Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - The future of sex (is education) with Cindy Gallop, Jameela Jamil and Freddie Feltham

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Cindy Gallop is the founder of Make Love Not Porn, a platform for people to post real-world sex videos. It’s not porn, she says, it’s social sex. Now, she’s on a mission to raise $1 million in crowd funding in oder to build a sex education academy that will operate alongside her Make Love Not Porn. Set to launch later this year, the Academy will will cover a broad range of topics, including masturbation, LGBTQ+ sex and relationships, first-time sex, menopausal sex, period sex, disability sex and erectile dysfunction. Users will have access to a vast range of sex education content, all vetted by human curators and searchable by age appropriateness, cultural sensibility and comfort level. During this live recording of the podcast we delved into the problems with our broken sex landscape, how parts of the mainstream porn industry have fed into the rise in toxic masculinity and rape culture, the value of good sex education and what we need to do to create a better culture around sex for everyone.  We were also joined by actor, presenter, activist and the CEO of IWeigh, Jameela Jamil, who is an early-stage investor in the MLNP Academy, and digital consultant and former journalist, Freddie Feltham.  If you are affected by the issues discussed this please seek help via the below: Rape Crisis are open 24/7 for anyone who has experienced something sexual without their consent. Call free on 0808 500 2222 or visit their website here. Samaritans are open 24/7 for anyone who needs to talk. You can visit some Samaritans branches in person. Samaritans also have a Welsh Language Line on 0808 164 0123 (7pm–11pm every day). 116 123 (freephone) [e-mail] Freepost SAMARITANS LETTERS samaritans.org

Hello and welcome to the live version of the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more open, honest and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing in changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about who we are and who we are. how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to be talking about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week, I'm joined by new guest whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine and do well just that. From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of

humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to attend a live recording of the podcast, click on the Eventbrite link in the show note. Now, this week's episode of the podcast is a very special one indeed, because it's in partnership with Make Love, not Porn, founded by the incredible Cindy Gallup. Now, for any of you who haven't come across Cindy yet, she is an absolute force. She spent the bulk of her career in advertising, working for the Global Advertising Agency, Bartle-Bogel Hegarty, where she was responsible for major accounts including Coca-Cola, Rayban and Polaroid. In 1998, she then headed to New York to set up the global branch of the

business and won the Advertising Woman of the Year award from Advertising Women of New York in 2003. A few years later, Cindy took her career in a new direction, however, when she founded Make Love, Not Porn, a platform for people to post real-world sex videos. It's not porn, she says, its social sex. Cindy launched the new business during a four-minute TED talk, which became one of the events most talked about discussions. She was the first, and I'm sure the only person at TED, to say, come on my face not once, but six times. Speaking from her personal experience, Cindy is very open about sleeping with younger men purely for sex. She argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex.

Make Love, not porn, was her way of fighting back. It sought to combat the damaging sex myths being propagated by mainstream porn, offering real-world, inclusive, diverse examples of sex instead. Fast forward to 2024, and we've seen the proliferation of the sort of violent, often misogynistic, fetishistic, mainstream free porn, Cindy remains so concerned about. Part of the problem as she sees it, and I have to say I completely agree with her on this, is that sex education is on the whole terrible and is poorly preparing young people

with the skills, the knowledge, and of course the porn literacy they need to navigate the start of their sexual lives safely and enjoyably. This is a topic we go into in some depth during the discussion. So, Cindy is a woman on a mission now, and I think probably always, and she is currently looking to raise $1 million in crowdfunding in order to build a sex education academy that will operate alongside Make Love, not Porn. Set to launch later this year,

the Academy will cover a broad range of topics, including masturbation, LGBTIQ plus sex and relationships, first time sex, menopausal sex, period sex, disability sex, all the different variety of sex. Users will have access to a vast range of sex education content or vetted, and this is super important, all vetted by human curators and searchable by age appropriateness,

cultural sensibility and comfort level. During this live recording the podcast, we delved into the problems with our broken sex landscape, how parts of the mainstream porn industry have fed into the rise of toxic masculinity and rape culture, the value of good sex education, and what needs to be done to create a better sex culture for everyone. I was joined by Cindy for this, obviously,

but also the incredible actor, presenter, activist and CEO of Iway, Jimmy La Jamil, as well as digital consultant and former journalist, Freddie Feltham. Freddie, by the way, was our Gen Z representative, very necessary for a conversation like this, of course. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

I've popped a link to Cindy's WeFunder page in the show notes. A quick trigger warning before we get started. This conversation contains reference to rape and sexual assault. Please do take care when listening, and if you're affected by any of the issues discussed, I've popped some resources in the show notes, as always. Ultimately, our mission of Make Love Not Porn is to help end rape culture globally.

Now, that may sound like a very big mission, but we have 11 years of proof of concept at a micro level. We help end rape culture by doing something very simple that nobody else is doing. We show you how wonderful, great consensual community, of sex is in the real world, we eroticise consent, our social sex videos role model, good sexual values and behaviour, and importantly, we make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture.

Hello, everyone. Thank you all so much for being here. It's so fabulous to be sitting from a room full of people who are just as excited. as we are about the future of sex education. So to kick us off, I really want to kind of better understand from each of you why this is something that you care about so deeply. So, Jamila, I'm going to start with you first. As your kind of professional engagement, as it were, with the topic of sex and particularly

porn began some kind of 10 years or so ago when you presented a documentary about porn for the BBC. I know you've since got on to host a two-part radio show for the BBC on consent. wrote a blog on the topic. Obviously, you've been kind of hugely influential in making tonight happen. So it's obviously a topic that you have really kind of dug into and it's something you care about a lot now. Nonetheless, you do, you have, you do kind of consider yourself or having been quite prudish in your relationship to sex, which I know you've kind of put down to perhaps your upbringing household and attitudes towards sex there. So can you just tell us, why is sex education

