Monday, December 05, 2016

Make Love Not Porn - your business model doesn't work



Dammit, Cindy Gallop's heart is in the right place and her desire to change the views of society toward women her age (and I'm only a little younger than her) is admirable.

I just wished her "Make Love Not Porn" concept worked as a business. The fact that she is now attempting to crowd-fund it shows it is not working as an actual business, and it is now more of a conceptual art project. The crowd-funding page doesn't present anything new so presumably she just wants to keep on doing the same thing - presenting videos of people who are not professional porn actors having sex ("making love") alone or with others.

It cannot work as a business because the videos on offer on her MLNP site - well first off, they aren't immediately available as all other porn on the Internet is. For instance, I could enter "romantic couple making love" or "amateur porn" into any search engine and get a whole bunch of links to videos that I can watch immediately.

Gallop's site requires you to join (free but still a hassle) just to see some previews, and then you have to pay to watch an entire video. Why would you do that when you could see similar content immediately and for free? Except that the free online videos you can access randomly usually feature much better looking people - especially the men.

I'm not saying there are no people in the world who prefer watching unattractive people over attractive people having sex. But I am saying there are not enough of them to make money on  it.

And after a review of the MLNP site today, I see it still has the same old problem that I talked about over a year ago in response to a comment made by, I think, Cindy Gallop herself, on this blog:
The problem, dear Cindy, is the collision between your business model and the Patriarchy. The people who volunteer to make these videos live in a world where women spend hours every day on hair, makeup and cute outfits, plus yoga and/or the gym, while most straight men think they can just shower and shave (or more likely these days, not even shave) and then throw on some baggy t-shirt and jeans they found on the floor, along with ugly sneakers. And if they have a beer belly, well so what? They dress for comfort, not to look good for other people. 
So the people making your videos look exactly like you would expect - the women look good while the men are, at best, blah. That's male privilege and you aren't going to escape it with your average jane and joe volunteers. You are going to get a reflection of the same exact values that drive commercial porn in the first place - it's all about the male gaze. Only in a culture that goes against that tradition, where men are meant to be looked at too, will you have truly attractive men - as in the gay porn world.

You can get an idea of the male gaze problem I'm talking about on the Makelovenotporn Youtube channel.  (None of these videos on Youtube feature any sex, they just show you the people who have the sex in the videos behind the Make Love Not Porn paywall.)

The first video is a perfect example of what I mean about men not making an effort to look good. It shows a heterosexual couple and the woman has obviously had her hair, makeup and nails done recently, and the man looks like he just rolled out of bed and his hair is a big graying mess.

This video has a pretty attractive man except that he is wearing that horrible style too many men have adopted lately, the high-top fade combined with the big gross beard. It's like men are trying to look as ugly as possible these days with this style. The best part of typing "romantic couple making love" into a search engine and seeing the random pornos that pop up is that none of the men in those videos have beards, or high-top fades

And the prospect of having sex with someone wearing a cheesy mustache like the one on this man is much worse to me than sex while suffering from a cold sore.

Like most women, I could go out and have sex with unattractive men any time I want, so why would I watch a video featuring unattractive men having sex? I'm only interested in seeing beautiful men having sex. But if Gallop's crowd-funded version of Make Love Not Porn is going to focus on beautiful men, this is not mentioned anywhere on the ifundwomen page she has set up. And I doubt they would consider it even as a special category within the MLNP universe since Gallop apparently doesn't see aesthetics as a serious consideration. 

In case you're wondering what I would watch, Cindy Gallop - maybe if you make your $500K goal you'll consider spending some of it on "making love" videos for people like me: get a male porn actor who looks like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and create a series of videos that show the life of a smoking hot Canadian Prime Minister and all the sex he has with the focus on his face and body during the sex. But make the PM single, it would ruin it for me if the character was cheating on a wife. He could have a hot but secret affair with the sister of his leading political rival, for example. Or maybe an off-again, on-again relationship with a Toronto reporter. Or a forbidden attraction for a hot but married leader of an Indigenous Peoples organization. Or ALL THREE. Stuff like that. But it would take much more time and effort than just asking random unattractive people to upload videos onto your site. But as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

OMG SOMBODY CLONE THIS MAN.