Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following, we break those rules, and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier. and more self expressed. I'm your host, Erin Keating.
Today, I talked to Cindy Gallop. She is a business innovator, a keynote speaker, and she's the founder of the social sex tech platform, MakeLoveNotPorn. What is a social sex tech platform? Well, it is kind of counter programming to pornography. It is a site where people can upload videos. Of themselves having real sex in a wide range of bodies and sexualities and genders and race and ethnicity, normal people having beautiful sex. This is what Make LoveNotPorn is all about.
We talk about getting funding as a woman founder and why AI created by women is a smart investment. We talk about how safe the internet could be if we devoted ourselves to human curation that includes women's intuition and our gut instincts about things. We were kind of raised to recognize the difference between like a creepy uncle and a nice uncle, good touch and bad touch that gets hardwired into us and Cindy thinks that that can be a real asset to the internet and to making it a safer place for everyone. She's so smart. She's so driven and she really is fighting the good fight for both women entrepreneurs and the sex positive culture for all of us. Take a listen.
Welcome to Hotter Than Ever Cindy.
Cindy: Thanks Erin. I'm thrilled to be here.
Erin: I've been following your work, your self expression, your talks, your engagement on social media. Like you operate on such a high octane level. You're so present everywhere all the time. How is that possible? I have been really excited to talk to you because I think what you're doing is so profound and also so needed in the world, and I think what you talk about a lot of the time, sex, money, gender, business, power, agency, those ideas are things that women are told to shut the fuck up about.
And so because this podcast is about how to live your best possible life, your most vital and self expressed and joyful and sexy life after 40, you know, it's not a business podcast, it's not explicitly a sex podcast, although listeners might take issue with that assertion. We talk about all kinds of things holistically, and I'd love to have you take the listeners in through the shallow end of who you are and what you do because you started in advertising, but now you are. the founder of a sex tech company and you're doing all this incredible work out there in the world. Take us through your story.
Cindy: Sure. So I think the important thing there, Erin, is that everything in my life and career has happened by complete and total accident. I've never intentionally consciously planned anything. And I'm a big believer in my ex boss, Sir John Hegaty's mantra, which goes, do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you. And I think that's a great way to live your life.
Erin: That is how I am living my life today. It feels really validating to hear you say that.
Cindy: So, um, so I actually began my career in theater because I read English literature at the University of Oxford at Somerville College. And I fell madly in love with theater at Oxford, which has a very thriving student drama scene. And so I wrote, acted, directed, stage managed, did everything. But I knew I wasn't good enough to be an actress or director. And I used to draw a lot when I was younger. And so my friends at Oxford kind of pulled me into designing theatre posters for their shows. And from there, I got pulled into selling their shows.
And I really enjoyed doing that. So I became a theatre marketing and publicity officer at several theatres around the UK. And I did that for a few years, until I got completely fed up with working 24 7 and earning chicken feed, which is for theatre.
Erin: Yeah, nothing. There's no money there.
Cindy: Yeah. And at the time, I was the marketing officer for the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. And part of my job promoting the theatre was giving talks about it. So I gave a talk to a group of women in Liverpool, and afterwards, one of them came up to me and she said, Young lady, you could sell a fridge to an Eskimo. And I thought, I thought that is the universe telling me something time to sell out and go into advertising.
And so I did. And so I basically worked, um, at a number of different advertising agencies in the UK in 1989. I fetched up at Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty, BBH. I ran large global accounts for them out of their London office, Coca Cola, Ray Ban, Polaroid. I moved to Singapore in 1996 to help start up and run their first office outside London in Asia Pacific. And I'm now here in New York because I moved here 25 years ago to start up BBH's American office for them. Which began as me in a room with a phone, starting an advertising agency in the world's toughest advertising marketplace. Madison Avenue.
Erin: Yeah. The world's advertising headquarters in New York.
