Originally written for The Economist Print Edition. Published September 26th, 2015.
“Cindy Gallop, an advertising executive, offers an intriguing, and disturbing, insight. In 2003, aged 43, she was pitching for an online-dating agency’s account. To study the market, she signed up with several of its competitors. E-mails from men in their 20s flooded in.
Since Ms Gallop, too, was interested in no-strings sex, she found herself in a position to sample changing sexual mores up close. In 2009 she created a website, makelovenotporn.com, to debunk ten “myths from porn world” that seemed to have become common currency among young men, such as the idea that calling women filthy names during sex is a sure-fire way to turn them on. A four-minute TED talk she gave about her experiences was one of the most discussed that year, and has since been watched on YouTube more than a million times.
Ms Gallop is still receiving e-mails from all over the world. They suggest that young women, too, have had their sexual sensibilities shaped by porn. Young couples thank her for sparking a conversation in which they discovered that neither had been enjoying things they had been doing in bed only because each thought the other expected them. She has since created makelovenotporn.tv, a video-sharing site aimed at making real-world sex “socially acceptable and socially shareable”, and hopes to set up another for sex-education materials, if she can find funding.”
Go check out the original posting on The Econmist!
