If sex sells, why are many marketers shy of using it well?

Unilever ignored an approach to comment on such marketing strategies. So did mattress companies Casper and Sealy. And car brands Toyota, Ford, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Bentley and Nissan declined to comment. General Motors said it would "prefer not to participate" -- more than once. Refinery29 said it wanted to "sit this one out."

Aston Martin, however, addressed it head-on.

Simon Sproule, vice president and chief marketing officer, stressed safety must take precedence in the car business, but said the idea could have legs in the aftermarket.

"We design a product that has to meet many varied and complex legislative requirements. Most important of those is safety," he told Campaign U.S.

"Anything that deviates from creating a safe place for driver and occupants is not something we would even be able to consider. Now, there is a flourishing aftermarket in the car business."

Sproule explained that companies are peddling products which cater for pets, "but that’s probably as far as it extends." He notes that child seats, which fall under the aftermarket category, must too adhere to strict legislation in its design and how it’s fitted into a vehicle.

"Our focus is getting both occupants home to a place where they can indulge in a more suitable environment," he continued.

"It’s all very well throwing out lots of very interesting ideas, but there is a commercial reality to this and I certainly don’t see any manufacturer anytime soon getting involved in trying to engineer something that may meet [Gallop’s] ideas."

The CMO said he’s never -- in his 25 years of being in the business -- sat in on a meeting where sex is raised as a research or marketing component.

Then again, "maybe I’ve been sat in the wrong meetings," Sproule joked, concluding: "I don’t think [the idea] is grounded in any practical reality for car makers, but the aftermarket and customer personalization knows no bounds, so who knows? Maybe the aftermarket will pick this idea up."

Jason Vines, a three-decade veteran of the automotive industry where he held positions at the helm of PR across Ford, Nissan and Chrysler, said sex has historically played a role in the marketing of cars, but does not believe using such direct messaging would work today.

"Sex and marketing in the car industry has been going on forever," he said. "But if you’re going to market to have sex in cars, why don’t we do a little more marketing around texting in cars? There’s been sex in cars since maybe the 20s, but to market that wouldn’t work."

Vines says this because he was with Chrysler when he saw the marketing team devise the infamous "Concorde" TV ad that eventually got pulled. The comedic spot centered around conversation between a mom and daughter. The young girl asks her mom why she’s named "Savannah," to which mom bluntly replies: "We named you after the place you were conceived." The daughter then asks why her sister is called "Concorde," spots the name on the car dashboard and cries out in disgust.

"It was outrageous," said Vines. "How could you do that at all? How could you bring that up?"

For some, the message of a spacious interior was driven home with an innuendo too far. But this was nearly 20 years ago. Vines knows culture has shifted, and the automotive industry is still trying to shake-off the cobwebs of its past and -- in some ways -- present.

"Sex is involved in everything, but recently [advertising has] boiled down to men being dumbasses and women being smarter," he said. "It’s funny, because we are the industry that really defiled women when they came into showrooms. We treat women like crap, probably still today -- you walk [into a showroom] and you’re not treated seriously because you’re a woman."

Today, Gallop wrangles with this same "patriarchy" and society's hyper-sensitivity of sex in more ways than one.

"We fight an enormous battle to build our business every day," she said, "because every single piece of business infrastructure -- any other tech startup takes for granted -- we can’t use because the small-print says ‘no adult content.’ And this is all pervasive across all areas of the business in ways that people out of the sphere don’t understand."

MLNP’s biggest operational challenge has been the payment process -- PayPal doesn’t work with adult content.

In fact, the lukewarm reception has been so consistent that it’s taken four years to find a bank willing to help fund the business. Everything prior to its recent cash injection (in the millions, we’re told), has been pulled entirely from Gallop’s pocket.

But now she’s ready to take MLNP to the next level. Armed with 500,000 members globally -- all built organically from media coverage and search -- her 2018 goal is growth (but not before she takes a vacation, which she promised to herself the moment she secured funding).

Education now leads to "orgasmic leadership" in the near future

Rachel Braun Scherl, CEO of Spark Solutions for Growth, global keynote speaker on entrepreneurship and female leadership, and author of Orgasmic Leadership, heaps praise on the Gallop movement, but questions her timeline for transformation.

