Billie Eilish says porn is ‘a disgrace’ and watching at a young age ‘destroyed’ her brain

Billie Eilish has never been one to hold back and she proved it once again while visiting Howard Stern for an episode of his Sirius XM radio show this week. During their candid chat (in which Eilish’s brother Finneas was also on-hand), the “Bad Guy” singer revealed she was exposed to porn at a young age, and it really devastated her growing up.

“As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace,” she said. “I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11,” she continued, explaining that she cued it up believing it would help her feel like, “one of the guys.”

Instead, Eilish now believes the experience took a mental toll on her. “I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she said. “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.”

Looking back, the Grammy winner says she still holds a lot of anger over the entire situation. “I'm so angry that porn is so loved, and I'm so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay,” she added. "The way that vaginas look in porn is f---ing crazy. No vaginas look like that. Women's bodies don't look like that. We don't come like that.”

The singer isn’t alone in her stance. In recent years as studies emerge about the negative effects watching porn can have (such as normalizing sexual objectification and violence, not to mention the fact that it can impact intimacy and distort views of healthy sex), many more stars are speaking out against the industry as a whole.

In the past, Terry Crews revealed how his previous love of porn, which he began watching when he was 12, negatively affected his marriage. And Orlando Bloom once explained that he feels porn is “super-disruptive” to a person’s sex life, because your real-life partner can’t possibly live up to the expectations created by these ongoing fantasies.  

Emma Thompson, Chris Rock, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Andra Day, Russell Brand, Lamar Odom, Hugh Grant and Josh Radnar have also added their voices to the conversation over the years.

Elsewhere during the conversation with Stern, Eilish also opened up about her dating life and the effect fame has had on her relationship status. She admitted she’s not a serial dater and she doesn’t “go to stuff and flirt with people,” which can make dating hard for anyone. But when she started becoming a household name, things got even harder.

“It's really hard to meet people when people are either terrified of you or think that you're out of their league," she explained. "Last year, I thought that I'd be single for the rest of my life. I genuinely couldn't even picture myself in a relationship of any sort. I got over that pretty fast.” Eilish is now reportedly dating actor Matthew Tyler Vorce

To be fair, there are a lot of single non-famous people who probably felt similar sentiments about being solo over the past year or so, given the giant dating curveball known as COVID. Which Eilish knows a thing or two about, having contracted a breakthrough case in August.

“I think if I weren't vaccinated, I would have, like, died, because it was bad … When I say it was bad, I more just mean that it felt horrible. But really, in the scheme of COVID, it was not bad. You know what I mean? When you're sick, you feel f---ing horrible,” she told Stern.

The 19-year-old (who turns 20 in a few days) revealed, too, that she suffered serious imposter syndrome while getting ready for Saturday Night Live this past weekend, and said she was so nervous that she even threw up.

“I mean I cried every single day of the week, no joke at all,” she revealed, adding that it was still one of the best days of her life. “That’s not my world, so I don’t know what the f--- I’m doing. I feel like I am terrible, like I suck… I was scared. It’s SNL, these amazingly talented actors [are] surrounding a table [read] where somehow I’m the main course for this show that I didn’t feel qualified for.”

It seems to us that many of the fans and critics who caught her beloved performance on the long-running sketch comedy would disagree.  

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