We all remember that certain teacher who, for better or worse, left us with a lasting legacy. And then there were our unofficial mentors who imparted how babies made their debut: stork delivery, cabbage patch finds, the birds and the bees. A self-proclaimed “rampant feminist” launched a website to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Cindy Gallop did not set out to become a sex evangelist. Born in England in 1960, the eldest of four girls of a Malaysian Chinese mother and a British teacher father, she described her childhood self as “chronically insecure.” She grew up in Brunei (“a great deal more boring than it sounds”) and returned to Britain to study English at Oxford. There she indulged her passion for theater and, after graduation, worked for several theaters. However, she “got fed up with working every hour and earning chicken feed.” She felt she might have the requisite chutzpah to make it in the corporate world—“and I thought it was time to sell out and go into advertising.” She joined the publicity firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London where, despite overt sexism, quickly rose in the ranks and in 1998 found herself in charge of the company’s Manhattan branch. Gallop stood out in the Big Apple, partially due to her wardrobe of black leather and tight dresses, drawing fashion inspiration from characters such as Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Her parents had never given her “the talk,” and Cindy clung to virginity till age twenty-one. She made up for being a sexual late bloomer and became a card-carrying cougar when her firm pitched an online dating site, and, wanting to experience the product firsthand, Cindy posted a profile. She said the majority of responses came from younger men, and Ms. Gallop never looked back. No doubt this Mrs. Robinson proved popular: attractive, uninhibited, and the owner of quite the crib—a cavernous 3,800 square foot “black apartment” in New York City’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, patterned to emulate a Shanghai nightclub. It had originally served as the site of the locker room of the first YMCA in the Unites States, which explains the fact that at her parties, the strapping young men who pass the hors d’oeuvres wear small white towels printed with the YMCA logo as their uniform. The pad’s décor consisted of animal prints, paintings, Gucci stilettos, and Chinese lacquer. The unique dwelling garnered fame when it was featured in The Notorious B.I.G.’s music video for his song “Nasty Girl.” It was also the venue for multiple beddings that would lead to Gallop launching a unique enterprise.
On Cindy’s forty-fifth birthday it was time to try something new, and in what she called “my own personal midlife crisis” she resigned her position at BBH. Her something new was the website If We Ran the World: its message was to encourage people to make small changes that would fuel larger action. Her own contribution stemmed from her relationships with younger men. She felt that while their stamina and her experience made a winning combination, she had observed a disturbing trend: the boudoir moves of most of her lovers seemed drawn entirely from pornography. She noticed that they were asking her to do things they had seen online and stated, “I was experiencing what happens when two things converge—when today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. It results in porn becoming, by default, sex education.”
In 2009, Cindy took her findings to a TED conference; her four-minute presentation quickly became one of its most talked-about videos, and for good reason: “I’m the only TED speaker to utter the words ‘c*m on my face’ six times.’ ” In the role of evangelist, she explained, “As a mature, experienced, confident older woman I have no problem realizing that a certain amount of re-education, rehabilitation, and reorientation have to take place.” She shared her concern that men, women, and children, via porn, are receiving an unrealistic, violent, and misogynistic vision of sex—something that can only lead to extremely damaging relationships. Ms. Gallop then unveiled her website, Make Love Not Porn, which compares what it calls the “porn world” with the “real word” of sex. Its aim is to provide viewers with the chance to see what it really looks like when people have sex as opposed to scripted scenes, so they can garner greater insight into what their partner really wants. Gallop expressed the thinking behind her website: “Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed, but they should. When we take the shame out of talking about sex we also end sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual violence—all areas where the perpetrators rely on shame to ensure their victims will never speak up—then we are fundamentally empowering women and girls.”
Initially the site was mostly text, but in the spirit of “a picture is worth a thousand words” she took it up a notch and launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv—a YouTube for erotically unshrinking violets. It consists of streaming videos of real people engaging in non-performance sex, hence devoid of insta-orgasms and showing a variety of size demographics. Thus, the men are not actors with Schwarzenegger bodies and the women are not Megan Foxes possessed of athletic moves—generally the realm of prepubescent Romanian gymnasts. Cindy does not see the difference between sharing pictures of romantic dinners during a weekend in Paris and what one does behind closed hotel doors. She claims that what her site is doing is in keeping with sharing other milestones on social media which were once considered for-your-eyes-only: naked selfies, childbirth, live liposuction. . . and then there are the rest of us who post pics of dinners and brunches.
On the entrepreneurial end, the videos are user-generated, so people submit a video of themselves getting busy and pay a non-refundable fee of five dollars to have Gallop and Co. check out their, er, work. Successful candidates are posted on the site, where users can pay five dollars to rent one for three weeks, during which they are free to view the video as often as they like. Fifty percent of the proceeds go to the cyber couple—affectionately dubbed by Gallop as “Make Love Not Porn stars.” She adopted the rent-and-stream model instead of providing downloads so that if those featured in the videos no longer want their home videos on the Internet, they are immediately removed. In contrast to mainstream pornography, the videos come across as sweet, playful, and human. In one episode, Lily LaBeau and Danny Wylde, professional pornographic actors who are a couple in real life, partake in a coupling, showing their lovemaking outside of work.
Shortly after its launch, nineteen thousand users signed up for invitations, with would-be viewers coming from countries such as China, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Gizmodo’s blog declared it “what the Internet has been waiting for.” Cindy said, “It’s not about performing for the camera. We’re looking for the comical, the messy, the ridiculous. We’re looking for the real.”
Cindy views MLNP.tv as filling a niche market, as porn lacks socially acceptable navigation, a situation she hopes to change, one video at a time. She feels it unfortunate that a number of her female pornographer friends are making innovative films without receiving sufficient traffic or income because “no one can f**king find them.” This problem was illustrated when Emma Watson called for feminist alternatives to pornography in a discussion with Gloria Steinem. She had no idea of the vast number of authentic lovemaking videos that no one had ever told her about—after all, there is no Yelp for porn. Gallop contends that her brainchild is vastly different from the traditional, as it is so much more than “masturbation material.” The mission of her website is to make it easier to have discussions about sex, and to take it out of the subterranean closet.
The fly in the ointment of “feminist pornography”—a term she does not view as an oxymoron—was that investors were scared off by its explicit content. Undaunted, Gallop launched All The Sky Holdings—a nod to Chairman Mao’s statement that “women hold up half the sky”—the goal of which is to fund her business as well as those of other women entrepreneurs. Though the world of raising venture capital is new to Gallop, this did not prove an impediment; she said, “I haven’t the faintest idea how you start a fund, but I’m going to.”
Cindy stated that the current political climate—“an utter fucking nightmare”—reinforces her mission. She commented ruefully, “The fact that we now live in a country where grabbing women by the pussy is presidentially endorsed is actually a good thing for my business, because it means that all of this has to come into the open.” Gallop might be insinuating that this misogyny might have had its genesis from women featured in traditional pornography being reduced to sexual objects, playthings for pleasure.
What started as a “tiny, clunky website”—which bears a name playing on the ’60s slogan “Make Love Not War”—now boasts upwards of four hundred thousand global members and over eight hundred videos, featuring more than one hundred video participants. Ms. Gallop’s hope is to bring real-life sex into the mainstream, and she believes that there will come a time when no one will feel ashamed of having a nude photograph or a sex tape of themselves floating around in cyberspace. Cindy’s hope is for a societal seismic shift in our relationship with pornography, so that it will no longer be the object of condemnation—though millions partake—but will rather be accepted in an authentic forum. A litmus test for liberalism may well be how one rates Ms. Gallop’s views on one’s personal Gallup poll.