A Dog Called Diversity
A Dog Called Diversity
Making love, not porn.....with Cindy Gallop
If you haven’t heard about Cindy Gallop you are in for a treat. As a start her LinkedIn headline says she likes to blow shit up. That's sounds fun doesn't it? She does this through her platform Make Love Not Porn, the first user generated human-curated social sex platform. It’s like Facebook for real world sex.
We invited her on A Dog Called Diversity because she is making the world of porn and online sex more accessible, more real and more inclusive. Imagine seeing regular people (eg not porn stars) having sex that's not glamourised? Just lots of different people showing how much they love or lust after each other?
We discovered through preparing this podcast that not many people like to talk about sex, but how do we make it less taboo and more inclusive if we don't?
Loved this converstion with Cindy and I hope you do too. If you would like to support Cindy and her platform Make Love Not Porn you can do this in 4 ways:
1. Purchase video access and subscribe
3. Donate, or
4. Become a sextech investor
Lisa xx
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Welcome to A Dog Called Diversity, a podcast from the Culture Ministry where we explore the themes of diversity, equity and inclusion through sharing stories of personal and powerful lived experiences, including how people have found their feet and developed their career in diversity and inclusion. We are so glad you are listening in and if you need some help or support with your diversity and inclusion work, go to wwwthecultureministrycom for more information. If you haven't heard about Cindy Gallop, you are in for a treat. As a start, her LinkedIn headline says she likes to blow shit up. She does this through her platform Make Love, not Porn, the first user-generated, human-curated social sex platform. It's like Facebook for real-world sex. We invited her on A Dog Called Diversity because she is making the world of porn and online sex more accessible, more real and more inclusive. Are you ready? Here's Lisa Mulligan.
Speaker 2:Welcome to A Dog Called Diversity. Cindy, it's so great to have you. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, do you know? I have admired your work for a long time, actually, since discovering your TED Talks and then your business Make Love, not Porn. In my research, I discovered that maybe a lot of people don't know about your business, your website, and I also discovered they weren't comfortable talking about making love and porn. But that's a different story. But I wondered if you could just start off telling us a bit about the platform Make Love, not Porn and how you got started with it.
Speaker 3:Sure. So Make Love, not Porn, is a complete and total accident, in the sense that I never consciously, intentionally set out to do anything I, very bizarrely, find myself doing now. It came about through my personal experience dating younger men. So the men I date tend to be in their 20s and about 14, 15 years ago, I realized through direct personal experience that I was encountering what happens when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world, and porn therefore becomes sex education by default in not a good way. And, being a naturally action-oriented person, I went I'm going to do something about this. And so 13 years ago and bear in mind this is for anybody else that identified this issue before anyone was talking or writing about this, I put up on no Money a tiny, clunky website at makelovenotporncom that, in its original iteration, was just words, so 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.
Speaker 3:I launched at TED in 2009. I became the only TED speaker to say the words come on my face on the TED today, six times a day, which I loved, I loved. 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 every single country in the world, young and old, men and females, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out, and I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue, and so I then felt I had a personal responsibility. I had to take Make Love, not Porn forwards in a way that would make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective. But I also saw an opportunity to do what I believe in very strongly, which is that the future of business is doing good and making money simultaneously. I saw the opportunity for a big business solution to this huge global need, and I use the word big advisedly, because even then, you know, 13 years ago, at concept stage, I knew if I wanted to counter the global impact of porn as default sex ed I would have to come up with something that at least had the potential one day to be just as mass, just as mainstream and just as all pervasive in our society as porn carriers. So thinking big right from the get-go.
Speaker 3:And so what I decided to do was I always emphasize that make love, not porn is not anti-porn, because the issue isn't porn. The issue is that we don't talk about sex in the real world. If we did, amongst a whole host of benefits, people would then be able to bring a real world mindset to the viewing of what is simply performative, produced entertainment, and so that's why our tagline at Make Love, not Porn is we are pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference, and that's why our mission is one very simple thing, which is to help make it easier for everybody in the world to talk openly and honestly about sex, and so I decided very simply to take every dynamic in social media and apply them to this one era of universal human experience no other social network or platform will allow in order to socialize sex and to make real world sex and talking about it socially acceptable and therefore ultimately just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, instagram, snapchat, tiktok. So 10 years ago, my tiny team and I launched the first stage of this vision, and I say the first stage because I've had a whole roadmap planned out for MakeLoveNotPorn from day one, but I'm only now, I think, finally able to raise the funding to build it out. So the first stage is MakeLoveNotPorntv, which is the world's first user-generated, human-curated social sex video sharing platform.