something that you care about so deeply? And why specifically, this academy and what we're discussing here tonight? I just think sex is such a pivotal and natural part of so many people's lives, and I don't think that we gain anything by being mystified and in the dark around such a massive subject that can have such a long-term effect in your life, especially if it goes wrong. I think, you know, I was saying to you earlier backstage that I think we make a mistake when we see ignorance and innocence as mutually exclusive. In my opinion, one of the greatest ways that my innocence could have been preserved is had someone given me a heads up about what

was coming or what to look out for in a predator or what to say I do or don't feel ready for in the bedroom and that actually would have preserved my innocence far longer. I think to find an age appropriate way to communicate to different people from different backgrounds how they can protect themselves can only massively protect them going forward and that to me is true innocence when someone hasn't been able to take something away from you and the reason the documentary first caught my eye back then

is the fact that it shocked me that they wanted to give sex education to five-year-olds and my first reaction was a little bit of horror and then they explained to me that it's very simple it's very age-appropriate, it's just things like you can't touch me here, you can't touch me here, you can't touch me here, you can't touch me here, and it's a massive deterrent for any kind of predator because they know that it's much harder to groom a child

who is at least aware of the very basics of self-preservation and their own protection and safety. And that's when I jumped in and started and then it just kind of opened my mind, blew my mind, and I realize that I don't think having prudish and very, you know, know, intensive South Asian background did me any favours in preparing me for a life in London. And so it's something that I care deeply about. And I can't think of anyone who handles this better and with more care and love and compassion and experience than Cindy. And I think what she's

doing with Make Love Not Porn and the Academy is so important and it's so destigmatising. And I think that that's so brilliant that everyone has some sort of age-appropriate avenue within which they can access information that they might feel too shy to ask about. And if we push people into the shadows and we continue to make these conversations uncomfortable, then those people will go onto the internet. And we know that is not always where you find the best information. So thank fuck for Cindy. Thank fuck for Cindy could actually be kind of the tagline for tonight.

Throughout this conversation, obviously you're all biased and massively in favour of Cindy. So thank fuck for Cindy is going to be the tagline. My t-shirt. That's a bit T-shirt. But if you're all like tagging or hashtag an event, I think, can we get that in? Can we start this? Well, I like that a lot. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Freddie, what about you? You, as I said at the very brief at the beginning, when you work at the news movement, you present a documentary exploring Andrew Tate, the misogynist extremist, who really, I guess, has become kind of the poster child for this called Crisis of Masculinity. Now, in a Guardian interview, I think earlier this year, you said that your personal impetus for doing the documentary was that you felt an acute sense of responsibility given the sexist behaviour I engaged in as a teenager.

Can you tell us a little bit more about how your own personal experiences have driven kind of the focus of your work, specifically around crisis of masculinity, and why the future of sex education is something that matters to. to you. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I wrote an article in The Guardian, which was remoting some work I did when I worked to the news movement looking at Andrew Tate. We made a few documentaries about his rise to fame, how he did it, what the ramifications were, and they wanted a young person's lens. Now, why do I care about this? I guess, look, on one side, it's about responsibility, like we know in the epidemic of sexual violence

that we're seeing that women are primarily the victims, the people you see speak up about this more most often than not are women but it's done more most often but not by men so there's a disparity there right and i wanted to be part of a conversation that redressed that and on the other side of it was accountability and it would have been completely remiss of me to do any of this work and not recognize the behavior that i engaged in as a teenager and without going into too much detail you know i participated in the culture that i want to see change and uh i feel a lot of guilt about that. I feel a lot of shame. It still feels difficult talking about it with loads of cameras in front of you even when there's not a single friend in my life who doesn't know how much

I care about this and how much I'm trying to define myself in contrast to the mistakes that I made. But that's why I care, you know, and maybe we can talk about this. You know, why aren't there more young men speaking up? I guess part of it is because, you know, you don't throw stones if you live in glass houses and all that. Like, if you didn't do something yourself and I would someone who did, you know, maybe you were friends with somebody and you participated in enabling them to do that. And it's confusing with teenagers, or I was a teenager at that time, and I look back now and one of the things I think and I care about is like, what could I, what did I need or what sort of intervention was needed for me not to make or not to take the decisions that I did.

And if I can at all participate now through the things that I've learned, through the work that I've done in changing that, I guess it would make me feel a bit better of. about the person I had today in front of all of you lot. So, yeah, it's complicated. Sorry, massive round of applause for that level of vulnerability. And thank you so much. I think you raised so many important points there.

Particularly, I think, really, we'll go into this, we kind of main thrust of the conversation. But how, and having such a poor sex education, I think most of us have had, we really set everyone up to fail. The fact that you said, you now feel a lot of shame around the way you were

and some actions that you had, and I think you alluded to it there, the web of complicity that surrounds the culture of sexism and misogyny. I mean, we're all complicit. And I think now, particularly with sex education being what it is, being so impoverished, the conversation we have around sex, being so

taboo-laden, we set young people up to fail. More now so than ever, I think, because of what is available online, which will be kind of, as I said, we'll go into and more depth momentarily. So thank you, Freddie, for sharing that. And as Jimenez said, for your vulnerability there. Cindy, I'm to turn to you now.

You just gave a fantastic kind of presentation outlining your vision for how the Academy can change the sex education landscape. But you gave an interview to Fortune magazine some nine years ago, I believe it was, in which you outlined this very vision for the Academy that we're discussing this evening. And I know you've been fundraising or attempting to fundraise the Academy since then and have been up against that taboo which anyone who works in the space of sex will be all too familiar with

that people recoil when you talk about sex. It's confronting for people. And so I know that has been a struggle with fundraising, hence why we're here this evening. I'm sensing a real kind of urgency to what you're doing now, especially with the conversation we're having this evening. Why now? Why now is the moment this academy needs to start?

