{"id":15449,"date":"2016-07-15T18:48:05","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T10:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lelo.com\/blog\/?p=15449"},"modified":"2026-03-14T05:44:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T04:44:47","slug":"meet-cindy-gallop-the-woman-wh-thinks-we-should-make-love-not-porn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lelo.com\/blog\/meet-cindy-gallop-the-woman-wh-thinks-we-should-make-love-not-porn\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Cindy Gallop: The Woman Who Thinks We Should Make Love, Not Porn"},"content":{"rendered":"

When discussing the effect of modern technology on our sex lives<\/a>, we often focus on things such as the latest advances built into the toys<\/a> we take into the bedroom, or how dating apps like Tinder and Grindr have impacted how we find partners, we often\u2015at least when speaking about adults\u2015forget to talk about pornography. And why would we? Explicit sexual material is by no means a modern invention; there are reliefs and carvings from ancient Egypt, Greece and India depicting all manner of sexual acts.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s different\u00a0 now is our increased access to porn, as well as the sheer variety of it that is just 2 clicks away. What that has meant for modern sex\u2015the good and the bad\u2015has been talked about by sex and relationship researches and counselors when helping individuals and couples, but one woman, Cindy Gallop, has taken the direct action against the things she\u2019s observed with the creation of the \u201cun-porn\u201d website, MakeLoveNotPorn.<\/p>\n

Who Is Cindy Gallop?<\/h2>\n

Cindy Gallop began her career in advertising in the late 80s, and excelled in the industry, founding the US branch of her London firm and later earning the honor of Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003.<\/p>\n

Just 6 years later, Gallop was giving a presentation at TEDTalk that has been called “one of the event\u2019s most talked about.\u201d\u00a0 Her TEDTalk, which was also the launch of MakeLoveNotPorn, involved an unusually frank (for TEDTalk) discussion of how exactly she came to conceive of the project.<\/p>\n

As Gallop explains, \u201c[It] was an accident that came out of direct personal experience.<\/p>\n

I date younger men, predominantly twenty-somethings. About 9 or 10 years ago \u2013 bear in mind this is long before the media ever picked up on this \u2013 I began realizing\u00a0 that I was encountering an issue that would never have occurred to me if I had not experienced it so intimately: what happens when total freedom of access to hardcore porn online, meets our society\u2019s equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex, and results in porn becoming by default the sex education of today, in not a good way.<\/p>\n

The average age today at which a child first views hardcore porn online is eight<\/a> \u2013 a Bitdefender survey done 3 years ago indicates that age may actually be as low as six.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t because eight year olds and six year olds go looking for porn. It’s a function of what in the digital world we live in today is inevitable and cannot be prevented, no matter how hard you try \u2013 they stumble across it. It\u2019s what they\u2019re shown on someone’s cellphone in the playground; what they see when they go round to a neighbor’s house – because it doesn’t matter what parental controls you have in place at home, your kids live their lives in other places; or, because this is the most wired generation ever, and in many privileged households very young children have access to phones, iPads, laptops, they do something cute and innocent \u2013 they learn a new naughty word, they google it – and one or two clicks away is something they never expected to find.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why, as I discovered for myself in my own dating life, young men and women who grow up today watching hardcore porn online for years before they ever have their own first romantic or sexual experience, assume that is what sex is and that is how you do it for real.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that is when Gallop decided to do something about it.<\/p>\n

What Is MakeLoveNotPorn?<\/h2>\n

In creating the small \u201cclunky\u201d (as she called it) website MakeLoveNotPorn, Gallop was creating a space wherein the myths of pornography were being exposed. What makes it unique is that rather than just focusing on the unethical practices that can be seen in the mainstream porn industry as many porn-negative projects choose to, Gallop is comparing what she calls\u00a0 \u2018Porn World\u2019 versus \u2018Real World\u2019 –\u00a0 “in a straightforward, non-judgmental, humorous way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Launched at a 2009 TEDTalk, Gallop was overwhelmed by the positive reaction her presentation garnered. Of it she says, \u201cThe response\u00a0 was extraordinary, in a way I\u2019d never anticipated. It resonated with huge numbers of people globally \u2013 young and old, male and female, straight and gay, from every country in the world.\u00a0 They wrote and poured their hearts out to me. They told me things about their sex lives and their porn-watching habits they had never told anyone else.\u00a0 Receiving those emails, day after day, made me feel I had a personal responsibility to take MakeLoveNotPorn forwards, in a way that would make it more far-reaching, helpful and effective.\u201d<\/p>\n