The content was so violent and abusive
It turns out porn isn’t good for girls.
Speaking on the Howard Stern Show on Sirius XM radio on Monday, [Billie]Eilish, who turned 20 on Saturday, said viewing porn at a young age had caused her emotional damage.
“I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the top-selling US singer said, adding that it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys”.
“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said, adding that she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive. Eilish said that it had an impact on her first sexual relationships. “The first few times I, you know, 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.
Why do men and boys need sex to be violent and abusive?
This week, a joint committee of MPs and peers recommended sweeping changes to the online safety bill, which imposes a duty of care on tech companies to protect children from harmful content.
Again, as with shorter or longer waiting periods for trans people, this isn’t the real issue. The issue isn’t that children shouldn’t be drinking in sexual violence as sexy fun times, it’s that no one should be. It’s that no one should even want that.
Yeah. That does nothing to protect the women and girls who are being abused by making the porn. I know, I know, there are women who LOVE it. I suspect they are a very small minority.
Oy vey…I hesitate to post, because I feel like I’m poking at a hornets nest. And I’m not even sure what my point is. But here goes.
If you do a sampling study (even an informal one, just clicking around porn sites), you find that the biggest category of porn on the internet is pictures (and videos) of naked women, and the second biggest category is pictures and videos of men and women doing the in-and-out in the ordinary way. After that it splinters into a million niches and fetishes ranging from the tame to the bizarre to the gruesome. (See also: Rule 34)
There is a big chunk that is vicious and violent and misogynistic. That chunk has a clientele (or it wouldn’t be there) and the usual inference is that these clients are themselves vicious and violent and misogynistic, but that goes beyond the evidence. A more defensible inference is merely that these clients are turned on by this kind of porn. The next interesting question is why this stuff turns some people on, but we don’t know what makes people kinky. We don’t even know what makes people straight.
I don’t want to deny her experience, but there’s a disconnect here. Why was she watching things that gave her nightmares? I avoid things that give me nightmares. Much will be made of her tender years (11), but when I was a kid (9, 10 years old) I avoided TV shows that I thought might upset me. Today I avoid the NY Times.
This strikes me as bizarre. “Cool” is usually a performative thing. Was she watching porn at parties? Was she watching porn alone and thinking that that private, unobserved act somehow made her cool? Was she judging her coolness by how violent the porn was? By how bad her nightmares were?
Welcome to the human race.
At the risk of shifting the blame, where were the adults? Where were the adults to teach her about sex, and about her body? To teach her how to masturbate; to recognize pleasure; to figure out what she wants and doesn’t want; to set and enforce boundaries?
No. I had a friend in college who did too much MDMA and it really destroyed his brain. Really. He’s not dead, but he’s not the person he used to be and he’s never going to be the person he used to be.
I haven’t listened to the interview, but just the few sentences quoted above show Eilish to be articulate and measured. Her brain is not destroyed. A charitable reading would make allowance for the fact that she was extemporizing; figure of speech; hyperbole to make a point. But I’m not going to be charitable here. The topic of porn brings out a lot of extreme rhetoric, and much of it is unfounded.
A few responses to Steven at #2.
“Why was she watching things that gave her nightmares?” Such things are compelling. Lots of people do this. It’s part of the attraction of horror movies. Gawping at a car wreck, that’s a common example. One can build up a tolerance, and seek out even more disturbing things, because the original thrill is diminished.
“‘Cool’ is a performative thing.” Kids talk to each other. I suspect it was “cool” to watch porn, perhaps to talk about porn, perhaps just to talk about having watched porn.
“Destroyed her brain.” I think you are taking the phrase overly literally. She isn’t claiming that her ability to think or to use her brain was destroyed. She was claiming that her thought process about most everything related to sex and relationships was severely affected.
“sampling study”: I don’t think that’s the point. Violent and abusive porn is abundant and extremely easy to find, at no cost, with no age verification, with no identification needed. It hardly matters what portion of the overall market it is.
I read another story about a girl who started watching porn at age 8, and the trials and tribulations her mother has gone through trying to help this young woman, who is now in her late teens, if I recall correctly. There was a lot of hiding, a lot of lying, theft, and clever subterfuge, on the part of the girl, thwarting her mother’s efforts to monitor and restrict access. Even the most dedicated efforts by parents can be worked around, depending on the child and the child’s set of friends and acquaintances. This is certainly a big issue in dealing with trans activists grooming kids into identifying as trans, and watching porn is another (and related) example.
