Cindy Gallop is a mighty force

"Make it very clear what you stand for, project that outwards, because then you will find your tribe."

Cindy Gallop is a feminist disruptor of the status quo and a master at telling her story online. Her startup, MakeLoveNotPorn, is revolutionizing the way we talk and learn about sex on social media. Cindy and I have exchanged a few emails over the years, and interacted online (Ted Lasso fans will appreciate that I once called her the female Roy Kent — a comparison she quite enjoyed), but this interview was my first chance to actually speak with her, and it was every bit as energizing and illuminating as I expected it to be.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. (Close readers will note that I say “Amen” a lot — but then, that may just be the effect Cindy has on people!)

On women’s fear of self promotion

Amanda Hirsch: I thought we could start by naming a problem we're both trying to solve: women's fear of self-promotion. In your experience, where does that come from, and how are you seeing it showing up in the world?

Cindy Gallop: Well, I think, unfortunately, from the moment we are born as women, everything around us conspires to make us feel insecure about absolutely everything to do with ourselves — the way we look, the way we dress, the way we talk. Nice girls do this, nice girls don't do that. We spend the rest of our lives coming back from that, and some of us never do.

This is why I've been urging women to self-promote for literally decades. You don't just owe it to yourself —the fact of the matter is that you'll progress through life far more effectively and successfully, and if you do self-promote, people value you at the value you seem to put in yourself — but also, as my friend Maggie Fox says, "Women who don't self-promote are letting us all down."

Amanda: That's absolutely true. In my experience, it's easier for women to get over the hump of self-promotion if they connect to that altruistic value...but the idea that you ought to promote yourself simply because you are worthy of promotion, seems like a harder bridge for people to cross. I don't know if that's your experience.

Cindy: Quite frankly, the way I put it is: If you don't promote yourself, who the hell else will?

Amanda: Absolutely. My company did a survey a couple of years back with some other women-owned businesses, and we looked at women's relationship to self-promotion. We found, unsurprisingly, that the overwhelming majority of women were inspired hearing other women talk about their successes and accomplishments. And yet, most women would rather downplay their accomplishments than talk about them — literally, would rather seem like less than they are.

“If you don’t promote yourself, who the hell else will?”

- Cindy Gallop

Cindy: This is why I say to women, "I want you to bullshit like the men do." I deliberately articulate it like that because I want women to consciously think, “Right. I'm now going to open my mouth and I'm going to start bullshitting” — because you have to believe you're bullshitting. 

The reason I feel very confident telling women to do that is because it doesn't matter how much you think you're bullshitting. You will never ever bullshit at the level men do. When you think you're bullshitting, all you're doing is you are finally talking about your achievements and your skills and your talents in the way that does yourself justice.

Amanda: Yes. Amen. I think that what's so interesting: saying, “I run a successful company,” or “I launched this powerful app”...feels like bullshitting, for so many women, even when it's telling the truth. It's so uncomfortable that it feels like bullshitting. When a woman “bullshits,” she's really just taking up the space that she deserves to take up.

Cindy: Yup. That goes hand in hand with my other piece of advice, which is WWSWGD: "What would a straight white guy do?” Do that.

Amanda: Amen. 

Why every woman needs a tagline, or an intentional “default throwaway descriptor”

Amanda: Cindy, you have the most epic tagline of anyone I've ever met or encountered. Would you tell everyone what that is?

Cindy: Sure. What Amanda is referring to is — I'm an entrepreneur, but to support myself, I work as a consultant, a public speaker, and a coach. I consult very selectively, only for clients and brands who want to change the game in their particular sector. You come to me for radical, innovative, groundbreaking, transformative. I don't do status quo.

“When you think you're bullshitting, all you're doing is you are finally talking about your achievements and your skills and your talents in the way that does yourself justice.”

- Cindy Gallop

Many years ago, I was in a meeting explaining this to some prospective consultancy clients, and completely off the cuff, I lightheartedly said, "I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business." I left the meeting, and I thought, “Actually, that's a really good way of summing up what I do.”

That has been my Twitter bio, my LinkedIn bio, my tagline, generally, ever since.

But my use of that line is not just a bit of whimsy or creativity — it’s entirely deliberate, because I'm a great believer in: Be your own filter. When I characterize what I do in that way, it attracts the people who want what I do, and it repels the ones who don't. I want to repel the ones who don't, because they're a waste of time, effort, and money.

