I'm Jesse Hemple, host of Hello Monday. In my twenties, I knew what I wanted for my career, But from where I am now, in the middle of my life, nothing feels ascertain. Works changing, We're changing, and there's no guidebook for how to make sense of any of it. So every Monday, I bring you conversations with people who are thinking deeply about work and where it fits into our lives. We talk about making career pivots, about purpose and how to discern it, about where happiness fits into
the mix, and how to ask for more money. Come join us in the Hello Monday community. Let's figure out the future together. Listen to Hello Monday with Jesse Hemple wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to sheep Pivots. I'm Cindy Gallop.
Welcome to she Pivots, the podcast where we talk with women who dared to pivot out of one career and into something new and explore how their personal lives impacted these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. Welcome back to she Pivots. I'm your host Emily Tish Sussman. Today we've got a guest who calls herself the Michael Bay of business, so basically, she likes to blow shit up. I'm so excited to share my conversation with the remarkable
Cindy Gallup. Cindy started her career in the eighties and climbed her way to the top of the advertising world, snagging the Advertising Woman of the Year title in two thousand and three. Then, on her forty fifth birthday, she had what she describes as her personal midlife crisis. Never thinking she'd be an advertising her whole life, she took a leap of faith, leaving behind the agency she'd been with for over fifteen years and not fully knowing her
next steps. A staunch feminist, Cindy has changed how we as a society think and talk about sex through her ted talk Make Love Not Porn, where she launched her company of the same name, centered around the idea of sex positivity and celebrating quote real world sex, Cindy is tackling the stigmatization of sex and hoping to promote sex
education through real world demonstration. Throughout her life, Cindy has continued to push and question the boundaries set by society and as a result, has curated a life truly her own. She says, if Sheryl Sandberg wants us to lean in within the existing system, she wants to redesign the system. And there's no question she is doing just that. Let's dive right in.
So I'm Cyndi Up. I'm the founder and CEO of Make Love nor Poom. We all pro sex pro pawn pro knowing the difference.
So you were born in the UK. We're going all the way back. We're going all the way back, right, But you grew up in Brunei, that's right?
Yes, how long were you there for?
What was that move? What was that community?
Like?
So my father was English, my mother is Malaysia and Chinese, and my father's passed away. My mother is ninety living in London. But basically I was born in the UK, as you say. But when I was six, my father got a job in Brunei, and you know, he met my mother in Singapore and my father just absolutely loved Asia and very much wanted to move back there and live and work. And equally, obviously, you know, that was where my mother has family, so she was very happy
to go back there as well. And so my father got a job as an assistant head master of a school in Brunei and we moved there in nineteen sixty six.
Wow, So were you living as part of a British community like English international English speaking community.
Not now case. No, because my father got a jobb as head master at one of the local Brunei schools. There certainly were expat communities, but they were focused around the fact that there was a lot of oil in Brunei still is, and so Shell and BP had very significant expat communities there. The rest of the expats were a bit ad hoc, and certainly in the places we were living Qualabolite and then Tutoon, there were not many other experts.
So what was that like to to adjust to acclimate, to learn the language.
Well, I would say that growing up in Brunei is a lot more boring than it sounds, because it's an orthodox Muslim state. It's one hundred miles long. When we were there, the population was two hundred thousand. I don't know what it is these days. But my parents would regularly apologize to me and my sisters for our childhood because Brunei was distinctly lacking in more international cultural pursuits, and so for English speakers that there was not a
lot going on. My father, you know, loved Malay culture. You know, he would do regular walking tours into the jungles of Borneo, you know, the center Borneo. But in our case, honestly, you know, it was a wee bit tedious.
What ages were you there for?
So we moved there. I was six and when I was fourteen, my parents sent me and my next sister, Annabelle back to the UK to go to boarding school.
But because my father worked for the Brunei government, they paid for us to go back to Brunei for vacations twice a year until we turned twenty one or completed full time education, you know, whichever came first, And so we would go back twice a year on vacation from university and then I guess it's indicative that, you know, once the government paid for leave ran out, we never went back. My parents understood it wasn't the most inflating place in the world, so they were fine with that.
