Cindy Gallop: Make Love Not Porn

WARNING: The following material and videos are labelled NSFW, Not Safe For Work.

Cindy is half English, half Chinese and grew up in Asia, in Brunei. The majority of her career has been in marketing. She joined the British marketing firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty in 1989 where she ran global accounts for Coca-Cola, Polaroid and Ray-Ban. She moved on to Singapore in 1996 to start up BBH Asia Pacific then to New York in 1998 to start BBH US, which only four years later was named Adweek's 2002 Eastern Agency of the Year, with clients like Johnnie Walker, Unilever and Levi's. In 2003 Advertising Women of New York voted Cindy Advertising Woman of the Year.

Cindy resigned as chairman of BBH US in August 2005, after sixteen years with the agency, in order to do something different for the next chapter of her career. This currently involves independent consulting and various start-ups.

Cindy spoke at TED 2009 (Technology Entertainment and Design) about her web site "Make Love Not Porn".

Cindy's "extended" talk on Gen Y and her web site. In amongst her discussion on porn and relations, she talks of how porn is always at the cutting edge of technology. She mentions rule #34 of the Internet: If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions. As porn relates to human sexuality, she talks of the impact of technology on human behaviour and here specifically on sex, the most fundamental of human behaviours.

Her idea: If people were having more sex and better sex, the world would be a much happier place.

Make Love Not Porn: Cindy Gallop's web site
http://www.makelovenotporn.com
The web site compares various sexual acts between what one may see in a pornographic movie and what happens in real life.

from About:
I date younger men, usually in their 20s, and came up with the idea for MakeLoveNotPorn based on direct personal experience.

I would like to stress the following:

• MakeLoveNotPorn is not about judgement, or what is good vs what is bad. Sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of tastes. Everyone should be free to make up their own mind about what they do and don't like.
• MakeLoveNotPorn is not anti-porn. I like porn and watch it regularly myself.
• MakeLoveNotPorn is simply intended to help inspire and stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography, in order to help inspire and stimulate more open, healthy and thoroughly enjoyable sexual relationships.

From a TED Q&A
Q: On the topic of feminism, you seem very comfortable as a woman who talks about having a sex life, without being ashamed of that at all. What did you have to overcome psychologically and socially to get to that point?

A: That’s a very interesting question. I’ve never really analyzed that, but I think I would say, funnily enough, that where I’m at today, personally has a lot to do with the industry I’ve grown up in professionally, and that is advertising. The single best lesson that I’ve ever learnt was born out of the advertising industry: When you identify what your personal brand stands for, when you know what you believe in, what you value, what your personal philosophy of life is, it makes life so much easier. Life will still throw at you all the crap it always does, but you know exactly how to respond to it in any given situation, in a way that is true to you. And that has a tremendous role to play in building self-belief, self-empowerment and self-confidence.

I’ve done a lot of talks and given a lot of business advice on the future of advertising and marketing, and something that I say to people is that the new marketing reality today is complete transparency. Particularly with the Internet, everything that brands and companies do today is in the public domain. When I talk to brand marketers who are nervous about this, I say, “Interestingly, the answer to that is the same answer as it is for a person: When you have a very strong sense of who you are and what you stand for, and you always act from and operate on that basis, you have nothing to worry about in terms of wherever people encounter you, because you are simply being completely honest.” Authenticity, integrity, honesty means you don’t have to worry about what people think of you, because you are being true to yourself. It’s true of brands, and it’s true of people.

So, bizarrely enough, where I’ve arrived at personally has something to do with where I’ve come from professionally. I find that life’s so much easier when you’re straightforward and say, “Here I am. Take me as you find me. Are you with me, or are you not?” If you’re not, that’s fine. There will be enough people who are.


References

Cindy Gallop's 2nd web site: If We Ran The World
Suggestion: Click on How It Works to see a video about how one uses this web site.
http://ifwerantheworld.com/

TED: Q&A with Cindy Gallop: Tackling porn, feminism and big dreams
This Q&A provides further details on Cindy's ideas, reactions to her web site and how frank she felt she had to be to launch the site when giving her TED speech.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/12/02/qa_with_cindy_g/

Texts From Last Night
Cindy talks about this web site.
Motto: Remember that text you shouldn't have sent last night? We do. 
http://www.textsfromlastnight.com

TED : Technology Entertainment and Design (conference)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_%28conference%29

2010-10-29