The ObserverPornography This article is more than 11 years oldMake love not porn, says Oxford graduate on a mission to make sex more erotic
This article is more than 11 years oldCindy Gallop sets up erotic website as an antidote to hardcore sexual imageryAn Oxford-educated British businesswoman has set out to challenge the "creeping ubiquity" of hardcore pornography by launching an elevated style of adult video which she believes is the sex education aid of the future.
Cindy Gallop, 52, claims that too many people – young men in particular – are learning their bedroom techniques chiefly from viewing hardcore porn on the internet, which makes them inconsiderate lovers. She aims to "reform porn" and "rehabilitate" the younger generation with an alternative campaign for tasteful erotica.
"When you have sex with younger men you see the creeping ubiquity of hardcore porn in the culture, in an era where it is more freely and widely available than ever before and kids are accessing it younger and younger," said Gallop.
Her new website, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, seeks to offer an alternative to hardcore porn because, she believes, parents and sex education teachers still give too little guidance about how to develop healthy sexual relationships. Enthusiastically single and unashamed to date men less than half her age, Gallop wears figure-hugging black ensembles, attends glamorous parties and is not shy in correcting her aggressive young lovers. "I date younger men, often in their early twenties, and I was finding that hardcore porn had become their de facto sex education."
Now she's taking her coaching to the next level, aiming to re-educate people via the internet, "so that young men don't think that's always the normal way of behaving in the bedroom and their girlfriends don't have to pretend to like it".
Her website features couples and individuals engaging in real-life sexual activities with the kind of genuine passion and intimacy missing from most porn. "I wanted to separate the myths of hardcore porn behaviour from the reality of healthy but hot sexual relationships," she said.
Born to an English father and Chinese mother in London, Gallop studied English literature at Somerville College, Oxford, then went into advertising. In 1998 she moved to New York, where she still lives, to launch the US office of the British advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. After 27 years in the business she became a consultant and is currently working with beauty brand L'Oréal.
MakeLoveNotPorn.tv is still in its development phase and is invitation-only while she works on selecting the best content and smoothing technical glitches. "About 18,000 have signed up so far and we are inviting people in in batches of 500 to 1,000 while we're perfecting the site," she said.
Requests to join are coming in from around the world, and the site is expected to go fully live before the end of the year. Invited members pay $5 per video chosen from the menu, and contributors who star in their own erotic show submit videos for inclusion on the site.
Gallop says that she maintains high standards and that has had no shortage of quality contributors. One popular video shows a couple who work in the pornography business, but for the website they share how they make love together outside their work. Their encounter is a graphic and uninhibited coupling, but intimate and communicative, with the odd giggle, and each partner enjoying equal pleasure and control.
Feminist writer and fellow New York "educational porn" maker Tristan Taormino, who pays professional porn actors to star in her videos for the porn company Vivid, said: "What Cindy is doing is fantastic. The more the merrier. Both men and women access my porn and it's also important for men to know that they don't have to be like the guys in the hardcore stuff – always ready, always knowing exactly what they're doing, that can be oppressive for them, too."
Gallop came up with the concept of MakeLoveNotPorn in 2009, delivered a lecture on the subject for TED, the organisation devoted to spreading ideas, and launched a prototype. But it took her two more years before an investor provided the $500,000 needed to go ahead fully because, despite the promise of lucrative returns, venture capitalists "wouldn't touch it with a bargepole", Gallop said.
She almost gave up, but the floods of public emails thanking her for breaking taboos inspired her to carry on, she said.
MakeLoveNotPorn.tv is legal and for over-18s only but Gallop eventually wants to create gift vouchers that can be bought for younger teenagers.
"They are accessing hardcore porn online anyway, whether we like it or not, and what they see on my website is a much more healthy form of sex education," she said.
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