make Love Not Porn at the TED Conference in 2009.

I became the only TEDx speaker to say the words ‘come on my face’ on the TEDx stage six times in succession. 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 all around the world, young and old, men and women, 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 went, Oh my God, I now have a personal responsibility. I have to take Make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that will make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective. And so I turned to a business designed to do good and make money simultaneously, which is what I believe all business should be.

And so today we are the world’s first and only user generated, 100% human curated, social sex video sharing platform. So we’re kind of what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed you to socially, sexually self-express, which it clearly doesn’t. The way to think about us is 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. Our tagline is we all pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference and what we’re doing is we are socializing, normalizing and destigmatizing sex in the real world, bringing it out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior.

We are literally sex education through real world demonstration. I designed Make Love Not Porn through the female lens to be the safest place on the internet. And that’s because I designed it around what everybody else should have. Nobody else did. Human curation. There is no self-publishing of anything on Make Love Not Porn. Our curators watch every video from beginning to end before we approve or reject and we publish it. Nobody else does that.

We review every post on every member profile. And by the way, all Make Love Not Porn. Your post can be a safe work or not safe work as you like, but we review them. We approve or reject and we publish them. No one else does that. We review every comment on every video before we approve or reject to publish. No one else does that.

We can vouch for every single piece of content on our platform in a way that nobody else can. And by the way, with tiny bootstrapping, have no money and we’ve had human curated everything for 11 years. Imagine what Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok would do with their billions if they chose to do that. Safety on the internet is not a matter of viability, it’s a matter of will.

We have the power to change people’s sexual attitudes and behavior for the better in a way that nothing else can.

So for the past 11 years, we’ve heard from numerous young people whom we’ve shown that porn is not sex in the real world. We’ve saved countless marriages and relationships, inspired communications breakthroughs within couples. Parents are buying their children’s subscriptions to Make Love Not Porn, because they tell us, ‘I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sex relations look like’.

And as with any disruptive technology, use cases emerge the founder never dreamt of. So I was blown away when we began hearing from survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse. We hear from female survivors, male survivors, trans nonbinary survivors. They tell us that Make Love Not Porn helped them reclaim their bodies. We help them feel able to be sexual again in a situation where porn is too triggering.

And it’s not just the people who watch the videos. We have a number of Make Love Not Pornstars who tell us that being able to share themselves sexually in a completely safe and trustworthy space has helped them process and heal from sexual trauma. That’s not a capability I ever envisioned when I came up with this platform. So basically we are spearheading what we call the social sex revolution.

The revolution part is not the sex, it’s the fact we’re finally making it social.

F&F: Younger people are so much more conditioned to the idea of sharing. I’m curious the response you’ve received from younger people about what you’re doing, the way you’re shifting the conversation.

CG: In the nearly 15 years since I launched Make Love Not Porn, we’ve had nothing but a universal positive response from everybody old and young. So Gen Z loves Make Love Not Porn.

And because I designed Make Love Not Porn through the female lens, we operate very uniquely. We do not capture any data about our members deliberately. We don’t operate like every other shitty platform on the internet. So when I say Gen Z, we know because they self-identify as such in their comments and in their appreciative emails.

One young man wrote a comment some time back in a video where he said “I’m 26.  I’ve only recently started having sex for the first time”. And he said, “you know, I’m so nervous about everything. Is it okay to laugh at this? What do I do?” You know? And he left this comment on a video where two of our Make Love Not Pornstars were having sex and the man had prematurely ejaculated.

No one saw that coming, literally. You know, it was very funny. And this young man said in the comments, “this was just so reassuring. It was so wonderful to watch. He wrote this massive long comment but ended up saying “this video was wonderful for so many reasons that had nothing to do with sex”.

We are the only window into how people have sex in the real world. We answer the question everyone has asked since the dawn of time, which is,  what is everybody else really doing in bed? And at Make Love Not Porn you can see and I’ll tell you what’s very interesting, Brian. So I designed Make love, not porn, to be fully diverse and inclusive.

