Tag Archives: porn

Make Love Not Porn, Cindy Gallop’s Voyage of Discovery

Lynne Murray says:

I found Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior as a TED Book and was captivated by Cindy Gallop and her story. As an advertising executive, she signed up with an online dating service as part of her research for a client.

cindy gallop on the Ted talk stage

The rest of my team were all married, living with partners, or dating, and so they created fake personas online in order to conduct this research. I was the only one who was single. Since I needed to do this for my job anyway, I thought, why not do it for real and see what this whole online dating thing was all about?

When I registered my profile online, I was completely honest about everything, including my age. To my surprise I received an avalanche of responses … 75% of those responses were from younger men. The majority were much younger than me (I was 42 at the time – I’m 51 now). For them, I was a fantasy come true: an attractive older woman willing to have a no-strings-attached relationship….

So I proceeded to date younger men … and had an absolute whale of a time …

I gradually began to notice, however, that having sex with younger men often involved a number of interesting dynamics (and, if you like, sexual memes) that felt increasingly recognizable. Those modes, those facial expressions, that particular modus operandi seemed familiar. And had not heard those accompanying verbal expression somewhere before? Eventually, it struck me that what I was encountering, very directly and personally, were the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hard-core pornography in our culture.

Gallop quotes research data showing that the average age at which a child now first views porn online is 11, that the fourth most popular search term by 7-year-olds and under is “porn” and that more than 80% of children between the ages of 14 and 16 regularly access hard-core pornographic footage on home computers or mobile phones.

Gallop suggests that “today, there is an entire generation of boys and girls growing up believing that what you see in hard-core porn is the way that you have sex.”

Gallop concludes that because of parental embarrassment around sex education,

[H]ard-core porn has become, by default, the sex education of today.

That’s not a good thing.

So when I realized the nature and recalls of what I myself was encountering, I decided to do something about it.

She decided to make a fun and funny educational website contrasting “Porn world vs. Real World.”

She uses ten stories from her own experience of “what can happen when technology enables unparalleled level of access to porn, which then informs and drives real-world human sexual behavior.”

Her first example contrasts how in porn actors must “open up” for the camera, which provides visibility, but minimizes skin-on-skin contact when you try it in real life. She realized that her young sex partners were performing joined only at the genitals as they had seen in porn films:

I found myself having to do a certain amount of, quote, “Hey, come here, Mister” — literally pulling my partner into an embrace to get as fully tactile as I’d like.

Her graphic examples of how porn differs from real life will be familiar to anyone who has experienced enjoyable sex and then cringed at such popular porn favorites as the inevitable semen facial bath, instant female orgasm with no foreplay, and women begging to be “deep throat” gagged by giant penises.

Gallop had not intended to launch her website at the Ted conference, but there was a call for short talks, and her proposal was welcomed once she reassured the conference organizers that, “it would employ words and graphics only, as opposed to anything that was triple X rated.”

The reaction to her TED talk was dramatic:

I think it’s safe to say that 30 seconds after I began, you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium. One Twitterer reported that this was “probably the first time the words ‘come on my face’ have been heard six times in succession on the Ted stage.” But the ripples of laughter in (mostly) the right places told me, the audience was on my side.

The traffic to her website was so dramatic that it nearly crashed when it first went live, and continues to resonate with both women and men. Gallop says her inbox for MakeLoveNotPorn is pretty much gender equal. She provides samples of correspondence that often poignantly illustrate the confusion and lack of information about actual sexuality that trails in the wake of the porn industry.

Gallop makes a point to say that her site is not skewed intentionally toward “heteronormativity,” but simply because she hasn’t had the time or money to expand it.

Addressing this issue she says:

I do want the next iteration of MakeLoveNotPorn to encompass the gay/lesbian/queer experience of all of this and in canvassing all those who talk to me about this further suggested quote porn world versus real world” scenarios to incorporate going forward.

Visitors to the site can participate in forums.The area where participants can view and/or share short personal videos of real world sex is in beta test.

