EPISODE 198: Cindy Gallop — Make Love Not Porn: Rethinking Sex, Consent & Connection

[00:04] Welcome to The Human Experience Podcast. The only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet. As we approach our ascent, please make sure your frontal, temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position. As you take your seat of consciousness, relax your senses and allow us to take you on a journey. We are the intimate strangers. Thank you for listening. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show, the Human Experience Podcast.

[00:43] My name is Xavier Katana. Today we’re talking about something that shapes all of our lives, but still can be difficult to discuss openly. We’re talking about sex, intimacy, and human connection. Our guest for today is Cindy Gallop. She is a British entrepreneur, former advertising executive, and outspoken advocate for healthier conversations about sex. She is best known as the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn and for establishing the New York office of the advertising

[01:18] won the Advertising Woman of the Year Award from Advertising Women of New York. In 2009, Gallup introduced MakeLoveNotPorn during a widely discussed TED Talk. The talk talked about explaining the differences between pornography and real-life sexual relationships. Cindy, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for being here. Welcome to HXP. Thank you. Very happy to be here. Why don’t we get started? Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself for the people who don’t know who you are, if you just want to give us a short introduction?

[01:58] Sure. So I’m half English, half Chinese. My father was English. My mother was Malaysian Chinese. I was born in the UK, but when I was six, we moved to Brunei in Borneo where my father had a job. I grew up in Asia, went back to school and university in the UK. My background is 40 years working in brand building, marketing and advertising. And today I am the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn. We are pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference.

[02:33] So, I mean, what does that mean? Because porn seems to occupy the daily lives of a lot of people. And, you know, I just want to differentiate between what a healthy relationship between porn is and what a negative relationship between porn is. Well, I should explain that in my case, my business was a complete and total accident because I did not consciously, intentionally set out to do anything I very bizarrely find myself doing now.

[03:09] MakeLoveNotPorn came about through my personal experience dating younger men and realizing 18, 19 years ago, i.e. long before the rest of the world did, through having sex with younger men, that when we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world, porn inevitably becomes sex education by default in not a good way. I’m a naturally action-oriented person.

[03:42] I went, right, you know, I’m going to do something about this. And so 17 years ago, at the time, purely as a little side venture, I put up on No Money a tiny clunky website at makelovelotporn.com that in its original version was kind of a public service announcement. 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.

[04:14] I launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED, as you mentioned. I became the only TED speaker to utter the words, come on my face on the TED stage several times. 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 male and female straight

[04:46] and queer pouring their hearts out telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they’ve never told anyone before and I realized I’d uncovered a huge global social issue and so that was the point at which I felt oh my god I now have a personal responsibility I have to take MakeLoveNotPorn forwards in a way that will make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective. And so I decided to turn it into a business.

[05:22] One designed to do good and make money simultaneously, which is what I believe the future of all business should be. And what I decided to do was I’ve been saying for 17 years, the issue isn’t porn. the issue is that we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world because if we did amongst a whole host of other benefits people would then be able to bring a real world mindset to the viewing of what is simply performative produced entertainment so I went [05:53] okay I’ve got to find a way to make it easy for every single person in the world to talk openly and honestly about sex. How am I going to do that? So I decided very simply to take every dynamic in social media and apply them to this one area of universal human experience that no other social network or platform allows in order to socialize sex. And so I turned MakeLoveNotPorn into what we

[06:24] are today, which is the world’s first and only user-generated and importantly 100% human-curated social sex video sharing platform. So we’re kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to openly, healthily, socially, sexually self-express, which it clearly doesn’t. The way to think about us is, if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, MakeLoveNotPorn is the badly needed documentary.

[06:56] We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world. And what we’re doing is we are, as I said, socializing, normalizing, destigmatizing sex, 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 love that background i mean it’s so interesting the way you move through your career and how you [07:31] your ted talk went viral because of what you said what’s something that you understand now that you completely underestimated when you started? Oh my God. I had no idea when I embarked on this journey 17 years ago that I and my tiny team would fight a huge battle every single day of those 17 years, not even to grow MakeLoveNotPorn, just to keep it alive. Basically because every piece of business infrastructure,

[08:07] startups get to just take for granted. We can’t because the small print always says no adult content. And that is all pervasive across every single area of the business in ways that people outside the sphere don’t realize. I can’t get funded. I can’t get banked. For the first four years of MakeLoveNotPorn’s existence, no bank would allow me to open a business bank account. try doing business for four years without a business bank account can’t talk about how i

[08:38] did it in ways i shouldn’t have but it makes life extraordinarily difficult just last year make love not paul was debanked three times in two months in 2025 and we did find a fourth bank we’re okay now every single text service that i need to use to run a video platform hosting, encoding, encrypting. The terms of service always say no adult content. In every case, I have to go to the people at the top of the company, explain what I’m doing, beg to be allowed to use their service.