I encourage other people, and especially women, to think of this as a guiding principle: Put what you are out into the world. Make it very clear what you stand for, project that outwards, because then you will find your tribe. Because the people who are on your wavelength and want what you do will absolutely be drawn to you — and the ones who don't, won't.

Amanda: Amen. I like to put it in the terms of, “We're trying to find the people who are trying to find us.” You're not for everyone. I also like to talk about it like sending up a bat signal: "Here I am," and some people will be like, "No, thank you," and other people just run to you.

Cindy: Exactly.

Amanda: I'd love to talk about how you advise women to come up with their own taglines. I watched a talk you gave that was wonderful — you talk about how there's “throwaway language” that people use when they talk about you, and that something for us to strive for is to shape that language. Can you talk about that a bit — how women can find that language for themselves?

Cindy: We all have a personal “default throwaway descriptor.” Your default throwaway descriptor is what happens when two people meet somewhere at a cocktail party, at a conference — these two people are talking, and one of them knows you, and the other one doesn't.

The first person mentions your name and the other person goes, "Oh, who's that?" The first person goes, "Oh, you know, blah, blah. She's _______." Your default throwaway descriptor is how somebody sums you up very quickly when you are not in the room. We all have one, and it therefore behooves us to make that what we would like it to be.

(Note from Amanda: The video below is the talk I referenced, where she gets into all this. Please take 30 minutes to watch it. She sums up so much, so well.)

Cindy (continued): The same thing absolutely applies to your business, because you want your business to have a very intentional default throwaway descriptor. Because you want your prospective clients to go, "Oh my God, we're facing this situation, we must hire ______ because ..." That's your business default throwaway descriptor — what somebody says your business does very quickly when you are not there.

You make sure it’s what you want it to be. You put yourself out there, you identify what you stand for, what you are about — you project it out, because the really important thing there is that you tell people how to think about you. Because if you don't, they'll get an impression, and they'll sum it up very quickly when you're not in the room, and it may be the completely wrong impression. So tell people how to think about you.

Amanda: I love that...I just think that's brilliant. For a woman who isn't a wordsmith, do you have any suggestions or ideas for how somebody comes up with, or finds, this language for themselves? Not everyone is a wordsmith, or has a budget to hire someone. Are there places to look or questions to ask yourself that you think might be helpful?

Cindy: Think about how you would like to introduce yourself. You're at a cocktail party, you've met somebody. They say something along the lines of, "So, what do you do?" How do you want to answer that question? I say, “how do you want to answer that question,” because answering that question literally may not be how you would want to answer that question. Very simply, think about how you would want to answer that question, and then do that.

On being seen inside — and beyond — your workplace

Amanda: One of the things you said that I really liked in the talk that you gave, that I mentioned earlier, was, "For someone who's inside an organization, people often subsume themselves in the brand of the business. But then, what happens when it's time to leave?" 

Cindy: I recommend very strongly that people don't give a shit to what their employer thinks of what they say on social media, because you've got to build your personal brand. If you go, "Oh my God, my employer's going to object,” you are going to have a very difficult time progressing in your career when you want to move on and get other jobs elsewhere. You need to build your personal brand in order to build the reasons why other people want to hire you when you move on.

Also, within a company: you need to tell the people in your company how to think about you. I say to women, "It doesn't matter what level of company you're at." If one day you want to be a CEO, start telling people now, because you want to be seen as a CEO material. You want to be seen as a CEO-in-waiting, and nobody's going to do that automatically. You have to tell them that you are here because your ambition is one day to be CEO. Then they start thinking about you as CEO material. They start looking at you as possible CEO material.

Amanda: It strikes me— this may sound obvious, but in some ways, the hardest thing for a person is to know what they want, so that they can say what they want. If we all went around super clear on what we wanted, it would maybe be easier for us to voice it. But I think part of what gets people jumbled up is, they know they don't like their current situation, but they're not super in tune with what it is they actually want. 

Cindy: Well, to be frank, it doesn't matter if you don't know right now what you want. The key thing is that you just go for...the next one, two, three, levels up from where you are currently. It doesn't matter whether or not you actually want to be CEO. When you tell people that you want to be CEO, you are viewed as CEO material. You are looked at more seriously. You are taken more seriously. You'll be given more opportunities — and you'll be paid more money.

