The 19-year-old Grammy award-winning singer Billie Eilish said pornography warped her views of sex and relationships after she began watching it when she was just 11 years old. “It destroyed my brain,” she said on “The Howard Stern Show” on Monday.
Eilish said being exposed to such violent and abusive “BDSM” porn at such a young age not only led to night terrors and sleep paralysis but also to issues of abuse and violence when she had sex.
“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 said.
Eilish went on to say that as a woman she thinks porn is a “disgrace,” and it makes her angry that porn is so widely loved and accepted.
“The way that vaginas look in porn is f-cking crazy,” she said. “No vaginas look like that. Women’s bodies don’t look like that,” she said. “We don’t come like that. We don’t f-cking enjoy things — what it looks like people are enjoying.”
Eilish’s confession to Stern comes on the heels of a corporate media realization that Gen Z women are rejecting the ideas of unrestrained sexual liberation, or “sex positivity,” that third-wave feminism pushed so hard to sell as a net good for women. Even New York Times feminists such as Michelle Goldberg have recently admitted that the sexual revolution did not deliver the freedom it promised women.
“Somehow, as sex positivity went mainstream and fused with a culture shaped by pornography… Sex-positive feminism became a cause of some of the same suffering it was meant to remedy,” she wrote.
The wide availability of and easy access to porn are also believed to be reasons why Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations. One recent study reported that American high schoolers are having less sex than ever before. In 2020, fewer than 40 percent reported ever having sexual intercourse — a 15 percent decline from the early ’90s.
“With the access to porn, more people are seeking that out now, and more people are actually staying at home and masturbating as opposed to having partnered sex,” Tatyannah King, a sex therapist grad student, told BuzzFeed Daily.
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