It was a over 10 years ago that I, Andre, while surfing through TED talks, stumbled upon a speaker named Cindy Gallop. She intrigued me in the first couple of minutes of her talk- an older woman, not ashamed to talk about her love of sex, and her love of sex with younger men. My immediate reaction was, “Holy crap! Who is this woman? Now I have to listen to what she has to say! What was this insanity of a website she was preaching? Make love not porn? That is a joke. All porn is porn, and all porn is sin, and all porn is bad for you.” These were the thoughts that initially passed through my very conservative, offended Christian head. Fast forward 8 years…
Lynn and I left the institution of the Christian Church. And with leaving the church, there was an eye opening to aspects of our lives that were totally repressed. There were so many facets that were internally programmed that sex had so many stipulations and ‘dirty’ aspects.
How could something so innately human that we were “created” with be so bad? So it was time for me to confess to Lynn. I looked at porn. A lot of porn. With all that repression, I looked for an outlet, and mainstream porn was it. It was the night that I showed Lynn what I watched that the allure of porn started to lose its luster. It no longer seemed forbidden and the general erotica that my brain had wrapped around it lost its sense of wonder. Now for Lynn, who never had watched porn… this was a whole new world.
I am a very calculated individual. I don’t like to commit to anything that doesn’t have a purpose. So my new venture with Lynn and porn couldn’t be like my past life. It had to be different. So, when we wanted to watch, we would put in the search engines, “Feminist porn” or “porn for women.” I felt like these would be softer items with different perspectives, but what I found was a lot of the same stuff, just with different packaging. Maybe it would look more like a romance movie poster, or it was in black and white, but it still felt so produced and so very male orientated. And as Lynn points out… they are all the same.
Porn follows the same formula: Clothed, Unclothed, BJ, LJ, She has a fast O, then it is like 3 various positions for him, cum somewhere on her. Rinse, Wash, Repeat. It was boring and produced and where the HELL was the lube???
This was produced for male masturbatory proposes only. No love. No connection. Nowhere close to real life sex. This is what I had known and grown up with for so long.
Shit, this is what a good sex life looked like in my head.
Thanks porn for being my really bad sex educator. Thanks Church for teaching me nothing but abstinence. Thanks Mom and Dad for never bringing up the subject.
Coming back around the second time, listening to Cindy’s TED talk 8 years later, it made so much more sense. The condemnation I had put on myself for all of those years was now finally gone and I could hear
the talk in a new light.
I finally realized that what I had been missing in the porn I was watching was showing sex with real connection and a sense of actual love.
This even started changing how I thought about sex- I started seeing the selfish aspects that I had brought into my sex life, and realized that I wanted so much more than just a “masturbatory fuck.” I wanted something meaningful for both myself and Lynn. In my mind, sex was very me-centered and then a paradigm shift took place and I wanted her-centered/us-centered sex.
I decided that I wanted to be a part of replacing the main stream porn with sex that is real- with the awkward silliness and the tender moments of real expressions of love- a true counterbalance to the porn
education I received.
So we made a video for MLNP. The experience was a little awkward- even though we have made videos for ourselves for several years, it felt different making a video that would have an audience outside of just the two of us. Part of the challenge was keeping our identities private- it was a big fear in the process because hell, we live in the conservative south. This act alone is so taboo. As we got comfortable and settled in to enjoying each other, we started relaxing and what happened next was totally natural.
We experienced a double portion, and it was a fantastic sexual experience. In retrospect, Lynn and I loved the filming and editing process. Even that taught us more about each other, which was followed by a big dose of excitement in the public sharing.
Sarah made this whole process smooth and reassured us that we would fit into the MLNP community. In the end, all of these experiences have been so positive, that we are planning to make another one.
We love the mission of MLNP and we want to shout from the rooftops the awesomeness of this social sex revolution…anonymously, of course.
Our first video trailer
Our First Video:
You can watch our full videos on MakeLoveNotPorn for $1 per rental or you can unlock the video here by becoming a Patreon Patron.