Cindy: Exactly. Um, so that was a lively ride, but it went pretty well. And so I ran the agency for a number of years and growing it until basically I turned 45 in 2005 and I had my very own personal midlife crisis in the sense that I'd always thought of 45 as kind of a midlife point. Obviously, by the way, in the happy assumption that one lives to be 90 fingers crossed, But in the company I was running up to it, to my 45th birthday, I've gone, you know, on your 45th birthday is a moment when you should pause, take stock, reflect and review.
Where have I been? Where am I going? So I ideally did all that on February 1, 2005. And that was the point at which I went, Oh my God, I've just spent 16 years working for the same advertising agency. And by the way, you know, BBH is a fantastic agency, love them to death, but I went, I think it's time to do something different.
And then the problem was, I hadn't the faintest idea what. So vast angsting ensued, and eventually I went, If I want to review every possible option open to me, for what is effectively the second half of my life, Maybe the best thing to do is to put myself on the market very publicly and go, Okay guys, here I am.
What do you got? And see what comes. So I took a massive leap into the unknown. I resigned as chairman of BBH in the summer of 2005 without a job to go to. And it was the best bloody thing that I ever did in my life. Because I am now evangelical about working for yourself. And that really was you know, the moment everything transformed for me.
Erin: I am relating and relating and relating because this happened to all to me at 50 having spent my career in television as a development executive, making other people's dreams come true, being the shepherd behind the scenes, getting these projects up the mountain.
And then I woke up to the fact that like my voice meant something to me and that I had been selling it to someone else and that I had some shit to say. that I think needed to be said out in the world. And that's where I am, out on the ledge, and not knowing a lot of things. Excellent. So I'm taking a ton of inspiration from your narrative.
Cindy: You know, and also, Erin, I would just say that too many people make the mistake of thinking that a job is the safe option. It's not. Because in a job, you are at the complete mercy of management changes, industry downturns, marketplace dynamics. I always say, whose hands would you rather place your future in? Those of a large corporate entity, who at the end of the day doesn't give a shit about you, or somebody who will always have your best interests at heart, i. e. you.
Erin: Yeah, Cindy, I hear you because, you know, Netflix had a bad quarter and the entire tech industry, the sort of where tech meets media, turned upside down and my entire team got eliminated at Snapchat.
We won Emmys, we won every award, we did everything, and still it was like, you're a cost center. Bye. So, it makes total sense to me, this idea of owning your destiny. You know, when you're in tech, you drink the Kool Aid in a certain way. I personally stepped out of it, and I was like, oh, there's nothing enlightened happening here.
This is all just capitalism. Absolutely. So how does your own sexuality play into your desire to enter this world of Representations of sex on camera and empowering people around their own sexuality and sort of taking on the poisons of porn. Um, I'm, I'm curious about that because I know that you have a personal part of your story that sort of led you to this.
Cindy: Well, you know, the thing is. And that, as I said earlier, everything in my life has happened by accident. And I have a business that was also a complete and total accident. Because I never set out to do anything that I very bizarrely find myself doing now. So, you know, Make Love Not Porn came about because I date younger men.
They tend to be men in their twenties. And about 16, 17 years ago now, I began realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering an issue that honestly would never have crossed my mind if I had not encountered it very intimately and personally. I realized that I was experiencing what happens when two things converge.
And I stress the dual convergence because most people think it's only one thing. I realized I was encountering what happens when today's total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society's equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. It's when those two factors converge that porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way.
So I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavioral memes in bed. I went, whoa, I know where that behavior's coming from. I thought, gosh, if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn't know that because 16 years ago, nobody was talking about this. Nobody was writing about it. This was me in complete isolation as a naturally action oriented person going.
I'm going to do something about this. So 15 years ago, purely as a little side venture, I put up on no money a tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn. com. That in its original iteration was just copy. The construct was porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world. Here's what really happens in the real world.
I launched at TED in 2009. I became the only Ted speaker to say the words, come on my face on the Ted stage, six times in succession. God bless you. The talk went viral as a result. And it showed this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated. Thousands of people wrote to me from all around the world, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they'd never told anyone before, and I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue.
