appearance by Elisa Kreisinger.
Cindy Gallop’s LinkedIn profile reads, “I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.” It goes without saying that Gallop gives zero fucks. It’s that point of view that led her, an ex-advertising executive in her 50s, to create MakeLoveNotPorn, an online social platform where users submit videos of their real-life, consensual sexual encounters.
Gallop started MakeLoveNotPorn as an accident. “I tend to date men in their 20s," she says. "I began realizing, through dating younger men, I was encountering what happens when today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex.” Gallop found that men and women were not only acting out what they saw in porn during real-life sexual encounters, but porn was how people were learning about sex to begin with. “Porn has become sex education by default,” as Gallop puts it.
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“Our society is completely messed up about sex," she says. "The patriarchy has infused the entire topic, which is a universally wonderful experience, with shame and embarrassment and prudishness.”
MakeLoveNotPorn’s mission is to make it easier for everyone in the world to talk about sex, and to help dispel the myths and stigmas associated with sex, so that we’re all having better sex more frequently. Porn, as Gallop told The New York Times, is “a male-dominated...industry shot through a male lens.” Gallop is hoping to change that through the industry she's pioneering, sex tech, which she defines as technology “designed to enhance, innovate, and disrupt in every area of human sexuality and human sexual experience.”
Hear more about how Gallop thinks sex tech is the last frontier and her plans to make money on delivering healthy, consensual sex in The Ladies Room episode above.
The Ladies Room is a weekly Facebook live show. It takes place in the women's rest room here at Refinery29 because women's restrooms are where all good revolutions start. You can follow along here.