[09:11] Sometimes they let me, sometimes they don’t. This is a very labor-intensive process. We never get to work with best in class of anybody business partner-wise, and we never get to work with best value of any business partner My two biggest pain points are one, payments. So PayPal won’t work with adult content, Stripe won’t, mainstream fintech won’t. I have to work with the murky subculture of adult-friendly payment processors who, because anybody adult has nowhere else to go, charge extortionate fees.

[09:47] I pay out 12% of my revenue every month in payment processing fees alone. When mainstream rates are That’s a huge business growth inhibitor. Another growth inhibitor is that we are banned from advertising and promoting MakeLoveNotPorn anywhere. We cannot advertise on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, YouTube, Reddit. Look at what’s on Reddit. They ban us for advertising. Look at what’s on Twitter X. They ban us for advertising. And so the thing I really did not understand when I started this was how shitty my life would be on a daily basis because of what I do.

[10:28] wow i mean that sounds like a massive hurdle you had to overcome and i’m still battling to overcome so you know if we can switch gears back into sex because it’s a topic a lot of people have trouble talking about uh you you took use your phrase real world sex what does that mean beyond going simply the opposite of pornography sure so so it’s important to say that we are very semantically precise um and i always correct um [11:07] you know articles written about us where the journalist says make love of porn is real sex i I go, no, no, no, no, because porn is real sex. Porn is real people having sex for real. We are real world sex, which means, you know, we showcase and celebrate the kind of sex that everybody has in their real world relationships with their real world partners. Basically, we answer the question, everyone has been asking since the dawn of time,

[11:40] which is what is everybody else really doing in bed and until MakeLoveNotPorn came along nobody knew because porn is you know performative produced scripted entertainment for an audience and MakeLoveNotPorn is the sex everybody is having all around the world in the privacy of their bedrooms their kitchen floors their you know the beach at their holiday resort wherever it may right so i mean what’s something that you think people are profoundly miseducated about [12:18] when it comes to sex so um i’ve spent 40 years working in advertising in the business of communication i know therefore that everything great in life and business is born out of great communication. Sex is no different. Great sex is born out of great communication. And the really unfortunate thing is that because of the shame, guilt, and embarrassment that society has imbued sex with, people find it really, really difficult to talk about sex.

[12:54] And they especially find it difficult to talk about sex with the people they’re actually having it with while they’re actually having it. Because in that situation, you are terrified that if you say anything at all about what is going on, if you comment on the action anyway at all, you will potentially hurt the other person’s feelings, you will put them off you, you will derail the encounter, you’ll potentially derail the entire relationship. But at the same time, you want to please your partner. You want to make them happy. Everybody wants to be good in bed.

[13:31] Nobody knows exactly what that means. And so you will seize your cues from anywhere you can. And if the only cues you’ve ever seen are important, because your parents never talked about sex, because your school didn’t teach you, because your friends aren’t honest, those are the cues you’re going to take. It’s not very good effect. And so I wish that more people understood it’s all about communication, communication, communication. Talk about what you don’t like. Talk about what you do like. Talk about what you’d like to try, you know, together.

[14:04] Think about what you’d like to try on your own. Just communicate, basically. Yeah. So just talk to your partner about what you want and how you want it. Yeah. And that’s precisely why I created MakeLoveNotPorn, because what’s very important is at MakeLoveNotPorn, it’s not just what we do, it’s the way that we do it. So we are spearheading what we call the social sex revolution. The revolutionary part is not the sex, it’s the fact we’re finally making it social.

[14:35] And so everything about a platform is consciously intentionally designed to normalize and destigmatize sex and make it easier to talk about. So, for example, when we were building the platform, my brilliant user experience designer, a woman called 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 that’s why MakeLoveNotPorn has a white background, because we are literally bringing sex out of the shadows into the sunlight. And so we are designed

[15:12] to be social sex. You can watch us on your own, but we’re designed for couples to watch together. And what we hear regularly, because as a unique business, we have a unique capability. MakeLoveNotPorn has the power to change people’s sexual attitudes and behavior for the in a way that nothing else can. And so one thing we’ve heard constantly over the 14 years we’ve been operating is, you saved my marriage. You saved my relationship. And so couples write to

