2021 saw Billie Eilish’s album, Happier Than Ever have a chokehold over the music industry. Naturally, many of her songs have been dissected, analysed, adored and repeated. One of her songs in particular – Male Fantasy, was a point of curiosity for many listeners, as it touched on the Grammy-winner’s relationship with pornography.
In a recent interview with Howard Stern on SiriusXM, Eilish elaborated on the topic of pornography, and her exposure to it from the age of 11.
Eilish’s honesty about a topic many sweep-under the rug opened up a myriad of sub-topics, including how pornography portrays women, their body images, how consent is or isn’t always present in pornography, and how abusive and devastating pornography can be for young minds.
In her experience, Eilish expressed that the exposure to “abusive” pornography led her to “not say no to things that were not good” when she began having sex because she thought it was what she was “supposed to be attracted to”.
Eilish explained that she thought pornography was how you learnt about sex, and she also wanted to be seen as “one of the guys”.
In retrospect, she views such early exposure to such sexual extremities as really harmful – even adding that it “destroyed” her brain and caused nightmares to ensue for her.
Eilish’s open manner of talking about something often seen as taboo is powerful because it also challenges how sex is taught to young people. Since sex education in schools is admittedly very limited in scope, people are going to look elsewhere to understand the two-backed beast.
As a result, naive perspectives on sex get skewed as people try to figure out what can often seem like a terribly mysterious topic, which could be avoided if more open conversations about sex, consent and safe sex were had.
As school’s are the starting points for so much foundational knowledge, it almost seems redundant that a fuller scope of sex beyond biological basics and reminders to use condoms are not as present as they should be, writes Cape {town} Etc’s Ashleigh Nefdt. As Cape’s editor Robyn Simpson wrote in an article highlighting what many of us wish we were taught in high school it should be about ” the reality of sex, intimacy, knowing your body, dealing with trauma, anxiety and everything in between. ”
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