Speaker 3:So we're kind of what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed you to socially, sexually self-express, which it sadly does not. No way. The way to think about it 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, beautiful, wonderful sex we all have in the real world. And you know I designed Make Love, not Porn through the female lens to be the safest place on the Internet. There is no self-publishing of anything on MakeLoveNotPorn. Our curators watch every single video submitted from beginning to end before we approve or reject and we publish it. And we have a revenue sharing business model. So our members pay to subscribe, rent and stream social sex videos. Half that income goes to our contributors, whom we call our make love, not porn stars, and so we're spearheading the social sex revolution. The revolution part is not the sex, it's the fact we're making it social.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and accessible, accessible, I think as well. Yeah, absolutely Is. I had a question a bit later on, but I to ask it now your curators, the people who watch every video and make sure it's it's okay to put up on your site is that your most coveted role?
Speaker 3:like when you do. You know, Lisa? Um, well, the lovely thing about make love, not poor, is that people write to us every week asking to come and work for us. You know now? Now we are tiny, we're bootstrapping because the one thing I did not realize when I embarked on this venture was that I and my tiny team would fight an enormous battle every single day to build it. Basically because every piece of business infrastructure any other tech startup takes for granted we can't. The small print always says no adult content, and this is all pervasive across every area of the business in ways that people outside the sphere don't realize. I can't get funded. I can't get banked. It took me four years to find one bank here in America that would allow me to open a business bank account to make love, not porn.
Speaker 3:Our biggest challenge is payments. Paypal won't work with adult content, Stripe can't. Mainstream credit card processors won't. I have to work with adult-friendly payment processors who, because anybody adult has nowhere else to go, charge extortionate rates. I pay out 12% of my revenue every month in payment processing fees. That's a huge business growth in India.
Speaker 3:Every single tech service I need to use to operate my 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. Sometimes they let me, sometimes they don't. It's a very labor-intensive process. I never get to work with the best in class of anything.
Speaker 3:We had to build our entire video platform from scratch ourselves as proprietary technology, because existing streaming services will not stream adult content. I'm so jealous of friends who built video startups on top of Vimeo Quick, easy, simple, cheap. I can't do that. Even something as simple as sending out our membership emails. Mailchimp won't work with adult content, Klaviyo won't. We've been rejected by a ton until we found SendGrid. Who would? And to give you an idea of how ridiculous this is, a few years ago I needed a contract user experience designer.
Speaker 3:I put a perfectly standard job description up on Upwork. 20 minutes later they took it down. They told us we're not allowed to advertise jobs there because we are MakeLoveNotPorn, and the biggest business growth inhibitor of them all is the fact that we are banned from advertising and promoting ourselves anywhere. So I'm not surprised you say not. A lot of people in New Zealand had heard of us. We are banned from advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Reddit. I ask you, you know Google search ads YouTube. You know we can't advertise on Snapchat. We can't advertise on TikTok. We can't advertise on TikTok. We can't advertise on traditional media. You know the MTA here in New York will not let me advertise on billboards in the subway.
Speaker 3:And, by the way, this is entirely gendered. It's not just us. I was going to ask about the gender, it's any female-led sexual health and wellness venture. Yeah, menstruation ventures can't advertise on Facebook and Instagram at all. Menopause ventures can't. Fertility ventures can't. In the meantime, male sexual health and wellness, erectile dysfunctions, notions, feel free, they're everywhere. So basically, you know I am now raising a serious round of funding. I'm raising $20 million to basically overcome these obstacles and scale MakeLoveNotPorn. And so, very long-winded response to a question which is every week people write to us and come and work for us and I have to say right now we have no money, we're not hiring. But if I can raise this funding, then you bloody bet we're hiring.
Speaker 2:I love it and I was going to ask you are your funding challenges? Like women, startups have funding challenges anyway, but of course you're classed in the adult space, so that makes it hard as well. How does the I guess the porn industry take payments? How does the general porn?
Speaker 3:industry. They have all the same problems. We do. They have the same. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly the same issue. They have to work with adult-friendly payment processes.
