On Monday, Billie Eilish opened up about her relationship to porn during an appearance on the Howard Stern Show, revealing that early exposure to porn from a young age warped her perception of sex and put her in compromising situations during her early sexual encounters.
“As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace,” Eilish said in the interview. “I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.” The star also explained that she continued to watch increasingly graphic and violent forms of “abusive” BDSM porn, which she blames for everything from night terrors and sleep paralysis to “problems” in her own sex life.
“The first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she told Stern.
Naturally, the response to Eilish’s comments was mixed. While many praised the star for speaking openly about her negative experience with porn and representing the novel perspective of the growing population of young people who have grown up with unlimited access to porn practically from birth, others took issue with the star’s blanket-statement condemnation of porn, finding Eilish’s comments reflective of a growing anti-porn crusade that seeks to discredit and abolish sex work and those who practice it.
Many sex workers, in particular, also took issue with stigmatizing and otherizing comments Eilish made about the bodies of porn performers. “The way that vaginas look in porn is fucking crazy,” the star said. “No vaginas look like that. Women’s bodies don’t look like that. We don’t come like that.”
While I’m sure many would agree that some porn features an idealized version of female beauty that is unattainable for your average woman, shaming and discrediting the bodies of porn performers is unfair, dehumanizing and whorephobic. Moreover, as multiple performers took to Twitter to prove by way of some NSFW photography, some vaginas do, in fact, “look like that.” (Not to mention, the great big world of porn happens to be home to a wide variety of different body types.)
Then, of course, in typical Twitter fashion, Eilish’s supporters came for her detractors, slamming them for turning a young woman’s comments on her personal relationship to porn into an anti-sex work campaign.
Of course, it’s important to first clarify that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and feelings about porn and other sexual material. It is fine to not like porn, it is fine to regret your own experience with porn. Moreover, Billie Eilish is in a unique position to give a voice to the novel but increasingly common perspective of children who grow up with early and frequent exposure to porn. As many porn performers and other industry professionals have clarified in response to the discourse surrounding Eilish’s comments, porn is for adults, not children.
Regardless of your stance on porn, I think the vast majority of us can probably agree that children having unrestricted access to any kind of porn imaginable is probably not a good thing, and it’s only natural that someone like Billie Eilish would grow up to have negative feelings about porn after such early and intense exposure to sexual material that was never meant for a child to see.
Still, just because porn is bad for children does not mean it is inherently bad, and Eilish’s sweeping condemnation of porn as “a disgrace” (particularly when framed as a feminist statement on behalf of all womanhood) does rightfully raise some eyebrows. Meanwhile, the star’s stigmatizing comments discrediting the bodies of porn performers as “not real” seem to reflect some harmful mentalities rooted in sex work exclusionary radical feminism (SWERF).
It’s important to remember, however, that at 19, Eilish is still a very young woman being made to speak on a very nuanced, very divisive topic, and represent an entire generation of young women while doing so. Moreover, she is a young woman still grappling with what seem to have been the very negative consequences of being exposed to sexually explicit material she was never meant to see at a young age. We can support porn and question Eilish’s comments while still sympathizing with her experience.
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