Empowering at Any Age: Social Sex Revolutionary, Cindy Gallop, Celebra

Happy Masturbation Month! What started out as a national day to be observed, on May 7,1995 by former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, is now an entire month. Elders was fired by then-President Bill Clinton for suggesting that masturbation be included in sex education for students across the country, but since then we have come a long way, baby. In honor of that progress and this monthlong recognition, we’re featuring another masturbation-friendly system challenger named Cindy Gallop.

Cindy Gallop does not do status quo. She says so herself, alongside her personal tagline, “I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.” The world zigs, and Cindy zags. She does things her own way and wants you to believe that you can too.

That bold, confident energy infuses every aspect of this daring entrepreneur’s own life, including her current full-time venture, MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a social-sex platform that is her response to male-centric, mainstream pornography. Launched in 2012, MLNP offers access to diverse, authentic, intimate, and often vulnerable social sex. It’s not porn, but real-world sex—and in Cindy’s view, more interesting and potentially life-changing.

She is a paradigm disruptor who lives the adage, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Cindy identifies a problem and sets out to transform it, creating the environment she wishes to inhabit. This is how MLNP came to fruition and continues to attract an audience seeking more meaningful sexual experiences.

Not only is she a fan of Thistle and Spire, but her values and worldview dovetail with ours. Cindy is a lover and avid collector of lingerie. Also, her “social experiment” of MLNP features an array of MakeLoveNotPornstars and viewers of different ages and races, male and female, trans and nonbinary, gay and straight.

All types of real-world bodies are showcased and celebrated without being fetishized.

Evident in her career and life choices, including the creation of MLNP, Cindy embraces her former boss Sir John Hegarty’s mantra: Do interesting things, and interesting things will happen to you. That philosophy was evident throughout our recent conversation with her.

Cindy wearing Kane

FOR OUR READERS WHO ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH MLNP, HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE IT?

We’re kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to sexually self-express in an open and healthy way, which it clearly doesn’t. If porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, MLNP is the badly needed documentary. The MLNP platform is a unique window into the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world.

What we are doing is normalizing, socializing, and destigmatizing sex—bringing it out of the shadows into the light, showing consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior, and providing sex education through real-world demonstration.

WHAT IS THE QUICK AND DIRTY ORIGIN STORY OF MLNP?

My business came about because I date younger men casually and recreationally for sex. I’ve never been someone who wants to be married or have kids and I’m deliberately very public about that. We don’t have enough role models showing us that we can live our lives very differently than we’re expected to and still be amazingly happy.

About 17 years ago, while dating men in their 20s, I saw what happens when total access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s equal reluctance to speak openly and honestly about sex. When those two components converge, porn becomes sex education by default. I thought that if I was experiencing that, other people must be as well. No one was discussing it back then, so I decided to do something myself. I put up a tiny, clunky website that in its original iteration was a public service announcement: Porn World vs Real World.

Cindy wearing Medusa

The issue isn’t porn. The issue is that we don’t talk about sex in the real world. If we did, people would be able to bring a real-world mindset to the viewing of something that is simply performative, produced entertainment. There is a universal human element that is expressed in a way that no other social platform allows.

I launched MLNP at TED 2009 and became the only TED speaker to say the words “come on my face” on the TED stage six times in succession. It drove global traffic to my tiny website that I had never anticipated. Thousands of people wrote to me from around the world, all pouring their hearts out and telling me about their porn habits and sex lives.

I realized I had uncovered a huge global issue, and felt a responsibility to take MLNP forward in a way that would be more far-reaching and effective. I decided to turn it into a business—do good and make money simultaneously.

Cindy wearing Fringe Benefits

WHAT MAKES MLNP UNIQUE FROM OTHER ADULT-CONTENT PLATFORMS?

It features social sex, not pornography. I’ve spent 15 years trying to get people to see the nuance in that difference. Also, our platform is 100 percent human-curated, which means that there is no self-publishing of anything on MLNP. Our curators watch every frame of every video before we approve or reject and publish it. No one else does that. We review every post on every member profile and every comment on every video. Imagine what Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok could do with their billions if they chose to. It’s not a matter of ability, but a matter of will.

What also makes us unique is that when we started, I foresaw the creator economy years ago with a revenue-sharing business model to democratize access to income. Half of our income goes to our contributors, whom we call our “MakeLoveNotPornstars.”

