How the female orgasm became big business / The Telegraph

Written by Rebecca Reid for The Telegraph. Originally published on Aug 8, 2020.

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I spoke to Cindy Gallop, founder of socially sourced pornography platform ‘Make Love Not Porn’ – where couples share videos of themselves having ‘real’ sex. Cindy has spent the last eleven years raising funds for MLNP, and while she’s been wildly successful by your average person’s metric, she tells me that she’s still swimming against the tide. 

“When I first started fundraising, this was a total no-go area, and there has been change. But even in the arena of sex tech, there is a hierarchy of acceptability. There is a familiarity with sex toys, and sex toys are finding it easier to get funded. Then there’s a growing category, further up the hierarchy, which is audio erotica and audio porn. Which is also ‘acceptable’ because you don’t have to look at anything. At MLNP we operate at the extreme end of this hierarchy, so we’re still finding it challenging.’

Currently, all of the major porn websites are all owned by one group, creating an effective monopoly and making it even more difficult for smaller sites with an ethical or feminist mission statement to make their mark on the industry.

But, it’s not hard to imagine that just as vibrators represented that illusive ‘uncaptured value’, feminist porn might well be the next place for anyone with the creativity and wherewithal to disrupt the industry and make an absolute killing in the process. Doesn’t that sound like a win win?