Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2013, Page 28

28The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 7 — 2013
“Bloody hell. Good god… It’s quite extraor-
dinary, actually,” Cindy Gallop said mere
minutes after walking into the Icelandic Phal-
lological Museum. This was the first stop on
Cindy’s itinerary in Iceland, which is perhaps
not surprising given that she is the brains be-
hind MakeLoveNotPorn, a unique tech venture
designed around sex and social improvement.
Cindy really loves sex. Not just for engaging in
it herself, but an unconditional kind of love of
the act itself. She deeply cares about sex.
Of course this museum is not really about
sex. It’s just full of body parts—a bunch of
disembodied phalli dangling in formaldehyde,
looking odd and car-crash-fascinating, like
a set of shrunken heads. “I have a few items
I could donate to this museum,” she proudly
exclaimed as she walked around.
Big explosions
Cindy was in town over the first weekend of
June for the Startup Iceland conference, de-
livering a speech at their Sunday night dinner
about MakeLoveNotPorn, as well as her other
venture IfWeRanTheWorld, which aims to tap
the pool of human good intentions that never
translate into action. The former one took con-
siderable precedence, as it has been a viral hit
since she launched it in a graphic TED Talk two
years ago.
“I’m particularly pleased to have this oppor-
tunity to speak in Iceland because it wants to
ban violent porn,” Cindy said. “I have a very
particular point of view on what all of us should
be doing to change the things that concern peo-
ple about porn, and it’s not banning it. In fact,
it’s quite the opposite. It’s opening everything
up. I think it’s safe to say that Iceland will not
have heard my perspective before, because it’s
quite a rare one.”
The site that accompanies the venture,
MakeLoveNotPorn.com, is definitely one of
a kind. Cindy presents myths from the porn
world side-by-side with the reality of human
sexuality, a porn world/real world construct.
There you’ll encounter such wisdom as:
Porn world: Saliva, all over everything, as
much as possible.
Real world: Some women like having their
pussies spat on, some don’t. Some men
like having loads of saliva all over their
cocks during blowjobs, some don’t. Some
women like salivating all over cocks dur-
ing blowjobs, some don’t. How much sali-
va features in sex is up to you. If you’re not
wild about it, say so. If you are, spit away.
But Cindy is quite the opposite of a pontifi-
Date
Cindy
Gallop
O
n
A
D
at
e W
ith: Let’s Talk
About Sex, Baby
Exploring the penis museum with the woman
who's out to change the world through sex
by Rebecca Louder
“Because of our
attitude as a soci-
ety towards sex,
we’re all ashamed
and embarrassed
around it. We all
do it, we never talk
about it and we’re
all screwed up
about it. My main
point boils down
to—talk about it.”
Dreaming Up The Breast Museum
Cindy wasn’t just interested in the penis mu-
seum because of her fervour for sexuality—it
turns out she’s really into weird and unusual
museums, like the Museum of Broken Re-
lationships in Croatia. She only found out
about the Icelandic Phallological Museum on
her way over to the country and it came as a
delight, but with one little criticism.
“I do feel it should be balanced by a mu-
seum entirely dedicated to the vagina, so I’d
like to lob this suggestion strongly at Ice-
land,” she said insistently. “I saw in one of
the rooms that something was donated to
this museum from a vagina museum in Rot-
terdam, but nonetheless, Iceland needs a va-
gina museum!”
After telling her about last year’s April
Fools’ joke by the town of Mosfellsbær call-
ing for a vulva museum, I suggested the idea
of an all-gender encompassing breast mu-
seum. Cindy approved.
“What would be interesting about a
breast museum, and what’s also interesting
here and would presumably be in a vagina
museum, are depictions through history,”
she hypothesised. “In a museum like this,
you realise that this is a perfectly natural part
of us. So it’s great to have artefacts, carvings,
things you can use in daily life. With breasts, I
would be interested to find out when women
had to start covering them up.”
She noted that there is a woman in New
York City who deliberately walks around
topless in the summer to make a statement
about men being able to go around shirtless
but not women, even though breast tissue is
all essentially the same. Cindy’s also a pretty
big fan of whipping her own out, but not on
the streets of NYC.
“I spoke at the Cannes Advertising Festi-
val last summer and one of the things I adore
about the South of France is topless sun-
bathing,” she said. “The minute I arrived, I
dumped my stuff at the hotel, raced down the
beach, ripped my top off and then I looked
around. I was the only one on the beach top-
less! I was gobsmacked. Later I tweeted,
“France, what is going on?” and someone
sent me an article which said that younger
French women no longer want to sunbathe
topless because they have body issues. So
when I gave my talk at Cannes called ‘Porn,
Youth & Brands,’ I said that the biggest socio-
cultural influence on young people today that
we don’t talk about comes from porn, media,
and us—the advertising industry. And that’s
appalling. It’s France!”
Photo: Alisa Kalyanova
Cindy Gallop is a former advertising CEO and a tech entrepreneur behind the ventures MakeLoveNotPorn (.com and .tv) and
IfWeRanTheWorld.com. We took her to the Icelandic Phallological Museum (www.phallus.is) and the Bubbletea Pancake Café.
Book online www.bustravel.is or call +354 511 2600
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