I’ve heard the story more times than I can count: A young boy stumbles across pornography, and spends the following years—even decades—struggling with sexual addiction. I’ve gotten emails from desperate high schoolers who started on porn in Grade 6 after Googling something out of curiosity and now find that they are nearly incapable of dating a real girl. I’ve heard from guys who found, in their early twenties, that their long-time porn addiction had resulted in erectile dysfunction. I’ve even heard from pastor’s kids who found porn stashed in the basement, and began their own secret habit.
So when hip-hop singer Kanye West came out to discuss his long-time struggle with pornography in an interview on Apple Music’s Beats 1 Radio, his story sounded very familiar. His porn use has been something he’s spoken about publicly before, and his casual comments on late-night talk shows about his porn preferences were extremely normalizing. Porn, West shrugged, was a totally normal thing to do. When Jimmy Kimmel asked him if he’d changed his views on women since having daughters of his own, he responded “Nah, I still look at PornHub,” and proceeded to tell Kimmel what his favorite porn categories were.