And so that was the point at which I went, Oh my God, I now have a personal responsibility. I have to take MakeLoveNotPorn forwards in a way that will make it much more far reaching, helpful, and effective. And so I turned it into a business. designed to do good and make money simultaneously, which is what I believe the future of all business should be, by the way.
And so today, as you referenced earlier, MakeLoveNotPorn is pro sex, pro porn, pro knowing the difference. We are the world's first and only user generated Importantly, 100 percent human curated social sex video sharing platform. So we're kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to healthfully, socially, sexually self express, which it clearly does not the way to think about us. No, nothing does. No, no, no.
Erin: Exactly. Nothing. Exactly. Nothing does.
Cindy: The culture does not. And so that is why the way to think about us is if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie make love, not porn is the badly needed documentary. We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex we all have in the real world.
And what we're doing is we are socializing, normalizing, and destigmatizing sex, bringing it out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and behavior. We are literally sex education through real world demonstration. And importantly, as a unique business.
MakeLoveNotPorn has a unique capability. We have the power to change people's sexual attitudes and behavior for the better, in a way that nothing else can. So in the 11 years we've operated, we have taught countless young people that porn is not sex in the real world. Gen Z loves us. We have saved numerous marriages and relationships.
We've inspired communications breakthroughs amongst couples. Parents who are members of our community tell us that just being part of MakeLoveNotPorn has helped them feel able to be more open in educating their children around sex. And in fact, they're buying their teenage and twenty something children.
Subscriptions to make love not porn because they tell us really they say and I quote, I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving sexuations look like. And, you know, what is fascinating, Erin, is that as with any disruptive technology. Use cases emerge that the founder never dreamt of. So, so I was blown away when we began hearing from survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse.
We hear from female, male survivors, trans, non binary survivors. They tell us that Make Love Not Porn helped them reclaim their bodies. We help them feel able to be sexual again in a situation where porn is too triggering. And it's not just people who watch our videos. We have a number of contributors who we call out, MakeLoveNotPorn stars, who tell us that being able to share themselves sexually in a completely safe and trustworthy space has helped them process and heal from sexual trauma. That's not a use case I ever envisaged. I'm humbled and grateful that it is.
Erin: That is so amazing and fascinating and you're normalizing watching people have sex in a healthy way. It feels like such a radical proposition because I think when you say porn to most women, they have a complex array of responses, right?
Like, ew, I don't do that. That's what my husband does, my partner does, and it's gross. It messes up our marriage or whatever. Or they, they watch it, but they won't admit it. Or it gives them ideas for things. That maybe they wouldn't have thought that they would be turned on by, but there's so much parsing you have to do when you go into a conventional porn site like a Pornhub.
There's amateur stuff and there's professional stuff, but there's always for me the question of coercion. And I always think, who gave permission for this? Who put pressure on who to videotape this intimate act, if it's amateur? Who's driving this, and what are the consequences in the relationship as a result of this?
Is this what she wants? Is kind of what I always ask. Or is she being exploited? Like, those are the things that come up for me, and that's the part of your brain that you kind of have to shut off when you engage with conventional porn. You have to not ask yourself those questions, because it's so troubling and problematic.
And you, especially seeing young women in the commercial porn world, I just worry about them. And I think how long are they going to live before they turn to substance abuse or whatever? I mean, it's, that's not everybody's story, but I have this whole complex array of dark things to think about when my own sexuality is pretty fun. And light and human and connected. So it's really a complex thing that you've taken on by starting this site.
Cindy: Well, do you know, Erin, on the one hand, you're absolutely right. It is. And I say that I've spent 15 years trying to get people to understand the nuance and everything that we're talking about.
But there's another way in which it's not remotely complex. It's very simple. And, and I'll explain what I mean by that because Make Love Not Porn operates completely uniquely as a business in a way that we do not get enough credit for because we are a sex tech venture. And what I mean by that is everybody else building anything on the internet should be emulating our unique operational model at MakeLoveNotPorn.
And I'm going to contextualize this in the broader tech landscape as a whole, because the young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate our lives today, they are not the primary targets online or offline of harassment. abuse, sexual assault, racism, violence, rape, intimate image abuse, revenge porn.
