In this special ‘Spotlight’ episode of BITE BIG, Amber Bonney goes head-to-head with one of the most fearless, sharp-tongued and unapologetically disruptive forces in global advertising and tech, Cindy Gallop, CEO & Founder of Make Love, Not Porn.
Cindy Gallop has spent 17 years building a business that the advertising industry trained her for and then refused to fund. That's not a complaint. It's a blueprint.
When the former BBH president stood at a TED conference in 2009 and launched Make Love Not Porn — a platform designed to counter the damage pornography does to real-world sexual relationships — she wasn't making a career pivot. She was doing what every great brand strategist does: identifying a market failure and building the solution. What she didn't anticipate was how long the world would take to catch up.
Seventeen years later, MakeLoveNotPorn is still fighting — and Cindy Gallop is still going. In this episode of BITE BIG, she and Amber Bonney get into all of it: the funding battles, the algorithmic suppression, the UK campaign that's trying to make Britain talk openly about sex, and the one thing she wants investors to understand. "We operate in the single biggest market of them all," she says. "Not sex. Not porn. The market of human happiness."
Cindy's mantra — "don't give a damn what anyone thinks" — didn't arrive fully formed. She's clear about that. It's the product of 66 years of life, and specifically of growing older in a world that spends enormous energy making women feel insecure about everything they are. "Fear of what other people think is the single most paralysing dynamic in business and in life," she says. "You will never own the future if you care what anyone thinks." What's interesting is how deliberately she wants to shortcut that process for younger women — to pass the freedom on before perimenopause, as Amber put it. There's a real urgency in that: not just permission to be bold, but an argument that boldness is actually the only rational strategy.
This is the line that will stay with you. When Amber raised the topic of women's financial literacy programs and whether they help close the gap, Cindy didn't celebrate them — she called them out. Her argument: we don't run programs to make men "board ready." We don't coach them into confidence. "We're ready now," she says. "It's just that we're not given the promotions and we're not written the checks." There's something sharp here that goes beyond the usual gender equity conversation. The real issue isn't women's capability. It's that the infrastructure of money — who has it, how it's socialised, who feels entitled to write a cheque — was built by men, for men. Cindy's ask is simple: skip the programs. Write the fucking check.
One of the most revealing parts of this conversation is Cindy explaining why conventional investor outreach doesn't work for MakeLoveNotPorn. Her potential investors can't be found through industry filters or LinkedIn searches — because their willingness to fund her is entirely a function of their own personal relationship with sex and sexuality. "You cannot tell from the outside what anyone thinks on the inside," she says. People who look like they'd get it don't. People who look like complete prudes do. So she has to make the connections happen through constant visibility — every media appearance, every social post, every conversation — and wait for the right synaptic spark. It's a long, slow, highly inefficient process. And it's a reminder that some of the most important work in the world is being stalled not by lack of logic, but by lack of personal resonance.
Cindy is launching what she describes, deliberately, as the Google of sex ed: a global aggregator for the world's best sex education content, which is currently being blocked, censored and de-platformed everywhere it tries to live. The mission — to organise the world's sex education information and make it universally accessible — is a direct paraphrase of Google's original mission statement. Because today, she says, Google itself isn't doing that. The algorithm is biased. The censorship is real. And parents and teachers are being failed by the infrastructure they were told to trust. MakeLoveNotPorn.academy is live in early beta. If you believe in the mission, become a paid member. If you're an investor, now would be a good time to reach out.
Cindy Gallop is one of the most important voices in this space, and one of the most underfunded. Both of those things should bother you.
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