Toral: Make love not porn
-A A +ATuesday, August 21, 2012
ONE of the most interesting TED Talks I watched last year was Cindy Gallop’s “Make Love Not Porn.” For a lot of people who have past or current sexual relationships, it can’t be denied how much influence pornography has on how people regard sex today.

Cindy’s experience in dating younger men made her realize that as much as sex is a taboo subject in schools and at homes around the world, most young people today get their sex education through pornography, some even hardcore.
As a result, much of what men think as normal as far as sexual play is concerned are also the same as that of women exposed to these type of content. A lot of women do certain acts in bed that they are uncomfortable with because they want to make their man happy. Online pornography makes this “normal.”
This prompted Cindy Gallop to create the MakeLoveNotPorn website with the intent of educating people on the difference between what pornography teaches versus what is in the real world.
A year after, Cindy launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv to provide adult content on sex from a non-hardcore and non-pornographic perspective.
Gallop’s talk resonated with me because like many young people, I first learned about sex through an x-rated film that my friends and I watched out of curiosity. I was 14 then. There was a lot of content in the movie that didn’t make sense to me but I was too embarrassed to ask. And when you got into relationships as you get older, you will have an idea who has been watching porn depending on the things a partner wants to do
in bed.
It puts a lot of pressure on lovers involved in a relationship until they get settled
down and more or less know what is real good and right.
Despite numerous debates on whether sex education should be offered in high school, I fully support the idea. Tackling birth control is one thing, sex is another. There need to be dos and don’ts and an explanation on what is hardcore pornography and what is real. I’m not sure whether this will happen in my lifetime. But who knows? I might get invited to talk about it in schools. Well, that will be the day.
But I guess for parents out there, I suggest you check out Cindy Gallop’s site and share it with your teens. Hopefully, it can help them understand sex better at a young age rather than experiment and follow hardcore porn films that they will be able to watch later.
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on August 22, 2012.
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