Speaker 2:I didn't realise that was such a big issue, gosh. It kind of leads me to the question about who are your creators and who are your customers. Are they the same people? Do you have demographics about the people who are providing content and consuming content?
Speaker 3:Sure, so, first of all, our members and our Make Love, not Porn stars are frequently one in the same, because what will happen is that people join, they go, wow, this looks like fun. Why don't we start sharing? I mean, we also have many more people who watch than people who then become MakeLoveNotPorn stars, but that's a very natural trajectory. Yeah, and you know again, frustratingly, lisa, because I don't have the resources and the funding, you know, and the you know massive in-house development team. You know, I've not been able to get all the data out of our code that I want to, which, again, is why I'm raising funding to build out a full analytic program. But what I can tell you is so I designed MakeLoveNotPorn to be fully diverse and inclusive.
Speaker 3:Our members and our MakeLoveNotPorn stars are male, female, trans, non-binary, but what I have observed over the 10 years we've been operating is that, interestingly, the people who find MakeLoveNotPorn the biggest revelation are men. So we probably get more appreciative emails from men than anybody else, because we are something utterly unique that men won't find anywhere else on the internet, which is a safe space where men can be and see other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. You wouldn't believe the number of men who write to us and say I just watched my first video Make Love, not Porn and afterwards I cried that's how moving our real world sex videos are. Um, I picked up a twitter exchange um last year between two men. One man had tweeted as a joke. He tweeted hey guys, I've got this really weird fetish, got this kink where I want to watch porn. Where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent and truthful, really nice to each other.
Speaker 2:Where do you find that? And so another man replied to each other Hit me up on your hot seat, where do you?
Speaker 3:find that. And so another man replied to him, and he said there's this website called Make Love, not Porn, where you can watch real couples fucking and making love. He said I watched a video where the woman said to her man I love you while making love. He said sincerely, I cried when I heard that. You know, lisa. I wish that 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 that fact, and we'd all be a lot better off if they were. And so make love, not porn, is one of the solutions to toxic masculinity.
Speaker 2:I love that and I think when you look at porn, if I was a man and I was looking at porn, you know I'm expected to be buff, I'm expected to have a massive penis. I'm, you know, expected to fuck five or six or ten women in an orgy in a video. Like it's not your everyday experience of most men, right?
Speaker 3:So like it's not your everyday experience of my sin right, and so this is why, also, you know, makelovenotporn has so many social benefits. As an unique venture, we have an unique capability. We have the power to change people's sexual attitudes and behaviour for the better in a way that nothing else does. So to the point you just made. Social sex videos on MakeLoveNotPorn are enormously reassuring because we celebrate real world, everything Real world bodies, real world hair, real world penis, real world breast size, real world vulvas. And the reason that's critically important is because you can talk body positivity all you like. You can preach self-love until you're blue in the face At the end of the day.
Speaker 3:Nothing makes us feel great about our own bodies like seeing people who are no one's idea of aspirational body types getting turned on by each other, desiring each other having an amazing time in bed. Our mantra at Make Love, not Porn, is everybody is beautiful when they're having real world sex, and they really are. And so our members desiring each other having an amazing time in bed. Our mantra at Make Love, not Porn, is everybody is beautiful when they're having real world sex, and they really are. And so our members write to us all the time and say you made me feel better about my own body. One man wrote to us and he said my girlfriend and I now feel able to be more open and central with each other because you made each of us feel better about our own bodies.
Speaker 3:And then here's another very important thing we do that is utterly unique. We celebrate real world emotion, love, intimacy, feelings. And the reason that's crucial is because, you know again, all around us in popular culture movies, tv, netflix we see many creative expressions and narratives of relationships, but we never see the actual sex. On Make Love, not Porn. You see the actual sex, but you also see the relationships, because in our videos those two things are indivisible. And when I say that I don't just mean in our coupled partner threesome videos. You see, you know a wonderful loving, healthy relationship dynamics within sex In our many solo videos. You see, you know wonderful loving, healthy relationship dynamics within sex In our many solo videos, because we have many masturbation videos. You know male, female, trans, non-binary. In those videos you see what it's like to have a healthy relationship with yourself, with your own body, your own genitals, your own sexuality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is taboo in society. No, talks about that. Yeah, I, I liken your platform to where I used to live in Sydney and in King's Cross, which is, you know, the red light district. Yeah, um, there's a beautiful Korean bathhouse, a ginseng bathhouse, and I used to go there a lot with friends, and you go to the change room, you take off all your clothes and then you go into the treatment areas and the baths and it's truly the only place that you can really see women, women's bodies, as they are not in a glossy magazine, you know not in a porn video.
