Cindy Gallop wants you to have good sex, for real. In 2009 the New York City-based advertising executive gave a four-minute talk at a TED conference that became one of the event’s most talked about presentations. “I date younger men, predominantly men in their 20s,” was her opening line, and she went on to discuss the obvious influence of hardcore porn on the sex techniques of her young lovers. According to Gallop, internet porn has created a generation of young people who think that “what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.” Basically, in the absence of proper sex-ed, porn has become the default sex-educator.

Gallop used her TED talk to unveil makelovenotporn.com, a witty, non-judgmental website that compares sex in the “porn world” to that in the “real world”. For example: “Porn World: Women come all the time in positions where nothing is going anywhere near the clit. Real World: There has to be some sort of rhythmic pressure on the clit in just the right way to make a woman come. Can be public bone, tongue, fingers, something else entirely. But it has to be there.” Oh, how true.

The site became a worldwide phenomenon, leading Gallop to publish the book Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. Four years later, she’s now preparing to launch makelovenotporn.tv, a video-based social-media site that aims to revolutionise sexual entertainment by offering videos of real people having real sex. Say goodbye to smoke and mirrors and anal bleaching –this is the real deal!

The best thing about makelovenotporn.com is that it’s funny. It’s so much less awkward to talk about sex when there’s humour involved.
Exactly. I wrote all the copy myself, and I deliberately made it lighthearted to defuse the embarrassment that exists around talking about sex. Also, when I was creating the site I said to my designer, ‘I don't want the slightest whiff of education or public service about it,’ because that’s the kiss of death where kids are concerned. I said, ‘I want you to take your design cues from the world of hardcore porn.’

And were you surprised by the response?
The response has been so extraordinary. I’ve been receiving emails about the site literally every day for the past four years. They tend to go something like this: ‘I came across your TED talk, I went to your website, I shared them both with my girlfriend/boyfriend/lover, and off the back of that we had a great conversation, and now our sex life is so much better.’ Essentially, the site is working as an objective, outside platform that helps people have the conversations they need to have.

You’re like the Santa Claus of good sex! So can you explain your new venture, makelovenotporn.tv?
Well, the sheer amount of emails I received made me feel that I had a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forward, in a way that would make it more far-reaching and effective. One of my philosophies – born of my advertising background – is ‘communication through demonstration’. So I decided to take every dynamic that currently exists in social media, and apply them to the one area no other social platform has gone or will ever dare to go: sex. I want to socialise sex, and to make real-world sex socially acceptable, and therefore just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. So makelovenotporn.tv is a user-generated, crowdsourced platform on which anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real-world sex.

And how do you define real-world sex?
Real-world sex is not performing for the camera; it's funny, messy, human, and ridiculous. It's the shit that really happens. For example, the total nightmare of putting the condom on. Guys are supposed to be able to do this like magic, but as we all know it often doesn't happen like that, and sometimes things go soft, juices go dry and libidos get derailed. Or fanny farts – everyone does it, nothing to be ashamed of. Also, I find it so amusing when people talk about porn being “dirty”, because porn actually sanitises sex. In porn nobody has hair, you never actually see anybody using lube, or having sex on their period, when actually that’s when girls are the horniest! So we want categories like ‘period sex’ – bring it on, blood everywhere – no big deal, take the tampon out with your teeth.

So your site will show actual orgasms, not the fake, overdramatic screamed orgasms common in mainstream porn?
Totally. For example, our very first submission was from a young straight couple, and as I was watching it, no matter how hot what they were doing to each other was, I just could not stop looking at the girl’s face. And the reason was because she was loving it. She was so aroused that it became adorable. You never see faces like that in porn.

Will there be a fee for users?
We charge $5 per video for a three-week streaming rental. We also charge $5 to submit a video to the site, which is a curation fee, as my team and I will review all submissions. But then we revenue share – we give you, the contributor, 50% of the revenue that your makelovenotporn.TV video generates.

Whoa, so one can potentially make a lot of money.
Absolutely! In theory, your video could hit the YouTube holy grail of a million rentals, and at $5 a rental, the revenue is a nice amount of cash. That’s why we like to call ourselves ‘the Etsy of Sexy’.