[15:44] us and tell us, one couple said, watching your videos together, it felt as natural and normal to talk about what happens in them as it would watching TV together or Netflix. And when we start talking about what we’re watching, it’s a short step from there to talking about our own sex life in a way that then massively improves it. So, yeah, basically, you know, it’s the way we normalize all of this, make sex either talk about what leads to tremendously helping people [16:18] and improving their sex lives. I mean, yeah, it makes sense to me just to talk about it more openly because it seems like it’s such a taboo to discuss this stuff. Do you think pornography itself is the problem or a larger problem that we’ve failed to provide a competing education about real intimacy? Well, first of all, I should say that I get very frustrated when people use

[16:51] porn the word like it’s all one big homogenous mass because that’s like using the word literature to say it’s all the same thing the landscape of porn is as richly infinitely varied as the landscape of literature there are just as many genres sub-genres you know different types um the issue is and a lot of people don’t realize this um there is one massive monopoly that dominates the porn industry that would not be allowed to exist in any other industry but nobody [17:21] wants to bring antitrust legislation to porn so a company that used to be called mind geek that was acquired and rebranded a few years ago as alo owns pretty much everything alo owns porn hub you porn red tube brazzers sex.com men.com etc etc and when you have that bigger monopoly you make it very difficult for it’s it’s like any other industry monopolies have a stranglehold on creativity and innovation i have many friends who are brilliant indie queer feminist pornographers

[17:59] and making very very innovative types of porn they don’t get the traffic numbers and revenue they deserve because nobody can find them. So, you know, I encourage people not to talk about porn as if it’s, you know, all one thing. But equally, there’s also the issue that like every other industry, porn is male dominated. And so again, what you see in mainstream mass market porn

[18:29] is for the male gaze through the male lens. And again, you know, there are some amazing women they struggle to get exposure and revenue. So essentially, as I said, I’ve been saying for 17 years, the focus should not be on porn, but on educating and talking about sex, which would then enable people to understand that what they are seeing in porn is fantasy and scripted situations, and to be much more educated about sex in the real world.

[19:03] Can you name a concrete moment when simply talking about sex openly changed a specific couple’s dynamic for the better? Sure. So, I mean, we get these emails all the time and it’s not just couples, it’s individuals. And so I’ll actually we post a number of these on our blog. But I’ll give an example. We got an amazing email some years back from a young man.

[19:36] and this is a great demonstration of how transformative the power of seeing real world love intimacy human connection for me it’s worth saying by the way Xavier that I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be fully diverse and inclusive and we are our members of MakeLoveNotPorn stars are all ages 18 to 80. All races, ethnicities, we’re a global platform. You know, male, female, trans, non-binary, straight, LGBTQ, asexual.

[20:09] But something noteworthy in the 40 years we’ve operated is that we’ve discovered that MakeLoveNotPorn is especially a revelation to men. More men send us grateful emails, leave appreciative comments than anybody else. And by the way, everyone else loves us too, but this is noteworthy 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.

[20:44] You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly and say, I just watched my first video on MakeLoveNotPorn 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 gender is allowed to openly celebrate either of those facts. We would all be so much better off if they were.

[21:15] I picked up a great Twitter exchange a few years ago between two men. The first man had tweeted as a joke, obviously. Hey guys, I’ve got this really weird fetish. I’ve got this kink where I want to watch porn where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent and really like each other. Hit me up with your hottest things, please. And another man replied and said, there’s this website called MakeLoveNotPorn where you can watch real couples making love. He said, I watched a video where the woman said to her man, I love you while they’re making love.

[21:46] He said, sincerely, I cried when I heard that. Here’s an email a man wrote us. And he started it by saying, so usually when people give feedback, they say, I don’t normally do this. This is actually true for me to write an actual email. I apologize if I may be long. I found out about your website via story on Playboy.com. I’ve been an avid reader of Playboy for almost 15 years now. I’m 35 years old and a very single straight male. I’m now working at a factory in a very small town.

[22:17] in. We can doubt location details, but it’s the American Midwest. As I’ve gotten older, the one thing I felt I’ve been missing is some type of connection when viewing porn. My habits have always been go to Pornhub, search a video, boom, done. That changed when I was watching one of the videos on here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something that I was so taken aback by. It was intimate. It was two people you saw an actual connection with. It made me question my right now, which is a good thing I feel in terms of growth. I also feel the need to speak about the

[22:52] need for males like myself to talk about how they feel. I feel like for the first time I want to confront my own issues with sex and my own sexual health, which in all honesty is not good at all. Dating has been non-existent for years, mainly due to me being so busy for most of my life with working three jobs to survive. I’ve never really got a chance like I do now to try to understand why. All of this came about with your website. I’m very grateful to kind of start a new journey here to try to understand myself more. I want to thank you guys for this. I feel like this has kind of