So, you know, it's been 15 years of Make Love Not Porn ever since my TED Talk, launching Make Love Not Porn in its original iteration, which is a kind of porn world versus real world public service announcement. So I've spent 15 years ever since then dealing with what began happening immediately an avalanche of emails, comments, conversations, seeing firsthand the enormous huge,

human unhappiness and misery caused by the shame, guilt, and embarrassment that we've imbued sex with. And I've heard harrowing stories from individuals, from parents, from teachers, etc. But over the years, those stories have come to light for everybody. So what I was actually pretty much the first person to identify, you know, publicly all those years ago, when we don't talk about sex, porn becomes sex education by default. we now see the evidence of that all around us. And I have to tell you that one interesting way

we are especially seeing urgency around us that make love not porn is some years ago parents began writing to us saying they wanted to buy subscriptions to make love not porn for their teenage and 20-something children because, and I quote, I want my kids to see what happy, healthy, loving, sex relationships actually look like.

Those emails and parents have got gotten much more frequent and much more desperate. So just in the past couple of months alone, what is interesting is that parents are writing to us saying, as one mother said, my 13-year-old son is watching Pornhub. I'm really worried. I know you're an 18-and-over sight,

but I would really like to give him access to your videos instead of what he's watching. You know, a mother wrote to us just yesterday saying, my husband and I want to give access to make love, not porn for our teenage son. I know you're over 18, there must be a workaround for this. We want to set up an account that is entirely secure for him. We have no access.

Literally, the desperation on the parental side is happening because they are encountering very directly everything we're talking about today. And so we are at a point where, you know, I think it's incredibly important as Jamila said, that sex education starts as early as possible. There are actually many educators out there creating amazing work that enables you to educate as early as possible.

But as we all know, that work is being censored and blocked everywhere. In the US where I'm based, it is illegal in a number of states to educate children about sex. You know, my friend Parameter Vora of Agents of Ish, who create culturally appropriate, sensitive sex education for India she told me when I was talking to her the other day that in India it's illegal

to talk to anybody under 18 about sex period her work cannot get distribution there and by the way her work is so valuable for the Indian diaspora all around the world which is why we can't wait to make it accessible on the academy so essentially you know we are seeing a ton of negative impacts and if we can just provide access to sex education,

there's age appropriate, culturally appropriate, you know, you can pick and choose. You can absolutely decide on the Academy what your comfort level is. But another reason also

why this is urgent is at the Academy, our mission is to help organize the world's sex education information. That is a deliberate paraphrase of Google's original mission statement, which was,

we want to help organize the world's information because they're not. The algorithm itself is biased. And so as we see big tech take more and more control of our lives in all sorts of ways, it's incredibly important that we build through the female lens to counter all of that with things that we know can help. Yeah.

Thank fuck for Cindy. Amen. Also, I feel as though I'm the person most well positioned say this, but look at the crisis of rape in India. So surely it would be helpful if, especially the young men of India, but if everyone was being able to have access, was able to have access to sex education, it's like we are in a crisis over there.

I had no idea until you just said that, but that's illegal. That's insane. And how can you miss that correlation? Sorry. No, no, no. Really, really valid point. And I think you mentioned that when we don't have proper sex education, when these conversations are shut down,

when they're rendered taboo, when we're not allowed to talk about these things, it doesn't mean suddenly people don't want to learn about sex, although they're not having sex, imagine that. It means that people are going to what is readily available online, which is pornography. And I want to say, kind of right at the outset, this conversation will not be an anti-porn, obviously, conversation at all. I think it's about acknowledging that one porn is not a monolith.

There are so many different types of porn, obviously, as we're discussing here this evening. but the readily available porn that is often free online, there is a lot of misogynistic, problematic pornography that is, as we can see, causing quite a lot of damage. So, Jamira, I want to turn to you again on this because we mentioned at the very start,

you fronted this documentary back in 2014 about the porn landscape then. And I'd just be curious to know, we're kind of 10 years on, we've seen the evolution of social media platforms, the proliferation of online pornography. I mean, I think Cindy mentioned some stats the very beginning, but just to give you a sense,

in 2020, the world's four largest porn platforms received nearly 11 billion visitors each month. That is more visitors than visited Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix, Zoom, and eBay combined. It's huge. The average age of which children now see pornography is around 13, and 79% of children have encountered violent pornography

before the age of 18. In these ensuing 10 years since you made that documentary, how have you seen the porn industry and our relationship to it evolve? I mean, it's just exploded. The statistics you've given us there show that and younger and younger people, I don't even think it's really 13-year-olds

who are looking at pornography. Even when I made that documentary back in 2013, 10 and 11 was the average age that kids were starting to watch this content. And now that we have social media that has really exploded in that time, pornography has made its way into mainstream platforms, and it's very rare to see that moderate it in any way.

So it's hyper normalized, but not in the way that I think make love not porn aspires to hypernormalize sex, right? I think that your tagline is pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-noborne, knowing the difference. And I think that what we see online, whether it's on OnlyFans or Instagram or Twitter even, I see obscene imagery that just kind of pops up all the time on all kinds of different platforms. And to me, it's not hyper-normalizing normal people having normal sex. It's always what is the most extreme. I think one of the things that really disturbs me about the homepage of Pornhub is that it's not necessarily the sexiest or most erotic thing that

makes it to the top of the algorithm, it's the most shocking video. It's the most shareable, uh, viral, uh, scary or offensive moment that people are watching sometimes not really to masturbate to, but just to watch because they can't believe what they're seeing. So that's what gets pushed to the top. And so some young person who's going to go onto the website thinks, well, this is what other people must be looking at. This is what I should be looking at. And then it starts to infiltrate their taste or it starts to dictate their taste. So many of the children, spoke to when I was making that documentary. I was talking to some children as young as the ages of 11 who were engaging in anal sex and the girls were telling me that they don't like it but they think

they're supposed to like it because the girls and the videos like it and the boys were telling me that they didn't enjoy it themselves. These are young straight boys and they were like, I'm not enjoying this but I know I'm supposed to like it because of the video so I push push through. One of the things we had to cut out of that documentary was a little boy saying that he was 12 years old. He was 12 years he puts hand up in the class, and he asked a question so sincerely, he said, miss, if I rape a girl, will she start to like it the way they do in the videos? That's a 12-year-old child. He was completely innocent. This is a little kid who's a virgin who doesn't understand what he's even really looking at.

