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Slow Porn: Cindy Gallop's Quest to Blow Up Internet Sex

With Make Love Not Porn, Cindy Gallop wants to create a porn counterpoint so people get the difference between real sex and artificial entertainment, to reprogram the porn industry to reflect real world sex, thereby incorporating women's desires and...

It didn't take long for a scruffy guy with glasses to approach me. It was a Saturday night last January, and I was at a cocktail party sitting feet away from porn stars and programmers alike.

“What’s your, uh, involvement with the site?” he shyly asked me. I told him I was a journalist. “Oh,” he said, laughing in a way that indicated he was secretly hoping he’d gotten off watching me fuck before.

This uncommon intersection of individuals was gathered at the home of Cindy Gallop, one of New York’s boldest technocultural ringleaders, to celebrate the release of the site they hope will turn the porn industry on its head: Make Love Not Porn.

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Though the site hasn’t officially launched, it’s come a long way from the bare-bones, restricted-access version that Gallop launched five years ago after she stood on stage at a TEDGlobal conference and became the first person in the history of the glossy confab to describe depictions of semen facials as a "world problem."

From the observations she'd gathered during her many sexual encounters with men 20 to 30 years younger than her, Gallop had grown worried that the generations growing up using hardcore internet porn as sex education were developing an unfortunately skewed relationship with sex.

"My concern is particularly with the young girl whose boyfriend wants to come on her face," Gallop told the audience. "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, all women love having their faces come on, and therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it."

This was the beginning of Gallop's initiative to reprogram the porn industry to reflect real world sex, thereby incorporating women's desires and direction into the narrative—and to profit immensely from doing so. Her primary weapon: Make Love Not Porn, a sex site where users can upload their homemade porn videos for a nominal fee; profits from rentals of the videos are split fifty-fifty with the creators. The goal is to promote real world sex, not porn per se, and in so doing to inject more humanity and openness into the otherwise troubled world of internet pornography.

"I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business," the 53-year-old, sporting a powerhouse haircut reminiscent of Anna Wintour's, declares as the tagline for her personal brand. As former chairwoman of BBH, one of the top ad agencies in the country, Gallop casually advises some of the most business- and media-savvy women in New York via Rachel Sklar's notorious "Double X in Tech" mailing list, which is how I became fascinated with her.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.