Therefore, they did not, and they do not, proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results of that around us every single day. Those of us who are most at risk every single day. Women, black people, people of color, LGBTQ, people with disabilities. We design safe spaces and safe experiences, but we don't get funded.
Only 1.7% of all venture capital last year went to female founders. And that is why we have never seen what the future of the internet could be when it's designed and built through the female lens at scale.
Erin: Cindy, I quoted this 1.7% to a friend, a man, and he said, no way. No way. Show me the research. And I found the research and I showed him the research. And he was like, well, there's other ways to get funding. Like he was not willing to engage with the absolute starkness of that statistic. And the fact that the number goes up to 17 percent if it's not an all female team. Like if there's a guy in the room, then maybe some of the guys in Silicon Valley will open the checkbook because that's what they can trust. Like, you got this dude, yeah, you got this. It's so outrageous. How do we fix fundraising?
Cindy: So let me first, Erin, share with you and our listeners why people should be funding the fuck out of Make Love Not Porn as the model for what the future of the internet could be built and designed through the female lens, which is a safer, better, happier internet for all of us, including white men.
So, I designed MakeLoveNotPorn through the female lens to be the safest place on the internet. Because I designed around what everybody else should have, nobody else did, human curation. There is no self publishing of anything on MakeLoveNotPorn. Our curators watch every frame of every video submitted from beginning to end, before we approve or reject and we publish it.
No one else does that. We review every post on every member profile. And by the way, on MakeLoveNotPorn, those posts can be as safe work or not safe work as you like, but we review them. We approve or reject and we publish them. No one else does that. We review every comment on every video before we approve or reject and we publish it.
No one else does that. We can vouch for every single piece of content on our platform in a way that nobody else can. And the important thing about this, Erin, is We're tiny bootstrapping, have no money, and we've human curated everything for 11 years. Imagine what Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok do with their billions if they chose to.
Safety on the internet is not a matter of viability, it's a matter of will. And at MakeLoveNotPorn, we take human curation to lengths that nobody has even dreamt of. Because, first of all, it is not possible to even complete our video submissions process, unless your video is fully consensual, legal, everyone's over 18.
We require two forms of government issued ID for every participant. And by the way, every other adult site on the internet only requires one. We require two. Including if you've chosen to have somebody else behind the camera. Even if you never see them, we have to know exactly who they are, two forms of government ishtargi for them as well.
And by the way, on MakeLoveNotPorn, it's absolutely fine to be anonymous. You know, if you're worried about your employer, your college, it's fine to wear masks, faces and shadow out of frame. But when people submit anonymous videos, we require them to submit a photo of themselves showing their face, holding their photo government issued ID up next to their face.
Nobody else requires that. As I said, it's not even possible to finish submitting, let alone have published anything that isn't fully consensual legal. But when we then watch that video from beginning to end, we brief our curators, even if that video has passed all of the paperwork tests, we brief our curators to ask themselves, as I watch this video, do I feel the camera's in a position where everyone knows it's there?
Do I have a bad feeling as I watch this video? Because what we say to our curators is you don't need to rationalize a bad feeling. If you just have a bad feeling that is enough for us, we're not publishing that video. Nobody, Erin, anywhere else on the internet goes one hundredth of the way towards human curation that we do at MakeLoveNotPorn.
And that is why it is literally criminal, and I use that word advisedly, that we can't get fucking funded. When we've approved your video, We again do something nobody else does. I mean, we do so many things nobody else does. We, we build a personal relationship with every one of our contributors. We know exactly who every one of our contributors is.
And we communicate with both halves of the couple separately. So we know that everybody is fully participating in this. And we've built an extraordinary community. We have phenomenal relationships with all of our MakeLoveNotPorn stars. But this is just me and our amazing team. And I'm sharing this with you and our listeners because This is what the future of the internet could be like if female founders like me got funded as lavishly and indiscriminately as white bros do.
And this is especially important because our mission at MakeLoveNotPorn ultimately is to help end rape culture globally. Now that sounds like a very big vision but we have 11 years of proof of concept at a micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something incredibly simple that nevertheless nobody else anywhere is doing.