I just I think this background is so interesting because you talk a lot about you know, we're going to skip ahead later to the culture that we're in and how people are raised and the ideologies around sex and intimacy, and actually you had quite a different upbringing than the US or even Western culture in general. So how do you think the Eastern Asian piece played into your thinking around what is culture and what are cultural constructs?
I grew up very much in Asian culture, and so first of all, it certainly gave me a global perspective with everything I've done since, I absolutely believe in bringing a global lens to anything that I'm working on or you know, my own ventures. And I think it just it absolutely broadens theal horizons and makes you think differently about how different people respond to different things.
After moving back from Brunei, Cindy attended Somerville College at Oxford University, one of the university's first women's colleges. It was there that she found her first love, theater.
I fell mad in love with theater at Oxford, which has a very thriving student drama scene, and I alreally threw myself into that. I was present in my college drama society. I wrote actor directed stage manage, and I went, oh my god, all I want to do is work in theater the rest of my life. But I knew I wasn't good enough to be an actress or directors. Many of my friends wanted to be professionally and I used to draw a lot when I was younger, and so my friends would pull me into a Sydney can
you design a theater poster for our show? And from there I got sucked into, you know, helping to promote and sell the shows. And I really enjoyed that, and I thought, gosh, I suspect it's easier to find a job in theater doing this than acting or directing. And I was absolutely right, because I had no problem at all finding jobs as a marketing and publicity office in theater. So that's how I came to occupy that role.
Did you enjoy it? It sounds like you must have enjoyed it, like why not stay in theater forever?
No, it was enormous fun to begin with, but then you know, after a few years of working theater, I got completely fed up with working twenty four to seven and earning chicken feed, which is what happens in theater. And just as I was starting to feel quite disillusioned, I was the marketing office at the Everyman Theater in Liverpool and part of my job promoting the theater was
to give talks about it. So I gave a talk to a group of women in Liverpool and after the talk, one of them came up to me and she said, young lady, you could sell a fridge to an eskimol And I thought, that is the universe telling me something. Time to sell out going to advertising, and so I did.
With her mind made up, she made her first pivot, but changing her career from theater had its challenges.
This was gosh the UK back in the eighties and advertising was considered the sexiest profession going. Everybody leaving university wanted to work.
In advertising, you know.
I mean it was the golden heyday of British advertising and it was therefore extraordinary different to beginning too. And so I tried, you know, applying for my theater job and got stuck in that bind of no one would give me a job in advertising because I didn't have experienced advertising. But I couldn't experience in advertising and they want to
give me a job. So then I went back to the beginning and I applied for entry level graduate trainee roles and took the first one I was offered at an agency called head Baits and actually that was a good thing to do, because I've got no idea whether UK ad agencies still do this, but back then they had these very thorough training programs where you literally spent six months working in every single department in the in the agency,
learning the entire advertising creation and production process end to end. And that was a phenomenal grounding in the business. I mean, advertising was not just sexy but sexist. You know. I really asked this question about what sexism I encountered coming up through the ranks advertising, and honestly, my response is always a fish does not know wh water is. It was all around me, but it was the norm and I never noticed. Right, that totally makes sense.
I think you probably get that question in the US, in particularly a lot because mad Men were so popular here.
Whenever I you know here mad Men mentioned, I have to bring this up. So I was on the inaugural board of Advertising Week in New York, which started, Gosh, I guess that must have been twenty years ago or so, in order to celebrate the industry make young people more
keen to come into it. And in our very first board meeting twenty years ago, I said, and by the way, I wish I had a video or audio of this, but I literally I said to the gathering, which was full of like luminous and advertising industry, I said, if we want to elevate the states of the advertising industry, you know, really excite people about it, make many more young people want to come to our industry versus Wall
Street or Silicon Valley. Then what I think we should do is, this was back in the day when the Sopranos had just ended at HBO. I went, HBO is bound to be casting around for the next big show. We should have a competition. We should invite Because every copywriter, every art director has like a student in their bottom drawer.
