Cindy Gallop is on a mission.

Ever since her 2009 TED Talk went viral, Gallop has been trying to save the world by giving it good sex. She’s building a web business called MakeLoveNotPorn, and it involves people sending in videos of themselves having sex and then sharing those videos socially. That said, she’s actually all for porn; she just wants people to understand the difference between hardcore pornography and real-world sex, and then encourage people to talk openly and honestly about what they want in bed. MakeLoveNotPorn aims to do that.

To an extent, Gallop is a digital-age version of Larry Flynt, the adult-content maestro and First Amendment freedom fighter. Gallop caught up with Brief prior to interviewing Flynt onstage at this year’s PromaxBDA: The Conference.

“I am absolutely and utterly delighted to be interviewing Mr. Flynt,” said the half-English, half-Chinese advertising exec and entrepreneur. Gallop first realized that young men were taking their sexual cues from hardcore porn after she started the US branch of British ad agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, in 1998. One of her clients was an online dating service, so, as the firm’s only single person, she decided she needed to do her research.

She posted an honest profile about herself, telling the truth about her age and her wants and desires. Those were different than most women in their late 30s: she didn’t – and at 53, still doesn’t – want to get married, have kids or even have a monogamous relationship. She just wanted to meet “very nice” younger men to have sex with. The responses were momentous.

What she learned from all of that dating brought her to TED in 2009: what young men knew about sex they knew from hardcore porn, because no one else – parents, friends, girlfriends – would talk about it. It was an error Gallop thought demanded correcting. “I found that today’s total freedom of access to hardcore porn online met our society’s reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex,” she said.

So she started MakeLoveNotPorn.com and set about finding funding. That’s where she was surprised to find herself running into a brick wall over and over again.

“I cannot begin to tell you how extraordinarily difficult it has been to build this venture,” she said. “That’s why I’m so thrilled to be talking to Larry Flynt. I’m in awe of how he pioneered a sector that people are never encouraged to pioneer. He battled every societal obstacle that I am battling now.”

Gallop tried to secure venture capital and angel investment, but found that as soon as she mentioned that her content was “adult” in nature, talks came to standstill. Credit card and online payment systems – such as PayPal and others – are legislatively forbidden to service adult content, making it exceedingly difficult to set up transactions.

That led her to startup, Dwolla. “I gave Dwolla’s founder, Ben Milne, the whole MakeLoveNotPorn pitch over Skype. At the end he said, ‘Cindy, I don’t know what to say. I mean I really don’t know what to say. I’m from Iowa.’” Once she made arrangements with Dwolla, she still had to head to Germany to find a European payment partner.

“The answer is just to open up, which is what MakeLoveNotPorn is set up to do. Porn is forced to exist in this parallel universe, in this shadowy underworld,” said Gallop. “When you force things to go underground, you make it easier for bad things to happen and more difficult for good things to happen.”

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