We end rape culture by showing you how wonderful, great, consensual, communicative sex is in the real world. Our social sex videos role model good sexual values and good sexual behavior. And here's the important part. We make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture. Men leave comments in our videos. One man left a comment saying. This video makes me want to be a better man in the bedroom and in life.
Erin: That's incredible. That's incredible. I want to roll back to something you said, which is two questions. One is a pure business question about scale with doing the handmade curation that you do and requiring what you require.
I can imagine that one of the conversations that you have had with investors and you tell me if this is right or not, how do you scale with that much handholding with that much? Checking with that much hands on engagement with the people who submit and the people who watch. I know that these larger tech companies have farms of people just scanning for things that break the big rules and regulations and.
Thousands and thousands of people in a good content curation, content management, really universe in these large social platforms. So you're not watching beheadings and you're not watching bloody shootouts and stuff like that, that they want to make sure that they don't get sued for. But they would argue potentially we can't scale to 300 million users or a billion users if we're looking at every single piece of content in this way.
And the second thought was. I have a bad feeling is not something they taught us about in our MBA program. It feels so female to me to have that be a criteria. I get it a hundred percent because I have bad feelings when I look at certain pieces of porn.
Cindy: Let me reply to that question first before I answer your first one, Erin. Yeah, you're absolutely right because as you and I and every other woman knows. The response to the men out there going, Oh my God, this bloody Me Too movement. You can't even compliment a woman anymore. I don't want to interview women. That's exhausting. Right, okay, yeah. So you know exactly what I'm talking about here, as does everyone listening, because we all know, that we know the difference between a well meant compliment and sexual harassment.
Erin: Yeah, we know when something feels skeezy or someone feels handsy.
Cindy: A hundred percent. You're absolutely fucking right. It's a female feeling. And the problem is that nobody has been funding female feelings designed into the future of the internet, um, built at scale in the female lens. That's precisely the problem.
Okay. The more female founders get funded, the safer the internet gets because of female feelings. Okay. Now, a couple of things to say to your first question. The first is, and honestly, our human curation model should be a Harvard Business Review case study, because it's enormously scalable. It's very efficient.
MakeLoveNotPorn, real world sex takes as long as it takes. Okay. And so that's why we designed a platform to which you can upload videos of any length. Our only criteria is it can't be less than three minutes. But real world sex takes anything from three minutes for a quickie, all the way to like three hours, which we also have.
Our average length of video is between 10 to 15 minutes, you know, roughly speaking. So right now, the time it takes one of our curators from reviewing the submissions, paperwork, etc. Watching the video through to publishing it is one hour. That's eminently scalable. Secondly, at scale, our human curation workforce is simply our equivalent of any billion dollar enterprise software unicorns human salesforce.
Every one of those billion dollar SAAS unicorns has hired thousands. Of humans to sell their software to companies. Nobody's questioning their enormous human workforce. That's simply our equivalent.
Erin: Cindy, can you define a unicorn for this audience?
Cindy: Oh, sorry. Yeah. Um, so unicorn is a term that was coined gosh, 10 years ago now by my friend, Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, who basically identified a unicorn as tech startups that have been funded and scaled to a billion dollar or over valuation. So that's the technical term of unicorn.
Erin: Venture capital backed billion dollar company.
Cindy: Yeah, exactly. So my first response is our human creation model is eminently scalable, and I want to scale MakeLoveNotPorn to be a billion dollar unicorn, and obviously this is designed to our business plan. But here's, here's the interesting thing.
About our model and why every other giant tech platform should be applying it themselves because right now the moderator model you described Erin is an attempt to shut the stable door off the horses bolted as the same goes. So, so first of all, for us, human curation starts far further back on the platform itself because we make it crystal clear, not just in our FAQs, but across social media, every interview any of us does, we make it crystal clear exactly what MakeLoveNotPorn was designed for and what kind of content we want.
