As Dr. Gail Dines once said, “Porn is not just a collection of images but a lens through which young girls are forced to see the world, and act in ways that destroy their sense of self.” As those who read this blog regularly will know, if I had my way, the porn industry would be crushed to powder by a civilization that recognized the hellscape it is creating for the young.
We do not yet live in that civilization (can we still call it that when pre-teens are watching violent gang-bangs as a matter of course?). But people are beginning to sound the alarm, as I detailed in a column in this space literally this week about child welfare workers warning that children were being twisted by ubiquitous violent pornography.
There’s already another story — there always is. Twenty-year-old Grammy-winning singer Billie Eilish, a progressive and hardcore abortion supporter, revealed to radio star Howard Stern (a product of porn culture if there ever was one) earlier this week that she first got addicted to pornography at age 11. Eilish, like millions of other children in this sick culture, was poisoned by it despite the fact that she initially thought it made her “one of the guys.”
“As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace, and I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest,” Eilish told Stern. “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 to have sex. I used to be the person who would talk about porn all the time. I’d be like: Oh, it’s so stupid that anybody would think that porn is bad … you know, ‘I think it’s so cool and it’s great and empowering.’ I was an advocate … and think I was really cool for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad.”
“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”
Like so many other children, the porn Eilish was watching was violent. “I think that I had sleep paralysis and these night terrors/nightmares because of it,” she said. “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 … had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good.”
Because her view of sex came from porn, she discovered that she had essentially been groomed by porn to accept sexual abuse as normal. “It’s because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she told Stern. “I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay … 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.”
In the recent song “Male Fantasy,” Eilish condemns pornography and notes its impact on girls, saying: “Home alone, tryin’ not to eat/Distract myself with pornography/I hate the way she looks at me/I can’t stand the dialogue, she would never be/That satisfied, it’s a male fantasy/I’m going back to therapy.”
Eilish, and millions of other girls like her, increasingly live in a sexual culture that has been created by the wickedest, filthiest male fantasies that porn producers can conjure and convey. There is no intimacy, no love, no tenderness in this culture. There is merely the extraction of fleeting pleasure from the bruised body of girls whose role it is to be the victim of male desire. This is the culture that our daughters must grow up in. It is a culture that must be utterly destroyed.
I’m glad she is speaking out. We most definitely need to do all we can to expose and call this out and “crush” it.
Revealing piece, Jonathon. Let’s hope Ms. Ellish eventually comes to the same conclusions about abortion.