We should invite people the advertising industry to write a really compelling series for HBO about our industry and get HBO to agree that if they find a really brilliant concept, they will absolute commission it and shoot it. And that would engage people in ndustry. No end and lo and behold. A few years later, mad Men certainly did.
While her idea may have been swiped, it became her reality when she was sent to New York City to open her Advertising Agencies American office in the late nineties. It was now Cindy, who became the new hotshot advertising executive running around the city.
The advertising agency I used to work for, Bartle Bogle Hegety sent me here to open up its American office, which began as me in a room with a phone, starting an ad agency in the world's toughest advertising marketplace. But you know, I absolutely got my dream job because I love New York. I had seized every opportunity to vacation over here, to stop off on business trips, and very soon after I arrived here in September of nineteen ninety eight, I went I found my spiritual home. I'm
never going back to London and that was it. I am now a New Yorker for life. I love this city, and you know, I love it for all sorts of reasons. It's absolutely my kind of pace. You know, I love the dynamism, the energy, but I also love the diversity and the cultural melting pot of New York, which is very special. And so you know, the business I founded here and now work on is global in its scope. But I think that having been started up in New York just you know, not just for my own business,
but for other businesses. There's something about that energy and that open mindedness, and that willingness to embrace difference, that absolutely informs, you know, businesses that started here in certain informs mine.
I think it's an important point because I think that for people who were born and raised in the US, they actually don't appreciate that the willingness to create something new and to cross lines is pretty unique to the US. How did you find that that was not the case in London.
After I moved here, you know, and I absolutely said this to people when I would go back and visit London after New York, London felt so much smaller, sleepier, more parochial. And actually one of the reasons I'd wanted to move to New York in the first place. I made this ambition known within within BBH was because I observed, and by the way, things are still not greater on this front, so that this is a massive in diamond
of the UK. But I observed that when it came to women in business, the US was ten years ahead of the UK in terms of welcoming women working and leading. And I observed this because while I was based at BBAH in London, I was running big global pieces of business Coca Cola, Polaroid, RayBan, and I was running their
business across Europe. But what that meant was working with teams from the US and quite often visiting you know, Atlanta for Coke, Boston for Polaroid, Rochester for RayBan, and I realized that my American clients had no issue at all with me leading the business, saw me as their first point of contact. I built amazing relationships with them, and I have to tell you that with you know, white male clients in the UK, that was not always
the case. So interestingly, one of the things that made me want to come and work over here was the fact that even though as I said, things are still not great in this front, at least if you were a woman, you were more accepted in business and leadership role here than you own the UK.
At that point, Cindy had spent over fifteen years as a top executive at Barto book or Hegarty, and despite being at the top of her game, she felt as if there was something more that she was missing in her career than in her life.
Basically, in two thousand and five, I turned forty five and I had what I described as my very own personal mid life crisis. In the sense that I've always thought of forty five as kind of a midlife point. Obviously, by the way, the happy assumption that one does in fact live to be ninety fingers crossed.
Well like you' have good genes, yep.
But in a couple of years running up to it, I'd always thought, on one's forty fifth birth is the moment when you should pause, take stock, reflect, review, where am I being, where am I going? And so on. February one, two thousand and five, idually did that, and that was the moment in which I went, oh, my god, I've just worked sixteen years for the same advertising agency and by the way, amazing agency, you know, I mean love BBH to death, cannot say enough nice things about them.
But I went, wow, I think it might be time to do something different. And the problem was I hadn't the faintest idea what because I'd always said to people for years, I'm not going to work in advertising forever, not gonna work bh forever. But advertisers a very good industry to work in to figure out what you want to do next, because you come into contact with so
many different sectors, companies, people. I guess i'd always thought that one day my next big thing with Bubblah from ether and there I was the age of forty five and it hadn't so I basically, in the summer of two thousand and five, took a massive leap into the unknown, resigned as chairwel of BBH without a job to go to, and honestly best thing that I ever did in my life.