[23:24] been a nice wake-up call. Thanks again. I have to tell you, I choke up with some of the emails I get. So that was a young man, you know, writing to us on his own. We also got a wonderful email from a woman um um her email was headed uh this is the best 10 month i’ve ever spent which is our lower subscription level and she wrote to us and she said my husband and i have been married for 20 years sex had dwindled to a few times a year she said we discovered MakeLoveNotPorn oh my god

[23:58] it’s amazing in the first month we’ve had sex eight times then she you know razzardized about how wonderful our videos are, our MakeLoveNotPorn styles are. But the really interesting thing is she said, it’s not just the sex. My husband and I now feel more connected, more intimate, closer, more in love than at any time before in our marriage. I mean, that’s the impact we’ve had, which is amazing. That’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, what’s something that young men

[24:34] about sex that they’re currently not hearing? Honestly, it is that being a great lover is not about applying a formula. You know, that’s the issue with learning from porn. You know, oh, you know, got to break out these moves. This is what I’ve got to do to be good in bed. And actually, you know, what our videos show at MakeLoveNotPorn is, you know, it’s all about, you know how two people connect um how you know how you communicate um how every sexual partner

[25:08] you will ever have is different and so you know use the chemistry between you to find out what what each of you does and doesn’t like and also very importantly all of this starts with loving yourself and feeling at ease with yourself as a sexual being so we have many solo videos on MakeLoveNotPorn. We have masturbation videos, again, you know, male, female, trans, non-binary. And, you know, what’s interesting about that is I remember one young man in his 20s. So he submitted

[25:41] a video. And in his introduction to the video, because we ask all our MakeLoveNotPorn stars to write their own narratives and also to do an intro video contextualizing their own sex video. So he said, he said, I grew up with porn and it really messed me up, messed up my relationships with women. He said, I came across this platform. Oh, my God, it’s amazing. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. And he said, I felt I really wanted to give back to this community and I wanted to share a video myself. But at the moment, I’m single. I don’t have a partner. So he thought, why don’t I share a video of myself solo?

[26:18] So he filmed himself masturbating and it was the first time he’d ever done that. And he said that just the act of doing that and sharing this video made him love himself more. And that’s something we hear a lot from our solo Make Love Not The Porn Stars. You know, they tell us that sharing this very intimate act, you know, to increase their self-esteem, their sexual sense of self. And our community is amazing. And it’s very, very affirming.

[26:50] And by the way, that young man in due course went on to meet somebody who he felt very much in love with. He, you know, tentatively said to her, there’s this thing I do. She was, oh, I don’t know about that. But then they shared their first video and they’ve been sharing wonderful videos ever since because she enjoyed it as much as he did. But we had this woman who she shared her first video, a masturbation video. and in her narrative she said all my life i’ve been told my vulva’s ugly it’s too flappy it’s

[27:22] too meaty it’s too this too that she said i don’t agree and so i just thought what the hell i’m gonna make a video i’m gonna share it here and i’m gonna see what you guys think and in less than an hour there was a stream of comments going what are they talking about you’re beautiful you’re absolutely gorgeous we want to see more you know and and so um You know, our community is very, very appreciative and grateful for the fact that these are real world people sharing, you know, their most intimate moments. You know, thank you is the comment we hear most often.

[27:57] And that is just tremendously affirming for the MakeLoveNotPorn stars themselves. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you’ve made a tremendous impact on the way people see love and relationships. Can you teach someone to become a better lover? Or does that require more vulnerability on a person’s part? No, absolutely. So I designed to MakeLoveNotPorn around all my own personal beliefs and philosophers.

[28:27] And one of my philosophers, which comes out of my background in the advertising industry, is I’m all about communication through demonstration. Don’t say it. Be it. Do it. Show it. So MakeLoveNotPorn is education through real world demonstration. You know, when you watch our videos, they absolutely show you how to be great in bed the real world sex way. I’ll give you one example. So one of the things we also do at MakeLoveNotPorn is that, you know, because we don’t talk about sex openly and honestly in the real world, we have no socially acceptable vocabulary with which to do so.

[29:10] rushed in to fill that gap. That’s not good on a number of fronts, not least of which is that, as you would expect in a male-dominated industry, the language of porn is predominantly male-generated. So the person who coined the term finger-blasting didn’t have a vagina. Because if you have a vagina, you hear the term finger-blasting all across your legs. The person who coined the term getting her ass railed, never got his ass railed, pounding, banging, smashing, slamming, destroying. At MakeLoveNotPorn, we are building, we tagged our videos with completely different language.