He's just at the precipice of his sexuality. And he meant it as a genuine question because that's what he's been taught. That's what he's been explicitly shown. And so to protect him, we took that out. But it was a moment that stunned the entire room and we had to kind of cover for it and not freak him out or, you know, make him afraid to ask these kinds of questions

because Christ, we have to let children be safe to ask these kind of questions, but we don't even know what they're looking at. So I think things are much worse and much scarier now and much more accessible. And I think that contributes to the emergency as to why work like Cindy's needs to exist. I think that's, I mean, that's that story of the young boy.

I mean, when I saw that in Dr. Monti, it stood out to me so much. What, heard you talking about it, sorry, really stuck with me as well. And it goes back to what I said before, that we're setting young children up to fail by not equipping them with the knowledge nor the language to understand what they're seeing online when they do see pornography, which imagine if that's the first experience, that is your first experience you ever have of sex, is watching something that you see that the algorithm serves you online. What does that do to someone's sense of self, their relationship to their body, how they then go and approach intimacy? And again, we're setting children up to fail in that.

Freddie, can I just turn to you on this? We spoke about this briefly when we chatted before this interview. Can I just ask, on a kind of personal anecdotal level amongst you and your friends, as the resident, Gen Z amongst us, the spokesperson of young people, yes. He feels slightly perturbed by that. What's your favourite porn? No. Well, Trimela. Do you need you stole the question? Thank you for asking. Stole the question right out of my mouth.

Thank you. So, Frederick, you do tell her. What kind of age? I'm not saying you have to say this person to yourself, but what kind of age did you and your friends? Your friends begin to watch porn. And how did that shape your relationship to sex and to intimacy? Yeah, I mean, look, I think, broadly speaking,

it fucks people up, just to be honest. I saw porn out of really young age. I'm not going to go into the ins and outs, because, to be honest with you, it is a bit traumatic. Like, I don't really enjoy talking about it. There's only a few people in my life, actually, that I really open up to about that sort of stuff. But I can tell you, for fact, anecdotally,

that, you know, by the time people were around, you know, year three, year four, let's talk about seven, eight, nine. There was, porn was being spoken about amongst us as a peer group. And people were watching it, and it was the thing that we spoke about when we were about 11 or 12. So this dovetails with and backs up your point. about what you've found in your documentary. I don't know. I'm not actually the spokesperson for young people. I don't know if that's the same for every single other young person. But it is

fucking scary, right? It was my first understanding of what sex was. Porn is my first talk about the paucity of sex education. We were getting sex education. It was through the worst means possible, arguably. And I think it does give people a really warped understanding about what they're into what they want to happen when they start to experience intimacy and explore it. And there's a weird sort of, because even though people are talking about it, it's not like they're having a really, you know, nuanced conversation. It's like the same conversations that young men have, which is kind of like, who's the most out there and insane and like, you know, it's a bit of a competition, right? And that's also not helpful because, again, what's that going to perpetuate

like your algorithms is going to put the most extreme stuff kind of out in as the norm and then everyone's trying to co-hear themselves around that and what you said earlier Jamila about young men saying you know I didn't even want to do that that is a thing that I know plenty of young men have said to me in private that they didn't they did it because they thought that they had to

and that's really confusing when we're talking about some of the most kind of baroque sexual stuff that you could possibly do. So, you know, I do think that this is where something like what you're trying to do, Cindy, it's so important. We need to get real, right? Young people are engaging at this in a rate that no one is, they're not going to want to tell you because you're their sister or their mother or their father or whatever.

Why the fuck are they going to want to be honest with you about that? But we need to get real and be like, this is actually happening and what are the effects that are happening as a result of it. porn can easily be like the violent video games, you know, are people violent because they're playing Call of Duty? Probably not. You know, really actually what we're talking about is a cultural problem that we have around sexual assault and rape culture, misogyny embedded deeply in our society. Part of that is being exacerbated by the issues that we're finding with exposure to violent pornography and the ease of access that's happened. And as you say, Twitter is just the place for that now.

Can I quickly tag on to what you're saying as one of the things, that I think we have trouble with, especially when it comes to children watching this sort of thing or young impressionable people, is that, you know, with fantasy, let's say, Avatar, the people are blue, or the Marvel people look different, or they have scales, or they have a big outfit on, and they're shooting blue out of their eyes. I don't know if that's actually maybe a Marvel character. As I'm in Marvel, I'm just going to shut the fuck up. But I think that it's so much easier for them to identify, oh, this isn't real. And so much of the most extreme pornography,

there's nothing that tells you that signals to you as a child, this isn't real, this is fantastical, this is from a maniac director's imagination. This just looks like people who you would see anywhere walking down the street who are engaging in this. And so there's nothing that signals to a child that this is not what everyday sex is supposed to look, like hearing about that girl who was left paralyzed because of a choking incident that went wrong

with her boyfriend has shaken me. That is so unbelievable that this conversation around choking is so commonplace and yet very people, very few people know what they're doing, know how long is safe to do it. I don't know. I have no idea. I'm 38, so I can't imagine a 13-year-old is looking into all these things and these are things that people enjoy and they might want to participate in but there are ways to do this in an informed way where you feel safe and where you are safe and I always think sex education gives us and when done well a filtering system through which to understand what we're seeing online for example to be able to understand when something is fanciful when it's being you know exaggerated for effect good sex education I think

lays a foundation that allows us to be able to understand good information, bad information, something that could be kind of inspiring, but maybe I'm going to leave it for now. And so when you don't have good sex education, you have young people who are just being hyper exposed to this content online without understanding what to make of it, how to understand it. And so if this is all they know about sex, if this is their only introduction to sex, then they go and experiment in an intimate setting with, you know, in an intimate setting with, with someone they know and the consequences can also be so long terms. They think the trauma that we then create that occurs when someone has a, you know,

disturbing sexual experience, that doesn't go away. That lives with someone for the rest of their life. And on that point, Cindy, I want to turn to you, Rufi, on this. We're talking now about the damage that is being done when we don't have proffer sex education, when we have this, what I often call it about broken sex culture, specifically regards to young people. we know now that one child is raped in school on every single school day in the UK. And recent research by the observer showed a 40% increase in reports of sexual assault and rape over the past few years

with a greater increase in reports in instance on school property. So the problems that we're discussing here today are happening at a younger and younger age amongst our population. Cindy, what role do you specifically see sex education as playing when it's, comes to combating this epidemic of sexual violence that we're witnessing amongst young people now? Do you know, I mean, I think first of all, it's incredibly important that this starts in the home. Okay, parents absolutely cannot leave this to school and sex education classes. And then I really encourage parents to think about sex education in a much broader and very different way. I designed make love not porn around all my own beliefs and philosophies,

one of which is that everything in life starts with you and your values. So I regularly ask people this question, what are your sexual values? And nobody can ever answer me because we're not taught to think like that. Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever has to be. Nobody ever. brings us up to behave well in bed. But they should, because in bed values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, trust, respect are as important as those values are in every other area of our lives where we're actively taught to exercise them.