You know, the premise of this show is how personal things in our lives end up impacting our professional decisions. And it sounds like you had a couple along the way, like wanting to live in the US, but it was a lot of professional decisions that you made. You know, who you wanted to work with, where you wanted to work. Do you think there were really driving personal factors in the first half or did that come later in the second half.
Honestly, none of any of this was consciously planned. I'm a big fan of serendipity. My ex boss at BBH, John Hegerty, has this great mantra. He says, do interesting things, and interesting things will happen to you, and that's been very much I've made my professional life decisions.
So what did you end up doing in those? Because we became a founder a couple years after you left the firm, but not right away.
So when all these things came to me, I went, Okay, I still don't know what I really want to do. So I'm going to be employment slut. I'm going to talk to everybody. I'm going to take every phone call, I'm going to do every meeting, no preconceived notions. Even if I think to myself, I'm not sure i'd want to work for this company, I'm going to go meet with them. So I embarked on a fascinating exploratory which was as good for telling me what I didn't want
to do as what I did want to do. That that really helped kind of give me a sense of what needs to be in place where I work next. At the same time, to support myself, I was working as a consultant and a public speaker and I've been doing that ever since. And the way my path went was an ex cloud Aman of Bee was starting up a new tech venture. This is back in spring of two thousand and six, and he asked me to partner with him on it, and I saw an opportunity to
make this venture something much more interesting. You know, He and the team loved it. The VC's backing the venture didn't get it, and so I ended up walking away from it because they wouldn't give me the equity I wanted to go forward, and by way, it was a very good thing I did, because they just took it in a very bad direction and it never it never
went anywhere in the end. But what that meant was that I spent three months out of Cambridge in Boston steeped in the world of tech startups and of what was essentially a social networking platform. And so when I came out of that, a headtime to call me up about the job of CEO of a Small World. He just raised some funding and knew he wasn't the right
person to take it to the next level. So he's looking for a CEO to take over, and I was really interested because I just spent three months steeped in this whole scenario, and A Small World back in the day was a very special community. The level of gatedness meant there was an extraor amount of trust within the community, and you could tap into that anyway you went all around the world. So I didn't get that job entertainingly
because of Harvey Weinstein. So Eric had just raised some money from the Weinstein brothers, and so he wanted me to do the job. The whole team wanted me to vince CEO, but I had to be interviewed by Harvey Weinstein. And by the way, I'm extremely grateful. I clearly wasn't in any way harvest type. The interview lasted five minutes
at the Direka Film Center. I mean literally, he came in, said Hi, asked me a couple of plunctory questions, dismissed me because he had already decided that this job could not be done by some you came from the advertising world. It had to be someone from Taker Entertainment. So that didn't happen. But another one of the investors was Bob Pittman, you know, the founder of MTV, and and he and
I got on really well. And so he said to me this, you know, sorry, isn't going forwards, but if you ever have any ideas for anything you might like to do, I'd love to hear them. And I thought, gosh, you know, that's a very nice offer. So I might go and thought about what I would do if I start something myself, and so I came up with the ideas my first startup, If We Ran the World, which I shared with Bob, and he really liked it, and
so that gave me the confidence to pursue it. And If We Ran the World was based on our observation that the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action. And so I built a platform to take not just human good intentions, but corporate good intentions and combine the two to enable brands and businesses to implement what I
believe is the business model of the future. Shared values plus shared action equals shared profit, financial profit, and social profit.
You can decide exactly how you want to make money. You can design your business model to be anything you wanted to be. I believe that the business model of the future is all about doing good and making money simultaneously, and that the business model of the future therefore is shared values plus shared action equals shared profit, financial profit, and social profit.
But which I mean that you know when brandom businesses come together with the audiences, consumers, employees on the basis of values that you all share, which, by the way, is the most important requirement for good relationship in life as much as business. You literally bond, finish, share the same values. And when you were then enabled to collectively and collaboratively coact on those values, to walk the talk together, you can then make things happen in the real world.