[29:46] So when we’re building the platform, I said to my team, I want us to find our own term for the female version of blowjob. Because cunnilingus doesn’t hack it. Oral sex. The reason being, when something is as quick, easy and simple to say as blowjob, it gets said a lot more, gets asked for a lot more and it happens a lot more. so um our term for the female version of blowjob is lick job and our lick job videos are very

[30:20] popular because um as my friend sex and sandra likes to say you know this is the real world if your eyebrows aren’t wet you’re not doing it right and so and so we we are a phenomenal how-to platform for how to be a great lover. Have you discovered anything about human desire through the platform that genuinely surprised you? Oh my God, all the time. So we have a weekly meeting every Tuesday with all the team. I mean,

[30:55] all the team. I have like five employees. We’re tiny. But during that meeting, the curation team will report back to the rest of us on, you know, the number of new videos submitted in the past week, the number of new MakeLoveNotPorn stars, and they’ll report back to us on notable video highlights. And to this day, and literally, we were saying this Tuesday, two days ago, we will go, wow, did not know that was a thing. I’ve been saying for years, real world sex is more innovative,

[31:26] more surprising more creative and more hot and arousing than porn will ever be so we are constantly surprised because you know MakeLoveNotPorn is a social experiment you know we’re putting this platform out there we don’t dictate what real world sex is you are community you the world show us and we are learning all the time and why do you think you talk extensively and we just covered this a little bit the difficulty of raising money for businesses involving sex. Why do you think society is [32:03] comfortable monetizing sex privately, but uncomfortable financing it publicly? Well, a lot of society is even uncomfortable, you know, financing it privately, unfortunately. As evinced by, ironically, look at OnlyFans’ attempts to find investors over the years. they’ve already struggled. So my challenge finding investors is and always has been that I know that my potential investors are out there, and there are a ton of them. And by the way,

[32:35] there are a ton of them in every single country in the world. No matter how repressed you think a country is, in that country are a ton of investors with a lot of money who would absolutely fund what I’m doing. But they are impossible to find by conventional means because those investors all have one thing in common. Your willingness to fund MakeLoveNotPorn is entirely a function of your personal sexual journey. It’s a function of your personal lens

[33:09] on sex and sexuality that’s being shaped by your own experience of it. And I obviously have no way to research and target for that. Especially because sex is the area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside. The people who look like they would totally get it, don’t. The people who look like, oh, complete prudes, do. And so my strategy has to be,

[33:40] I put what I’m doing out there all the time across all my social channels. I do every media interview master. I go on every podcast. I have to make synaptic connections happen that will attract those investors to me. This is a long, slow, painful, and highly inefficient process. It does work from time to time, but it takes time. And why do you think financial institutions refuse to work with companies in your space? Do you think it’s risk management, moral judgment, or institutional discrimination?

[34:17] is it um it’s completely knee-jerk you know it’s it’s um when there is a no adult content clause um they will not entertain anything operating this area regardless of the fact that MakeLoveNotPorn is a no risk business in what is deemed a high-risk category and what i mean by that is, you know, we are unique not only in, you know, our content and our approach, [34:48] but we are unique as a business in the way that we operate. And I’ll just contextualise this for our listeners in the broader tech landscape as a whole. Because the young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today, They are not the primary target online or offline of harassment, abuse, sexual assault, racism, violence, rape, intimate image abuse, deep fake sexualization.

[35:25] Therefore, they did not and they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results that are around us every single day. Those of us who are most at risk every single day, women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, we design safe spaces and safe experiences, but we don’t get funded. Only 1.7% of all venture capital last year went to female founders.

[35:57] And that is why we have still not seen how much safer, better, happier, and by the way, way more lucrative, the future of the internet and technology could be when it’s designed and built through the female lens. And these are the two key words because this is what funding enables at scale. So I designed MakeLoveNotPorn through the female lens to be the safest place on the internet. Before we ever built the platform, I and my team spent literally years concepting and designing it.

[36:30] Because we knew that if we were going to invite people to do something they’ve never done before, socially share their real world sex, we had to think through every possible ramification of that to create a completely safe and trustworthy space. not only do we operate unlike anybody else in the adult sphere, we operate unlike anybody else on the internet, period. So it’s not possible to complete our submissions process unless your video [37:01] is fully legal, consensual, everyone’s over 18. We require full identifying details for every single participant in the video, including, by the way, if you’ve chosen to have somebody else behind the Even if you never see them, we have to know exactly who they are. We require not just full identified details, but we require two forms of government issued ID from every participant, including if someone is behind the camera. All other adult sites only require one, by the way.

