Recently, Billie Eilish shared a video for her Happier Than Ever standout “Male Fantasy,” and even more recently, she performed the song on Saturday Night Live. The song sees Eilish talking openly and honestly about pornography, and she did more of that on yesterday’s episode of The Howard Stern Show. On the program, she revealed that she thinks porn is “a disgrace,” that she started watching it when she was 11 years old, and that she believes it was damaging to her.
Eilish said (at about an hour and 7 minutes into the conversation):
“As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace, and I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. I didn’t understand why it was a bad thing. I thought that’s how you learned how to have sex. […] I used to be the person that would talk about porn all the time. I’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s so stupid that anybody would think that porn is bad or f*cked up,’ you know, ‘I think it’s so cool and it’s great and it’s empowering.’ […] I was an advocate and I thought I was ‘one of the guys’ and would talk about it and think I was really cool for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad and… you know. I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”
She went on to discuss how watching “violent” porn led to problems when she became sexually active:
“I think that I had sleep paralysis and these night terrors slash nightmares because of it. I think that’s how it started because I would just watch abusive BDSM and that’s what I thought was attractive. It got to a point where I couldn’t watch anything else unless it was violent. I didn’t think it was attractive. And I was a virgin, I had never done anything, and it led to problems. The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It’s because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to. I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was OK. The way that vaginas look in porn is f*cking crazy. No vaginas look like that. Women’s bodies don’t look like that. We don’t come like that. […] It’s how so many people think they’re supposed to learn.”
Meanwhile, she also revealed on the show that she had COVID-19 this summer and that she thinks being vaccinated prevented the situation from being a lot worse than it could have been.