Does makelovenotporn.tv have a primary ambition?
The message is pure and simple: talk about it. The issue I'm tackling is not porn, I'm tackling our society’s lack of an open, healthy dialogue around sex and porn. Because people find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they're actually having it with, because they’re terrified of hurting the other person’s feelings, or putting them off, or derailing the entire relationship. But at the same time, people really want to please their partners and make them happy, so they take cues on how to please from anywhere they can, and if the only cues people have are from porn, then those are the ones they take, to not very good effect.

And is it only men who are being misled by this sex-ed-through-porn trend?
Not at all. I talk to young men who say, ‘My girlfriend is putting on a performance in bed and it’s getting in the way of a real connection.’ One guy said, ‘I've been getting a lot of pornified blowjobs lately. I don't know whether she's really into me or if it’s what she thinks she should be doing.' So it cuts both ways.

That makes sense.
And porn does a massive disservice for men, because it makes them think that sex is entirely dick-centric – it’s all about how big it is and how hard it is. For example, the other night I was with a 25-year-old, and for whatever reason he was having some trouble getting it up. I didn’t mind, but obviously he cared massively, and so as unfortunately often happens in these situations, the entire session became about his need to get it up and cum. And I was thinking, well, there’s actually a whole different way to approach us being in bed together, and it doesn't have to be all about addressing your penis. Great sex is about the whole body. I deliberately spend time telling the men I sleep with how beautiful they are, and praising various parts of their bodies that aren't their dick, and they're stunned when I do this, because that’s not something they've even conceptualised. So for a lot of men, porn is causing unnecessary neuroses and insecurity.

Do you think people truly have difficulty understanding that porn is not an accurate representation of real sex? That it’s sensationalised for entertainment, just like regular films?
I had this conversation with some students in Oxford recently, because they were saying, ‘Come on, how could anybody think that porn is real? It's like disaster movies or police chases.’ But here's the difference: you can watch The Fast and the Furious, but everybody knows and talks about how to drive in real life. But with sex there’s no counterpoint, because we don't talk about how sex operates in the real world. That’s why our tagline is 'Pro-Sex, Pro-Porn, and Pro-Knowing-the-Difference'.

You have said you think makelovenotporn.tv could actually benefit the mainstream porn industry. How so?
Porn is a male-dominated industry. Now, the best of all possible worlds, in every sector, is one that is designed by men and women equally. I explain to guys that us girls like porn too – who doesn’t like to watch other people fucking?! – but often we have to watch porn that’s made for men. So I'm watching porn and trying to get off, but I can't avoid processing it through the lens of female experience. I can’t help but think, ‘I know that hurts – if she keeps her leg up one more moment she's going to get a cramp, I know she's not actually coming,’ etc. But I want to see real-life sex, because I’m much more in tune emotionally with something I can relate to. The world of porn hasn't even begun to experience what women can bring to the table. Make Love Not Porn is a venture founded by a woman, conceived by a woman, and built by a tech team that is more female than male. So that's part of how we want to help the porn industry – by demonstrating that it’s possible to create a disruptive, innovative new business model, and to leverage human sexuality entertainment in a whole different way.

To get the essence of Damien Echols’ character you need only look at the footage of him, aged 19, being sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. “You will be administered a continuous intravenous injection of a lethal quantity of an ultra-short acting barbiturate, in combination with a chemical paralytic agent, into your body, until you are dead,” is how the judge put it. In this moment, Echols stood with his head tilted back, almost arrogantly so. His posture was loose under his black t-shirt. Even as his girlfriend ran screaming from the courtroom, he never lost his cool. Ever sardonic, even in the face of death.

It was in 1994 that Echols was found guilty of the brutal murders of three eight-year-old boys. Convicted along with him and sentenced to life imprisonment were Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr, aged 17 and 16 respectively. Commonly known as the West Memphis Three, the teens were accused of murdering the children as part of a satanic ritual, but there were questions hanging over their guilt from the beginning. The story gained worldwide attention through the 1996 HBO documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which detailed a series of investigatory errors that indicated that the conviction was made under almost entirely false premises.

In the proceeding years, the perplexing and sensational case became the subject of two more Paradise Lost documentaries, multiple books and vast media and celebrity attention, in turn generating the West Memphis Three an army of devoted supporters. Finally, on August 19, 2011, after 18 years and 78 days in prison, the men were released on the grounds of a lack of DNA evidence. Echols’ release was one of the most high-profile releases of a death-row inmate in American history.

