What is the biggest thing you’ve learned from MakeLoveNotPorn?
When you discover something is way more transformative than you thought
What is the biggest thing you’ve learned from MakeLoveNotPorn?
MakeLoveNotPorn is a social experiment. Never before has anyone built a platform that answers the question everyone has been asking since the dawn of time - “What is everybody else REALLY doing in bed?” - and gone to lengths nobody else on the internet has ever gone to, to ensure that what MakeLoveNotPorn showcases, is the way the world has sex, for real. For the past 10 years I and my team have had front row seats to something that’s never been seen before (not even in the days of Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, because those were clinical environments). And as with any innovative, disruptive technology, what emerges are use cases the founder and team never originally conceived of.
The biggest thing I’ve learned from MakeLoveNotPorn, is the transformative power of social when applied to sex, to change people’s sexual attitudes and behavior for the better.
This might seem odd given this was my idea in the first place. The extraordinary response 14 years ago to the TED talk with which I launched MakeLoveNotPorn in its original ‘Porn World vs Real World’ PSA format, demonstrated I’d uncovered a huge global social issue, and really brought home the fact that of course, when we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world, porn becomes sex education by default, in not a good way.
14 years ago, I decided that the simplest way to get everyone in the world to feel able to talk openly about sex, would be to take all the dynamics of social media, and apply them to this one area of universal human experience, that no other social network or platform will allow.
So yes, I pioneered the concept of a whole new category, social sex - but I’ve been taken aback over the past 10 years that MakeLoveNotPorn has operated as a business designed to do good and make money simultaneously, to learn myself what that has the power to transform.
MakeLoveNotPorn does the things I designed it to do.
MakeLoveNotPorn has taught young people all around the world that what they see in porn is not the way you have sex in the real world. Here are some comments on MakeLoveNotPornstars maartssci’s videos.
We’ve made people feel better about their own real world bodies.
We’ve given people a new sense of their own sexual agency.
MakeLoveNotPorn has saved many marriages and relationships. We inspire communications breakthroughs - as this couple told us: “Having these discussions while watching the videos from MakeLoveNotPorn seemed to ‘normalise’ them. They became more casual and comfortable, almost like discussing a television show that you watched, across a lot of areas. This increased level of comfort in discussing various aspects of sex made it easier to communicate with each other what it was we liked, what we wanted and what we’d like to try.”
Parents tell us that simply being members of our community, has made them feel able to be more open about sex with their children, and increasing numbers of parents are buying MakeLoveNotPorn subscriptions for their teenage and twenty-something children, because, as they tell us:
But MakeLoveNotPorn also does things I never consciously designed it to do.
We’ve helped people recover their sex lives post-cancer and gotten incredible notes like this:
“As I’m recovering from breast cancer with one boob missing, I hardly find people to have fun with, those days. But it’s ok since I’ve just discovered how fresh, hot, fun, charming, sexy your stars are.”
We’ve heard from survivors of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, that we’ve helped them reclaim their bodies, and feel able to be sexual again.
And we’ve heard this, not just from members viewing our wonderful social sex videos, but from our MakeLoveNotPornstars. They tell us that sharing themselves sexually in a completely safe and trustworthy space, has helped them process and heal from sexual trauma.
In fact, I’ve been blown away by how transformative becoming a MakeLoveNotPornstar in itself, can be. Read these moving blog posts from Shakti River and hiya maia.
And while MakeLoveNotPorn is fully diverse and inclusive - our members and our MakeLoveNotPornstars are male, female, cis, trans, non-binary, straight, LGBTQ+, many races and ethnicities - I’ve been especially struck by how transformative men find us, because we are something men see nowhere else on the internet: a safe space where men can be, and watch other men being, open, emotional and vulnerable around sex. We regularly hear from men who tell us, ‘I just watched my first video on MakeLoveNotPorn, 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 celebrate either fact. We’d all be a lot better off if they were.
Imagine the impact this young man wrote to us about, scaled globally - “After watching my first MakeLoveNotPorn video, I feel like for the first time I want to confront my own issues with sex, and my own sexual health”.
MakeLoveNotPorn helps to end rape culture by doing something very simple, that nobody else is doing. We show you how wonderful great, consensual, communicative sex is in the real world; our social sex videos role model good sexual values and behavior; and - the important part - we make all of this ASPIRATIONAL, versus what you see in porn and popular culture. We love that so many men tell us that MakeLoveNotPorn makes them want to be a better man, in the bedroom, and in life:
So that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned from MakeLoveNotPorn.
I’ve also learned how much the business, tech and finance world makes it extraordinarily difficult to build and grow a sextech business - and how it’s possible to overcome all of those barriers through grit, determination, perseverance and sheer force of will.
I’ve learned that even possessing all those qualities that investors claim to want to fund in a founder, accessing the capital MakeLoveNotPorn needs to scale all of the above will only come from the investors who get it. MakeLoveNotPorn operates in the area of online content that we are all most fascinated by, engaged with and most fucked-up about - but with the unique power to change those fucked-up attitudes and behavior for the better. Dollar signs all over that shit 🙂
Investors who get it, email cindy@makelovenotporn.com.
Everybody else - please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to Dear Cindy, and bear in mind that when you do, you can make the dollar amount for an annual subscription anything you’d like it to be.
Everything goes to keeping MakeLoveNotPorn going while we confirm the investors who will stand with us, support and champion us, to bring good sexual values and behavior to the world.
Because I’ve also learned that MakeLoveNotPorn operates in the single biggest market of them all. No, not sex. Not porn. The market of human happiness.