On disrupting the way we talk and learn about sex online

Amanda: For people who don't know, can you tell us about MakeLoveNotPorn, and where you are with it right now?

Cindy: MakeLoveNotPorn came out of my direct personal experience dating younger men and realizing that when we didn't talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default. MakeLoveNotPorn is specifically designed to address that issue and to make it easier for every single person in the world to talk openly and honestly about sex.

(Note from Amanda: I can’t actually embed a TED video, so that’s a screenshot below - click here to watch Cindy’s TED talk.)

Cindy (continued):We're making it easier for everybody to talk about via the fact that we are the world's first and only user-generated, human-curated, social sex video-sharing platform. We are what Facebook would be, if Facebook allowed us to socially, sexually self-express...if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, MakeLoveNotPorn is the real world documentary.

Ultimately, what MakeLoveNotPorn does is help end rape culture. We do that by doing something incredibly simple, but nevertheless, nobody else is doing: We end rape culture by showing you how wonderful, great, consensual, communicative sex is in the real world.

Our social sex videos role model good sexual values and good sexual behavior. We make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture, so we call ourselves the social sex revolution. The revolution part is not the sex —it's the social.

Amanda: I love that. I've heard a couple of horror stories lately from people who have a nine-year old, an 11-year old, who have already been exposed to porn — whether through an older cousin or they stumbled on it somehow by accident. My daughter's nine, and my husband just shared an article with me...about how nine, 10, is the age to start talking to your kids about this... so, “Thank you,” as the parent of a daughter. I mean, I suppose I'd be thanking you also if I was a parent of a boy,  of a son — because we all need this education. It’s really important.

To go back to your tagline: Obviously, some of what you're “blowing up” is porn —

Cindy: No, I'm not. I'm not blowing up porn, because MakeLoveNotPorn doesn't compete with porn. We’re the badly needed counterpoint and compliment to it. As I said, porn is the Hollywood movie, we're the documentary. People like watching movies, they like watching documentaries...we are an oddly unique window onto the way we all have funny, messy, wonderful, loving, glorious, comical, human sex in the real world. That's very badly needed to counterpoint the fact that otherwise, porn is the only place anybody ever gets, apparently, real live sex education...so MakeLoveNotPorn is sex education through real world demonstration.

Amanda: I guess it's more blowing up the chokehold that porn has on people's introduction to sex.

Cindy: Yeah. But also, really, it's eradicating shame, guilt, and embarrassment around sex...bringing it out into the sunlight and taking away this ludicrous guilt and shame that society’s imbued it with.

Amanda: It's so important. Is there anything else that you're blowing up these days, other than patriarchy, Cindy Gallop, that you would like to talk to us about?

Cindy: Honestly, I have my hands full with MakeLoveNotPorn. I fight an enormous battle every day just to keep my business alive because every piece of business and infrastructure, any other tech startup gets taken for granted, we can't. Small print always says, "No adult content," and that's all pervasive across every area of the business. Honestly, the biggest thing we have to celebrate in MakeLoveNotPorn is that we're still here in a world where tech, business, and finance are trying to shut us down every single day. 

I've been trying for 13 years to raise funding, to scale MakeLoveNotPorn to be the Facebook of social sex. I'm about to set out to raise a serious round of funding — it’s the first time I feel relatively optimistic I'm going to be able to do it, so fingers crossed.

Amanda: Oh, fingers crossed, indeed. Is there an action that people can take to help you or to help shift the conditions that have held you back?

Cindy: There most certainly is. First of all, please do everybody, go to makelovenotporn.tv, sign up, and subscribe. It starts at $10 a month, so it's eminently affordable. Do consider contributing in becoming MakeLoveNotPorn stars. We operate a revenue share business model, so our members pay to subscribe, rent, and stream social sex videos. Half that income goes to our MakeLoveNotPorn stars. 

Do follow me and MakeLoveNotPorn — @cindygallop, @makelovenotporn, on Twitter and Instagram.

If anybody knows any open-minded investors, tell them to email Cindy at makelovenotporn.com.

Amanda: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Cindy. I so appreciate you spending this time here today.

Cindy: Amanda, it's been an absolute pleasure.