So I say to parents, it is literally about inculcating for the bedroom, the same thing, values that you inculcate in every other area. And by the way, what is not true, because I've had people say this to me, is, oh, but Cindy, if you have good values generally, those will translate into the bedroom. No, they don't. I am my own research lab. I'm very open about the fact that I date younger men casually and recreationally. I've dated a lot of them. And I'm very selective about whom I date. Number one criterion is they have to be a very nice person. I have fantastic radar of a very nice people. I only date utterly lovely younger men in an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, affection and liking. And still, when we get into bed, I see them modelling the body language

that says, my dick is the centre of the universe and it's all about me. And that's because they have unconsciously internalized what male-centric male-lens porn has taught them, which is it is all about them. It's all about them coming. You know, it's all about making sure that they have a good time, no matter what lovely young men they are. And so this has to start in the home, and it has to start with understanding. This is about bringing your children up to behave well sexually, to operate good sexual values and good sexual behavior as much as you bring them up to behave well in every other respect. Here, hear to that.

And I think, you also raise a really important and what should be a really obvious point, and that's around pleasure. Sex is meant to be pleasurable. It is meant to be fun. It is meant to be joyful and intimate aquitine to maybe lots of people, maybe just with yourself. But when we don't learn about it properly,

we don't get to the opportunity to explore our own bodies and explore our own boundaries in a way that allows us then to go into a sexual situation and know what we want and be able to ask for it and in turn create the sort of environment that you're kind of outlining there. Jamila, you did a, I mentioned in the beginning, you did a BBC two-part radio series a while ago on consent following... I'm obsessed.

It was fantastic. I really have been, you know, living in all of your worlds the past few days and it's been absolutely pleasurable. But during this consent BBC radio show, you interviewed someone called Bitsy La Bourbon, aka badass burles activist, who I fell a bit in love with. And you know how we're talking about consent and the issues surrounding consent now. And she said something that really struck me. She said, and I'm paraphrasing entirely, I can't remember the exact words, but she said,

if we can't even talk about the good bits, if we get all kind of stuck about, you know, unable to talk about the good elements of sex, the pleasurable bits, the joyful bits, if there's still such a taboo shrouding sex, how on earth are we going to be able to talk about the bad bits, the uncomfortable bits, the bits when our boundaries have been broken? Let's then talk about consent and pleasure and where sex education fits into that

because I want to make sure this conversation isn't just about highlighting how sex education helps to combat rape culture. It's also about encouraging us to have more pleasurable consent and more joyful consent. Tell us where sex education fits in. into that in helping us experience more pleasure. Something that I wrote about that I think may be led to that documentary, although I can't

remember because time just faded after the pandemic, but is enthusiastic consent. And it's something that I care deeply about, and I've been talking about for years and years and years, that surely we would want to have a rave review after we have shagged someone. I know that deep down, that's what we all want. We all want money on a house and da-da-da-da-da. Really? We would love a rave review. And I think that that's something that we should be encouraging. And I think it's something that women are very programmed to try to make sure that, you know,

we leave the bedroom with. I think it's taken years of my life even to suppress the urge to not wait even more than a second after sex. And then you just be like, how is that for you? Because I don't know if I have permission to have enjoyed myself. if they didn't. And I have very rarely come across anyone who is that interested in how it was for me. And so it took me, I think all of my 20s to stop asking that fucking question. I think enthusiastic consent is the gold standard. I don't think it's consent. It's enthusiastic consent. And I think that I can't imagine not wanting to have a nice, safe space to learn some tips and

tricks to make sure that you are a known legend in these streets you know i who wouldn't who wouldn't want that who wouldn't want like you know a little tip here and there and you look at women's magazines throughout the 80s 90s noughties cosmo for example always like 10 ways to make him happy 10 ways to please your man i've never seen the cover of gq saying 10 years 10 ways to make her scream like that i mean yeah um but you know 10 ways to make her happy you know 10 ways to make her happy would be so refreshing to see on the cover of a men's magazine. And if you do not think that young men and young boys

would flock to get that cover to find out, oh my God, I really want to know. They do want to know. Like, there is nothing that is inherently in men or boys that is not interested in being well reviewed and in someone having a nice time. They are being,

someone is, certain people are going actively out of their way to try to indoctrinate boys and young men out of the idea, that it is important to care about a woman's pleasure. Inherently, we are social creatures. We want to please each other. We want to be connected.

It is being dragged out of. They are being indoctrinated. They are being brainwashed. We're all being brainwashed in one direction or the other. But I feel concerned for young men because I think they're missing out. I think whenever I hear women reviewing the sex they've had the night before with someone,

I always feel really gutted sometimes for that man because I'm like, fuck, he probably has no idea. And it's scary for us to be the one to say something, especially if you don't know someone very well, they might kill you in their house. But there's got to be a way that we find a less stigmatized way to communicate to men that this is something that women really, really enjoy.

And it's all different strokes for different folks, but I just think sex education is pivotal. And I think that we just have, have to find a way to make it less embarrassing. It's so ridiculous that it's embarrassing. It's so ridiculous that it's okay for us to talk about anything else. But when it comes to the most important conversation of all, we think the best idea, like one of the most marking, you know,

experiences you can have for the rest of your life. The best idea is to turn the lights off. Get your genitals out and wish for the fucking best. Everything else we can discuss, politics, like anything, but we don't discuss the most important thing. We just go dick first. and vagina verse? Like, this is insane.

