Gallop's Social Sex Revolution Starts Here

Richard Christiansen, founder and CD, Chandelier Creative

Can you tell us a bit more about the residency and how the invitation to MLNP came about?

As a creative agency it’s essential that we stay inspired. We create the ongoing happenings at Mermaid Ranch as part of a much our larger vision to use our creative resources to bring people together to shine a light on the people, ideas and movements in our culture that we feel are making our world a brighter and better place.

Making art and films, curating and hosting talks and salons are ways we use our spaces to support and generate culture that inspires us and hopefully the world at large too. Whether it’s the artists, thinkers and makers we support or the members of our team with a burning desire to create outside the advertising form – we’ve found that we’re at our best when we’re making things that impact the world in positive ways.

We wanted to support Cindy and MLNP for a number of reasons but mainly because we were intrigued and inspired by her courage as well as the nature of the MLNP platform and the vision of what the success of it could mean for so many people.

The opportunity to create a piece like this with this kind of topic and an all female crew was an immensely inspiring experience. Thalia and her team from The Front were endlessly inspiring to work with, bringing true auteur sensibilities to the table.

Thalia Mavros, director, The Front

What appealed to you about this project?

As a founder of The Front, I tend to be very selective about the projects we take on. From our own projects to creative collaborations to brand partnerships, we are attracted to great stories, impressive collaborators and an alignment of values.

The Front is what we like to call a new media cult built on feminism and Cindy Gallop is a legendary provocateur, an agitator for social change and a tenacious warrior for gender diversity. Her platform MakeLoveNotPorn embodies similar values to ours and I was excited to spend time with the community in the early stages of changing the way our society views and speaks about sex.

We also consider ourselves a creative cultural force and love to find like-minded cultural collaborators and beyond the great advertising work, Chandelier impressed me because of their strong cultural initiatives, originally brought to my attention by the Dolly Parton exhibition and then reinforced by their “Summer of Sex and Love” artist residency. Richard, Jason and Alexandre do an amazing job of cultural creation and curation. 

The Front is fueled by the passion for powerful stories about the complexity of the human condition; passion for the creative force that runs through our lives; passion for media with purpose, intention and humor; and a passion to create a future in which we’d like to live. What better project to take on?

Had you ever worked with this sort of subject-matter before?

Not in my professional life! No, but really, if you embrace the fact that sex is only a portion of what constitutes sexuality then this project is a natural extension of many of my films. I’m drawn to telling stories that unearth the things that motivate us, impassion us, and often sexuality is a key component.  One of my next films takes on sexuality but from a totally fresh angle -  by looking at  one of our culture’s most enduring and subversive symbols: leather.  It’ll explore the language of leather through stories of people who’ve used it as a means of challenging identity.

What were the biggest challenges involved in putting the documentary together?

Real World Sex is physical, mental, spiritual and social. Filming and capturing the complex and mysterious relationship between all four is no small feat. In return, we discovered the most incredible diversity of experiences and realized there are so many more stories to uncover in the wider MLNP community. We’re currently developing a docuseries based on those stories in collaboration with MLNP and its MLNPstars.

How easy was it to make a documentary about real-world sex without actually showing the sex?

Most of the mystery of real world sex is so about what happens before and after the act. While editing the piece, we realized much of the power lay beyond the physical act—in the characters’ desires, fears, connection with their audiences and their courage and motivation to be part of a brand new movement.

How did you find a stylistic balance between art and authenticity?

As a documentarian, I’m not sure I can separate the two. I’m a visual person but at the same time, my main mission is to connect with my characters and tell stories through them. By the time I turn on the camera, I inhabit their worlds and seek to share them with humanity.

Cindy Gallop, founder, MakeLoveNotPorn 

Why was Thalia the right director for the job?

I specifically proposed to Chandelier that we work with a female director, because I wanted the documentary to be approached through a female lens. In the nine years I’ve been working on MLNP,  I’ve found that the very issue MLNP is tackling – how the shame and embarrassment society imbues sex with makes it difficult to operate around normally – means people all too easily default to standard, stereotyped approaches to covering us, particularly when the lens is male.

I wanted an innovative, enlightened, insightful approach for a film about a unique movement and business, with, not coincidentally, a predominantly female team running it, and I felt a female director would deliver that. Chandelier embraced this idea and proposed Thalia and The Front, and I could not be more delighted that they did. Thalia blew me away both before and during the shoot. I have been so impressed with Thalia’s vision, understanding, creativity, sensitivity, and ingenuity  when it comes to the key task of any documentary – observing, drawing out and documenting the real world in a way that fully engages the audience.  And her all-female crew were fantastic. 

Ultimately, what are you hoping to achieve with this documentary and screening?

Three things:

Firstly, this documentary is important for us because it captures what MLNP is all about in exactly the same way our social sex videos capture what #realworldsex is all about – by observing and presenting what we are doing as it happens, versus through the all too often pre-determined lens or narrative with which a lot media coverage processes us. At the screening we combined the documentary with a curated edit of our MLNP videos, This Is Social Sex, which for the screening audience will help their understanding even more. It’s impossible not to sit through that edit without a big smile on your face all the way through – that’s how charming, funny, endearing, joyful, celebratory social sex is, particularly in a communal screening context.

Secondly, I want Chandelier Creative to get full credit for being the only agency in our industry to see the importance of what MLNP is doing, to approach me of their own initiative and to have been so unbelievably supportive and willing to undertake this project with us. I’ve gone on record in the media highlighting my disappointment that, separate to my many individual friends in the industry who applaud what we’re doing, there’s been a lack of industry support at the corporate level.  It says a lot about Richard Christiansen as an innovative creative leader, that he reached out and made all of this happen.

And finally, I hope that everyone in our industry looking for a kickass director will hire Thalia Mavros and The Front immediately.

What’s next on the agenda for MLNP?

I’m continuing to try to raise the $2million we need to scale.  Given how challenging this is, I realized a couple of years back that I needed to do what I tell other entrepreneurs: When you have a truly world-changing start-up, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way round. So I began defining, pioneering and championing my own category – sextech - which is any form of technology or tech venture designed to innovate, disrupt and enhance in any area of human sexuality and human sexual experience. I speak at tech conferences about why The Next Big Thing in tech is disrupting sex.

But the challenges continue – so I realized last year I needed to take it to the next level. In order to get my own startup funded, I have to get the category funded.  So I am now also raising $10million to start the world’s first and only sextech fund.  The name of my fund derives from Mao Tse Tung’s quote ‘Women hold up half the sky’. I think that’s unambitious, so my fund is called AllTheSky Holdings. The derivation is deliberate, because my fund will have a primary focus on radically innovative sextech ventures founded by women. 

The most interesting things in sextech are coming from female founders – as I like to say, women challenge the status quo because we are never it. We get the enormous financial potential of the market that is women’s needs, wants and desires historically deemed too embarrassing, shameful or taboo to address through businesses – and when you tap into that huge primary market, you also tap a huge secondary market of extremely happy men.

So I’m raising the world’s first sextech fund, and I welcome interested industry investors to contact me at cindy@makelovenotporn.com.