Today, in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Echols reclines in a floral armchair, next to a window overlooking Central Park. Dressed all in black, with skin of a striking pallor, he appears tired. He’s in New York as part of a press tour for his new memoir, Life After Death, and to promote West of Memphis, a new documentary by award-winning documentarian Amy Berg that highlights fresh evidence in the case. It’s been over a year since his release, but Echols has had little time to relax.

“People are always talking about this case like it’s extraordinary, but it really isn’t,” he says in his soft southern drawl. “This happens all the time – people get murdered, things get swept under the rug, and nobody thinks twice about it. We were three kids: bottom of the barrel, poor white trash. They thought they could just throw us in jail and we’d be forgotten. The only thing that made our case an exception was that there were film crews in the courtroom who caught everything on tape.” It’s an eerily poignant statement, given the recent string of criminal exonerations through DNA testing that have forced America to face the fallibility of its justice system. Since the first such case in 1989, over 300 people in the United States have been released from prison on the basis of new DNA evidence. Eighteen of them had served time on death row.

The bodies of the three young boys, Christopher Byers, Stevie Edward Branch and Michael Moore, were found in May 1993 in a drainage canal in Robin Hood Hills, a wooded area in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, where almost a third of the population live below the poverty line and more than one in four people have less than a complete high-school education. It’s Bible-beltcountry, the land of teased hair, where people are born but rarely leave, and where time moves slowly, or not at all.

When found, the bodies of the children were stripped naked, and each had been hogtied with shoelaces – right wrist to right ankle, left wrist to left ankle. They appeared to have been mutilated, specifically Byers, who was found castrated. Unsurprisingly, the grotesque nature of the murders had emotions in the town running wild, intensified by rumours of rape, forced oral-sex and genital mutilation. The murders happened at a time when an irrational fear of satanic cult violence was sweeping America, fuelled by sensational media coverage. Police officers in West Memphis felt the crime had “cult” overtones, which led them to suspect Echols – a self-proclaimed Wiccan whose black clothing, long hair and affection for heavy metal and the occult made him an outsider in the small, conservative town.

Looking for information on Echols, police questioned an acquaintance of his, Misskelley, whose IQ of 72 classified him as mildly disabled. After being interrogated for nearly 12 hours, Misskelley confessed to the crime, implicating Echols and Baldwin (Echols’ close friend) along with him. There was immediate doubt surrounding the confession, as many felt it was coerced out of Misskelley through leading questions by the police, and because parts of Misskelley’s statement were inconsistent with the facts of the crime. Though he recanted within hours, it played a major part in the three convictions.

If a trial is a contest of competing narratives, then this particularly dramatic narrative – rumours of murders performed as part of a satanic ritual – had the power to outcompete truth, implicating Echols based on his character and appearance rather than concrete evidence. In keeping with the convoluted nature of the case, the conditions of the three men’s eventual release were bizarre. Under a deal with the prosecutors, they had to plead guilty to the murders, while still declaring their innocence – what is known as an “Alford plea”. For everyone involved in the defence, the deal was bittersweet.

“There are so many people and things and situations that formed the chain that got me out of prison, that if you remove one single link in that chain, I’d be dead right now,” says Echols flatly. “And the very first link in that chain was the first documentary, which I really feel played a huge part in saving my life.” The original courtroom footage, referenced by Echols earlier, was the basis for what would become Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. Seen by millions, the documentary rallied celebrity support: Johnny Depp launched a campaign for their release, rock stars Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins performed benefit concerts to raise awareness and funds and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson went so far as to finance a new investigation of the crime. But the heart of the movement was always about the kinship people felt with the three imprisoned young men, who became reluctant martyrs in the name of every kid who’s ever been picked on, singled out or called a freak. It’s a strange place to be in: solely by virtue of being wrongly convicted, you are suddenly a celebrity, a hero. But Echols always played the part well. He was the perfect bad boy: young, beautiful, irreverent, articulate. The courtroom footage of him is remarkable – goofing off for the camera, styling his hair, smiling charismatically, ultimately too innocent to think he could ever be convicted for a crime he didn’t commit.

