Cindy Gallop, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn(MLNP), has been fighting a long battle for the last 8 years: opening up a dialogue around sex by making it easier for the world to talk about sex.
Gallop, who launched MLNP in 2009, told DIVERGE that her startup was a complete accident that came from direct personal experience.
“I date younger men who tend to be in their 20s,” explained Gallop. “About 9 or 10 years ago, I began realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering what happens when today’s total freedom access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex.”
“Porn becomes sex education by default, in not a good way,” she added.
So Gallop chose to do something about it- she launched www.makelovenotporn.com, a site that posts the myths of hardcore porn and balances them with reality, showing the contrast between the porn world versus real word.
After her launch at TED, her talk became viral and to this day, she receives thousands of emails from everybody, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, from every country in the world, to pour their hearts out via email, sharing personal details about their sex lives and their porn watching habits.
4 years ago, Gallop and her team took another huge step when they launched the first stage of MLNP tv, which is a user generated crowdsourced video sharing platform that celebrates real world sex so anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real world sex.
“We are really clear what we mean by this, we are not porn and we are not amateur, we are building a whole new category online that has never previously existed, social sex,” Gallop explained.
She elaborated that their competition isn’t porn, it’s social media. Or at least it would be if sites like Facebook and YoutTube allowed sexual self expression and self education, which they don’t.
“Videos on MLNP are not about performing for the camera, they are just about doing on what you do on every other social media platform capturing what goes on in the real world as it happens spontaneously in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, wonderful, beautiful humanness,” she added.
The site has a revenue-sharing business model, similar to Uber and AirBnb. You pay to rent and stream real world sex videos and then 50 percent of each video rental goes to the contributor.
“We want to hit the kind of critical mass where one day your MLNP video could hit a million rentals at $5 a rental and we could be half the income,” Gallop explained.
The mission of MLNP, not only makes it easier for the world to talk about sex, it also helps parents communicate more openly with their children about good sexual values by teaching them what that entails and ideally ending rape culture.
If society has an understanding of good values are and what good sexual behavior is, then we don’t raise Brock Turners, Gallop explained, saying that good sexual values could end rape culture.
“When we do what MLNP is doing, we socialize sex, normalize it, take the shame out of it, and we end sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual violence” because it takes out the shame around sex that perpetrators think will keep their victims from speaking up.
But this by no means is a simple journey.
“Now, one thing I didn’t realize when I embarked on this adventure was that my team and I would fight a battle every day to build it,” she told DIVERGE
Her biggest struggle has been getting any kind of support, whether it’s technical or financial because everything includes the disclaimer and small print, which says “no adult content.”
Usually, for support, Gallop explained that she has to go to the people on top of the company, explain what they are doing, and beg for support.
“We had to build our entire video-sharing platform from scratch ourselves because existing streaming services off the shelf components will not work with adult content,” she explained.
Another issue that Gallop has been trying and failing to do for two years is raising $2 million dollars for MLNP to enable the company to hire a full-time team for support.
After no luck with crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, which also does not permit adult content, Gallop discovered ifundwomen.com, a new crowdfunding platform, dedicated to the female founder businesses, founded by Karen Kahn, a member of MLNP from the beginning.
When Gallop reached out to her, Kahn was more than happy to put up MLNP on her site.
On November 16, MLNP went live on the site and have raised $29,865.00 (as of Nov 23) out of the $500,000 goal.
Donations provide incentives such as a Twitter shoutout from Gallop for $20 or a dinner for you and four friends With Gallop.
She chose to do this because she gets requests to meet frequently is unable to reply to all the requests personally.
“I cannot reply with all of those requests for help so I felt that a really good way to operate the rewards system would be help me help you,” Gallop said. “The rewards are deliberately structured to embrace what people are constantly asking me for but they are also structured so that what ever your affordability level, you can actually split it as a group,” Gallop explained.
She shared the following example:“You can Skype with me for an hour and ask me anything and that’s a $1000 dollars but it could be 1 person for a 1000 dollars or it could be 10 of you for $100 or 20 of you for $50 dollars each because I don’t mind Skyping a room full of people. Get your friends together, get the drinks in, and we can talk on Skype for an hour and it’ll be fun.
She also had one major ask for the advertising agency.
“I would just like to say to the advertising industry that I would like my industry to fund its own,” Gallop told Diverge. “MakeLoveNotPorn is exactly what our industry reports to characterize as its holy grail. It’s a big creative idea, extremely creatively executed that is innovative and disrupting in order to create enormous social benefit and to make a huge amount money.”
You can find out more and contribute here: https://ifundwomen.com/projects/makelovenotporn
In the spirit of the holidays and giving, Gallop hopes that her supporters can donate a small amount, to help her follow through with her passion and truly make a difference.
If each of my Twitter followers chipped in $10 the Social Sex Revolution would be funded. Please help at @ifundwomen https://t.co/1JWzM2BAei
— Cindy Gallop (@cindygallop) November 22, 2016
