After many intimate relationships with men 30 years her junior, Cindy Gallop was frustrated that her younger partners had grown up learning about sex solely from hardcore online pornography. So Gallop founded MakeLoveNotPorn: an online collection of “real world sex” videos meant to debunk the “myths of porn” and teach young adults what a healthy intimate relationship looks like.
Gallop — the former chairman and president of Bartle Bogle Hegarty US — launched her sex education website when the then 45-year-old left her leadership position in 2005. Fortune reported from Gallop’s interview at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in London last week that she just wanted to “do something different” with her life.
“Anybody who is offended by sexually explicit language, please cover their ears now,” Gallop interludes in her TedTalk on MakeLoveNotPorn.
“Predominantly, [I date] men in their twenties. And when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men,” were the opening Gallop said in the session. “And when I have sex with younger men, I encounter — very directly and personally — the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture.”
She explained that because “educational institutions are so terrified of being politically incorrect,” among a few other factors, young people watch porn and think “that is the way to have sex.”
Gallop’s vision is the website will serve as a sexual education version of Khan Academy — the nonprofit online education company that videos academic lessons in a variety of subjects for students who need additional help with schoolwork.
Gallop is hoping her site will provide the same service. Except instead of lessons in calculus, MakeLoveNotPorn.com would have a collection of “real-world sex” videos — either for rent or purchase — meant to “socialize sex” and create sex videos that are “acceptable and shareable.”
Additionally, the site has a feature that seeks to debunk the “myths of porn,” which can be sent in by voluntary submission.
Gallup also clarified that her sex education company is in no way “anti-porn.”
“I’m a fan of hardcore porn. I watch it regularly myself,” she stated in her TedTalk. “Although my overriding criteria when selecting has to be to find something that doesn’t resemble overly open-heart surgery.”
The 55-year-old CEO is now working to raise $2 million to build MakeLoveNotPorn’s socially acceptable library of sex videos. After facing the challenge of trying find a mainstream host for her site — hosts like Brightcove and Amazon do not allow their products to be used for adult content — Gallop has realized that, at the end of the day, MakeLoveNotPorn is really fighting a war against the fear of judgment.
“Fearing what other people think of you is one of the most debilitating things,” Gallop said in her Fortune interview. “[So] we are fighting [that] fear.”