There’s one particularly chilling interview with Echols on Court TV, filmed two years after his sentencing, in which an off-camera interviewer asks him if there’s anything he wishes he could change about his life before the trial. He responds: “I don’t think I’d change anything that’s ever happened in my entire life. I don’t think there was anything I could do to change (what happened). What, become a clone? Give up my personality? Give up my identity? Just march along like everyone else? I’d rather die.”

Following his release, Echols and his wife (who he fell in love with and married while in prison) moved to New York City, where they lived for a year before relocating to Salem, Massachusetts, last autumn. As the site of the most famous witch trials in history and a modern Mecca for alternative spirituality, it’s an all-too-fitting home for Echols, who became passionate about energy work and meditation while incarcerated.

“Salem is the only place in the world where I’m in the majority,” he laughs. “While I was in prison, I was ordained in the Rinzai tradition of Japanese Buddhism. I also had to learn Reiki and Qi Gong energy-working techniques, because on death row there’s no medical care, because there’s no point in spending time and money on someone you’re going to kill. I was in solitary confinement for ten years, I didn’t see sunlight for almost a decade, and I was eating garbage. There were times when I was so sick that I literally thought I was going to die before the night was over – times when I was in the most horrendous pain – and the only things I had to rely on were these energy techniques.”

Echols also devoted a large amount of his time inside to reading and writing. Despite dropping out of school in ninth grade (the highest formal education of anyone in his family), he is an autodidact who read obsessively from a young age, including thousands of books while incarcerated. “For the first few years I was in prison I couldn’t write, because I was so psychologically scarred by the way the police and lawyers had taken my own writing and twisted it, in order to use it against me,” he says, referring to things he’d written as a teenager which dealt with the occult, which were later used as evidence of his Satanism. “I really had to force myself to work through those emotional and psychological blocks to write.” In 2005, he self-published his first book, an autobiography titled Almost Home. While inside he also wrote lyrics with Pearl Jam and Michale Graves of the Misfits. His new memoir, Life After Death, avoids the details of the case, instead discussing his life on death row, as well as his childhood.

Something that is clearly absent from Echols’ story is his family, who do not appear in the documentaries. “I’ve never really been close to my family,” he says. “My father left when I was seven, and my mother gave me away to my grandmother when I was three years old because she couldn’t raise both me and my sister. So my grandmother was really the only person I considered family, but she died when I was in jail waiting to go to trial. I saw my sister maybe twice in the entire 18 years I was in prison. My biological mother came to see me a handful of times, but it was always pretty fucking horrible.”

However, in light of a new Hollywood film being made about the case, Echols’ mother and sister have suddenly appeared in the media, and have a book coming out detailing their side of the story. “The funny thing is, I haven’t known my mother or sister to read a book in their entire lives, but now they’ve apparently written one,” he laughs. “Somebody brought to my attention recently that they were selling t-shirts with my tattoos on them. They’re not making any effort to reach out to me, but they’re selling t-shirts, keychains, coffee mugs, and fucking cellphone covers.” Echols tells this story without revealing the slightest bit of anger. Always calm, always in control. “I don’t hate them,” he says. “I just want to stay as far away from them as possible.”

Filming is underway on the movie, the Atom Egoyan-directed Devil’s Knot, which stars Reece Witherspoon and Colin Firth and is based on Mara Leveritt’s book of the same name. It credits Baldwin and Misskelley among its executive producers, a fact which has led to a public falling-out between Baldwin and Echols. “That movie is foul,” says Echols. “They’re saying it’s based on Leveritt’s book, but nothing in it is accurate. In the screenplay there’s a scene where Reese Witherspoon, who plays one of the victim’s mothers, wakes up in the middle of the night and sees me standing in her bedroom with blood running from my mouth, from when I’d been chewing on the bodies. There’s another scene where I take a woman to a satanic orgy and cut her and drink her blood. And the people making the film say, “Oh, that’s just a dream sequence,” or, “It’s just illustrating what someone is thinking.” But you know when they make the trailer that those are the scenes they’re going to stitch together.” The movie also completely cuts Echols’ wife from the story, who, he says, did 85 per cent of the work on the case, and quit her job to work on it full-time. “But I’m not allowed to say much more about it,” he says, “because they’ll sue me.”