I love Gallop’s unfazed attitude and unflappable determination to shed light on how and why so many people can be starving for pleasure in a banquet of titillation and performance-oriented raw footage. MakeLoveNotPorn is not anti-porn but it is pro-humanizing porn. Gallop may be making some progress towards reconnecting people with what genuine sexuality looks like–and feels like.

Montana Fishburne: Individuality and Representing the Group

Debbie says:

I’ve apparently come late to the Montana Fishburne party, since I just learned about the story yesterday. For those of you who’ve been living under the rock next to mine, Montana Fishburne is the daughter of acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne, who is African-American. At the age of 18, Montana decided to perform in porn movies. Her father is furious and not speaking to her.

Montana is extremely articulate and clear about her decision. In an open letter released by Vibe Magazine, she says:

I was the one who reached out to Vivid. [Male performer] Brian Pumper had nothing to do with getting me started. I did my first video with him, but that’s it. I chose Vivid because they are the best in the business and I wanted to go to the top seller. And they have released other movies with celebrity girls like Kendra, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. So, I wanted to go somewhere I knew I would be safe. People have it wrong. Doing porn is not about me becoming famous…it’s about becoming successful. Porn just happens to be the industry I was most interested in, so for critics to say I’m going about it the wrong way they are missing the point. I am making a buzz in the porn industry and in the mainstream, too. It’s leading me to more opportunities, so people can’t say that I’m not going to get anywhere.

Her right to do this is not in doubt, and it’s difficult to read that quotation and question that she’s making a conscious choice. No one can say whether or not it will work out for her, but that’s true of all choices we make at any age; sometimes the least controversial-seeming choices turn out to be the most dangerous, sometimes vice versa. So my basic reaction is “You go, girl!”

Andrea (AJ) Plaid adds a layer of complexity to the story at Racialicious. After discussing her own understanding of Montana Fishburne’s choices in the context of her own history, Plaid goes on to give us some racial/ethnic context, and then finishes with a superb analysis of the role of the woman of color in pornography and what kinds of obstacles Montana Fishburne may encounter. (“What’s not getting nuanced in this statement is the deeper notion of what Latoya Peterson describes as the Montana’s and Midori’s “double marginalization”: that “black bodies are devalued, both in mainstream media and in porn…”) Read the whole piece.

In the middle of her post, Plaid analyzes how Montana Fishburne’s racial identity affects public perception of her choices.

… to hear that [Laurence Fishburne]s] Black daughter is not only a sex worker—which is, according to some people, what one turns to only “out of desperation” or is the path of “those (read: poor, uneducated) women,” though some sex workers would state otherwise–is something some people just couldn’t imagine Papa Laurence doing because he’s just too righteous for that. Laurence, like my moms, are what some would refer to as “race people” those Black people who are proud and try their damnedest to do right by The Race™, including rearing children who won’t embarrass the rest of The Race™ by, in the case of Black women, staying sexually “proper”—meaning no “laying up” and certainly not doing it on video for millions to see. And when their child shames them—and by extension, The Race™—sometimes punishment is swift and, in my mom’s and Laurence’s cases, silent.

I completely get this, and at the same time, it is one of the hardest things about being in any marginalized group: Paris Hilton can star in porn flicks and she’s just a rich white girl starring in porn flicks, but if Montana Fishburne does the same thing, she stands in for all African-American women, or at least all middle-class-and-higher African-American women making that choice. Everyone white has the option of generalizing from Montana’s choice to the choices of Montana’s whole group. Everyone of color is strongly pushed to think about how to respond to her as a representative of their choices. Individuality itself is muted by the role of representation. Individual choices and individual public actions become more difficult.

This also makes me sympathetic to the people of color who are opposed to Montana’s choices. If she cannot escape the role of representative, similarly no one who is identified as being in her groups (in this case, people of color and African-Americans, especially conventionally beautiful young women) can escape being lumped in with her to some extent.

Despite the fact that she is chipping away at the bedrock of these issues by being so public, there is nothing immediate or dramatic that Montana Fishburne can do to change her ‘assigned’ role as representative of her identified group. For me, that means that her choice is even more courageous and challenging than it would be if she was white. So, along with Plaid, “I wish her much luck and success in her chosen path.”