Porn is dead, long live sex / Vice

Porn is dated, passe, over. It’s got nothing to do with reality and its business model is so archaic it’s not making any money – the internet’s moved on, you see, but the industry hasn’t. Make Love Not Porn is a video streaming website built around that notion; in its pages you’ll find only tapes of “real world sex”, made and submitted by users, in an attempt to revert our understanding of sex from performance to experience.

I met up with founder Cindy Gallop – you might remember her from the TED Talk that went viral in 2009 – and spoke about misconceptions, economics and, of course, sex.

VICE: Hi Cindy. Why did you want to create an “alternative real world sex streaming site”?
Cindy Gallop: Porn has gotten so big that it’s become conventional. It’s built on an old world order business model that is being destroyed by free online porn, and it hasn’t invented a new one. What do a bunch of guys scared shitless in any industry do? Play it safe. The explosive rise in violent, extreme porn is not due to evil, twisted, malicious forces within the porn industry, and it’s not due to the fact that human beings have all become so much more depraved and corrupt. Much more prosaically, it’s a competition thing driven by business problems. People don’t realise that.

I’d never thought of it like that. How do you make your website not just the moral option, but the desirable option?
There is nothing moral about what we’re doing. I date younger men, predominantly men in the twenties, and realised six or seven years ago that a very important dual dynamic was going on: today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online had met with our society’s complete reluctance to talk honestly about sex. The result was porn becoming the sex education of today.

So Make Love Not Porn isn’t just about tackling the porn industry?
No, we’re tackling the complete absence in our society of an open, honest, healthy and truthful conversation about sex in the real world. Our mission is to socialise sex and to make real world sex socially acceptable, in order to make it easier for people to talk about sex in public and with each other, to make better connections to get to better sexual relationships. Porn is purely masturbatory material. As one young member put it, “Watching porn makes me want to jerk off. Watching your videos makes me want to have sex.”

Do you veto videos?
Oh, we watch every video. I don’t want to reject anyone’s real world sex, but we do reject videos for three primary reasons: The first is if the light levels are too low and you can’t see anything; also if you’re using copywritten music and if it’s too pornified. We ask you to contextualise your sex. Real world sex has a back-story and a relationship. It can be, we’ve been together for years, or, I brought this guy home from the bar and am never going to see him again. Start the camera running as early as possible, leave it running as long as possible, we want to see you seduce each other and we want to see the aftermath. Porn sites make people think they have to start the camera running as soon as they hit the sheets and stop it running as soon as they’ve come, but real world sex is the whole experience.

Read the rest here .