It will benefit consumers, benefit society, and benefit the brandness business. So that's what if rand the world was all about, and that was what I was in the process of building. When life was in a completely different direction.
As you were trying on different things, taking different calls, consulting for different projects, how did you side what was worth your time to spend bandwidth on and what would end up just being a suck to suck your energy and suck your creativity so you couldn't also be a creative like, how did you balance the space for both?
I was pursuing my own philosophy of be your own filter. And what I mean by that is, you know, as anyone who follows me on social media will have seen my LinkedIn bio and my biocross all the other channels, is I like to blow shit up. I'm the mothel
bear of business. And where that came about was you know, back in those years I was in the meeting talking to some potential consulting clients about my approach to consulting, and I said to them, I consult very selectively, only for clients and brands who want to change the game in their particular sector. So you come to me for radical, innovative, groundbreaking, transformative. I don't do status quo that I like, hartly said off the calf, I like to blow shit up. I'm
the Michael Bear business and I really laughed. I left the meeting and I thought, actually, that's a really good way of summing up what I do. So I've been using that line ever since. But I use that line entirely deliberately. It's not a bit of fun or bit of whimsy. I use it because when I characterize what I do in that way, it attracts me the people who want what I do. It repels the ones who don't. And I want to repel the ones who don't because
of the waste of time, effort, and money. So I am my own filter, and that's how I make sure that what I'm focusing on is always worth it.
After pivoting out of advertising and leaving room for exploration and opportunity, her next big pivot actually came as a result of work that she had done for the advertising agency. She was doing product background in research to pitch an online dating client. So she created a profile, and much to her surprise, I.
Got an avalanche of responses, but the vast majority were from younger men, and most of those were much younger men, And I went, wow, Okay, I hadn't thought about this approach to dating, but here I am. You know I do not. I've never wanted marriage, I've never wanted children. I just want to have some fun. So I date younger men. They tend to be men in their twenties. And about fifteen sixteen years ago, I began realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering very intimately and
directly what happens when two things converge. And I stress the dual convergence because most people think it's only one thing. I remembered I was experiencing what happens when today's total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society is equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. When those two things converge, Paul becomes sex education by default, in not a good way. So I far myself encountering a number of sexual behavioral memes in bed. I went, whoa,
I know where that behavior is coming from. I thought, gosh, if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn't know that because fifteen years ago, no no one was talking about this, no one was writing about it. This was me an isolation as a naturally action order person, going I'm going to do sorry about this. So nearly fifteen years ago now I've put up on no money, a tiny, clunky website at makelovenoporn dot com pure as
a side venture, kind of a public service announcement. You know. The construct was porn world versus real world. Here's what happens in the porn world, here's already happens in the real world. I had the opportunity to launch Make Love Not Porn at TED in two thousand and nine. 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 as a result, and it drove this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that I had never anticipated.
I date younger men predominantly men in their twenties, and when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men. And when I have sex with younger men, I am counter very directly and personally the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity.
Of hardcore pornography in our culture. So I am launching at TED today. I am unveiling make loovelotporn dot com. This is a website that posts the midst of hardcore porn and balances them with the reality.
Thousand people wrote to me from all around the world, young and old, male and female, straight and gay, pouring their hearts out, telling me things about their sex lives and their porn watching habits they've never told anyone before. And I realized I'd uncovered a huge global social issue. And so that was the point of which I went,
oh my god, I now have a personal responsibility. I have to take make Love Not Porn forwards in a way that will make it much more far reaching, helpful and effect And so I backburned if we ran the world, because even I, superhuman as I am, cannot run to startups simultaneously. And I turned Make Love Not Porn into what it is today. We are as our tagline says
pro sex pro porn pro knowing the difference. So make love mo porn is the world's first and only user generated and importantly one hundred percent of human curated social sex video sharing platform.
