WGSN CEO Carla Buzasi talks about the future of sex, sex tech investment, and how porn is impacting young people with guest Cindy Gallop. Former advertising executive Cindy is the founder of Make Love Not Porn, a user-generated video-sharing platform. A sex-tech pioneer, she aims to build a community to promote positive sexual values through user-generated content, in response to the ubiquity of hardcore porn and the harmful myths it generates.
Porn world versus real world
“So 15 years ago, pure little side venture, I put up on no money a tiny, clunky website to makelovenotporn.com that in its original iteration was just copy. The construct was porn world versus real world. I had the opportunity to launch it at TED in 2009. I became the only TED speaker to say the words ‘Come on my face’ on the TED stage six times in succession. The talk went viral, and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated. Thousands of people wrote to me from all around the world, young and old, men and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn-watching habits. They’d never told anyone before. I realised I had uncovered a huge global social issue.“
On reinventing aspiration
“We have a huge opportunity to do good and make a ton more money simultaneously by reinventing aspirational culture. And the reason I say that is because we invented aspiration. We made people want things, but we made people want material things our industry [advertising] made you want the right watch the right car, the right outfit, the right house. Today we have a huge opportunity to reinvent aspiration to make people want things that will benefit them will benefit society and in so doing will also enormously benefit the brand and the business that gets it.”
Changing big tech
“The young white male founders of the giant tech platforms have dominated all our lives today, including the big AI platforms. They are not the primary targets online or offline of harassment, abuse, sexual assault, racism, violence, rape, revenge porn, therefore, they did not and they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results of that around us every single day. Those of us who are most at risk every single day, women, black people, people of colour, LGBTQ people with disabilities, we design safe spaces and safe experiences, but we don't get funded. Only 1.7% of all venture capital last year went to female founders.”
– Cindy Gallop, founder of makelovenotporn.com
Head to Apple or Spotify to hear the full discussion on our Lives of Tomorrow podcast episode, Sex, Porn and Everything Inbetween with Cindy Gallop