[37:31] We require two. We have an automated submission form. But when you submit all this paperwork, our curation team then checks it all with human eyes before we accept your submission. So, you know, not only do you have to provide it all, but then we double check it. And we don’t watch the video that you’ve submitted until everything’s in place and it’s all legit. We then do something nobody else does. We watch every single video submitted from beginning to end.

[38:05] There is no self-publishing of anything on MakeLoveNotPorn. We review everything, we approve or reject it, and we publish it. And it’s not just the videos. we review every post on every member profile. And by the way, posts on Make Love at Porn can be as safe as you like, but we review them, we approve or reject, we publish them. Similarly, every comment in every video, we review, we approve or reject, we publish comments. There’s no self-publishing of anything. So going back to the video,

[38:37] when we’ve watched your video from beginning to end, we’ve ensured it’s legal, consensual and real. We then do something nobody else does either. We message each participant in the video individually to say, we are now going to publish this video. We want to know that we have your individual consent for it to be published. And we won’t publish until we have that. Also, by the way, any participant in a video can ask to have that video taken down at any time.

[39:08] That goes, by the way, if there’s someone behind the camera, if for whatever reason they want it down, And any one of the participants can message us and say, I’d like that video taken down and we will take it down immediately. We don’t need the other people involved to give their approval. And importantly, also, something else we do that nobody else does is, as I said, we remove your video immediately. So we have no online application form. We have no waiting period. We have no process. you just message us and within 24 hours or less we take the video down in fact quite often is it’s

[39:46] 10 or 15 minutes later um and by the way you know we will do that at any time interval so it’s absolutely fine we might publish your video one day you change your mind overnight you know we’ll take it down the next morning the moment you want your videos gone, they’re gone. And also, once we have approved your first video, we begin building a personal relationship with every single one of our MakeLoveNotPorn Stars. We know who every one of them is. We hold regular MakeLoveNotPorn Star happy hours.

[40:16] before the pandemic we used to do this IRL you know in New York where I’m based if we were traveling around the country we we held one in Portland we held one in London when I and our curator were over there these days we hold them on zoom and so we invite our MakeLoveNotPorn star community to come and meet each other we’ll also hold you know member and MakeLoveNotPorn star and zooms where our members can meet our MakeLoveNotPorn stars as well and you know we have MakeLoveNotPorn stars have been with us like you know for the duration of make love not [40:48] porn um who stay with us for years it’s wonderful we have really terrific relationships with um with our entire MakeLoveNotPorn star community yeah i mean it sounds like you’ve established a good framework there over at make love dot porn has there ever been a criticism of you or MakeLoveNotPorn where you thought they’re right i need to rethink this um not that i can think of because you know from the moment MakeLoveNotPorn launch we’ve had

[41:18] nothing but a universal um positive response from people all around the world and in every country you know um that comes to us and and that i’ve been to in fact you know i feel very fortunate because a few years ago a friend of mine um a female journalist um contacted me and said cindy you know I’m thinking about writing a book about how you know women aren’t welcome on the internet and so I’m asking my friends who are you know prominent women in the public eye if they’d be [41:50] willing to share their hate mail and and talk about how they deal with it and I said you know I think that sounds like a great idea I’d love to take part I’m afraid I can’t I don’t have any hate mail and i really don’t i mean i feel very fortunate um i think because when you understand what we’re doing at MakeLoveNotPorn why we’re doing it nobody can argue with it okay that’s fair i mean is there something that you’ve changed your mind about drastically in

[42:22] last decade um well i’ve changed my mind drastically about how easy it was going to be to start MakeLoveNotPorn and launch it and build it and grow it. Bloody hell. I mean, you know, I have, you know, certainly I now feel very, very strongly about what I’m seeing happening online, which is the fact that we are going backwards as a society.

[42:53] And this refers to the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, So, giant tech is dominated by white, for the most part, male-founded platforms. I mentioned earlier that only 1.7% of all venture capital goes to female founders. What that means, and I don’t think people think about sufficiently, is that 98.3% of our daily lived experience of technology on the internet is through the male lens.

[43:26] And so when you have not proactively designed safety into your platform, your only recourse when very bad things happen is retroactive, which is why there is an appalling degree of censorship across the entire digital space that is massively disadvantaging female lens anything. women’s health generally and women’s perspective on sex so it’s absolutely fine um to you know [44:03] talk about penis testicles whatever in a social post if you use the words vagina vulva or clitoris your posts are blocked and your account is suspended and i mean for example you know Instagram deleted our MakeLoveNotPorn account back in February of this year. We only posted safe for work posts on it. We were told the reason was account integrity. We’ve been totally integrity before. There was no review, no recourse, no way to have any conversation with them.