And we all our members and I make love, not porn stars range in age from 18 to 80. You know, all male, female, trans non-binary, straight LGBTQ all races, ethnicities…we’re a global platform. Yeah, but in the 11 years we’ve been operating we’ve observed that Make Love Not Porn is especially a revelation to men, young men, old men, all men. More men than anybody else and grateful emails leave appreciative comments.

And that’s because we are something utterly unique that men will find nowhere else on the Internet, which is a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly and say, I just watched my first video Make Love Not Porn and afterwards I cried.

I’ve said for years, I wish society understood the opposite of what it thinks is true. Women enjoy sex just as much as men, and men are just as romantic as women. Yet neither genders are allowed to openly celebrate either fact to this day, and we’d all be so much better off if they were. I picked up a wonderful Twitter exchange between two men last year.

The first man tweeted, This is obviously a joke. He tweeted, “Hey guys, I’ve got this really weird fetish. I’ve got this kink. Well, I want to watch porn where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent, the really like each other. Hit me up with your hottest links, please”. And another man replied and said, “There’s a website called Make Love Not Porn where you can watch real couples fucking and making love”.

He said, “I watched a video where a woman said to her Man, ‘I love you’ while they’re making love”. He said sincerely, “I cried when I heard that”.

Make love Not Porn is one of the solutions to toxic masculinity.

F&F: That’s got to be a wild experience for you too, to see your work organically showing up in conversations like that on Twitter[X].

CG: Well, what is enormously frustrating, Brian, is that I’m you know, we can help Gen Z globally. We can help everybody globally. But the one thing I didn’t realize when embarked on this venture was that me and my tiny team would fight an enormous battle every day, not even to grow Make Love Not Porn, just to keep it going.

Every piece of business infrastructure, any other tech startup takes for granted, we can’t use. The small print always says no adult content, and that is all pervasive. I can’t get funded. I couldn’t get banked, I can’t get payments in place. I can’t use the tech services I want. And one of the most frustrating things, given my background is that we are banned from advertising Make Love Not Porn anywhere.

We cannot advertise on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitter.  Twitter, ha. You know Reddit, ha. YouTube, Google. And by the way, it’s not just us. This is utterly gendered. Any female lens sexual health and wellness ventures are also banned from advertising. Menstruation ventures can’t advertise, menopause, fertility. In the meantime, male sexual health and wellness is not a problem. Erectile dysfunction solutions are welcome everywhere.

Right now, Google bans us from doing paid search, and so we can’t advertise on Google. But, every day on Google, all around the world, people search for Make Love Not Porn, without knowing that we exist. And what I mean by that is, the top organic search terms that send traffic to us all ‘make love’, ‘not porn’, ‘real sex not porn’, ‘Make love, not porn’, where they don’t know there’s a company actually called that.

One young man told me that he found us when he googled ‘porn that is not porn’. He was so fed up with everything out there. Wanted something different, but had no idea what to search for. Ultimately searched ‘porn that is not porn’ and found Make Love Not Porn.

That gives you some idea of how much the world wants us and thinks it needs us.

The other indication of the opportunity is, at the end of every year, Pornhub produces a year in review where it analyzes its gigantic trove of data and identifies what it sees as the key trends. When Pornhub released that year Review 2022 earlier this year, they identified the number one trend across their gigantic platform as what they call ‘reality’.

People are looking for real. And when that study came out, I shared the shit out of it and I said what all those people are looking for, although they don’t know it yet, is Make Love Not Porn.

F&F: How do you think we got here? Coming of age is not new. Access to porn is not new.  How did we get to this point where it’s become so where people are at their wit’s end, feeling misled, where people are exhausted by it?

CG: First of all, Brian, let me emphasize what I’ve been emphasizing for 15 years. The issue isn’t porn, but that we don’t talk about sex in the real world.

If we did, people would be able to bring a real world mindset when they view what is simply manufactured, performative produced entertainment.

