What gave you the idea for Make Love Not Porn?

What I’ll do guys, is I will give you my 3-minute TED talk. I’ve realized that it’s really needed to contextualize where Make Love Not Porn came from and what it’s all about.

I must admit, I submitted the idea as an application for one of the audience 3-minute slots at TED almost as a joke. I had thought, “I’d love to see Chris Anderson’s face when he sees this.” And to give him his due, he got straight back to me and said, “I think this is a very serious issue, and I’d love to do it. We just need to kind of talk about it first.” He was extremely supportive, and gave me a fantastic slot on the opening day of TED, which is traditionally the best attended.

Bill Gates spoke at the end of the first session, and then I came on in the second session right behind Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. And I must admit I was very nervous before I gave this talk. I had no idea how the concept would be received. Chris and the TED team knew what I was going to talk about, but nobody else did. When Chris introduced me, he just said, “This is Cindy Gallop, she’s been on the TED stage before, please welcome her back.”

So I walked out on stage and I said,

“Those of you who saw my previous lecture at TED University know that I date younger men. Predominantly men in their twenties. When I date younger men, I have sex with younger men. And when I have sex with younger men, I encounter, very directly and personally, the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture.

Now, as a confident, mature, experienced older woman, when I encounter this personally, I have no problem accepting that a certain amount of re-education, rehabilitation, and reorientation needs to take place. I have no problem responding, as I’ve had to on a number of occasions, “Actually, no thanks, I’d much rather if you did not, in fact, come on my face.” My concern is not for me, it’s for the young guy who believes, because hardcore porn has taught him, that all women love having men come on their faces. And it’s particularly for the young girl, whose boyfriend wants to come on her face. She does not want him to come on her face, but hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women’s faces, therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it.”

As one twitterer said, it was probably the first time the words “come on my face” have ever been used six times consecutively on the TED stage! And I went on,

“So, I’m launching at TED today a website called makelovenotporn.com. And what this site does is it take the myths of hardcore porn and it balance them with the reality. Two very important things about this site – the first is that Make Love Not Porn is in no way whatsoever about judgment. This is not about ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad.’ Because sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of activities. Secondly, Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn. I’m a big fan of hardcore porn; I watch it regularly myself. But hardcore porn as an industry is predominantly funded by men, managed by men, driven by men, directed by men and targeted at men. And so hardcore porn tends to have one worldview. Hardcore porn goes, ‘This is the way sex is.’ And I just want to say, ‘Not necessarily.’

I’m asking the audience to be aware this is an issue, because I would never have thought about it had I not encountered it myself. Check out the website. Forward it to anyone you think might be interested. All I want to do with this is help stimulate and inspire an open, healthy discussion about sex, in the interest of encouraging more open, healthy, and thoroughly enjoyable sexual relationships. Thank you very much.”

Brought the house down. Totally.

That’s awesome. So you launched the site, and then what?

Make Love Not Porn was massively well received. For the next 3 days of TED, everybody came up to me and said, “That was fantastic.” A lot of people said that they particularly liked it because, while TED talks a lot about big ideas and art and science, it touches much less often on human emotions and behavior. They found it very interesting in that context. And it absolutely exploded all over the blogosphere. What really pleased me was that, if you look at the comments, it did what I wanted it to do – it got to young people in the mainstream.

The site is very basic at the moment. You can only do 3 things. You can leave comments, you can send in your own porn world/real world ideas (and I have a shitload, by the way) and you can write to info [at] makelovenotporn.com. Now, I’m not promoting it in any way at the moment. Nevertheless, It’s getting 900 hits a day. Obviously it has the word “porn” in the title, that helps. But any way that they come at it, that’s fine by me.

One of the most recent emails that I got was from a young guy in Morocco. He wrote to say, “Thank you so much. Young people in Morocco are just like young people in the US. They are heavily influenced by porn. Now, at last, I can tell my friends how to make love to a girl, thanks to your wonderful website.” I love getting emails like that.

Do you have intentions to grow the site?

I’m looking for funding, at the moment, because I want to build makelovenotporn.com out into a broader interactive community and discussion platform. The need is absolutely there. I’ve been looking in two areas for funding. On the one hand, I’ve been looking for commercial brand partners. Whenever I say that, people’s minds always go to the obvious. They go, “Oh, condoms. KY jelly.” I’m actually interested in the not-obvious. I’m interested in, for example, youth-targeted brands, who want guaranteed youth attention, interest, and an engagement platform. It obviously requires a very brave brand. BBH, my ex-agency, loved this, and thought it would be great for Axe. They talked to Unilever, who felt it was a bit of a bridge too far. Which I understand. The corporate world is a little nervous about this.

The other place that I would love to get funding from is the porn industry. This could be the porn industry’s version of corporate social responsibility.

Which would be amazing.

In the same way the big tobacco makers fund anti-smoking campaigns, this could be the porn industry going, “We know what we do is fantasy.” The site would be a way to balance it out with the real-world picture.

I started Make Love Not Porn effectively as a public service announcement. I would like to embed a business model in it. And I see a very interesting business model in the other URL that I own, which is makelovenotporn.tv. I won’t say anything more about that at the moment, but I’m looking for far-sighted and broad-minded investors who are interested in something that has the potential to do something very, very different versus the porn category. That’s all I’ll say about that at this point in time!

Want more? Watch Cindy’s entire TED talk here: