The Make Love Not Porn Podcast Episode
Sarah Beall’s full-time job is to watch people have sex. That’s because she’s the curator at Makelovenotporn.tv, a user-generated collection of videos of real people having real sex.
This is not pornography and the videos are not performances. Make Love Not Porn believes that the sex we have in our everyday life is the hottest sex there is, and I completely agree.
We discuss what makes great sex great, how you can dip your town into making your own real sex videos, and the beauty and freedom of releasing your sex videos online for all to see.
The Make Love Not Porn Show Notes
Sarah Beall can be found on Twitter and Instagram. Please don’t be shy about contacting Sarah if you have any questions, she can be contact via email at: sarah@makelovenotporn.com
Make Love Not Porn can be found at their website, on Twitter, Facebook, and on Instagram.
Watch real amateur porn at Dan Savage’s Hump Fest:
Who is Cindy Gallop, the founder of Make Love Not Porn?
This show has been produced by Shaun Galanos with help from Gilford Street Studios.
The Make Love Not Porn Transcript
Shaun Galanos: Could you please introduce yourself?
Sarah Beall: My name is Sarah Beall and I’m the curator for a website called Make Love Not Porn.tv.
Shaun Galanos: Can you tell me about the work that you do and how you got to do what you’re doing today?
Sarah Beall: Make Love Not Porn is a curated, real world sex video sharing site where people share the sex they have in their everyday lives without performing for the camera, in a way that’s contextualized, consensual and porn cliche free.
The people who share videos on our site have usually never shared a video of themselves having sex before.
We have a profit-sharing business model where people pay $5 right now to rent a video for three weeks and then we split the profit 50/50 with our creators or as we call them our Make Love Not Porn stars.
We are the social sex revolution.
Our mission is to get people to talk about sex in the real world. We’re not anti-porn we’re pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference.
Curation isn’t about censorship but it’s about creating a space online where people can celebrate and watch the messy awesome humanness that happens and is a part of real world sex.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I like to say that sex is often messy and awkward and we just don’t talk about it or share it or see it in videos.
Sarah Beall: When you actually watch real world sex, it’s very very different from what you usually see in mainstream porn and hopefully, if we’re doing our job right a lot closer to your own experience in a way that helps you feel better about your body, your real world body and your real world awkwardness.
Shaun Galanos: What’s the difference between real-world sex and porn sex? How does it differ?
Sarah Beall: We are fans of feminist porn. So we are not feminist porn.
We are an entirely new category that we call social sex.
We’re what you would share on other social platforms like Facebook and YouTube if they allowed sexually expressive content.
Our competition isn’t porn, and again, we’re not anti-porn.
But the truth of the matter is that a lot of mainstream porn is produced according to a kind of rigid and wrote formula of positions and camera angles.
Straight porn in particular, follows a pretty standard trajectory of oral sex for a man, five different positions, 40 minutes later he comes on her face and it’s over.
That’s not really how most people have real-world sex.
Shaun Galanos: And she’s happy about getting come on her face.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, exactly. Make Love Not Porn began because my boss, Cindy Gallop, she was a high-flying ad exec in her late 40’s, and she was dating younger men.
She discovered through her own direct personal experience that the otherwise lovely young men that she was dating were pulling out the porn moves in the bedroom.
After this had happened to her multiple times, she sort of had an aha-moment. It was like,
“Oh, people are learning about how to have sex from porn. This guy thinks that what he’s doing with me in bed is what I want.”
Because nobody is talking about what it really means to be good in bad, there’s so much free online porn plus like the sex education today, isn’t that great? People are learning how to be good in bed from porn.
She decided to set out and change that through a very basic site called Make Love Not Porn.com which had infographics and it boiled down to just talk to your partner about how you want to have sex with them. Just talk to your partner.
So, examples of the infographics were, “In the porn world all women love it when men come on their face; in the real world, some women like it, some women don’t, talk to your partner, it’s entirely up to personal choice,” and so on.
There were also ones about, “In the porn world, all women like to be called sluts and whores and in the real world, some people might not want to be called the slut during sex, again entirely up to personal choice.”Click below to read the full transcript.
Read The Full Make Love Not Porn Transcript here.
Shaun Galanos: Could you please introduce yourself?
Sarah Beall: My name is Sarah Beall and I’m the curator for a website called Make Love Not Porn.tv.
Shaun Galanos: Can you tell me about the work that you do and how you got to do what you’re doing today?
Sarah Beall: Make Love Not Porn is a curated, real world sex video sharing site where people share the sex they have in their everyday lives without performing for the camera, in a way that’s contextualized, consensual and porn cliche free.
The people who share videos on our site have usually never shared a video of themselves having sex before.
We have a profit-sharing business model where people pay $5 right now to rent a video for three weeks and then we split the profit 50/50 with our creators or as we call them our Make Love Not Porn stars.
We are the social sex revolution.
Our mission is to get people to talk about sex in the real world. We’re not anti-porn we’re pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference.
Curation isn’t about censorship but it’s about creating a space online where people can celebrate and watch the messy awesome humanness that happens and is a part of real world sex.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I like to say that sex is often messy and awkward and we just don’t talk about it or share it or see it in videos.
Sarah Beall: When you actually watch real world sex, it’s very very different from what you usually see in mainstream porn and hopefully, if we’re doing our job right a lot closer to your own experience in a way that helps you feel better about your body, your real world body and your real world awkwardness.
Shaun Galanos: What’s the difference between real-world sex and porn sex? How does it differ?
Sarah Beall: We are fans of feminist porn. So we are not feminist porn.
We are an entirely new category that we call social sex.
We’re what you would share on other social platforms like Facebook and YouTube if they allowed sexually expressive content.
Our competition isn’t porn, and again, we’re not anti-porn.
But the truth of the matter is that a lot of mainstream porn is produced according to a kind of rigid and wrote formula of positions and camera angles.
Straight porn in particular, follows a pretty standard trajectory of oral sex for a man, five different positions, 40 minutes later he comes on her face and it’s over.
That’s not really how most people have real-world sex.
Shaun Galanos: And she’s happy about getting come on her face.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, exactly. Make Love Not Porn began because my boss, Cindy Gallop, she was a high-flying ad exec in her late 40’s, and she was dating younger men.
She discovered through her own direct personal experience that the otherwise lovely young men that she was dating were pulling out the porn moves in the bedroom.
After this had happened to her multiple times, she sort of had an aha-moment. It was like,
“Oh, people are learning about how to have sex from porn. This guy thinks that what he’s doing with me in bed is what I want.”
Because nobody is talking about what it really means to be good in bad, there’s so much free online porn plus like the sex education today, isn’t that great? People are learning how to be good in bed from porn.
She decided to set out and change that through a very basic site called Make Love Not Porn.com which had infographics and it boiled down to just talk to your partner about how you want to have sex with them. Just talk to your partner.
So, examples of the infographics were, “In the porn world all women love it when men come on their face; in the real world, some women like it, some women don’t, talk to your partner, it’s entirely up to personal choice,” and so on.
There were also ones about, “In the porn world, all women like to be called sluts and whores and in the real world, some people might not want to be called the slut during sex, again entirely up to personal choice.”
Shaun Galanos: I would say that most women don’t want to be called whores or sluts or have their face cummed on. It’s not realistic.
I remember my brother turning on porn when he was 13 and drinking a beer and I walked into the room and I was started watching this thing, I didn’t know what it was.
And then my mom came in and obviously he got in trouble and then my mom pulled me aside and said,
“This isn’t how real people have sex.”
Sarah Beall: That’s great, that’s a great mom right there.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, she is a great mom.
Why is it important for people to see real-world sex on the internet?
Sarah Beall: Well for one, if you are just getting your sex education and your instruction on how to be good in bed and what’s important in sex from porn, then you’re probably not having very good sex.
For one, it’s important for people to see examples of that because it could really make you much happier in your own life.
It’s people doing things that they actually do in their sex lives, some people are super flexible, but having great real-world sex doesn’t require you to have the Olympian skills of a porn star.
Shaun Galanos: I did a podcast yesterday actually, where I was interviewed on a podcast called Shameless Sex, where basically they normalize a whole lot of sexual behaviors, which is one of the things that I think real sex does, is that it normalizes stuff that we don’t see in pornography.
I was invited there to talk about how to eat pussy, which is a thing that you don’t really see in porn. I mean, I went on PornHub yesterday and in the blow job category there were 51,000 videos and in the pussy-eating or pussy licking category, there was only 10,000.
It shows you how disproportionate some acts are in pornography that aren’t actually that disproportionate in real-world sex.
It’s beautiful to be able to see a whole spectrum of how people have sex and not just what drives ad dollars or clicks on porn sites.
Sarah Beall: The thing is in mainstream porn, the female orgasm is not really important. Because there’s no way to prove that it happened, right.
Men ejaculate for the most part and that’s like proof of sex and that’s the “money shot” right? So whether the female porn performer comes is not really important to anyone.
I think frankly, probably for the most part, unless the performers she’s working with is really great or she’s worked with them ton of times and feels like he can make her come, probably doesn’t want to spend an extra 20 minutes having an orgasm, she probably wants to get the scene over with and enjoy the rest of her day, right? It’s her job.
Definitely porn scripts, I would say the blow job is incredibly essential in mainstream porn and what we call the lick job Make Love Not Porn is not so much.
If it is it’s performed primarily for the view at home, so at a really awkward angle.
In mainstream lesbian porn with like really, really long nails, not to say that you can’t have great lesbian sex if you have long fingernails, but I think it’s an added challenge.
Shaun Galanos: Sure, yeah, you have to be extra careful.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, and people who eat pussy know that it’s not an act that takes a set amount of time, you kind of have to just get in there and go for it.
Shaun Galanos: It doesn’t video well. I mean if you want close-ups, it’s not really feasible.
Sarah Beall: One thing I love seeing in our real world sex videos is people’s faces. I’m personally much more interested in seeing what a person’s face looks like while they’re being pleasured.
That’s hot to me, I’m personally less interested in a close-up. I think it’s okay if you are but that’s one of the things we do at Make Love Not Porn is we encourage people to pull the camera back and show the whole experience. Close-ups are a porn trope.
That’s what we see in produced porn and that’s what we see in so-called amateur porn, much of which is actually produced.
I think that people get this impression because the only sex they’re seeing on video is porn that in order for something to be valuable, in order for people to want to pay for it, that you have to show proof of sex at all times.
One of the things I do in my work is to encourage our Make Love Not Porn stars to see the entire experience as valuable and worth watching.
So the before and after and the awkward moments and the part where your cat jumped on the bed.
And your face and how you look at each other and how you switch positions and all of that stuff that people just really relate to on a human level.
But it takes some time.
I consider myself kind of like a bit of a cheerleader, a bit of a coach a bit of a guide.
A lot of what I do is just telling people that they’re great the way they are and encouraging them to go further in terms of just capturing that completely unvarnished.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah you empower people to show us what it really looks like.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, it’s incredibly fortunate job to have.
Our Make Love Not Porn stars do their own work, they’re on their own journey, so to speak.
I like to think that I play a role in just reassuring them and making them feel good about what they’re doing.
Shaun Galanos: You talked about encouraging people to show their face because that’s intimate and it’s vulnerable and it’s what makes these videos different from pornography.
What draws people to put their videos on Make Love Not Porn?
Sarah Beall: Okay, so first of all, I would say that one thing to point out is that you can remain anonymous on Make Love Not Porn so you don’t have to show your face.
I always explain that in terms of meeting people where they are and how comfortable they are.
Again, most of our Make Love Not Porn Stars are just regular people who have regular jobs outside of what they share on Make Love Not Porn.
So in order to be able to represent as wide a breadth of what sex looks like in the real world, we’re totally fine with people obscuring their faces.
Shaun Galanos: Like with the mask or blurring or cropping.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, all of those three. So we’ve had videos with masks. We have a couple of people who just completely crop their heads out of the shot and they do it really well. We do have some blurring as well.
What draws people, I think it’s definitely our philosophy. I think that in order to really appreciate the good sex that you’re having, you have to kind of have some bad sex.
That’s how it happened in my life.
You have some good sex and you have some bad sex and you have some partners that you don’t communicate with that well, and then maybe you find somebody that you communicate with well and you can kind of get a sense of like, “Oh, okay that felt really good and genuine and that was a little bit like not so good,” and it’s entirely up to personal choice.
I think that people who submit to Make Love Not Porn have a degree of experience with good and bad sex.
People are proud of that. They’re really enjoying themselves sexually and there’s kind of even a generosity in that sharing the good sex you’re having so that other people can then sort of see themselves in you and think, “Oh, I can also experience that.”
People also share because they’re looking to spice up their relationships. Spoiler alert— it works.
We have lots of great feedback from our Make Love Not Porn stars saying that they started filming their real-world sex to spice up their marriage and they thought maybe they would just do like one video.
And now, 30 videos later, it’s allowed them to deepen their communication and become closer than they ever have.
Things like people reconnecting after the birth of a child, which leaves both parents really drained and not very interested in sex.
Sarah Beall: You care about the technical quality. You’d be more ashamed if it was like really dark.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, or out of focus. Yeah, it was shot in 4k, it was well lit and we have great chemistry together, so it was like a fun video to make.
I would be hard-pressed to put it online. I’m not there yet. But maybe by the end of this conversation—
Sarah Beall: Oh God, yeah, you should definitely share on Make Love Not Porn. Yeah.
Shaun Galanos: There are definitely ways, I could definitely hide.
Actually, it was cropped out, not intentionally, but it just happens to be almost fully cropped video.
By the end of this conversation, you might convince me to put it online. I think some of my listeners would really appreciate that.
Sarah Beall: Challenge accepted.
Shaun Galanos: I have to talk to the other partner. It’s a two-person situation.
Sarah Beall: You do, yeah, you have to talk to that person.
Shaun Galanos: How much time do you spend watching videos?
Sarah Beall: Right now I’m getting about 20 videos a month. I’m the only curator, so I tend to batch them. I like to set aside a special time where that’s just video time.
Shaun Galanos: I think I understand.
Sarah Beall: Not all the videos that I get turn me on necessarily, but it is kind of an emotionally and physically vulnerable position to be in.
Watching the videos is a lot more of an emotional experience than you might think. I’m watching people be vulnerable and it makes me feel kind of vulnerable myself.
I take my job pretty seriously just in the sense that I do want to make sure that we’re creating this space that’s consensual and porn cliche-free.
I really do watch like the beginning to end and that requires focus.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I had a listener just ask a question, well, it was a comment and he said that watching regular porn no matter how extreme doesn’t bother him, it might not turn him on but it doesn’t turn them off.
But watching real people making love makes him really, really uncomfortable and he wants to know why.
Sarah Beall: I would say it’s the emotion. “Congratulations you feel things, you have real-world feelings. You’re human”.
I’ve heard that before. Very early on we had somebody who was advising for us say like, “Actually I feel uncomfortable watching this.”
We’ve had people cancel their accounts with us and say like, “I felt like I was spying on their private moment, and it it was too intense for me.”
First of all, the videos on Make Love Not Porn people are choosing to upload them. So it’s a positive experience for them.
I would just suggest not to get freaked out if you feel uncomfortable because you are probably having an emotional reaction to two human beings actually acting how real people act, and it might even kind of remind you of your own vulnerability. I would just say stick with it.
We’ve never done a study on this, hopefully, we will eventually. In porn there’s kind of like a spike, it’s like your monkey brain is stimulated by something really graphic.
There might even be something going on physiologically that you can’t control like your brain is just like, “Whoa, okay, I’m turned on now.”
Whereas in real-world sex, the build is much slower. You might not even find yourself getting really turned on say for the first five minutes. But the arousal just feels a little more real and afterward, you feel good.
We had a guy come to us and say, “Watching porn makes me want to jerk off. Watching your videos and makes me want to have sex with my partner. “
It actually makes you want to connect with other people.
Shaun Galanos: I love that.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, it’s amazing.
That is what we’re all about in terms of creating change in the real world. We’re not just about being an online platform, we’re about people actually bringing people together offline.
Shaun Galanos: Has it been hard— and you don’t have to answer this if it’s too personal but has it been hard getting funding from like VCs or investors because of the type of business that you guys are in?
Sarah Beall: Yeah, it’s been incredibly hard to get funding. It’s been incredibly hard to operate in any way that a normal business would.
One thing that’s always been really important to us is our profit sharing business model. Our founder Cindy Gallop always wanted to fairly compensate people for the incredible value that they are bringing to Make Love Not Porn.
Because we are in the adult business, we can’t work with sites like for example like PayPal. PayPal won’t work with us because we’re in adult, so we have to work with other payment processors for payments in and out the charge like exorbitant fees.
People will ask, “Oh well, how does the porn industry process their payments?” And they do it through these third-party payment systems that charge huge fees in order to take on the risk of working in the porn industry.
Shaun Galanos: Because of potential liability and so they have to charge higher fees in order to cover themselves?
Sarah Beall: Yeah, I mean in the porn industry, there are a lot of chargebacks, that’s when you basically say like, “I didn’t purchase this,” and you go to Visa and then Visa dings the company for a fraudulent charge.
Shaun Galanos: Which they totally purchased and jerked off to and then felt remorse, had a porn hangover in the morning and then tried to get the charges reversed.
Sarah Beall: Yeah. I mean I used to do customer service for an online dating site. The chargebacks were rampant.
I know people who’ve worked in customer service for porn and that’s just one of the things that goes hand in hand right now with the porn industry.
On the other hand, Make Love Not Porn has almost no chargebacks in our history.
We are actually a very, very low-risk company, but because we’re in adult, businesses don’t look at, even if they personally support us, they just apply the same blanket, “no adult content” thing to us.
So yeah, it’s been difficult for us to stay afloat while also paying our Make Love Not Porn stars as well.
Shaun Galanos: It’s a shame.
I was just talking to a friend this morning who is a sex therapist and she her Instagram account blocked and now it’s been reinstated but she’s no longer allowed to share her link to her website, which is how she was getting clients.
I mean, she’s a legit therapist who just deals with sexuality and intimacy and content that’s relevant to that.
She got she gets sort of just bulked into adult services when it’s not an adult service, right?
There’s this mainstream prudishness or just sort of like, “I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole” even though if we look at Make Love Not Porn no one can say that this is a bad service, that this is creating harm in people’s lives.
We could say that to pornography or to the porn industry, but we can’t really say that to this but as much as people want to say they love it, they also don’t really want their name attached to providing funding for companies and not just this company, I’m thinking about other wellness companies in the sexuality and intimacy industry.
I think it’s terrible.
Sarah Beall: Instagram and I guess Facebook could lead the charge in terms of actually putting some work into saying like we support good sexual values and we understand that some content is explicit and shouldn’t be seen by the minors who are on our site but what’s more important, a picture of a kale salad or information that could help you lead a healthier and happier life.
Or sex education information that somebody under the age of 18 shouldn’t be seeing but on the other hand, we know that children as young as eight are discovering porn on their parents’ iPads and stuff like that.
Shaun Galanos: Oh, yeah, it was on AOL when I was like 11 or 12 and that was trading pictures with I think probably full-grown men.
They weren’t my pictures and they weren’t their pictures, but like we were trading porn at the age of 12, so it happens everywhere.
Sarah Beall: Basically, they just don’t want to touch it.
It’s also a shame because for example with sex workers people, who work in all kinds of sex work, strippers I know, porn stars I know, who share content that’s within the content guidelines.
They’re also kicked off of Facebook and Instagram.
Shaun Galanos: Or Patreon.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, for content that isn’t in fact sexually explicit, but because it has to do with sex it affects their business in that they don’t get as much.
And it also forces them to negotiate in ways that are probably less safe for them. It’s also an issue in terms of the safety and survival of people who work in sex work.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah. I guess one way forward is for more people to touch it with a ten-foot pole, like more people willing to say,
“Okay, I’ll endorse this and I’ll actually put my money where my mouth is and damn the consequences,”
and hopefully there’s a movement where more people do that where it becomes less of a risk.
Sarah Beall: Cindy often says, that the biggest obstacle in life and business is fear of what other people will think. That is literally what it comes down to you have to take a stand and you can’t care what other people think.
Shaun Galanos: I mean, that’s my biggest fear in life. Mine personally, well, and professionally.
Sarah Beall: I feel like you get over what other people think in stages.
Shaun Galanos: I’m caring less.
Sarah Beall: I started working in sexuality before social media with really big and before, all of my distant relatives were on social media and adding me all the time.
And yeah, it’s been interesting for me realizing that.
My mom is fine with what I do, my dad is fine. My friends are fine.
And all of a sudden, I’m like carrying what’s some distant aunt in the United States thinks about what I’m doing and yeah, it’s tough.
Shaun Galanos: My uncle once emailed my dad, his brother and expressed concern over what I was doing on the internet with these articles.
Sarah Beall: See? And then, you know when you’re like, okay, that’s actually their problem.
Shaun Galanos: To be fair, he is Mormon and he lives in Australia.
I also don’t really care. John, I love you, I just don’t care. I did talk to my dad this morning, I said,
“Hey, one of the episodes that is coming out is going to be a guide to eating pussy and you might want to skip that one because it’s all me talking about eating pussy.”
And he was like, “Oh cool. Thanks for letting me know.”
Sarah Beall: It was like, “I taught you well, my son.”
Shaun Galanos: I don’t think he taught me anything. I mean he taught me a lot, but he didn’t teach me how to eat pussy.
That’s the thing that we don’t learn through pornography, that you learn through trial and error and experience, and hopefully, communicating with your partner.
Because I’m not any good unless I get feedback.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, and everyone is different.
Shaun Galanos: It’s like going to play tennis for the first time like you’re going to suck and you don’t know the rules, the balls are going everywhere, and then if you get a coach that tells you actually, this is what you do, you’ll eventually get better.
So communication with experience makes great sex.
What makes great sex videos?
Sarah Beall: 39:59 The most important thing for a video on Make Love Not Porn is that it be of the sex you actually enjoy having in your real life, without performing for the camera.
So that is like the number one thing that I look for.
Definitely, technical elements are way less important than that.
There are some really simple things that you can do though to make a better video.
Again, I would really encourage people to not try to be perfect and just film around their real-world sex life, carry your phone or your camera around with you try to remember to turn it on before you’re both naked, which is a challenge sometimes or you yourself are naked because we have videos with just one person in them.
That’s also real-world sex.
I always say this because this actually happened to me a couple times. Make sure you actually hit record.
I have thought on two occasions that I recorded a video and thought it was great and then realized that I had not. It’s very disappointing.
Shaun Galanos: I’ve done that on the podcast before, so I have like a checklist that I go through before I start the episode, and one of them is hit record and then make sure that it’s recording.
That’s a great tip. It’s pretty basic, but it’s also really easy to forget.
Sarah Beall: Then also make sure that you have space on your memory card or your phone because it’s also very sad to record half of a really great experience.
Batteries and memory are important. Another thing is the lighting.
Shaun Galanos: You’ve just made me happy.
Sarah Beall: One thing I always tell people is like one of the easiest ways to get good lighting is to use natural sunlight.
If you like having morning sex and you have a bedroom with nice natural light, then set your camera up before you go to bed, and then just turn it on as soon as you wake up in the morning.
Shaun Galanos: Make sure it’s not backlit.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, make sure it’s not backlit.
Shaun Galanos: That’s an important one.
You might have great light but it’s useless if it’s backlit. I am sure you have seen quite a few backlit videos.
Sarah Beall: I have and it doesn’t mean I won’t accept anything that’s backlit. It’s just, natural light when it’s not backlit, is one of the most flattering.
Also, if you’re worried about like—
Shaun Galanos: Your wrinkles.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, which you shouldn’t be, but yeah, everyone wants to look good.
Shaun Galanos: We’re human.
Sarah Beall: I would say if you can set your camera up before or figure out where you’re going to put it beforehand.
Find a spot on your dresser where you can prop up your phone and you’re going to get like a nice wide shot.
Shaun Galanos: Use a tripod.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, use a tripod. We have lots of great dresser/ tripod videos.
I reviewed one yesterday from a couple in their 60’s and it was the second video they ever shot and they just prop the camera up on the dresser and it looked awesome.
As long as the camera doesn’t fall over.
Shaun Galanos: These are all technical requirements for making a good video. It’s not a lot, but it is something that you have to think about.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, when I first started reviewing social sex videos, I didn’t have a lot of experience filming and so I went through the process myself in order to just really understand what it’s like.
My husband and I, we recorded a video once, it was really funny. The room was way too dark, first of all, you could barely see anything and I think we were just like kissing on the bed and then we had just gone out and had this really wonderful dinner and he was like, “I’m too full”.
Shaun Galanos: I mean, that’s real sex right there.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, and that was the video.
Shaun Galanos: That’s a great video. Is that video available for rent?
Sarah Beall: Not currently, but maybe sometime I’ll get somebody to like edit it together to show what real-world sex looks like.
Shaun Galanos: I think that’s why Dan Savage recommends fucking first and then having dinner. I know that to be true for myself and I think most people agree that it’s just not as fun when you’re full.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, whether or not you share a sex video online is something that you should think a little bit about.
Shaun Galanos: Often once it’s out there you can’t pull it back, but that’s actually not the case with Make Love Not Porn.
Sarah Beall: We operate what we call our “change of heart clause”.
Basically, if you email us and you say, “I don’t want my video up anymore”, we will take it down. No questions asked.
I think that’s a really important part of how we operate because we want people to feel comfortable taking that sort of fun, calculated adventurous risk, and we also want them to feel like if they decide they don’t want it online anymore, then it will disappear.
Shaun Galanos: That’s beautiful that makes, that’s like one less hurdle.
Sarah Beall: We actually had Make Love Not Porn star couple who, before they submitted to us, shot themselves having sex live on Chaturbate.
They decided to take their videos down for personal reasons, mainly related to work and they told me that actually Chaturbate had like recorded a video and it was floating around their site and they couldn’t get them to take it down.
They just kept getting the runaround from this company and it was so the opposite of how we do business, which is just like they were like, “Take the video down,” We’re like, “Okay fine. Thank you very much. You’re always welcome back anytime.”
Whereas I don’t know if they ever actually were able to get that video taken down.
Shaun Galanos: Chaturbate probably has different user agreements where when you put your content on there becomes their content.
Apparently, you guys are doing a different language, which is awesome.
Sarah Beall: I’m a little naive now, not naive, I’m used to treating people well, it’s sad when you see that other businesses don’t really care.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, have you seen the Hump Fest, Dan Savage’s Hump Fest?
Sarah Beall: I have not seen Hump yet.
Shaun Galanos: The idea, for people who don’t know about it, is that amateur people who don’t really make porn get to make a porn and it gets screened at the Hump Fest all throughout the United States and Canada and maybe overseas now, I’m not sure.
But the idea is that when you go to watch the Fest, you’re not allowed to film it, there are no phones if they see a phone they confiscate it and you leave.
They make it really safe for people to make videos that will never, ever be seen, even on the internet. They’re only seen live like a handful of times and then they get archived, and I love that idea. I love the idea.
That’s why I love Make Love Not Porn, I love the idea that normal people that don’t have any experience shooting erotic films can get naked and have sex and see it. See it and show it to people.
Sarah Beall: And people will watch it and pay for it.
Shaun Galanos: Well, that’s the other exciting part.
Sarah Beall: People pay to see something authentic.
Sometimes a video will be totally awesome but not like technically the best, and I’ll make the decision as a curator that as long as I can actually see what’s happening, I’ll accept it because it’s non-performative real-world sex.
And then people will see that other people are actually renting that video and then they’ll make more and they’ll get better at filming because they’ll gain more experience.
Shaun Galanos: Are there people that make a decent wage just making videos?
Sarah Beall: There’s no one who makes their regular living off of Make Love Not Porn yet.
As long as your videos are on Make Love Not Porn, you continue to earn money from them, so it can be passive income.
It becomes passive income pretty quickly.
We have a couple on our site who was with us since we launched in 2013 and I want to say they’ve made over $20,000. So yeah, we have people making four figures each payout, we pay out every 90 days.