And here's the thing, when you make it crystal clear what kind of content you want, that is the only kind of content you get. And the reason Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, et al, should absolutely adopt our model is because if they did, they would make far more money than they even do currently. And a couple of reasons for that.
The first is, it's eminently adoptable by those platforms with billions of dollars at their disposal because The moment you announce that you are human curating everything and you are filtering out for the bad shit The moment you announce that, you instantly turn off the fire hose of Nazis, racists, child rapists, because when they know that shit will not get through the human curation filter, they stop submitting it.
So it becomes far more manageable to do this than those platforms think currently. And secondly, When you do that, when you human curate everything, you will make so many more billions of dollars than you do currently because two key words, brand safety. When you guarantee to advertisers that they can advertise little hearts out with you and their ads will never, ever, ever turn up next to content they don't want to be next to, you will quadruple, quintuple your advertising revenues.
Erin: Yeah. I mean, that's certainly a huge. Problem when everything is driven by automation and when you, there's no way for these platforms to guarantee that as good as some of their content restrictions and guidelines might be, or how much effort they put towards it. That is fascinating to me. I got lost in the thought of who are your advertisers on make love, not porn. Do you have advertisers?
Cindy: Um, not as yet. A couple of reasons, Erin. The first is that I did not originally design our business model to be advertiser supported, okay? Our core business model is revenue share. I foresaw the creator economy 15 years ago when I designed our revenue share business model to democratize access to income.
So explain revenue share. So our members pay to subscribe, rent, and stream social sex videos. Half the income goes to our contributors. You know, our MakeLoveNotPorn stars, but I absolutely designed in a number of other revenue streams. Since before I launched MakeLoveNotPorn, I've been looking for paying brand partners because we offer the opportunity for product demonstration, the way a lot of products don't get to be demonstrated, but should.
So I've been talking to Reckitt about Durex condoms since before we launched for 12 years. To this day, they've not been brave enough to push the button. Okay. So we absolutely will have brand partners. I'm breaking those barriers down. But if you don't mind, I just want to close the loop on the previous question.
Please. Because there's something else that I want to build, that actually at scale, I can then deploy myself. As we all know, the buzzword at the moment is AI. And I have had an AI product in the pipeline at MakeLove. org for five years, since before it was the absolute buzzword. And that's because I wrote an op ed for Fast Company last month titled Three Reasons Why the Future of AI Relies on Women, which I encourage everyone to read.
Erin: I will put a link to it. I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
Cindy: So the three reasons the future of AI relies on women is A, as you've just heard, we design safe AI. And by the way, my piece is written very much to appeal to white bros. It's written to appeal to capitalism. Now, OpenAI et al are coming under attack for being non ethical, for being unsafe, etc.
When you fund female founded AI ventures, we take the heat off you and we build the safe future of AI that means you don't get hauled up in front of Congress all the time. The second reason is because also a big debate right now for open AI et al is how are you going to achieve profitability? It's bloody expensive to operate those large language models.
You don't get to be profitable without 50 percent of the population buying into you. And as 50 percent of the population, women build AI use cases the world embraces. And I've listed women building AI ventures in manufacturing, in agriculture, etc, etc. The third reason, obviously being then, we make AI make money.
So, I have had, as I said, an AI product in the pipeline for five years, because, you know, ChatGPT etc. are built on LLMs, Large Language Models, for our listeners, you will hear that abbreviation a lot. I have something utterly unique at MakeLoveNotPorn. I have a unique LVM, a Large Video Model. That is the world's only 100 percent human curated, fully consensual pool of real world sex video content.
Erin: That's right.
Cindy: So to do AI effectively, you need to teach it by training it on a body of work. And so the body of work that exists in MakeLoveNotPorn is that large video model, that pool of videos that have been curated and submitted and put up on the site. And so I want to use that pool. To build an algorithm for consent, say more about with, with, with a whole spectrum of use cases, Erin, because for example, Hollywood, okay.
Because as we all know, um, we are surrounded every day in popular culture, in movies, in TV. In streaming in music videos by representations of sex that purport to be consensual but are modeling non consensual behavior at the extreme end of Game of Thrones, where nobody has sex unless it's rape, you know, through to right.
