Recently I came across an old article from the taz in my timeline. May 2016. Subject: realistic sex in pornography. I read it the way you look at old photographs. With that slightly touched expression: Oh, so that’s who you were back then.
Ten years. What actually lasts ten years?
Most diets don’t. Hardly any start-up. No smartphone. Many marriages don’t either — anyone who has ever had a divorce case on their desk knows that. The dishwasher, maybe, if you’re lucky.
And, as I discover: Make Love Not Porn.
What the problem was in 2016
The article described what we all knew and nobody said out loud. For many people, pornography is their first sex education. For teenagers above all. As young as twelve, the studies said back then. And what’s shown there isn’t sex. It’s competitive sport with a camera. Often sexist, often racist, almost never with a woman as subject.
Cindy Gallop, a former advertising executive from New York, had noticed this in younger lovers. The men were capable of a great deal. Just not what she wanted. From that observation came a platform: real couples, real sex, self-filmed, curated by human beings.
I have to admit: I knew the problem firsthand. Not from studies. From hotel rooms.
Men with a script
In my former profession I met many men who had learned about sex secondhand. They arrived with a script. Position changes on schedule. The sounds they expected to hear. A finale that had to end somewhere I didn’t enjoy.
These weren’t bad men. These were men nobody had ever told that what they’d seen was staged. They had mistaken the performance for the norm and taken intimacy to be a deviation from it.
Part of my work involved gently putting that script aside. Slower. Talking. Laughing when a knee cracked at the wrong moment. Many were relieved. Some were relaxed for the first time in their lives. That taught me more about desire than any film ever had.
What real sex actually is
That is exactly what Make Love Not Porn shows. And that is exactly what the taz article illustrated with examples from Berlin and elsewhere: couples filming their private sex lives, with everything that goes with them. Fluids. Awkward moments. Pauses. No operating-theatre lighting, no direction, no money shot.
The argument at the time: mainstream pornography keeps pushing toward the extreme in order to seem somehow real. Tears, pain, the crossing of boundaries as proof of authenticity. Yet real sex is usually the opposite of spectacular. It is imperfect. It is sometimes funny. It is a negotiation, not a script.
I still think that is the most erotic truth there is.
Why it’s remarkable that it still exists
It’s one thing to have a good idea. It’s quite another to keep it alive for ten years. Especially in this industry.
Gallop has spoken about how investors turned her down, email providers rejected her, banks and payment processors made life difficult. Advertising is hard, social media is quick to block. Anything that smells of sex is treated like hazardous material — regardless of whether it involves exploitation or two adults who simply like each other.
As a lawyer, I know a lovely term for this: Dauerschuldverhältnis (a continuing obligation — a contract fulfilled not by a single act but by showing up again and again). Every month. Even when nobody applauds. A rental agreement works this way. A marriage too. And apparently this platform.
Cindy Gallop is now in her mid-sixties and she’s still at it. There is now even an Academy with sex-education content. She has been saying for years, in essence: the real problem isn’t pornography. The problem is that we don’t talk about sex.
What became of the other projects from that era — the crowd-funded pornographic comedy, the Berlin-based women producers — I can’t say exactly. Some ideas live on without anyone seeing them anymore. Others disappear quietly. That’s how it goes with idealism. It gives no notice when it leaves.
The mother in me
And now the part that keeps me awake at night.
Twelve years old. That’s what the article said in 2016. I’m afraid it’s even younger now, and the WiFi is faster. My children are growing up in a world where hardcore content is one click away and honest sex education is still hidden behind embarrassment and parents‘ evenings at school.
I don’t ban what I can’t control. I talk. Awkwardly, haltingly, sometimes at the kitchen table while someone rolls their eyes. Make Love Not Porn is for adults and should stay that way. But the attitude behind it belongs in every family: what you see there is theatre. Real sex asks questions. Real sex is allowed to laugh. Real sex stops when someone no longer wants to continue.
That’s not moralising. That’s basic equipment.
What remains
Ten years. In that time the pornography industry has invented still more extremes. The algorithms have grown hungrier. And alongside all of that, unspectacular and stubborn, a small platform keeps running — showing nothing more than people who genuinely want each other.
Perhaps that’s the real point: what lasts ten years is rarely the loudest thing in the room. It is what you keep doing anyway, even when it looks boring from the outside.
Good sex is like a good marriage. Unspectacular from the outside. From the inside, the best thing you have.
This English version was created with the help of AI (translated from the German original) and may differ slightly from a professional human translation.