Speaker 2:And your sight. You know it's kind of like that. It's like, oh, everyone's bodies is different and everyone has wobbly bits, and you know it's kind of like that. It's like, oh, everyone's bodies is different and everyone has wobbly bits, and you know, I think it's like that and I think it's really healthy. I wanted to ask you, though you do have people who curate your content, and I guess, every now and again, you might reject videos. What videos don't make it onto the platform? Sure?
Speaker 3:So there are three broad reasons why, why we we have to reject some videos and and, by the way, so when I, when we started, make love on the porn, I said to my team I want us to design this platform so that our acceptance rate is 99.9, because I don't want to have to reject anybody's real world sex. So the three broad the first is too porn-tropey. An interesting thing about this, lisa, is this is not about what people do. Ok, I have to say to people all the time, everything you see in porn, somebody somewhere loves doing, in fact, millions of somebody's. What is very interesting about what we characterize as too porn-tropey is that, because of the ubiquity of porn, people have internalized porn tropes without even realizing it. So, for example, you know, people think, because this is what they see on tube sites, they think we want them to start the camera running the moment they hit the sheets, turn it off the minute they've come and we go. No, no, no, no, we go.
Speaker 3:Real world sex has context. Real world sex has a backstory relationships. Start the camera running as early as possible. We want to see how you get turned on, we want to see the clothes coming, you know, and leave it running as long as possible afterwards. We want to see the aftermath, the cuddles, the conversation, the showering, you know all of that real world stuff. Or the other thing people will do again because they've seen this in porn they think we need to see it is Too many genital close-ups. They think they have to show it's real. We know you're having sex for real. Call the camera back. We want to see the interaction.
Speaker 3:So that's what I mean by too porn-tropic. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is you know we are a user-generated platform. We are absolutely not about production values. You know people film themselves on their webcams, on their phones, but every so often, you know, someone will submit a video where it's so dark you can't see a thing, you know. And then we'll have to say I'm terribly sorry, but you know, can't publish this. But here are some lighting tips for you know, the next time around.
Speaker 3:And then the third reason we have to reject videos is enormously aggravating, and we do try and preempt this as much as possible on our site. But it's copyrighted music. You know this is real world sex. You've got the radio on the background. You're not thinking about the fact that really popular song is on. But we can't publish videos that feature copyrighted music. And so, as I said, we try and preempt this. You know, in our FAQs we have, you know, use these libraries of Creative Commons music. You know if you have a friend, you know who's a singer or a band or whatever. You know here's a great way to sell their music. But yeah, we can't publish videos of copyright music in them.
Speaker 2:Sure, so my podcast is all about diversity and inclusion, and one of the things I've really noticed about porn in particular is that there seems to be a shame about it. So in couples some couples, you know people will watch it in secret. They may not watch it together, and so there's a shame to it. I think we recently had to call an IT help desk about our internet because there was some issue, and got someone in a help desk who went through and tried to find what our issue was and then, you know, had to make the point that someone in our house was looking at porn.
Speaker 3:That was none of their business, by the way. What the hell.
Speaker 2:What the hell Exactly I'm like, I don't think that.
Speaker 3:It was like you know, like that IT person doesn't watch porn either, so what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and that wasn't the issue that we were having that someone was watching porn and I wondered you know how? Do you think your platform helps with that shame and that you know that it's not okay to watch people having sex? You know that's? You know that it's not okay to watch people having sex? You?
Speaker 3:know that's. You know society. So I call Make Love Not Porn a shame changer, because the power of Make Love Not Porn, Lisa, is two things. It's not just what we do. You know what we are, what we show you, it's how we do it. So, as I said earlier, you know I got an extraordinary response globally to MakeLoveNotPorn in its original clunky format, and I think that was because MakeLoveNotPorncom in its original format was a manifestation of me, and what I mean by that is it was very simple, very straightforward, truthful, honest, utterly non-judgmental, very down to earth, and it had a sense of humor.