And I... Yes, it is totally nothing insane. And I think, do you really, you raise such an important point because when we don't get versed in the language of sex, when we don't kind of exercise,

I guess it's kind of like muscle memory, if we don't get used to exercising that muscle around talking about sex, then when it comes to talking about sex in the context of intimacy with someone else, the stakes feel so much higher because it does feel quite embarrassing.

It does feel something. I used to, you know, very funny, I used to really struggle to say in the context of sex what I wanted, what I liked, because I just wasn't used to saying those words. I wasn't used to saying clitoris or vulva or finger me harder. Those weren't things that were part of my lexicon, and I felt so much shame and embarrassment about sex. And so I think, yeah, as you say there, the stakes have become much higher. And then we're not giving people the, you know, in-person feedback that might help them

increase their reviews, their rave reviews when it comes to sex. Everyone wants a good, shagging, yelp review. Who doesn't? want a good shagging yellow. Also, I've just had a memory of my dad at like 60. It's not a trauma story, don't worry. My dad, when he was 60, like, or so maybe 50. And my mum was pregnant with me,

and he had to be excused from the gynecologist's office because every time the doctor said vulva, my dad found it so funny that he had to leave the room. I was like, that is, that has not really gone away. Like, we have not lost that feeling of complete awkwardness, especially people who've been socialised in Britain. We really need to get a fucking grip and have a conversation about this.

You and I were talking about the fact that Bitsy, who was in that documentary, says that she has a sex menu that she has saved on her phone and she sends her sex menu to anyone who wants to meet up with her online and they have to send their sex menu to her. And if the two aren't compatible,

they don't waste each other's time. They just don't meet up. Imagine the hours, the days, the fucking vad shaves that we would all have been saved if we'd just had a fucking sex menu. I really think it was so... She blew my mind, would she say that?

It never even occurred to me. It never occurred to me that I could just advocate for myself in such a nonchalant way. And I really think we need to normalise menus. But yes, and everyone... In fact, tonight challenge for everyone, can you actually go home and write

your sexual values, as Cindy says, and then your menu? What is on that menu? And it's okay to have a couple question marks. you know, things you want the specials. You don't know what the today's special is going to be. That's okay. But to actually, but to understand

and to know what you want, to know what's on that menu, to know what you like, to know your body means you need to be well-versed in the language of sex, which we are depriving young people of, as we are discussing this evening. Freddie, I want to turn to you... Sorry, you look kind of nervous every time I turn to you as our resident...

Lovin. Gen Z man, which you are the... What about... So we're talking now about kind of the importance of, you know, learning the language of sex and I guess not having that kind of social stigma surrounding this most universal of topics. You've obviously done a lot of research into the kind of Andrew Tate world, and I know you've interviewed some Andrew Tate superfans, more power to you. How do you think kind of a better sex education,

one that is kind of pleasure-focused, consent-orientated, a bit more substantial. than we currently have on offer. What Cindy articulated in, when she was talking about the Academy, what do you think, what impact do you think that would have on the attitudes of some of the young men who you've interviewed and who are drawn to the kind of Andrew Tates of the world and their ideas about women, their kind of deep misogyny? Well, yeah, so look, young men want to be educated on this stuff,

as you said, Jamila. They're interested, they care fundamentally. They want to be good at sex. it's not necessarily a competition but boys always puts themselves in these social hierarchies of who's the best and who's the worst of these sort of things and they want to learn more because they want to be better one of the things i think and this is not necessarily cause for concern but something that we should probably think about is not just improving education but really broadly thinking about this as cultural movement and cultural understanding because people can be

well educated but if their values aren't aligned they're still going to take bad decisions right they'll just know things, they'll know what they're doing, somebody might disagree with, for instance. And I think it's really important for us to be digging in at kind of a deeper level beyond just necessarily just the education, which we have to sort out as a priority now, to be able to get young people and young men to understand accountability and responsibility

in a completely different way in a different lens. That's something that's going to enable more, better communication and better intimate experiences for people when they get into the bedroom. And how do we do that? Like, that's a massive question, right? Like, it's like when you talk to an Andrew Tate superfan, they don't know, I don't think, that much about sex anyway. But even if they did, I don't think it would change them from thinking,

well, ultimately, I've got a problem around intimacy. I feel very lonely. Why do you think I love this random guy who's constantly got his shirt off and his massive muscles? It's very confusing if you're kind of heteronormative and a bit kind of repressed about your sexuality. You know, how do you change that for that person to see themselves as somebody who has a level of responsibility to their neighbor, as somebody who wants to be and have a close set of intimate friendships, not just partners, but friendships. You know, we have to think about those questions as well because people aren't getting seduced into this world of misogyny just by sheer, you know, hatred. It's about isolation, fundamentally. It's about loneliness.

And even if you educate people, you might not necessarily be enabled. them to participate in our social landscape in a way that they find easy and there's not an obvious answer to this by the way this is a conversation that we have to have all the time i i hope that one of the things that we can see change is that credible kind of like uh message carriers you know young men that other young men want to aspire to be put these conversations front and center when they describe what their identity is right like your friend jordan stevens like he's massive on this right like and he's gone through a whole journey like i think most guys who talk about this stuff tend to have. But yeah, this is the thing is that we need to, education is one

step, but really we need to get a whole sense of movement that coheres around fundamentally about accountability and about responsibility, being a good man not just in your sex life, but in your life more generally. Can I just respond to that point that Freddie's just made? Because I designed Make Love Not Porn to be fully diverse and inclusive, and we are. Our members, our Make Love Not Porn stars are all ages 18 to 18. all racist ethnicities are a global platform, male, female, trans, non-binary, straight, LGBTQ, asexual. But in the 11 years we've operated as a business,

we've discovered that make love not porn is especially a revelation to men. More men write grateful emails to us, leave appreciative comments than anybody else because make love not porn offers them something utterly unique that men will find nowhere else on the internet, which is a safe space where men can be and watch other men being open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. You would not believe the number of men who write to us regularly who all say the same thing. I just watched my first video Make Love Not Porn and afterwards I cried. I've said for years

