Make Love Not Porn

Since 2009, I’ve been praising Cindy Gallop in my lectures for her brilliant website makelovenotporn.com and this witty TED talk. She tells ABC news she noticed when she would have sex with younger men, they would have “porn sex” instead of “real sex” and that porn seemed to be the new default sex-ed for millennials. So, she created a website which compared sex acts seen in porn with how they might be received in real life. This site became wildly popular among sex educators such as myself, for its ability to highlight the differences between porn sex and real sex. However, Cindy’s next endeavor seems to have deviated from that a bit, in my opinion. She launched makelovenotporn.tv in January. It is a site that will only showcase real people having real sex. This is an extremely refreshing concept. However, it is still porn. It is just regulated amateur porn. Which is much better than most mainstream porn in terms of depictions of sexuality. However, frequently seeking out any sex on the internet will still be extremely problematic for some and potentially problematic for teens or anyone who frequently does so (due to the way one’s brain reacts to porn vs. sex). Unfortunately, I don’t think makelovenotporn.tv is the perfect antidote to internet porn. We still have to learn how to have intimate sex with people (if we want successful relationships), and we don’t learn how to do that from masturbating while watching others get it on. We can really only develop those skills from experiencing vulnerable sex with another human being.