[44:41] By the way, so you know, what we’ve done is we’ve taken Meta to Small Plains Court in Albany, It’s extremely cheap to do that. It costs 40 bucks. We had a court hearing last week. The judge told the meta representative five times he recommended they reinstate our account. Unfortunately, you know, the court has no legal mandate. They still haven’t. But we are absolutely fighting. But what that means is that I’ve realized that what we need very badly is all of those platforms operating a one size fits all policy.

[45:22] And what we need is we need one policy that blocks and disables harm. And we need another policy that enables and supports good. I can tell you that MakeLoveNotPorn, and this is important because our mission at MakeLoveNotPorn is to help end rape culture globally. Now, that may sound like a very big mission, but we have 14 years of proof of concept at a micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something very simple that nevertheless nobody else

[45:57] anywhere is doing. We show 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 key part. We make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture. One young man wrote to us, your website makes me want to have sex in a more grown up, honest and respectful way. Another man left a comment saying, this video makes me want to be a better man in the bedroom and in life.

[46:32] We can do that. But we are being blocked by the same algorithms and the same processes that are there to block much greater harm. And by the way, I’m not blocking that harm because child sexual abuse ads are rife on meta when we are banned from advertising. You know, child grooming is rife on Snapchat. We’re banned from being there, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, I am really trying to get people to understand that it’s not simply about shutting down harm.

[47:04] It’s also about elevating and welcoming and supporting and funding and championing good, because that’s what we are. Yeah, I can respect that. It sounds like you’ve received a glowing amount of review for the positive work you’re doing. Let’s get into AI. We’re approaching the end of the first hour. We’ve got about 13 minutes. But how does AI change your concept of intimacy and relationships and what people expect about sex?

[47:40] So first of all, it makes us even more important. And actually, you know, I think that AI is our tailwind. because as the world is overwhelmed with AI slop, there is more and more of an appreciation for the human touch, human curation, genuine human connection, artisanal approaches to venture building. And so, and by the way, we ban AI at MakeLoveNotPorn, obviously.

[48:13] And we find a tremendous appreciation for the human element of how we uniquely operate as a business. Now, at the same time, you know, I absolutely have an AI strategy for MakeLoveNotPorn, which has been the pipeline for crumbs. I mean, it must be six or seven years now because I need funding to do this. But this came out of a conversation I had all those years ago with a friend whose background is AI and machine learning, who assured me that this was feasible.

[48:46] AI is obviously built on LLM’s large language models. We have something very unique at MakeLoveNotPorn. We have an LVM. We have a large video model that is the world’s only pool of fully consensual, 100% human curated, real world sex videos. I want to use AI to turn that into an algorithm for consent. with a number of different industry applications, because this is not a consumer-facing algorithm,

[49:23] this is an enterprise application. So, you know, one example is Hollywood. And I say that because right now, all around us in popular culture, we see many sex scenes and representations of sex that purport to be consensual, but are actually modeling non-consensual behaviour. Whether that is, at one end of the spectrum, Game of Thrones, where pretty much the only way anyone ever has sex is rape, or at the other end of the spectrum, rom-coms, where even

[49:56] in a love story, when you get to the sex scene, you know, know, there is no communication. It’s all wordless. You know, they embrace wordlessly. They fall gently back onto the bed in slow motion wordlessly. White curtains flutter in the breeze. You know, there is zero foreplay. There is instant penetration. you know wake up next morning ripple dissolve beaming at each other across the pillow wordlessly you know that is not helping anybody understand how to have great sex and how to have great

[50:30] consensual sex so imagine being able to run your script or your film through an algorithm that will tell you whether what you were modeling was or wasn’t consensual behavior another use case very obvious one is criminal court because as i think we all know something like you know one of all rape cases ever make it into the judicial system, something like 0.00 whatever percent ever result in convictions, imagine being able to overcome the he said, she said of the courtroom, [51:03] the bias in the mindsets of old white male judges with an algorithm that can tell you the nuances of whether what happened was or wasn’t consensual. So obviously that’s an enterprise that requires ton of funding, which I do not have. So that is in the pipeline further down the road. We reference it. We have a holding page at MakeLoveNotPorn.ai. But I hope that one day I will get to make that happen. I mean, yeah, you’ve publicly rejected marriage and children as the default measures

[51:37] of a woman’s fulfilled life. What does that mean for people? all um so for the benefit of our listeners um what you’re referencing is the fact that um i am very open about the fact that i’ve never ever wanted to be married i have never wanted children very glad i always knew that as opposed to finding out the hard way by actually having them i adore being single i’m not a relationship person i cannot wait to die alone and i date younger men casually and [52:10] recreationally and I’m deliberately very public about all of that because we don’t have enough role models in our society for women and for men by the way that demonstrate you can live your life very differently to the way that you’re expected to and still be amazingly happy and I’m one of the happiest people I know um and and one of the things I love about MakeLoveNotPorn is that you know as the only platform that showcases you know real world people and the real world sex