It's knowing that if we were able to have access and the freedom for people to choose to see things in the same way as they do on Instagram on Facebook, how amazing will that be?
Literal social sex revolution.
Let's talk about it without there being such a stigma and this pressure. Oh my god, everything's so terrible. No, we were here.
To have a conversation, so a kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to socially sexually self express, which it clearly doesn't. The way to think about make Love not Porn is if paun is the Hollywood movie, may Clove, not porn is the badly needed documentary. We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful
sex we will have in the real world. And what we're doing is we are socializing, normalizing, and destigmatizing sex, bringing out of the shadows into the sunlight to promote consent, communication, good sexual valuism behavior. We are literally sex education through real world demonstration.
Now, one of the things that you made a point of saying here is that it's human curated. That was interesting to me. Why do you make that point in particular? You know, I'm glad you asked that.
I mean, because we operate very uniquely as a business, and we don't get enough credit for it because people get stuck.
On oh my god, people have sex and video.
So I want to contextualize my response in the broader tech landscape as a whole, because the young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate our lives today, they are not the primary targets online offline of harassment, abuse, sexual assault, violence, racism, 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 color, LGBTQ, that disabled. We design safe spaces and safe experiences. I designed Make Love Not Porn through the female Lens to be the safest place on the Internet because I designed around what everybody else should have. Nobody else did human curation. There is no
self publishing of anything on Make Love Not Porn. Our curators watch every frame of every video submitted from beginning to end before we approve or reject and we publish it. No one ask does that. We review every post on every member profile, and by the way, on Make Love No Porn, those posts can be as safe work or not safe work as you like, you know, text photos, illustration, but we review them, we approve, our reject, and we
publish them. No one else does that we review every comment on every video before we approve or reject and publish it. No one else does that. We can vouch for every single piece of content on our platform in a way that nobody else can. And one thing to bear in mind, I mean is that we are tiny, bootstrapping, have no money, and we've human created everything for over
ten years. Imagine what Facebook and you do you do their billions if they chose to safety on the Internet is not a matter of viability, It's a matter.
Of will, right. It's a matter of choosing to prioritize exactly putting your resources there. So what is the business model for it?
So I foresaw the creator economy fourteen fifteen years ago when I concepted Make Love Not Porn around a revenue sharing model which I've designed to democratize access to income. So our members pay to subscribe and then rent and stream social sex videos. Half the income goes to our contributors, whom I call our Make Love Not Porn stars. And as I say, this was like over a decade before
the creater economy OnlyFans, you know. I designed my own startup around my own beliefs, and one of those is that everybody should get to realize the value of what they create. And I feel that especially strongly because my background is theater and advertising, two industries where ideas and
creativity are massively undervalued, even by the creators themselves. So I believe that when you create something, anything that gives other people pleasure, that might be a video, a piece of journalism, you know, a book, you should see a financial return on it. And the more people you give more pleasure to, the greater that financial return should be.
So when we launched Make Love Not Porn, I introduced our business model with a blog post that I titled how Make Love Not Porn can Help the Global economy, and I began it by saying, you know all those little scam ads that pop up on the Internet all the time going make ten thousand dollars a week working
from home, Well now you can. And I said in that post, my vision is that one day make Love Nott Porn hits the kind of critical mass where your video gets a million rentals at five dollars per rental and we give you half income. By the way, that's still our vision, where some way off from achieving it until we get funded. But I was thrilled when during the pandemic, like everybody else, our make Love Nott porn
stars lost jobs, couldn't find work. They told us that our monthly payouts were what kept them going, help them pay rent, help them survive. And that's exactly why I designed that revenue showing business model.
Now, you said, in the sense of the interaction of the personal and the professional, if you've always dated men who are primarily in their twenties, did you see a marked difference in behavior over time or was it sort of a gradual change? And then does that basically turn you into the instructor? And does that get exhausting?