I’d hazard that the main effects from porn are normalizing some risky or straight up dangerous practices (anal certainly, probably choking and other edge play) and that’s about it.
A pretty damn significant “it” as it were…
Also the whole idea of seeing violence and abuse [male on female] as part of sex, a turn-on, pleasurable, yadda yadda – none of that seems likely to foster healthy attitudes and practices.
Sackbut, I think you and Steven are both correct. I’m not sure if this is what Ophelia was implying, but there is a notion that large percentages of men enjoy violent porn, which was fueled by some bad studies. Better studies indicate this is not the case (easy to Google, and Steven’s summary seems fine). But, yes, violent stuff is apparently out there. I certainly agree with Ophelia that nobody needs to see this.
A ban is probably unrealistic. Pornhub has previously responded to pressure, for example removing everything with “rape” in its description and directing anyone who uses that in a search term to seek counseling (admittedly a low bar). I think they also removed all content where a clear chain of ownership and permission wasn’t established after claims that people were having their videos posted without consent. Maybe they could be pressured to remove anything with any sort of violence, even implied. If it’s true very few men even care about this, then it should barely affect their bottom line.
Billie Eilish’s experience is…interesting. I’m sorry she went through that, but she had to seek that out. Yeah, people can get caught up in things that are unhealthy for them, but some of it would be hard to ban in any meaningful way. I had a friend who got swept up in a web site called “the daily rotten” which had a lot of sick or gross stuff posted there daily and a community that reveled in it. It was amazing how addictive this was for her. She would stay up all night consuming this garbage and discussing it on their forums. Who would think laughing at gross stuff would turn into an obsession?
Skeletor, I agree with you that a ban is unlikely to be effective or useful.
There are a great many problems that I see discussed or that I myself discuss, and some people automatically jump to wondering how to solve the problem. Sometimes it’s helpful just the recognize there is a problem. I tend not to consider solutions, so I am very often caught up short when people ask what to do about things; I have no idea, I wish to note and examine and complain about a problem.
Re Pornhub, they could go completely out of business and the porn presence on the internet would be barely affected. I don’t think their efforts at trying to comply with regulatory pressures are an indication of much of anything. If anything, it gives would-be regulators a false sense of influence.
I never said anything about a ban.
It’s frustrating. Sackbut’s response is more even-tempered than mine would have been. If I say “here is a bad thing” then that’s what I’m saying. I’m not saying “this bad thing should be banned” unless I actually say that. It’s frustrating not to be able to point out a bad thing without being solemnly told that a ban wouldn’t work.
I encounter this kind of this a lot, myself. Just pointing something out is its own thing, and doesn’t imply anything than that you’re trying to underscore the existence of that thing. I was in a group advocating for population control on facebook, and on one discussion about being child-free someone said “I like the idea of being child-free and independent”. I pointed out that most people cannot remain independent as they age, and was promptly called all manner of names for “selfishly advocating for having children”. It’s exasperating, and it happens constantly.
It’s funny, because when it became apparent in my 30’s that my partner and I were NOT going to have children, it was very common for us to be accused of being selfish and self-interested by not breeding. Always by people with children I might add.
Agreed. I wonder if anyone has studied the equivalent of an Overton Window for porn? I’ve never watched a lot of porn and what I’ve watched recently has been more by way of dipping in and out of categories on aggregator sites like Pornhub to understand what people are debating. What strikes me is that the preponderance of what I’ve seen in the last few years is at best abusive or unsafe for the woman.Choking, slapping, unsafe practices, and just generally treating mostly very young woman as lumps of meat, rather than sentient people. As my partner put it “receptacles for their pleasure”. And that’s before we get to what is apparently one of the most popular categories “Old vs Young”. Yeah. I’m not pretending that porn from the 70s and 80s was woke and composed of unicorn fluff, but I don’t recall what I saw then being anything like as uncaring toward women at best and abusive at worst.
I think a young person (girl or boy) getting saturated in even mainstream modern porn is getting a really unhealthy and unrealistic idea of what even casual recreational relationships should be about. I think it does warp and distort their thinking, and from what I’ve heard from Drs being interviewed, some young men find themselves unable to perform adequately without the choking/slapping/anal/contorted position/hard physicality, simply because otherwise they don’t get sufficient arousal.
Rob, I got that for only having one.