MakeLoveNotPorn reposted this
Thank you to all the people tagging me in the comments on Sam Plant's post who know that I was the first person to publicly identify this issue in my TED talk of now almost 16 YEARS AGO: https://lnkd.in/e3e7gG6Z and yet people continue to angst about porn, versus asking themselves, what can I do to support the proven solution, MakeLoveNotPorn. and the entrepreneur who's battled every single possible obstacle to build and keep that solution operational for 16 years? Spoiler alert - PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE help fund us, by micro-investing at wefunder dot com slash makelovenotporn (minimum is just $100) 🙏 If I'd raised the funding I was looking for in the wake of the astonishing global response to my TED talk 16 years ago - the kind of funding tech bros get lavished on them all the time - MLNP would have been able to make a much more substantial impact AT SCALE in the interim years. It's not too late. Then we can continue to help parents like the mother who emailed us a couple of months back in desperation, saying, I've just discovered my 13 year old son is watching P*****b, I'd rather he watched MakeLoveNotPorn, I know he's underage, can we work something out? While we are for 18+ (and 100% human-curated - with our unique human-curation model that I designed through the female lens to make MLNP the safest place on the internet, human eyes vet every video from beginning to end before WE approve (or reject) and publish - there is no self-publishing of anything, including profile posts and comments), our policy is that parental judgement trumps that. Parents know what's best for their children and what they want to give them access to - that will, as Sam Plant says, have a major impact in shaping their education about and attitudes to relationships, intimacy, connection. On MLNP you see love in action, not p**n. We've helped many parents over the years, including the increasingly desperate ones in the past year (these requests have significantly accelerated). When you invest in our wefunder, you are enabling us to build MakeLoveNotPorn dot academy (see our vision laid out at that url) - the 0-18 and beyond aggregator hub for the best of the world's sex education content, made easily accessible and searchable by age-appropriateness, cultural sensibility and personal comfort level. If everything Sam and everyone else says about p**n perturbs you, you CAN DO SOMETHING - support, and fund the proven solution 💗
When I was about 14 I bought a copy of Playboy from my mate David. It wasn’t actually his, he’d nicked it off his older brother. But he charged me a pound and solemnly handed over the goods during break before English. It was a pretty well known edition, featuring Madonna before she was famous. From what I can remember, it was a bit underwhelming - grainy, black and white, more arthouse than pornography. I kept the magazine in my school bag for a while before chucking it out in case my mum found it. Later my friends and I tried, and spectacularly failed, to get hold of a porno video. We didn’t know where to go and wound up awkwardly shuffling around Blockbusters trying to avoid parents we knew. The best we could do was the softest of soft porn. If you were really quick on the pause button you could see a breast (maybe?). I wished we’d rented St Elmo’s Fire, at least that had Demi Moore. I must have been about 17 when I saw my first porn film at a house party. By then, I’d had a few girlfriends. I didn’t know much about relationships but what I did know I’d learned in the real world, with real people. By the time our kids are 17 they have been exposed to pornography for 5 years. The average age to first see porn online is 12. And getting younger. And it’s not the soft porn of my teenage years. 8 out of 10 children encounter coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts on-line before turning 18. This isn’t about hankering for the good old days. Or about the morality of pornography. I’m boringly liberal and don’t know enough about porn or the porn industry to pass judgment. I assume that, like any industry, there are bad players and good ones, decent role models and abusers. And I feel much the same way about people who use porn. It probably plays a healthy role in the sex lives of some users and has a less positive impact on others. But we can all imagine how online porn must impact the developing values and expectations of children. In the porniverse, women are submissive, subservient and grateful. They are always up for it, consent is never a problem. They are used and abused and would, dare I say, let you grab ‘em by the pussy. And if that’s how our sons learn about sex, about relationships, about girls, why would we expect them to respect the ones around them? Or even consider what those girls might want from a relationship or from sex. And what are our daughters to make of all this? Is something wrong with them if they don’t want it all the time, all the ways? Adult men and women, knock yourself out on porn sites if that’s your thang. But it’s bonkers that we earnestly slap age restrictions on Disney movies while waving our 12 year olds through into the darkest corners of the online world. That we are still waiting for legislation to restrict underage access. That we hope the next generation will be less misogynistic and abusive than ours when we have swapped dog eared copies of Playboy for unrestricted 24 hour hard core porn.