Obviously, you know dating men my own age previously and so you know, this was the first time that I identified what Make Love Not Porn was created to address, which is when I realized, my god, you know, the ubiquity of online porn now means that that is what these young men are taking instructure from. And yes, absolutely, I then had to tackle that. And you know, I think this is why people have responded so positively Make Love Not Porn from the get go, because I completely
understand the issue. I'll be in bed with a younger man and I'll go, Okay, we're going to have a conversation about this, and the moment I've broached that conversation, the atmosphere ben is going to change. But I have to do this for every other woman he'll ever sleep with, and I have to tell you that what I've found.
And again, this is how I reassure people, because the entire point of Make Love Not Porn, in socializing sex, is to make it easier for every single person in the world to talk about sex, and people welcome the conversation. I'm a big fan of radical simplicty. I like to keep things very simple. The single biggest turn on in this world is to be in bed with somebody and know, they're having a bloody, amazing time because of you. That's
what everybody wants. And so when you broke communication around this topic with that goal in mind, you know, the young men I date love that and they welcome the education and they see the results, and that makes them all the kuna to make sure that they adopt that approach going forwards.
Now, you mentioned that you would never want to get married or have children. Was that something that was just always kind of in you.
It wasn't consciously in my you know, because obviously I grew up with the same social conditioning we all do, especially growing up in Asia, where you know, a woman's role is especially focused in that culture on you get married, you have children. So it was something I realized over time that, you know, marriage was absolutely not an end. Girl. I really did not want children, And by the way,
I'm so glad. I always knew that I was supposed to find out the hard way by having them, and over time I just went I didn't even want to be in a relationship. In fact, I remember the moment, and this wasn't one moment per se. It was more like a gradualization, But it was at some point in my thirties that you know, I just went, I'm not here for the one anymore. Because from the moment we're born as girls and women. Everything in popular culture, you know,
from the fairy tales were read as babies. Everything tells us that we must dedicate our life to finding the one. And what that means is that in your teens and your twenties, you go to every single social event thinking, you know, and I'm straight, so I'm going to use the straight colism, but will he be there? What this means you spend bloody hours clamming yourself up and making yourself up. You go to the social event. This quest is a dynamic that forces you to compete with other women,
which is a out of clause. At the end of the night, you trudge him going he wasn't there. Maybe next time. And so at some point in my thirsts I just went saw this, I'm not give for the one anymore. Oh my god, the liberation and the relief because now I could go to social events and just enjoy them. By the way, obviously there are people who want to find the one, who want to find the soulmate. But the sheer joy of when you decide that you actively do not want to be in love. That strips
a whole lay of crap out of life. I'm very public about all of this. I'm open about, you know, not married, not in children, adoring being single, not want to relationship, don't want to be in love, cannot wait to dialone, date young men for sex. I'm probably about all of that because we don't have enough role models in our society for women and for men, by the way, that demonstrate you can live in your life very differently the way to start expected to and still be amazingly happy.
I want to have this people, I know, did.
You think along the way of what you were doing as revolutionary or you were just sort of like this is just the way I am, and other people started paying attention.
You know, this is the way I wish other people would look at this. I just realize what makes me happy. And so many people live life in oiled grooves. So many people are living lives that don't really want to be living that don't really want to be in in relationships that don't want to really I mean, they have children they didn't really want to have, just because of what society and popular culture told them. What their parents wanted what all their friends were doing at the same time.
And I urge people to stop, take all those other considerations out of your mindset, look deep into your own heart and ask yourself what would really make me happy, because maybe living life on those oiled grooves won't.
So do you then find the creator economy right now? Like the prevalence of it? Like OnlyFans being in the category, do you see them as a competitor or are they kind of building the category for you?