Since his release, Echols has also done some acting himself, playing a part in the upcoming IRL, about a girl’s (Sky Ferreira) dark adventures in NYC. The 20-minute short was directed by Grant Singer and written by Dazed contributor Patrick Sandberg. “I play a guy who works in a gun shop who tries to convince Sky that she needs weapons to protect herself against the monsters in the big city,” he laughs. “I liked doing it, mainly because it felt very ‘New York’.”

But Echols can’t devote his life to movies and meditation and casually hanging out with Johnny Depp just yet, for there is still work to be done. Because the West Memphis Three technically pleaded guilty, no further action can be taken in the case until the three are exonerated. West of Memphis focuses on this goal, and highlights a possible new suspect in Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of victim Stevie Branch. The film reveals that new forensic tests found DNA from Hobbs (who has a history of violence) at the crime scene, and displays expert testimony stating that the “mutilation” of the bodies, originally thought to be evidence of a satanic ritual, was more probably the result of post-mortem animal predation in the wooded area where the bodies were found.

In light of the accusations against him, Hobbs had created his own, early-2000’s-looking website, terryhobbs.com, with a header-bar that reads, “I am a quiet, laidback man who loves my children and is always there when needed. I love to play guitar and write uplifting music – every message is positive.” If you scroll down you will also notice off-putting photos of him “goofily” re-enacting stabbings in a wooded area with his family members, accompanied by such captions as, “The day was beautiful and we enjoyed it like a regular family. Nobody was fighting and there wasn’t any drama.”

“The person who killed those three kids is still out there walking the streets,” says Echols sternly. “I’m not pointing a finger at anyone, I’m just saying we should let the evidence speak for itself. Not myth or rumour or ghost stories, but concrete, physical evidence. There is significant evidence against Hobbs – there’s DNA evidence linking him to the crime scene and three eyewitnesses who say they saw him on the day of the murder, with all three boys.

“It makes me feel physically sick to talk about this,” he continues. “The only thing I can compare it to is being car sick. But as hard as it is to keep ripping open these wounds, I understand that it’s a necessary evil. I’m looking forward to the day when I can finally put this all behind me, but this isn’t the time. This isn’t that day.”

West of Memphis is out on December 21

This interview was taken from the January 2013 Issue of Dazed & Confused

Photography by Michael Avedon

A story in leather, lacquer, babycat, denim and pussy bows, Hedi Slimane’s first collection in five years takes a rock wardrobe and infuses it with the youth explosion that characterised Saint Laurent’s ready-to-wear line in the 60s, Rive Gauche. In many ways the tale here is one of genesis, as what the late Yves Saint Laurent did as the first couturier to propose luxury ready-to-wear with the spirit of the street, Hedi Slimane did from the late 90s to 2007, redefining menswear both in silhouette and attitude. Essentially, as Saint Laurent liberated women, Slimane did so for men.

Since 2007 the influential designer has concentrated on a parallel career in photography, introducing the monochrome illusive portrait – what the camera shouldn’t see – into contemporary culture. His images are charged with the ethos of what he began in fashion, demonstrating a talent for capturing the spirit of our time that goes beyond clothes, however sublime.

On his return to design, there is a notion of planets aligning. Slimane’s installation at Saint Laurent befits the wishes of both the late Monsieur Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berg, to whom the debut women’s catwalk show was dedicated.

As stores are reconceptualised under Saint Laurent’s original helvetica logo, Dazed heralds a new fashion epoch by heading to Stockholm to shoot a 2012 youthquake on a group of professional and street-cast models. Here we present an extended image edit from the magazine editorial and meet the boys from the shoot.

CinematographyMartin Rinman
Edited byInessa Tsulimova

PhotographyFumi Nagasaka
StylingRobbie Spencer
GroomingSharin at Link Details
ModelsAdam and Peder at Nisch Management, Daniel, Hugo, Kimie, Martin at Stockholmsgruppen
Photographic AssistantHannah Richter
Styling AssistantUlrika Lindqvist
RetouchingColor One NYC
Special Thanks ToJane Glandal, Meghan Scott, Hjalmar Klitse

All clothes Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane SS13 menswear

The stories' lead protagonist, Hugo, soundtracked the film with his band Side Effects. Visit theirofficial Facebook page