I thank Cindy Gallop for personally contacting me to not only direct me to her statement about this unfortunate situation, but for also cutting and pasting that statement into an email to get around my firewall situation. That kind of leadership gives me great hope that MakeLoveNotPorn is in the right hands and that, moving forward, difficult issues like this can be avoided. I’ve linked to the statement, and pasted it below as well.
As you can see from their statement, MakeLoveNotPorn has a rigorous review and interview process. Not to minimize it, but this relationship slipped through the cracks. It is heartening to see how committed Cindy and her team are to ensuring this does not happen again.
Making #realworldsex safe
By cindygallop, January 13, 2014
At MakeLoveNotPorn, our mission is to make it safe, socially acceptable and empowering for anyone – especially women – to talk about and share their #realworldsex.
So when, six months ago in August of last year, reporter Rebecca Hiscott who had asked to write a story about us and was interviewing some of our MakeLoveNotPornstars, informed us of the situation outlined in her just-published Mashable piece, we acted immediately.
This is precisely the scenario we have worked very hard to prevent happening.
It took years to concept MakeLoveNotPorn.tv because we considered every possible implication of what we planned for our members and our MakeLoveNotPornstars, and executed accordingly.
The couple Rebecca cites submitted their videos via our rigorous video submissions process that ensures every participant in every video on our site is of legal age and has given full consent. MadamCurator Sarah Beall engaged with them personally throughout their relationship with us – we make sure we talk to both halves of a couple. Our curation is human: we watched every single video they submitted to make sure it was publishable based on our criteria of fully consensual, celebratory #realworldsex. We ask our MakeLoveNotPornstars to contextualize their #realworldsex by providing ‘sneak peek’ intros for each video published; in this case the two of them reminisced together about each #realworldsex occasion as joint voiceovers on all of their intro videos.
We value our MakeLoveNotPornstars enormously, and so we set out to build personal relationships with each half of the couple, as we do from the moment anyone first approaches us about contributing or submits their first video. We focused on building a sense of community for them, and invited them to meet with us in person at one of the regular IRL gatherings we hold for our MakeLoveNotPornstars so that we can all get to know each other.
And so it came as a horrible surprise to us that things were not as whole-hearted and as fully consensual as they had appeared.
As Rebecca says, we acted immediately.
Our site is members-only, and we deliberately stream rental videos instead of offering downloads. #realworldsex = #realworldrelationships = #realworldshithappens, and our commitment to you is that the minute your relationship/mind/life/circumstances changes, we take your videos down immediately.
We take domestic abuse extremely seriously; a number of us have known people in these sorts of relationships, and we know how insidious abuse can be and how hard it can be to get out of. Sarah immediately spoke at length with the woman in this couple, and we discussed as a team how to remove the videos in a way that would not cause any additional difficulty for her; we agreed our approach with her, and moved swiftly.
Our entire mission with MakeLoveNotPorn boils down to one thing: talk about it.
Talk about sex in the real world openly, honestly and truthfully, whether it be in the public domain or in private with your intimate partners.
The appalling situation Rebecca outlines is something we all need to talk more about. We welcome this dialogue. We ask our community to discuss and share their views and feedback, as we do here regarding the difference between porn and #realworldsex, and so we also welcome any additional ideas anyone may have on how we can supplement our already rigorous, hi-touch, human curation and MakeLoveNotPornstar relationship-building process.
Law professor Mary Ann Franks is quoted in the Mashable article saying, “The problem is that a good thing can’t exist for more than two seconds before someone comes along and makes it a horrible thing.”
We’re not going to let that happen.
Rebecca writes, “Creating a sex-sharing site without the exploitation and abusive language of mainstream pornography is noble, and much needed, but perhaps it simply isn’t possible.”
One of the many social agendas we have for MakeLoveNotPorn is tackling the ‘abusive language of mainstream pornography’, which is why we are deliberately creating a new vocabulary for #realworldsex.
And we are determined to prove it is possible to ‘create a sex-sharing site without exploitation.’ We welcome your help, ideas and input alongside our own for achieving what we hope you agree is a difficult but very necessary goal.