[52:42] lives we showcase many other things one of which is how people design their real world relationships to be what they want them to be and so at MakeLoveNotPorn you know you can see a spectrum or relationships from. So one end is, so we have a woman, MakeLoveNotPornstar, who tells us in her narrative for the videos that she and her husband have an agreement. Once a year, [53:14] she is allowed to meet up with her old high school sweetheart and fuck his brains out in the motel room. Now, we assume that this is a reciprocal arrangement. We don’t know because those are the videos that she shares. on MakeLoveNotPorn, her and her high school sweetheart. We assume the husband is, you know, seeing his own high school sweetheart. But I think it’s great that people see that this couple is doing that because, you know, if you are thinking about opening up your marriage

[53:45] or your relationship, that’s a great baby steps example. You know, it’s a known quantity, you know, a lover from the past. It’s a contained occasion, you know, once a year. And that might be a great way for a couple to test the waters in opening things up. Then, of course, at the other end of the spectrum, we have polyamorous MakeLoveNotPorn stars. We have threesomes, moresomes. Our tag for that is more the merrier. But what you see on MakeLoveNotPorn is you see the real world version.

[54:18] You see the respect, you know, the empathy, the sensitivity with which these sorts of relationship models are conducted. But I love the fact that we are showing people that you are free to design the relationship model that works for you, which may, by the way, be different at different stages in your life. This is very limited number that society tells us it’s only okay to do this. Right. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Let’s start to wrap this up, Cindy.

[54:51] What’s something that you can tell our listeners that can inform them about sex and sex culture that they don’t already think about? Honestly, I think I would just say communicate, communicate, communicate. Talk about sex openly and honestly. And incidentally, we’ve just launched in very early stage beta, MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy. which I had the idea for 11 years ago.

[55:21] That’s how long investors refused to fund it because parents and teachers reached out to me begging for the zero to 18 and beyond sex education extension of what we do. And so MakeLoveNotPorn.academy is a global aggregator hub for the best of the world sex education content that is already out there, but it’s been blocked, censored and de-platformed as I referenced earlier. Our mission at MakeLoveNotPorn.academy is to organize the world’s sex education information to make it universally accessible and useful.

[55:52] That is a deliberate paraphrase of Google’s original mission statement, which was to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful because today in this area, Google is not doing that. The algorithm is biased, it’s censoring. Parents and teachers tell me they cannot find the education resources they need when they search for them. And so we are building what we hope will be the Google of sex ed. But I bring that up because You know, that is designed to make it easier for parents to talk to their children about sex. If you go to the homepage of MakeLoveNotPorn.academy, you’ll find two videos from me, short videos.

[56:26] One is how to talk to young children about sex, porn and love. The other is how to talk to teenagers about sex, porn and love. It’s very simple. It makes it very, very easy. And I just think everybody will benefit from communicating more around sex, talking about it more openly and honestly. 17 years I worked on MakeLoveNotPorn, I can tell you I’ve discovered everybody is dying to talk about sex. And sex gets better when we talk about it openly, we educate about it openly,

[56:57] and we communicate about it openly. Well said. Fair enough. Cindy, where can people find your work for this first hour that people are listening to? How can people get to where you are? So first of all, I would love everyone to join us at MakeLoveNotPorn.com. You know, if you believe in what I’m doing, please do take out a subscription to support us. Consider becoming a MakeLoveNotCorn star. We have a revenue share model. You get half of all the revenue that your videos make. Do check us out at makelovenotcorn.academy.

[57:31] It’s free for everyone to access, but it’s the museum model. If you believe in our mission, there are several tiers of paid membership to help fund operations. So please do take out a paid academy membership. I have a sub stack, Dear Cindy, where I answer a question a week on any topic anyone wants to send in. So do send me your questions. And you can find me on at Cindy Gallop on Instagram and on Twitter X. On Instagram, because they deleted our at MakeLoveNotPorn account, we are at MLNP underscore videos at MLNP Academy.

[58:08] me and you can also follow me on linkedin and have a personal website at cindygallop.com yeah we’ll make that those links available for all of our listeners and we’re going to move into the bonus round where cindy has graciously agreed to stay for an extra 25 or 30 minutes or so if you want to get to the bonus round go to the human xp.com membership and you can listen to the rest guys so much for listening. We’ll be back next week.