Written by Sophie Browner for LA Review of Books. Originally published on November 15th, 2016.
SOPHIE BROWNER: Make Love Not Porn’s tagline, “Pro-sex, Pro-porn, Pro- knowing the difference,” really opens up the conversation about what differentiates porn sex from real world sex.
CINDY GALLOP: The tagline does communicate immediately what we’re all about. The pro-porn part of that is very important. I remember when we first put our tagline out there, [pornographic actress] Stoya, who is actually now a friend but at the time we hadn’t met, tweeted at me and said, “that’s a great mission,” which I really appreciated, coming from a porn star. We are very specific about what we describe as real world sex — porn sex is real sex, because people are having sex for real. But we’re differentiating between porn-world sex, which is performative entertainment, with camera angles in mind, versus real world sex, which is the sex that we all have in our daily lives: funny, messy, beautiful, ridiculous, glorious. The reason we are showcasing it is precisely because there is no real world sex counterpoint to porn for anybody to look at, engage with, and understand.
We are the only online platform in the world doing this. People often say, “but what about amateur porn?” But 99.9 percent of all amateur porn isn’t; it’s being made by professional production companies masked as amateur, and even when you have true amateurs, they replicate what the porn stars do because they think that’s what people want to see.
The reason amateur is the most popular sector of porn has nothing to do with the porn itself. It has everything to do with the fact that everybody wants to know what everybody else is really doing in bed. That’s what we’re showing them, in a way that nobody else is. For us, real world sex is everything and anything that happens between fully consenting people in the real world. It’s all-inclusive. It’s so many things. We celebrate real world everything: real world bodies, real world hair, real world penis size, real world breast size, real world messiness, real world accidents. The same shit happens to all of us. It’s wonderful seeing that other people have sex just like you do with all the ridiculousness, with all the joyousness, with all the wonderfulness of real world bodies.
By the way, our philosophy is everybody is beautiful when they’re having real world sex. It’s just terrific to look at what are not “aspirational” body types and see them turning each other on and being madly loved and desired. It’s enormously moving because we celebrate real world love, real world intimacy, real world feelings, real world emotions.
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