Make Love Not Porn by Cindy Gallop

Author:Cindy Gallop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TED Conferences, LLC

Not trolls, just people

While TED has been enormously supportive of MakeLoveNotPorn at every point, they did struggle with whether or not to post my talk online — for most of 2009. A lot of the people trying to find it online thought it had been deliberately censored or taken down, without realizing it had not yet gone up in the first place (as with many talks given at the TED Conference, which often don’t go up until months later). They eventually posted it online in December 2009, but not on TED.com, given the number of subscribers and visitors who are children, whether under the aegis of parents or teachers (which caused me a slight pang, as that meant not getting the kind of reach and viewing numbers the rest of the TEDTalks on TED.com achieve). Instead, they posted it on the TED blog, and on the TEDTalks channel on YouTube.

When TED posted my talk on YouTube, they originally disabled the commenting capability. I understood why — YouTube is mass market with a capital M — but I asked them to enable it, explaining that I had started MakeLoveNotPorn to stimulate an open dialogue and was keen for viewers to be able to say anything they wished. I reassured TED that I had a pretty healthy sense of humor about the kind of comments I was likely to get, and undertook to monitor the comment stream myself and to respond personally wherever I felt it was appropriate.

My MakeLoveNotPorn TEDTalk has, to date, been viewed more than 110,000 times on YouTube since it was posted a year ago. The comment stream contains over 900 comments, and I estimate that I have responded personally to probably 90 percent of them. I’ve done so for three reasons:

The first is — and I won’t lie — there has been a fair amount of entertainment value in doing so for me.

While there are many very positive comments, there are many negative comments as well. The negative ones tend to fall into the same category. They are predominantly from young men — sometimes older men, but almost always men — hiding behind the veil of anonymity that a YouTube username affords, hurling obscene abuse at me.

When a YouTube user posts, “Who’d want to come on her wrinkled old face anyway, shriveled up old hag?” he never expects Cindy Gallop to respond to him, personally and publicly, in a way that is open, honest, straightforward and with a sense of humor.

To that young gentleman I responded, “I know! I could really do with those facials, right? — Yours, Shriveled Up Old Hag.”

To the YouTube user who posted, “Any young guys fucking her must be doing so out of pity,” I replied, “Fortunately, a number of guys in their twenties like to do charity work.”

So, yes, entertaining. But, secondly, it’s an opportunity to do something I feel strongly about, which is operate the online equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder and saying, “Look me in the eye and

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