THE FOUNDER OF an online business whose aim is to ‘reclaim’ the business of sex from porn sites has made a callout to Irish people to upload videos of themselves having sex.

The provocative, though not insincere, call to camera was made by tech entrepreneur Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn TV and the IfWeRanTheWorld project.

Gallop was speaking at the Dublin Web Summit in the RDS today about her MakeLoveNotPorn project. As elucidated by Gallop in a much-shared Ted talk in 2009, Gallop believes that we must start a conversation about the difference between porn and real-life sex by pointing out the myths of porn sex. To this end, she would like to see people upload their personal sex videos to her site, with a promise that they will get 50 per cent of the revenue. Her intention, in part, is to be a disruptive force to a billion-euro industry (online porn).

She told delegates:

MakeLoveNotPorn is not anti-porn. It’s pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-telling the difference.

Gallop insisted that she wanted warts-and-all videos, so users can see the funny side of sex, the mishaps, the awkwardness, even the potential cultural differences in how different nations approach their sex life. She invited Irish people to chart their sex lives and upload their home videos as a matter of “national pride”.

She envisaged the site becoming a social platform and that she was applying “sexual social currency” to the user experience – the ability to ‘share’ videos, ratings, followers, likes, and badges for “special skills”.

She decried the fact that tech entrepreneurs wishing to proceed to an idea related to sex found it difficult, if not impossible, to get big company players like Google or Amazon involved in investing, hosting or otherwise interacting with their product. This, she maintained, meant that there was a niche to be filled by a brave start-up willing to engage with such ideas as MakeLoveNotPorn.

This was Cindy’s Ted talk in 2009 (NOTE: contains some sexual language)

via TEDtalksdirector/Youtube