Billie Eilish tells us what we already know about p-rn
The singer said that it destroyed her brain at a young age
Singer-songwriter Billie Eilish yesterday told interviewer Howard Stern that her exposure to violent p-rn from the age of 11 onwards “really destroyed my brain”.
Eilish, 19, isn’t unusual: a 2019 BBFC report said children as young as seven years old are ‘accidentally’ exposed to p-rn, and in the 11-13 group more than half reported they had viewed p-rn. A recent survey of frontline staff at Barnardo’s, a charity that works with at-risk children, reported a rise across the board in children being exposed to increasingly extreme p-rnography.
The Barnardo’s report notes viewing p-rnography effectively normalises abusive s-xual behaviour in the minds of children — an effect that workers pointed out in practice aids adult s-xual abuse of children.
And even where this doesn’t smooth the path to the abuse of minors, it can harm young people. Eilish spoke frankly about how when she started having s-x, she was “not saying no to things that were not good”. And this was “because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to”. That is, viewing p-rnography had normalised the expectation that such acts are common and she ought to enjoy them.
Eilish’s words convey a sense of mourning that’s difficult to reconcile with the ‘s-x positive’ idea that more knowledge about s-xuality is inevitably better. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much p-rn,” she said.
Between the lines lies an implicit reproach: where were the people who were supposed to protect me from this? The same sentiment lurks between the lines in this TikTok video, where a young woman speaks tearfully to photos of herself as a child. That child, she says, is precious; but in hook-up culture she doesn’t experience the affection and caretaking she’d instinctively feel was due to the child she once was.
We’re two decades into our experiment with mass-participation internet, an experiment we began with little grasp of the impacts it might have on children. At 19, Eilish is one of a generation that’s reached adulthood having never known a world without the ability to access “anything, everything all of the time”, as Bo Burnham put it. She was left to roam relatively unsupervised in that world, and having reached adulthood has realised how this lack of protection left her not free but acutely vulnerable.
She’s just one of the more vocal casualties. Her experience is normal; she just has a platform to speak out about it.
Last week 14 charities called for Ofcom to have the power to shut down p-rnography sites that don’t demand age verification, after the last attempt to bring in age verification requirements was derailed by lobbyists.
We should ask ourselves how much more evidence we need before we stop pandering to the commercial interests (and squalid desires) of adults and take concrete steps to end this. In the digital age, violent s-xual imagery is an active source of profound and irreparable harm to young minds. It can’t be restricted safely enough to warrant a ‘free speech’ protection.
We already accept digital censorship in principle. We should be proactive about extending it to p-rnography.