Speaker 3:We never get to have conversations about sex within those parameters. The moment we do, the floodgates open. And so everything about Make Love, not Porn is designed to socialize, to normalize sex, to bring sex out into the sunlight and the relief people feel when they encounter that. You know, here is the sunlight and the relief people feel when they encounter that. Here is the platform where everything about it is designed to take the shame, guilt and embarrassment out of social sex. That also is why men cry when they watch our videos, because a word I hear so often from our members is guilt-free.
Speaker 3:You know, one man wrote and said that you know he watched his very first video make love, not porn. He masturbated and he cried afterwards because it was the very first guilt-free sexual experience he'd ever had. That's our power and I have to tell you, lisa, you know I've been fighting this battle and working on this business for 13 years, which means you know I have 13 years' worth of emails, conversations, comments. The 13 years I have seen up close, every day, the enormous human unhappiness and misery caused by the shame, embarrassment and guilt that we imbue sex with and so make love, not porn has decided to remove all of that and, as I said, we are socializing sex in the real world. That's why we are the social sex revolution.
Speaker 2:I have so experienced that, when I was preparing to talk to you, because I was so excited to talk to you, and I was asking friends at the dinner table last night, it's like right, what would you want to ask, cindy, knowing this, you know, knowing this platform, and there was a lot of silence, there was a lot of very uncomfortable looks. There was oh well, wouldn't this website be illegal in some countries?
Speaker 3:oh, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2:We, we are legal everywhere in the world yeah, I was, um, I was, I was really surprised. What have you learnt about yourself by you know, over the last 13 years? What has surprised you, that you've learnt about you?
Speaker 3:I've learnt that I can keep a business going for 10 years on just $3 million of funding. That is an extraordinary feat.
Speaker 2:Wow, and I don't know if you talk about this, but is your business self-sustaining?
Speaker 3:No, it's not because of all the barriers we face. As I told you earlier, we can't use payment processes with mainstream rates of 3% or less. We can't advertise. I cannot get my business to be self-sustaining when I face all those barriers and that's why, right now, business to be self-sustaining when I face all those barriers and that's why right now, I'm raising $20 million to keep MakeLoveNotPorn alive and to scale it. And if anybody listening to this is an investor, absolutely email Cindy at MakeLoveNotPorncom. And, by the way, I would love investors from New Zealand because all of those barriers fall the moment. I write big enough checks. You know you'd be amazed where I can advertise when I've got a lot of money to do it with. So that's the answer, and so if people want to see make love, not porn, survive and continue, they need to fund me.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. Okay, final, which I'm sure everyone asks you have you made your own video?
Speaker 3:So that question is asked frequently. So we, absolutely, as a team, before we launched Make Love Not Porn. You know, 11 years ago, whenever this was, we sat down as a team and had the conversation about you know, as entrepreneurs, we should be using our own platform. What do we all think? So you know, as entrepreneurs, we should be using our own platform. What do we all think? So you know, there were different views within the team. Some people are keener than others. But what we all agreed was, as I said earlier, every one of us has to fight a battle every day trying to get business partner services in all our different spheres of operation, partner services in all our different spheres of operation. And we all agreed as a team that you know that's already difficult enough, without compounding that difficulty by being on our platform, and so it's a business decision. But if, further down the line, those barriers go away, then who knows? But right now, that's why, you know, none of us are.
Speaker 2:No, fair enough, Fair enough.
Speaker 3:I get a lot of men emailing me, asking me if there are videos of me they can watch.
Speaker 2:I bet you do. I bet you do, cindy. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. I hope that there are investors out there listening who'd love to get in touch, and I will put all your contact details in the show notes.
Speaker 3:Fantastic, lisa. I enormously appreciate that and I also want to urge New Zealand to make Kiwi Love, not Porn. I'm trying to think Love, that I think we do have. Australian Make Love, not Porn. I'm not sure we have any from New Zealand. So New Zealand represent, maybe we could start.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:If you would like to support Cindy and her platform, make Love Not Porn, you can do this in four ways One purchase video access and subscribe. Two buy merchandise. Three donate. Or four, become a sex tech investor. Check out the links in the show notes. At the Culture Ministry, we know how challenging and lonely it can be working in diversity and inclusion and how progress is often slow. You might be just getting started in diversity and inclusion or you might be on your way. The Culture Ministry is here to help you with your diversity and inclusion progress. Go to wwwthecultureministrycom to learn more. If you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned something, please share with your friends on social media. Give a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and leave a comment. This makes it easier for others to find a dog called diversity.