here - Somerville College

Somerville Magazine | 15After 38,000 tweets and counting, she can surely lay claim to be Somerville’s mostprolific tweeter.We sit down in the Old ParsonageHotel on Banbury Road and thewaiter asks our order. Awareit’s late afternoon and my interviewee hasalready advertised, on Facebook, that she’llsoon be mixing martinis with students inthe College bar, I hesitantly guess we’regoing non-alcoholic. Thankfully CindyGallop takes charge of a familiar situation.She, after all, is the one who “dates men intheir twenties”. Tea, scones, jam and “lotsof cream” it is.It’s been a big year for the formeradvertising executive. While shehas continued her consultancywork “to pay the mortgage” and ranwebsites IfWeRanTheWorld.com andMakeLoveNotPorn.com (MLNP) from herNew York base, her workload has beentransformed by her new start-up, MLNP.tv.The user-generated crowdsourced site,which for a small fee allows users to watchothers’ “real world sex” video submissionswhile encouraging them to also submitvideos themselves, launched in theautumn. A powerful message lies behindthe video venture: porn, which many nowuse to begin to find out about sex, is aworld away from reality. Her big idea is to“get people talking about sex” and sharetheir experiences – tagline: ‘Pro-sex. Proporn.Pro-knowing the difference.’The .com version of her website starkly laysout the differences between the porn andreal worlds. The “extraordinary response”to that instilled a feeling of “personalresponsibility” to take the idea to anew level.“We should be able to laugh at ourselveshaving sex. Real world sex is funny, messy,dirty. It’s also responsible.” She points outthere are no condoms in porn. “I want tomake those awkward condom moments hotand arousing.”The site’s launch and her ability to givea good quote has not gone unnoticed bythe international press, with provocativefeatures in the Mail and Guardian and, toher own surprise, a prime-time televisioninterview on Ireland’s RTE.“I’ve not been waiting for publicity in theslightest but it’s been incredibly easy to getcoverage without doing a single piece ofmedia outreach.”“We were going to go live under the radar,to test things out, but it’s been great”.As well as leading the business, one ofCindy’s and her small team’s roles is to“curate” the videos people send in. Onlyones which pass certain criteria go up. “Ifind the right moment of the day – I don’toften [watch videos] at breakfast.”I feel a lot more intouch now with therest of the world in theright kind of way.The journey to launch was tough and attimes despairing.Despite believing she was “an investor’swet dream” with a tech concept designedto disrupt a sector worth billions of dollarsin a way both socially beneficial andpotentially highly lucrative, it took twoyears to get funding. At first, “nobodywould come near me”.Funding eventually in place, the nextproblem was accessing it, because no bankaccepted business accounts with “porn”in the name. With the likes of Paypal alsorefusing adult content clients, she directlycontacted tech entrepreneurs via Twitter tofind a payment system for the site.As anyone who follows her on Twitteror Facebook can testify, social media isa “seamless” part of Cindy’s life. After38,000 tweets and counting, she cansurely lay claim to be Somerville’s mostprolific tweeter.It’s all part of her self-branding – buildingon skills she developed at advertisingfirm BBH but, of course, without the paypacket.“I’m reinventing myself financially. Myold days were high-flying advertising exec.These days it’s impoverished start-upentrepreneur. I’m no longer one of theone percent; I’m one of the 99 percent.And I think that’s a good thing. I lookback at my old life and am horrified athow extravagant I was. I feel a lot more intouch now with the rest of the world in theright kind of way.”I suggest this is all still a long way fromtutorials in Maitland and then perilouslybegin comparing her to an ordinarySomervillian – something which brings outa ferocious support for the College.“There is no such thing as an ordinarySomerville alumnus,” she responds.“I feel enormously strongly about helpingSomerville because I think it has been afundamental part of helping me to achievethe things I’ve always wanted to do. I’ma huge believer in giving back, that’s whyI’m here (to fulfil an invite, from a currentstudent, to speak at a TED conference).I would love to see more alumni reallyunderstanding the relevance Somervillestill has to all of our lives and doing whatthey can in their different capacities tohelp give back.”There is a potential future for her ideain sex education, but although she saysshe has enough to be getting on with,you couldn’t rule anything out if the rightbusiness partner came along.“Everything in my life has beenaccidental. If you had told me five yearsago that one day the leading porn industrytrade journal would have Cindy Gallop onits front page, I’d have told you youwere joking.”