So rapey. Yeah, no, is that through to even Even sex scenes in drama movies, action movies, whatever. We're talking zero foreplay, instant penetration, instant neutral orgasm. Completely, you know, um, and so imagine Hilarious to any woman. Precisely. So imagine an algorithm you could run scripts through, you could run filmic content through, that tells you whether or not what you are depicting is genuinely consensual.
Another use case, obviously, criminal court. As you probably know, something like 1% of all reported rapes find their way into the judicial system. The conviction rate is 0.0, and by the way, that's of reported rapes versus the undoubted majority that never, ever go reported because this is the only crime where the IUs is on the victim to prove it happened.
You know, he said, she said. So imagine an algorithm that can be used to define what is consensual versus non consensual behavior. Oh my god, men would hate that. And by the way, at scale, that also augments, because we'll never replace, but it augments our human curation process at Make Love Not Porn.
Erin: What I really admire about you is you are Willing to take on these fights that feel unwinnable to me because the systemic sexism of our culture is so deeply rooted and the fights that women have fought for equality and agency and all those things, they have accrued to a tremendous amount, but they have not accrued to control over representation and control over rape culture and all of the, these things that you're talking about.
And. Yeah. I think it's fascinating to think about a world where you could actually get buy in from the power structure for your definition of consent and buy in for using a model like this that will clearly result In a whole lot more accountability for men that they're trying not to have and that they've never had well
Cindy: Why would they say yes to this because we are looking at a world Erin in which deep fake porn is exploding currently you know, not just with Taylor Swift, but but with everyday women and girls and You know, I've spent the past 15 years parallel pathing two things working to build make love not break Corn and working to change the cultural and business context around it, because when you have a truly world changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around.
And 15 years on, I am finally seeing the barriers falling that I've worked for 15 years to break down. And fortunately, the thing that most motivates me. Is the dynamic that I characterize as, I'm going to fucking well show you. You tell me it can't be done, I'm going to fucking well show you. You put an obstacle in my path, I'm going to fucking well show you.
I take all of the daily demoralization and discouragement and depression that I encounter trying to keep Make Love Not Porn operational, let alone grow it. And I channel all of that into motivation and inspiration because I have to.
Erin: You have a very fierce will. I think. It takes a lot to fight the way you fight.
And I also think it takes a lot for a woman to be okay with being angry and fed up and frustrated and being the avatar of that in a way, in a culture that conspires to have us make nice all the time in order to succeed. Make nice angry women, women who are pissed off, women who have a chip on their shoulder or something to prove.
I'm going to fucking well show you that's a hard seat to sit in if you want the things that most women want, which is to be lovable and approvable by the culture at large. So. What is it in you that, that allows you to be so oppositional in the most virtuous way?
Cindy: Do you know Erin, I don't think about it as oppositional because, and you know, this is something I recommend to everybody, which is if you've never done this exercise, just take a long hard look inside yourself and ask yourself, what do I believe in?
What do I value? What do I stand for? What am I all about? Because when you do that, it makes life so much simpler. Life still throws you all the shit it always will, but you know exactly how to respond to that shit in any given situation in a way that is true to you. And that really is the secret of happiness.
Living your life and working your work according to your values and according to what you believe in. So that's all I'm doing. I'm living and working my values. And I have to say that the response I receive is Absolutely not oppositional, you know, I'm just enormously moved by I get messages on LinkedIn every day from women who appreciate what I'm doing, but I also get messages on LinkedIn every day from men who appreciate what I'm doing.
Men who say, and a number of men say this publicly in posts on LinkedIn, you know, Cindy Gallop made me completely change my thinking on this. They write to me, they're grateful for what I'm doing to change the world their daughters will grow up in. Right minded men are right there with us. And I see the evidence of that every day, which is just wonderful.
Erin: That is so heartening to hear. And I'm not surprised by that because I think there's a lot of Men, Gen X and younger, who are a little bit more aware, um, and a little bit more conscious and a little bit more willing to bend their thinking or to have their minds changed about things or to think about things in a way that they've never thought about things before.