I wish society understood the opposite of what it thinks is true. Women enjoy sex just as much as men and men are just as romantic as women. Yet neither gender is allowed to openly celebrate either fact. We would all be so much buffer off what they were. I picked up a wonderful Twitter exchange sometime back between two men. The first man had tweeted, as a joke, obviously, Hey guys, got this really weird fetish. I've got this kink where I want to watch porn

where people are honest, loving, loyal, decent and really like each other. Hit me up with your hottest links, please. And another man replied and said there's this website called Make Love Not Porn where you can watch real couples making love. He said, I watched a video where the woman said to her man, I love you while they're making love. He said sincerely, I cried when I heard that. We have opportunities to demonstrate different things to aspire to

that are absolutely available to anybody in order to shift culture around what is, aspirational and desirable as a man in a way that actually will drive that connectivity and intimacy that men are lacking currently. And honestly, you know, I completely agree Freddie. It's about many different dynamics. But honestly, the thing that Make Love Not Porn has has shown men that nobody else has is the extraordinary power of loving, intimate, connected sex in the real world in a way that nobody else is showcasing. And it's really important as many men as possible see that

and realize everybody, everybody can have that. And also something that you show on your platform that I think we've all touched on at some point about shaping people's taste via what they're seeing. I've had multiple friends, male friends, have to stop watching pornography

because they find that it has started to alter who they're attracted to. So now they're starting to find a specific body type, a very, very restricted type. of body types. It's like the big tips, the small ways, the big hips, but the skinny thighs, which doesn't really make any sense. But that's what we're supposed to look like now, apparently according to the latest dossier handed to women. And so they find themselves, it is kind of, it is shifting who they feel they have permission to be attracted to. And that means

that rather than being able to date people that they find they have an actual romantic chemistry with, unfortunately, their penis is no longer responding. And that person, that person and may have been their taste before, but now they have been sort of brainwashed algorithmically against being able to find that person attractive, so then they end up going on dates with people who maybe look like the pornographic aesthetic, but then they don't necessarily have that chemistry,

that pheromonal chemistry with someone. And so we are seeing a rise in youth in erectile dysfunction in young men. We are seeing Gen Z having less sex than any other generation. There's all of this data that shows us that it is not helpful for them to not see reflection, of people that look like them and people who look like the people they are attracted to,

anything outside of the kind of whatever fashions you remit of what a woman's supposed to look like is treated as if it's some sort of a dark fetish. And it's so ridiculous. Men write to me all the time saying they feel shame about fancying a muscular woman or a very curvacious woman or a dark-skinned woman. They feel ashamed of who they are naturally attracted to.

It is so ridiculous. We are failing as a society because of things like this and so I really appreciate the fact that someone can have the amount of anxiety men have about dick size is just ridiculous and women are complicit in that conversation

we are complicit in making men feel bad about their height or their dick size and porn is massively complicit in making people feel both genders feel worried about their genitalia we are just giving everyone so much anxiety and we're getting in the way of their bangs and we just have to stop

and that is a key point we are we're getting in the way of people having good bangs. And I think, you know, Cindy, when I was deep diving in to make love not porn, just the variety of body sizes and shapes and ethnicities and couples and ages, it's so refreshing. And I think you just, you know, it really reinforces just how often kind of monolithic is the idea of the body and kind of archetype of beauty that we, I think, particularly as women are supposed to have. We're constantly spoon-fed this idea of. what we're supposed to look like, how our bodies are supposed to look, what size we're

supposed to be. And we're supposed to have had, you know, body positivity has made a dent in that. But still, I think we're kind of rowing back quite fundamentally. And I do think kind of a lot of mainstream free porn plays a big part of that. The shame we have around pubic hair, around the size of our boobs and whether they're lopsided, yes, they are. All those things, when we don't see different bodies represented in our sexual media, we then feel so much shame about what we look like, particularly what we look like naked. Now, despite the fact that I think we're all obviously in quite a lot of agreement with regards to the importance of the type of social sex, as you describe it, that you are showcasing through make love, not porn, you nonetheless come up against

barrier and business challenge after barrier and business challenge. I'm conscious of time, so we've got a couple more questions, which we're more like the business side of things, and then we are going to go to questions just to kind of give you a bit of a steer on the direction in this conversation. But I think it is important that we highlight this. For anyone who isn't aware of the challenges that someone running a site focused on sex faces, can you just outline some of the biggest kind of business challenges you face the business? Sure. I mean, the one thing I didn't realize when I embarked on building Make Love Not Porn was that I and my tiny team would fight a battle every single day, not even to grow the business, but just to keep it

going basically because every piece of business infrastructure any other tech startup gets to take for granted we can't the small print always says no adult content and that's all pervasive um i can't get funded i couldn't get banked for four years um no bank in america would allow make love not porn to open a business bank account try doing business for four years without a business bank account. Can't tell you how I did it. Dany ways I shouldn't have. Makes life very difficult. Every single text service I need to use to run a video platform. Hosting, encoding, encoding. The terms of service always say, no adult content. In every case, I have to go to the people at the top of the company, explain what I'm doing, beg to be allowed to use their service.