"I do think we’re making progress," Scherl said. "What I like about Cindy is she’s the one who’s so far ahead with a pretty extreme perspective, and it’s that type of bold thinking that will keep us moving.

"I don’t think we will get as far as she wants us to as quickly as possible. Where Cindy is going is like the Holy Grail. And I would never bet against her, but we have a lot of work to do to get to where we’re talking about."

Scherl explained that some companies in the incontinent space are already broaching sex as a marketing tool by encouraging women to fix the problem by strengthening the pelvic muscle which, by the way, may lead to a better experience in bed.

You have to think big to change the conversation. But more work needs to be done on education, argues Scherl.

"Less than 50 percent of states in the U.S. even require sex education," she said. "Of those, not all of them require it to be scientifically factual. We don’t have a vocabulary to have a conversation."

That means people (alarmingly young people) are being educated by porn. It’s led to an unconscious fusion of porn’s dictionary and marketing. Think about the Viagra’s of the world. This particular brand has been stocking shelves for 20 years, and inundating consumers with language that screams "bigger, longer, stronger."

"That language doesn’t apply to women," Scherl added. "They don’t think of sex as a performance sport. We don’t even have the language to have a mature conversation.

"The fear, combined with the lack of knowledge, combined with belief that might have been handed down that might not make sense any more, has created an environment where it is too terrifying to have the conversation. ‘Vagina,’ ‘labia’ or ‘clitorious’ can’t be words that people are uncomfortable with saying on TV."

The person who coined the term ‘getting her ass railed’ never got his ass railed

There’s no socially acceptable vocabulary because porn has rushed in to fill that gap. But now it has competition: stripping back the language of love is on the top of MLNP’s manifesto.

Words associated with vulgarity like "squirt" and "creampie" have been replaced with "juicy" and "succulent." Searches for "oral" on MLNP won’t offer as much as "downtown" -- the website’s word of choice for oral sex. It’s "anal" tag is actually derived from the recipient’s experience of anal: "Ow ow ow, hey now!"

"The person who coined the term ‘finger blasting’ didn’t have a vagina," said Gallop. "The person who coined the term ‘getting her ass railed’ never got his ass railed. ‘Pounding,’ ‘banging,’ ‘wrecking,’ ‘destroying’ -- all terms generated by the people who do not possess the soft internal tissue to which those things are being done."

�� what makes a house a home is sharing it with the ones you love! in celebration of Pride month, we asked our Brooklinen family what makes life with their partner feel like home. the responses were too good not to share! ��https://t.co/c7qXVnNYtY

— brooklinen (@Brooklinen) June 21, 2018

The choice of wording is mirrored by those who watch MLNP videos (which cost $5 to rent -- half of which goes to the "Make Love Not Porn stars"). Every day, viewers write to the team and describe the films as "joyful," "adorable" and "life-fulfilling." MLNP is already changing the sex dictionary. And by doing so, it’s opening up a whole new marketing category for social and real-world sex. While big brands aren’t ready to dive in, smaller brands are beginning to flirt with it.

Brooklinen, a New York-based bedding company which arrived on the scene fairly recently, is embracing the category. Its marketing acknowledges that beds aren’t just for sleep; we get intimate in them, we argue in them, we eat in them, we seek refuge in them when ill, we share them with our pets. The brand pokes fun at this in an OOH ad currently running in Manhattan’s subway. Two photos, one of multiple pairs of feet and the words "hook-up" and the other of a couple facing away from each other during a dispute, run adjacently. Its blog, "Brookliving," showcased couples' stories straight from their bed for Pride Month. That’s real life. Brooklinen gets it.

Gallop isn’t worried that big brands aren’t on board with her idea yet because, in her mind, they will be very soon. As she routinely says: "I don’t wait for change -- I am the fucking change."

But her mission statement is more far-reaching than persuading businesses to buy into social sex and leverage it to "make a shit ton of money." Her end goal is to make sex and everything that revolves around it as natural as your weekend grocery shop. Her end goal is to stamp out rape culture. Her end goal, she says, is world peace.