We have the capability to change people’s sexual attitudes for the better in a way that nothing else can.

Since 2012, we have taught countless young people that porn is not sex in the real world. People have written to us telling us that we have saved their marriages and relationships. We have helped with communication breakthroughs around sex. Parents have told us that they are better able to educate their children about sex because of MLNP.

WHAT CHALLENGES HAVE YOU FACED IN THIS MALE-DOMINATED INDUSTRY?

Our two biggest challenges are lack of access to payment processing and advertising. PayPal and major credit card companies won’t work with adult content, so I have to work with the murky subculture of adult-content-friendly payment processers, who charge exorbitant fees, which is a massive growth inhibitor. We are banned from advertising MLNP anywhere, which is a gendered bias. Ventures with a female-focused lens—fertility, menstruation, menopause, female pleasure—are not allowed to advertise on major tech platforms. In the meantime, male sexual health ventures are welcomed everywhere, and can advertise erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagara.

One thing I wish more people understood is that the young, white, male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate all our lives today are not the primary targets of online or offline abuse, racism, violence, rape, revenge porn, and harassment, so they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. Those of us who are at risk every day—women, people of color, LGBTQ, people with disabilities—devise safe spaces and safe experiences, but we don’t get funded. Only 1.7 percent of all venture capital last year went to female founders, and that is why we still have not yet seen what the future of the internet could be when it’s designed and built through the female lens to scale.

That said, it’s enormously challenging to build and grow my team, but also just to stay alive because we struggle with every piece of business infrastructure—things that other tech platforms take for granted. Because our platform contains adult content, I struggle getting funded. I couldn’t get a bank account in the U.S. for four years, so operating has been very challenging. I have a unicorn in waiting if I can just raise the funding to overcome all of these barriers.

WHAT HAS SURPRISED YOU SINCE STARTING MLNP?

I’ve been surprised by feedback I never dreamed of receiving, like hearing from rape survivors—male, female, non-binary and trans survivors of sexual assault and abuse. They’ve told us that MLNP has helped them reclaim their bodies. They are able to feel sexual again post-trauma in a situation where porn is triggering. That was something I never considered when concepting MLNP, and am so moved and grateful that is the case.

Also, real-world sex is more innovative, more surprising, more creative and arousing than porn will ever be. Every Tuesday we have a MLNP team meeting where we discuss videos that have just come in with the curation team. Regularly, we go, “Wow, we did not know that was a thing.” The real world is way more surprising than porn.

Cindy wearing Verona

HOW CAN MLNP AND MASTURBATION CLOSE THE O GAP BOTH WITH A PARTNER AND SOLO?

We have many solo masturbation videos of all sorts. The only things we curate for are: Is it real and is it consensual? You see kinks and the negotiation that occurs beforehand, and lots of role-play videos.

Most of our stars have never filmed themselves doing anything sexual before. They do it for us because they believe in our social mission. They often tell us that the act of doing that in such an intimate environment made them love themselves more. One woman sent a masturbation video because she said all her life she was told that her vulva was ugly. Immediately after posting, she received a slew of affirmative comments telling her how beautiful she was.

The number one use of YouTube is how-to videos, and MLNP is the how-to of real-world sex. Because we don’t talk much about sex in the real world, we have an insufficient vocabulary to do so. The language of porn has rushed in to fill that gap. That is bad for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it is male-dominated and male-generated. With our approach, openness, and use of vocabulary around sex, we are one of the solutions of toxic masculinity.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL SEX LOOKS LIKE?

The future changes when you and I and everyone else make it change. For 15 years, I’ve parallel pathed two things: Working to build MLNP and working to change the business and cultural context around it. When you have a truly world-changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around.

Too many people think the future is something that happens without us. I believe in deciding what the future should be and then making it happen. We are spearheading what we call the “Social Sex Revolution.” The revolutionary part is not the sex, but that we’re finally making it social. I paint a picture of the world that we would all live in when the social sex revolution has succeeded. MLNP operates in the biggest market of all—not porn, not sex, but the market of human happiness.

Ultimately, our goal is to end rape culture globally and create world peace. That may sound like a very big mission, but we achieve it by doing something very simple that no one else on the internet is doing. We show how wonderful great, consensual, communicative sex is between real people, and how social sex videos role model good sexual values and behavior. We make all of that aspirational.

My favorite quote of all time is from Alan Kay who said, “The best way to predict the world is to invent it.”