sex

There's a website showing people having sex, but it's not porn.

Porn is evolving into something that can hardly be called porn. It’s real people having sex and instead of being about the sex, these videos are about making love.

And you can find them all on a website called Make Love Not Porn.

Founder and CEO Cindy Gallop first came up with the idea for the website when she grew tired of mainstream porn which seemed to focus on graphic, close up sex acts. Instead, she wanted people to be able to enjoy real couples having real sex, including the build up, the foreplay, the fun, the awkwardness, the enjoyment and even the showers they took after.

Gallop talked about the site on New York Magazine’s podcast Sex Lives.

How can you consume porn in an ethical way? Article continues…

“Make Love Not Porn is a social sex video sharing platform that helps make it easier for the world to talk about sex in order to promote good sexual values and and good sexual behaviour,” she said. She says the organisation is “pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference.”

The videos are not about performing for the camera, so not porn and not amateur, “They are simply what you do on every social platform which is capturing what goes on in the real world as it happens spontaneously in all it’s funny, messy glorious, silly, ridiculous, wonderful, beautiful, humanness,” Gallop says.

The social activist says the idea for the site came out of her own experience dating younger men via online dating sites and seeing the effect total and free access to online porn has on a society that still doesn’t talk honestly and openly about sex.

Porn is changing, into something that can't even be considered porn. Image: Boogie Nights, New Line Cinema
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Cindy Gallop launched the site at TED in 2009 during a talk about how porn has set unrealistic expectations about sex because it now acts as a sex educator for so many young people. She says after the talk went viral, she felt a responsibility to find a way to create sex content that was helpful and effective.

"Clearly this was a huge global social issue that needed an equally huge global social solution."

Sarah Beall, curator of the site, says it's free to sign up to the site and view still photos and back stories from each video then once you choose a video you want to rent it costs $6.50 AUD for three weeks. The profits are split 50/50 with the couple who submitted the video.

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"So they earn money and you support a good cause and then you just get to sit back and enjoy."

Founder and CEO of Make Love Not Porn Cindy Gallop explains how the site works. Article continues...

Video via TED

Beall says to curate the videos, submissions need to fulfill a number of criteria:

Everything that happens in the video is consensual, including the sharing of it;

If anyone changes their minds or a couple breaks up, their video is taken down no questions asked;

People in the video aren't performing for the camera or using any porn cliches;

They do what you like doing, not what you think people would want to see you doing.

Gallop says the wonderful thing about real world sex is that it's people "just like you and me, having an amazing time." Their mantra is "everybody is beautiful when they're having real world sex," and Gallop describes it as, "enormously inspiring... enormously moving."

"Because this is real world people who are inviting you into their real world sex life and into their life as a whole."

A woman asks for advice on her obsession with having sex with strangers.