I wish they were building in a category for us. And that's because no, I absoutly don't see them as a competitor. You know, it's like porn. We are pro sex pro paorn pro knowing the difference. So only fans is adult content in a performative context because you're performing for fans and you're fulfilling fan request, not all of which you may feel very happy fulfilling, by the way, but you know, if you want to make money, that's
what you have to do. And the good thing about make love not porn is that nobody's requesting anything, no one's performing because this is simply the sex you have in your life. But you know, it's a huge shame because only fans growth and size means that they had the opportunity to mainstream adult entertainment in the creater economy for all the rest of us, and that's not what
they chose to do. You know, it is still a matter of debate as to whether or not they will at some point absolutely do what they did a few years ago and kick ad our content off the platform in order to get funded and support and be able to grow. And they should have just embraced, you know, the fact that that was what powered their growth. It's
absolutely why they started only fans. But honestly, you know, with the original found and CEO, he would literally read interviews with him where he was asked if you buy the information, So you know, obviously adult content is ary powered only fans growth. You know, where do you see that going? Oh? I think we see our future in music and film entertainment. And literally avoiding the question they
haven't avoided in subsequent years. But that's how much they want to present themselves as just a general fan platform. How much do they embrace you know what actually they owe their success to and so I would have loved to have seen them do that. It's a huge shame they didn't. What are your markers of success now? Honestly, depressingly,
my most immediate marker of success is raising funding. Because I've kept making Love Not Porn Alive for nearly eleven years now as a business on just three million dollars of funding from one investor. That's extraorinary feet and by the way, all my own savings. I've destroyed myself financially for this business to keep it going, and so I really need to raise funding now to scale the business, to build out the zo I rode to eight in
and beyond sex education expansion. Parents have asked before since day one, make lovenotporn dot academy.
You know.
Unfortunately, now measure of success is simply survival, which we will only manage if I can raise funding.
What is something that you saw as a negative at some point in your life and then now in retrospect you look back and you're like, oh, that actually really put me in the right direction.
There are things that where I'm doubtitely negatives about, for example, my industry in my cron advertising, which I wish weren't negatives because I was lucky enough not to be impacted by them. And I say that because whenever I'm asked about my you know what, is always framed as my successful cryan advertising, I explain that my success was entirely accidental as well, and it was down to luck. And
it was down to luck on two fronts. First of all, I was incredibly lucky that I never got sexually harassed in the way the end of my career, and by the way, I was absolutely sexually harassed, but not in a way that happens to so many women in my industry. In every other where you are retaliated against, you are managed out of your company, you are managed out of your industry, and that honesty was a matter of pure luck.
Then the second thing I was lucky about was I can literally count on the fingers of one hand a number of female bosses I had in my advertising career.
Too.
I was incredibly lucky because I virtually always reported into men. But I reported to men who saw my potential before I did, who wanted me to succeed, who championed me and gave me every opportune to do so. And that is not the experience of most women industry, and most women in any industry. And both of those things come from, you know, a very negative norm. That is the case
not only in advertising but in every industry. And I wish those negatives have never ever been there, because we would have so many more women in positions of power and leadership and shaping the world in the way it truly should be shaped if the patriarchy and everything that results, including sexual harassment us systemic and endemic in every single industry, had not prevented so many women from realizing their own potential.
Well, thank you so much, Cindy, great conversation, So happy to have you on.
Thrill to have been here on the state.
This is terrific. As you might have guessed it. Cindy still lives happily in New York City and is continuing to build her company, Make Love Not Porn. Like Cindy said, they need capital to keep the movement going, so if you're interested in being involved, you can contact us through our website, she Pivots the podcast dot com. Be sure to follow Cindy on Instagram at Cindy Gallup to stay up to date on her general badassory. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening to this episode of she Pivots where I talk with women about how their experiences significant personal events led to their pivot and eventually their success. To learn more about Cindy Make Love Not Porn and all of our guests and fun happenings, follow us on Instagram at she Pivots the podcast. Leave a rating and comment if you enjoyed this episode to help others learn about it. A special thank you to our partner Marie Claire and
the team that made this episode possible. Talk to You Next Week special thanks to the she Pivots team, Executive producer Emily eda Velosik, Associate producer and social media connoisseur Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson, Events and Logistics coordinator Madeleine Sonovak, and audio editor and mixer Nina pollock I endorse she Pivots