So I am asked regularly, “So Cindy, why are we all so repressed about sex?”

Three reasons.

Reason number one. Centuries of repression, religion, socio-cultural dynamics in every country in the world. What we’re talking about is a global issue.

Reason number two is the patriarchy. Because historically, every institution, including government and religion, has been male dominated. We as women have never been allowed to bring our lens to bear on human sexuality, and the world is a poorer place for it.

And the third reason very straightforwardly, is that there are not enough people like me, by which I mean, as you’ve heard, the world makes it fucking difficult to innovate and disrupt social narratives around sex. Many people have tried and given up, and I don’t blame them because my life is shitty on a daily basis because of what I do. We need many more people like me who will not give up no matter what.

F&F: But how? How do you not give up? I mean, since you gave that TEDx talk, I think about book bans. I think about the gutting of openly talking about all kinds of things, including sexuality and orientation and body safety. There’s so many forces pulling in the other direction.

CG: Well, so two things keep me going. The first is that we hear from our community every day, how do we change their lives? You know, we have 11 years of proof of concept. And by the way, Brian, ultimately our goal at Make Love Not Porn, is to help end rape culture globally. And we help end rape culture by doing something incredibly simple that nevertheless nobody else anywhere on the Internet is doing.

We end rape culture by showing you how wonderful, great, consensual, communicative sex is in the real world. Our social sex videos role model good sexual values and good sexual behavior. And here’s the important part. We make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn in popular culture. That’s it. It’s that simple. It works. And if I could raise the funding I need, I would demonstrate how that could work globally at scale.

So the first thing keeps me going is that I see every day the impact we are having, that means I can’t give up on it. And the second thing that keeps me going is that the dynamic that most motivates me is the one I characterize as I’m going to fucking well show you. You tell me it can’t be done, I’m going to fucking well show you. I have to take all of that daily demoralization, depression and discouragement and turn it into motivation and inspiration to keep going.

F&F: Through much of the research we do with younger people, I find they seem so much more ready to have evolved conversations about consent, about safety, about self-care, about mental health, versus older generations. I’m curious if you see your job getting easier as this next generation comes of age and becomes more established in systems of culture and power?

CG: Yeah, well, so here’s the thing, Brian. I mean, you’re absolutely right. You know, Gen Z brings a whole different set of attitudes and Gen Alpha even more. But at the same time, we are in a society that is going backwards. So, you know, to your point book banning, censorship, anti-porn campaigning. Anti-porn campaigning is a threat to free speech on the Internet, period. And everyone needs to understand that.

So you know, there is what Gen Z is open to, and then there is how much the world is closing down around them. That’s why it’s so important that female founders like me raise the funding we need to demonstrate that there is a different future for the Internet when it’s designed and built from the female lens. We can create a safer, kinder, nicer future for everyone on the internet. But only if we support it. 

F&F: What are you working towards, and what is the biggest hurdle you face?

CG: I want to build the 0 to 18 and beyond version. Make love Not Porn.academy.

And if you go to that URL, which I bought many years ago, you will see my full vision laid out there.

This is what I characterize as the Khan Academy of Sex Education, because Khan Academy, the online tutoring platform, tutors on every other topic under the sun except this one. Educational technology, EdTech is exploding as a sector, not in this area. So I want to build Make Love Not Porn academy on the same principles as MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. User generated, crowdsourced, human curated, revenue share.

I want to build the go to global hub for the best of the world’s sex education content. So the way it works is, we invite sex educators all around the world to share with us their own content, coursework, materials, books, videos, comic strips, whatever may be.

And I use the term educator in the broadest possible sense, you know, sexual health and wellness experts, therapists, anybody informing, educating in any aspect of this whole area. We will curate. At the heart of everything we do lies human curation.

Human eyes will vet every piece of content to make sure it’s safe, we endorse it. We will then publish all of this content segmented by age appropriateness.