People have said, “We bought a new washing machine with the money that we made off Make Love Not Porn,” or people buy new cameras or we’ve had people donate to the charity which is really nice. People pay off credit card debt that go on vacation. It’s really nice.
Shaun Galanos: That’s awesome.
What are some of the hurdles that new Make Love Not Porn stars might experience?
Sarah Beall: There’s a technical hurdle of not being super used to filming things in general.
I think that’s changing more and more because so much of our social media involves video now like we’re all getting pretty good at like framing and basic editing.
So that becomes less of a hurdle, but it can be one and you have to get used to being ready with your camera when something’s happening in your life. So there’s that, that’s a bit of a hurdle.
Shaun Galanos: Any emotional hurdles?
Sarah Beall: There’s the hurdle of embracing your real-world body and how it looks.
We’re not used to seeing the way that real bodies move and jiggle and for women things like showing your cellulite, for example, which most women have and then men, showing their bellies.
I have to say based on totally unscientific research I’ve done, most men have a little belly.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I think you’re right. Probably like 95% of men have some sort of abdominal fat that they probably wish they didn’t have.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, but I’m here to say a lot of men with a little bit or a lot of abdominal fat are having great real-world sex.
Your cellulite does not dictate whether you can have awesome sex. How your body looks has no bearing over how much pleasure you can experience.
So yeah, there’s the emotional hurdle of feeling comfortable in front of the camera, we just don’t see real bodies moving.
I mean, we’re basically trained by— I don’t know, media diet industry, to see like flesh jiggling or moving on our body as something like really abhorrent.
Shaun Galanos: And hair. No hair in porn. No hairy bodies.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, no hairy bodies. So there’s that and then just getting used to how your orgasm pays. 51:42 There’s that like, it’s beautiful, but it’s not always like a supermodel beautiful, which is not the only kind of beautiful.
It’s totally up to personal choice again.
Then I think communicating with your partner because I found that communicating about shooting a video, planning it, talking about it, it opens you up to just talking more about sex in general with your partner and I don’t really think that’s a hurdle.
Shaun Galanos: That’s a side effect like a positive side effect.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, but you have to be able to broach the subject.
Shaun Galanos: If you’re not used to it, which most of us aren’t really that great at talking about sex either before during or after sex.
It teaches you that you’re going to have to talk about it, you don’t just spontaneously set up a camera without telling your partner.
Sarah Beall: No, don’t do that.
Shaun Galanos: That’s not going to get accepted.
It’s a hurdle in the sense that it’s not something that we do, but it’s also like a beautiful side effect of making these videos is that you get to become closer to your partner.
Is there something you want to cover that we didn’t cover?
Sarah Beall: I would just really encourage your listeners to try shooting their own real-world sex video. I think even if you don’t ever share it, it can just be a really interesting experience.
I think you can learn a lot about yourself and your partner if you have one.
I would also encourage everyone in your audience to become a Make Love Not Porn star.
We have people on our site submitting videos they range in age from about 19 to 80.
Shaun Galanos: Wow.
Sarah Beall: All different ages genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities. Everyone is welcome and in particular, right now, we are looking to have more queer representation on our site.
If you are queer in your hearing this and you go to the site and you don’t see a ton of queer folks, we want you to share your real-world sex so that we can showcase it.
Shaun Galanos: You heard it, we encourage you to make your own videos, and then if you’re comfortable, we’re also encouraging you to become a Make Love Not Porn star, and especially strong shout out to all the queer folks so that we can get different types of sex that we just aren’t used to seeing that often.
Sarah Beall: Yeah, we’re entirely user-generated.
We don’t produce any of our own content, so if you don’t see yourself represented and you feel like giving it a go, please do.
Shaun Galanos: Do you have a parting thought for our listeners?
Sarah Beall: I would just say be kind to yourself.
We’re all human, the world is kind of a dark place right now.
The work that I do is about helping people sort of just embrace themselves in for who they are, perfectly Imperfect.
So be kind to yourself and others and communicate. Talk to your friends about sex.
Shaun Galanos: Oh nice, that’s a good one. Thank you so much, appreciate it.
Sarah Beall: My pleasure.
