In a recent interview that went viral this week, world renowned artist Billie Eilish dropped a bomb on porn’s public image, sharing that exposure to violent and abusive porn at just 11 years old “really destroyed my brain.” She said, “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”
Billie’s testimony powerfully aligns with our current campaign, Protect Children Not Porn, which is pushing for global awareness about how pornography exposure is derailing the lives of children everywhere. The campaign’s key objective is to cut off porn at the source by requiring ID-based age verification on every single porn site, so that no person under 18 can be traumatized by this content.
RELATED: Sign the Petition to Require ID-Based Age Verification on All Porn Sites
The Grammy Award winner spent close to 15 minutes in her interview with Howard Stern outlining her personal experiences with porn and why she thinks, “porn is a disgrace.” She shared how it gave her sleep paralysis, nightmares, and led to her “not saying no to things that were not good,” in the context of sex.
Millions of young teens see Eilish as a role model and, as a 19-year-old, she represents the first generation of young people who have grown up with high-speed internet and unprecedented access to hardcore porn.
RELATED: Violent Porn Is Shaping Children Everywhere
We posted a sound bite from her interview on our Instagram and the post already has over 380,000 views. A massive wave of media articles are now discussing the harms of porn on children and we’re counting this as a huge win.
View this post on Instagram
Exodus Cry founder, Benjamin Nolot, shared, “Unfortunately, consuming violent porn at 11 is not an anomaly within our culture, it’s emblematic of our culture, since the average age of exposure is now somewhere between 7 and 13 years old, and most kids have unsupervised internet access by age 8.
While there are virtually no safeguards on any porn sites, Billie’s testimony underscores the undeniable need to protect children from the world of freely accessible porn that they are immersed in, and it’s exactly why we launched the Protect Children Not Porn campaign.”
WATCH Our New Film Raised on Porn
By age 13, 69% of boys and 23% of girls have already seen pornography and according to a 2019 UK study, 62% of 11-13 year olds who had seen pornography reported that their first exposure to it was unintentional.
Porn as Sex Education
In the interview, Eilish recalled the first time she told her mom she was watching porn. She said, “I was complaining to my mom… and I was like ‘Oh my friend’s mom doesn’t let her watch porn!’ And my mom was like, ‘What?! Do you watch porn?’ and I was like ‘Yea’, she was like ‘You do?!’ And I was like ‘ya,’ and she was appalled. And she was like, ‘Well, why?’ and I was like ‘Well, how else am I supposed to learn how to have sex?’ and she was horrified by that—and understandably.”
The singer’s story here is absolutely representative of the widespread tragedy our society is facing. Firstly, parents are startlingly unaware of what their kids are watching. This is in part because of the unprecedented access to technology and phones that children have. Research on this topic was commissioned by the BBFC, finding that 75% of parents thought their child hadn’t seen pornography online. But of their children, 53% reported that they had seen it.
If you’re not interested in getting thrown around during sex, if you’re not interested in being slapped and being choked, people are like, ‘you’re vanilla, you’re soft… you’re boring in bed, you’re not a freak’
The second issue is that young people think that porn is “normal” sex education. This is a deeply disturbing reality when we realize that many children are consuming porn depicting violent and dehumanizing sexual scenarios. In a sample study from Italy, 42% of males and 32% of females were watching porn that included violence against women, including extreme degradation, rape, torture, and murder.
Violent Porn
Eilish admitted that she began watching increasingly more graphic types of pornography, warpping her ideas about sex and relationships. She blames abusive BDSM porn for her night terrors and sleep paralysis.
“It got to a point where I couldn’t watch anything else unless it was violent, I didn’t think it was attractive… If you’re not interested in getting thrown around during sex, if you’re not interested in being slapped and being choked, people are like, ‘you’re vanilla, you’re soft… you’re boring in bed, you’re not a freak’… and I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about women. Women are like, ‘oh, I have to like being hurt to be thought of as good in bed.’”
This is consistent with research that’s shown that 46.9% of people surveyed said their porn tastes/preferences escalated to the point of them being interested in more extreme porn that had previously disinterested or even disgusted them.
“I was a virgin. I had never done anything. And so, it led to problems … The first few times I 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.”
Unrealistic Body Expectations
Eilish also slammed the porn industry for creating unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies.
“The way that vaginas look in porn is f**king crazy. No vaginas look like that. Women’s bodies don’t look like that… I’m so angry that porn is so loved. And I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay.”
We applaud Billie for boldly speaking out about the destructive nature of porn.
Our newest documentary, Raised on Porn, addresses the key points Billie raises and exposes the ways pornography has become the new sex education for children, unpacking the dangerous lifelong implications of this global phenomenon. The film is already impacting audiences in tangible ways; 94% of viewers polled said the film inspired them to be more proactive in protecting their children from porn. In just two months since its release, Raised on Porn has amassed 775,000+ views on YouTube.
All of this emphasizes the reality that our culture is ripe for change. Society is starting to listen.
With your help, we can build a formidable movement that demands ID-based age verification on porn sites and challenges the predatory porn giants that are harvesting the innocence of children everywhere.
Here are three very practical ways you can help protect children:
1. SIGN the petition, now with 60,000+ signatures, demanding age verification, with ID, on every single porn site. Then share it.
2. WATCH Raised on Porn, free on YouTube, then like, comment, and share it with 5 friends.
3. GIVE and help us reach our year-end goal of $300k so we can protect 1 million children from porn.