Sometimes they let me, sometimes they don't. It's a very labor-intensive process. We never get to work with best in class of anything. Our two biggest business, business growth inhibitors are number one payments because PayPal won't work with adult, Stripe won't, mainstream credit card processes won't. I have to work with the murky subculture of adult friendly payment processes who because anybody adult has nowhere else to go charge extortionate fees. We currently pay out 12% of our monthly revenue in payment processing fees alone versus the mainstream rate of 3% or less. That's a massive business growth inhibitor. The other inhibitor is we are banned from advertising anywhere. We cannot advertise make love not porn on Facebook, Instagram,

TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, I ask you. We're banned from advertising on Reddit, I ask you. And by the way, because you may not all know this, this is a gendered ban. It's not just us. Any female lens sexual health and wellness venture is also banned. Menstruation ventures can't advertise. Menopause can't. Fertility can't. In the meantime, male sexual health not a problem. erectile dysfunction solutions welcome everywhere. And so literally everything is a battle. And I will just let you know that I am currently in a dialogue with the UK government independent porn review commission,

which a number of you may have read about is ongoing at the moment. They reached out earlier this year to me. They said we want to talk to leaders of sex positive businesses, ethical porn businesses. and so I did a very long interview with them where I laid it all on the table. Financial discrimination, funding, I need government grants. And the point I made to them, and I'm happy to say in an ongoing dialogue where they're taking this on board, is the answer to everything that worries people about everything you've heard today about porn and sex is not to shut down, censor, clamp down, block, repress. It is instead to open up.

open up the dialogue in the way that I'm so thrilled we're doing this evening, open up to welcoming, supporting, funding and championing entrepreneurs like me who want to disrupt all of this to the better, and importantly, open up to allowing us all to do business the same way everybody else does. Because when you do that, you completely transform the landscape of adult. I like to repurpose in this context, Wayne LaPier of the NRA's infamous gun control quote.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a business is a good guy with a better business. That's what I'm doing. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! And Cindy, that leads me perfectly on to then ask about the business case for why we should all want to invest.

Jamila, I'm going to turn to you. You and the I-Way team are lead investors in the Make Love Not Porn Academy. And I know this is one of your first investments, if not. Your first? My first. It's your first. She took my little investment cherry.

We love that. Why was this such a compelling business proposition for you? I think I care about people's health and happiness. I care about women's happiness and safety. I care about men's happiness and safety. And I really believe that autonomy and agency is better achieved with information. and Cindy just ticks all the boxes of everything that I think would make us less of a lonely,

less of a miserable and less of a lost generation. I see nothing but more and more suffering every year that I am alive. And the statistics show that and the only way that we would be able to have a chance to bring people back together is via information, is via opening up conversations, opening the doors to one another, opening our hearts to one another,

and de-stigmatizing things that should never have been stigmatized in the first place. And so for me, this company is so much more than just sex, and it's so much more than education, and it's so much more than intimacy. This is, it's built from a true love of people, and it's been created by someone with such a big heart, who's such a phenomenal speaker that I hate speaking after you. and I really think that you are such a hero of mine. I look up to you so much in every way

and the hurdles that you continue to overcome and you still show up in your pink feathers with the same amount of gusto as you had when you first started this journey 15 years ago if only I could clone you and make 10 billion of you and have you run all the countries in the world I feel like it would be a better place.

Oh well, the Cindy Gallats. I just, I, I, I, I, I ride at dawn for Cindy, you know, and I really believe, I really believe in what she's doing. And I think that, you know, I don't want to have children, but all of my friends are. And I think that work like this would make the world a safer place. And so, instead of putting children into the world, I could invest in someone who makes it safer for them. And then I've done my bit. I love that, folks. And, Shemille, I just would pick, something you said there.

I think is so true and really kind of brings together so much of what we've been discussing tonight. Sex is never just about fucking. It is about your relationship to your body, your relationship to yourself, your sense of self-confidence, your capacity for vulnerability, your ability to show up vulnerably in the context of intimacy with another. It's how we relate to other humans. It's how we relate to ourselves. When we have the opportunity to have a good role model in sex, which I think your platform really does, that just opens so many doors for how we're able to cultivate the relationship with we have ourselves in a more productive, healthier, happier way and with other people. So I really want to echo that. I think it always is

it's so much more than just sex, even though sex is goddamn important, as we know. Cindy, can you make the kind of, just continue what Jamila has said there about her kind of business incentive for investing in your platform. I want to hear from you now too. Why should we put our money in the Make Love, Not Porn Academy and your vision of the future of sex education? Guys, I have a business that operates in the single area of universal human experience that we are all most engaged with, most fascinated by, and most fucked up about. Dollar signs all over that shit! But also, the point I've been making to investors for literally 15 years

is, oh my God, the money to be made out of sex. But the money to be made in two areas, the second one of which people never think about because no one thinks it's possible. So first of all, obviously, the money to be made out of sex. We all have it, we all enjoy it, recession-proof, market never goes away. but the second area is oh my god the money to be made out of socially acceptable sex when you do what we're doing at make love not porn socializing and normalizing all of this you then normalize people really willing and excited to publicly

buy your goods products and services and then publicly do what they currently do with everything else publicly review recommend share advocate and basically badge themselves publicly as proud brand ambassadors. That's the trillion dollar financial future we're going after at Make Love Not Porn. And that is absolutely the kind of return that we want to deliver for everyone who has faith in and invests in us now like Jamila. That's my commitment to you. Huge run, pause for that. So we can all get rich, improve the world and have better.

sex by joining up. Sign me the hell up. Absolutely. Yeah, I think I've, I just want to make it very clear. I do not consider this my helping Cindy. I consider this me being very lucky to be a part of what Cindy's building and that's how we should all look at this. This is a massive privilege to have the inside scoop on something like this that is so healthy, so holistic, so helpful and so whole. Just to round up this conversation, I'd love just in one line, I know you all have so many wonderful things say, but in just one line, what is the vision of the future of sex and sex education which you would like to see? Cindy? Honestly, a world without shame, guilt and embarrassment around sex is a world in which we are

all so much happier and so much more able to connect well with each other. So that's the world I want to see. Fantastic. Jamila. I echo exactly what Cindy just said. Fantastic. Freddie. Accountability, inclusivity and hope for change. Absolutely. I'd say I want to see a world in which we're all facilitated and encouraged to have relationship to our bodies that allows us to experience the depth and breadth of pleasure these bodies are capable of

and I believe your platform is going to help us do that. Thank you so much. We must all now go and invest in Cindy's wonderful platform. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, and Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the Eventbrate link in the show notes, as we have lots of exciting live events coming up. In the meantime, don't forget to submit whatever ad-dient question you'd like us to tackle

on a future podcast episode via the SexTalks website. That's sextalks.co.uk. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, I hope you did. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform. you're listening to this on, as apparently it helps others to find us. Have a wonderful day.