I think you shine a light in places that people haven't really looked for their own conscience and their own. Sort of, I feel some yuck about this. I wish things were different. But this is what I'm handed, so this is what I accept.
Cindy: You know, what is especially interesting, Erin, is I designed Make Love Not Porn to be fully diverse and inclusive and we are. Our members are Make Love Not Porn stars of all ages, male, female, trans, non binary, straight, LGBTQ. We're a global platform, all races, ethnicities. But in the 11 years we've operated, we've discovered that we are especially a revelation to men.
More men send us grateful emails, the appreciative comments than anybody else because MakeLoveNotPorn is something utterly unique that men will find nowhere else on the internet, which is a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex.
You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly and say, I just watched my first video on MakeLoveNotPorn and afterwards I cried. I've said for years that I wish society understood the opposite of what it thinks is true. Women enjoy sex just as much as men, and men are just as romantic as women. Yet neither --
Erin: Oh, more so in my experience. Yeah.
Cindy: Yet neither gender is allowed to openly celebrate either fact. We'd all be better off if they were. I picked up a wonderful Twitter exchange last year between two men. The first man had tweeted, as a joke, Hey guys, I've got this really weird fetish. I've got this kink, where I want to watch porn.
Where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent, and really like each other. Hit me up with your hottest lips, please! And, and another man replied and said, There's this website called MakeLoveNotPorn, where you can watch real couples fucking and making love. He said, I watched a video where the woman said to her man, I love you, while they're making love.
He said, sincerely, I cried when I heard that. Make love not porn is one of the solutions to toxic masculinity. And that is why I say when men finally fund the future of the internet design and built by women, they will be so much happier.
Erin: Oh, Cindy, this is just the conversation I needed today. I wanted to ask you a question that I've asked everyone who's been on this podcast, and this is about you personally and how you navigate your life, which is, are there any deal terms in your life?
Today that you want to reopen and renegotiate. I mean, you live a pretty open and clearly negotiated life where you've made up your own code for how to live and how to be and how to be happy and self expressed in the world. But is there any sort of nagging thing where you go, I could tweak that. I could change that. That's a good thing for me to try.
Cindy: Honestly, I just consider myself enormously fortunate because I'm one of the happiest people I know. Obviously, I'm not happy with the battles I have to fight on Make Love Not Porn. You know, my life is shitty on a daily basis because of what I do in a business, financial, tech context.
I was interviewed last year by a woman for a podcast about leadership and entrepreneurial stress. And one of her questions was, she said to me very earnestly, you know, so Cindy, obviously you're dealing with a lot of stress that would make love not porn. Do you have a daily self care practice? How do you de stress on a daily basis?
And I went, oh yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely have a daily self care practice. You know, my daily self care practice is I have no husband, I have no children. I feel enormously lucky to be living my life. on my own terms in the way that I want to. I'm also, by the way, enormously lucky that I have a wonderful family.
I have an amazing friends. But honestly, with regard to all of that, I am one of the happiest people I know, and there is nothing that I would change about any of that.
Erin: Oh, I love it, Cindy. I love it. Well, we should all be so clear about who we are in the world and who we want to be, what our mission is, what we believe in, and live into those things as fully as you have. I'm so grateful to have talked to you today. Thanks for coming on.
Cindy: Thank you, Erin. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Erin: Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. I hope you've been listening to our weekly advice episodes. I hope you've been enjoying them and getting something out of them. I wonder if it's bringing up issues and questions for you about love and relationships, career, ambition, menopause, divorce, anything else you would like my very, very biased feedback on.
Do you need permission to do something you know you're already going to do and you want to frame it? in the form of a request for advice. I'm really, really good at saying yes to what you've already said yes to in your lives. Sometimes we just need a little push. I'm here for it. DM us on Instagram at hotter than ever pod or call and leave a voicemail or text us.
A lot of people have been doing that. Text your question to 323 844 2303. I would love to answer your question in a future episode.
Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Girard and PodKit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez. Come back next week for some more juicy goodness.
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