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"Rampant feminist" Cindy Gallop tackles love, sex, porn

by julie-mollins | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Monday, 2 April 2012 10:57 GMT

* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Web access to pornography and a lack of sex education is changing attitudes about lovemaking, Cindy Gallop says

By Julie Mollins

Easy access to hardcore pornography on the Web and a general lack of sex education for youth is changing attitudes about lovemaking, according to entrepreneur Cindy Gallop.

“I date younger men – they tend to be men in their 20s – and in dating younger men I encounter the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture,” Gallop, 52, said during an interview at London Web Summit, where she gave a presentation.

“I can personally testify we now have an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore porn is the way that you have sex.”

Gallop, who has a background in marketing and refers to herself as a “rampant feminist”, started the website MakeLoveNotPorn.com in 2009 as a platform to inspire discussion on the differences between lovemaking and pornography.

She plans to launch MakeLoveNotPorn.tv this year to expand the conversation.

“We live in a society where we all have sex but nobody ever talks about it,” Gallop said.

“Parents are usually too embarrassed to teach children about sex. Schools and colleges run into issues if they make up the gap and so hardcore porn has become, by default, the sex education today and that's not a good thing.”

British-born Gallop, now based in New York City, is also founder and chief executive of the social networking site IfWeRanTheWorld.com, which encourages users to share and swap “good intentions” to transform ideas into reality.

Related: TED Blog: Cindy Gallop

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