When Billie Eilish said this week that viewing pornography at a young age had “devastated” her, 19-year-old Jay recognised the feeling and the experience.
“I really identified with what she said. I first saw porn at about 12 or 13 on social media; it came up on Instagram and boys at school would show it around and laugh,” says Jay, who preferred not to use her real name. “Boys talked a lot about porn, especially as we got older. It was less socially acceptable for girls to say they watched it, though we all did, I think.”
Jay, who attended a mixed comprehensive in south-west England, said pornography had “really affected how I view my body and sex”. She added: “It’s now I’m older and I’m having sex that I am aware that I have a strong feeling of how sex should be performed and this makes me really sad. I don’t know how to undo that thinking. I’m starting to feel porn actually damaged me.”
Advocates for age assurance, a range of measures to check someone’s age before they access a website or app, say under-18s can access pornography too easily. A survey by the British Board of Film Classification last year found that 60% of children between 11 and 13 who reported having seen pornography said it was largely unintentional.
Speaking on the Howard Stern Show on Sirius XM radio on Monday, 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.
Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University, said Eilish’s comments could help children and adults have a “better conversation about what material is out there on the mainstream sites”. She added: “I think her comments will help us to have a more open conversation, because certainly young people will be able to relate to her.”
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. The 192-page report recommended that an updated bill requires all pornography sites to prevent children from accessing their content and called for the introduction of minimum standards for age assurance measures, from entering your date of birth on a pop-up form to more stringent age verification. Under the current terms of the bill, commercial pornography sites would not have to adhere to the legislation if they did not host user-generated content – the form of digital content that is the draft bill’s focus.
McGlynn said bringing all porn publishers into the scope of the bill would be a “very positive step forward” but legislation was only “one part” of a solution to the problem. “Young people are still going to find ways to access this pornography. They’re still going to be looking at it, using it and thinking about it. So we still have to have the conversations with them, have a better public conversation about it and have far better sex education in schools,” she said.
Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, a colleague of McGlynn at Durham University who has researched the impact of pornography on young women, said the ease with which adult sites could be seen, and their content shared among friends, was “frightening”. She added: “We have abandoned a generation. They get no sex education and too much sexualised material.”
Jay says she stopped watching pornography when she was 17 but remains angry about how easy it was to access it.
“I watched it through my teen years, say 13 to 17, but then I made a choice to stop. I feel angry now at how much I saw, how easy it was to watch it.”