So if you’re a parent freaking out, going, ‘Oh my God, my six year old, just ask this. What do I say!?!’  Here’s what you would find entirely age appropriate tools and content to be able to have that conversation with a six year old.

If you’re a teacher in a class of 14 year olds here are your age appropriate teaching materials. If you’re an adult, access all areas. Adults are desperate for all of this as well.

But the key thing is that the Academy will be what children, young people can access sex education without parental teacher gatekeeping. And here’s why that’s important.

I have a friend who’s a mother, and as you have to these days, she monitors her kids browsing history. And this happened a few years ago. Her son was eight years old. And she saw to her horror that on the family computer he had Googled ‘sex for children’. So she freaked out but did the right thing. Stayed calm, sat him down, ‘darling I saw this, and that’ you know, ‘why?’. This anecdote is adorable and horrifying in equal measure because her son wondered about sex.

He was a child. He knew he was a child. He wanted to learn about sex in a child appropriate way. He sweetly, innocently Googled ‘sex for children’. You can imagine what came back… utterly traumatizing.So the academy will be a place where an eight year old boy can enter his age and we will only serve him age appropriate sex education content.

Now some of us will be free to access, per that example. But we’ll also charge to download, subscribe, bulk buy for schools, different registries, different use cases, and we will then split the income 5050 with its creators, the educators, the same way we do right now with our Make Love Not Pornstars. Because right now, Brian, no one goes into sex education to make money.

I have a network of friends all around the world who are brilliant sex educators. They face all the same problems I do. Their content gets blocked on Instagram, Facebook, you know, they’re banned from advertising, their accounts are deleted. They can’t even make a living doing this. And I want to change that because it’s enormously valuable work. But our three other agendas for the academy.

The first is, the moment I build education expansion, I reframe Make Love Not Porn. I give us social legitimacy.

The second is, given my background in advertising, I designed the academy to be a growth engine for the core business, because when you’re 18 and over, you’ve graduated to sex education through real world demonstration.

And thirdly, I want to prove the concept. What I mean by that is people said to me, for all these years, ‘oh Cindy, you should go into schools, you should be on the curriculum’.

And I’ve gone, No, I shouldn’t, because anyone trying to bring sex ed in schools comes up against the Parent Teacher Association. Moral panic.

But here’s the thing. The people keeping sex ed out of schools, in their heads they have this abstract concept that Sodom and Gomorrah will ensue. When I can show you what doesn’t exist anywhere, you know, all in one place, the best of the world, sex education content.

And you can see for yourself, at a glance how brilliant, informative, educational, healthy and non-threatening it is. You can search by age and sensibility. We’ll have Christian sex ed, Muslim sex ed, etc. That’s when I can get sex ed into schools.

F&F: It’s so it’s so necessary and so essential to counter the forces that are trying to gut it in schools.

How can we expect youth and younger people to have a healthy relationship to sex if we can’t yet figure out ourselves as adults how to have an open, honest, consenting, healthy relationship to sex.

CG: That’s another wonderful benefit of Make Love Not Porn. Parents or members of our community tell us that just being part of Make Love Not Porn has made them feel able to be more open in talking about sex with their children. Again, because we are socializing and normalizing all of this. That’s the power of what we’re doing.

Bringing sex out of the shadows into the sunlight. And that has an extraordinary impact in every single area of our lives.

I would say to people, you know, Make Love Not Porn operates in the single biggest market of them all. Not sex, not porn. The market of human happiness.

F&F: And as you said at the beginning of our conversation, when parents realize that not stepping up to have that conversation with the youth… they will fill that void with something, but it will be dark, toxic, twisted, AI…

CG: I Know, and it’s shocking. Because the thing is, Brian, what parents want more than anything else is for their child to be happy. And this area will impact your child’s happiness across their lifetime more than almost anything else.

F&F: And their safety, social relationships and so much more. Cindy, thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, and for taking the time to talk about it.

CG: Thanks for the support, and have a great afternoon.

– Brian Flannery