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At age 54, I doubt Cindy Gallop ever thought she would become a leading voice on the topic of porn. Before launching her acclaimed Ted Talk, she was actually a high roller of advertising, winning the Advertising Woman of the Year award for Advertising Women of New York in 2003.
Cindy also dates younger men, and as usually assumed from such a statement, has sex with younger men. As a consequence of this, she encountered firsthand the effects of what happens when, as she explains, “today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online, meets our society’s equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex”.
This, she explains, creates a system where porn becomes the sex education of today, and according to Cindy, this is not a good thing. This is what she spoke about in her Ted Talk, and on a personal note, I doubt the words “come in my face” have been used so prolifically on the Ted stage before this. Check it out, it’s great.
So let’s talk about porn. I like porn. For a long time I didn’t really think about why; it served its purpose and often I’d just watch it for kicks when I had a lot of spare time on my hands, or if I had uni work to do but I wasn’t really feeling it.
I have an appreciation for porn, for what the people who work in the industry do. Obviously, like everything you watch, you have to be critical of what you see, but the majority of what I’ve watched has been very much a staged, (seemingly) consensual, well thought out production where two people have sex and make money from it.
The thing is, certain parts of the porn I watch stay with me. Whether it’s a technique or an idea about bodily aesthetic or a power construct, the things you let in to your brain slowly connect and form bits and pieces of who you are. This is not a problem for someone who has a pretty clear idea of that already, but where do the things you’ve learnt from porn sit in your own sexual ideologies?
For me, a 20 year old woman with a strong sense of self, it’s given me an appreciation for the sound of sex, and the various sounds you can make whilst having sex; sexy sounds and spoken sounds and sounds that make you laugh so hard you have to stop and recollect yourself.
For a lot of people, especially young people, porn has been a form of sexual education. With such easy accessibility, PornHub can become almost a reflex move when staring at a search bar with time on your hands; it’s happened to the best of us.
But what happens when young humans with no prior sexual education and a limited conscious knowledge of their own values and beliefs encounter hardcore porn? It was the consequences of this question which prompted Cindy to create Make Love Not Porn. Make Love Not Porn contrasts the myths of hardcore porn with their realities, so as Cindy explains, “the construct is porn world, versus real world”.
Cindy says, “The issue I’m tackling is not porn. I’m tackling the total lack in our society, of an open, healthy, honest conversation around sex and porn, which would enable, amongst many other benefits, people to bring a real world mindset to the viewing of what is essentially artificial entertainment”.
But this is where it gets interesting. More recently, in a bid to make the experience more user involved, Cindy launched Make Love Not Porn TV, a user generated, crowd sourced platform where anybody, from anywhere in the world, can upload videos of themselves having real world sex.
The deal is, you pay to rent and stream real world sex videos, and then fifty per cent of that income goes to your contributor, or as Cindy likes to call them, your “make love not porn star”.
But what the fuck is this “real world” sex? I feel like I’m at a QUT lecture and they’re just slipping it in all over the place, no pun intended. All of a sudden Make Love Not Porn creates TV ads with people fucking in New York and London while riding double decker buses and moaning the word ‘cawfee’.
Make love not porn doesn’t dictate what “real world” sex is. It’s simply a platform for you to project your version of what sex is onto the greater, sex loving, porn loving public. Make love not porn TV is pro sex, pro porn, and pro knowing the difference. It’s not PornHub, YouPorn, Xtube, or amateur; it’s real world sex.
It’s apparently also “the etsy of sexy”, and if that doesn’t pull you in, I don’t know what will.
