In college, I was a Cool Girl — for a bit. I wasn’t hot, but I was skinny. I wore low-rise Diesel jeans to art history lectures. I drank tequila from the bottle at late-night parties. When my male friends talked about porn, I laughed along. I was routinely praised for being “chill” and “fun.”
It was all a pose, of course, a way to find power in a world where women are routinely dismissed.
A lot of us can relate to Eilish’s confusion about sex and gender dynamics, about the pressure she felt to consume media, observe sexual behavior and engage in it herself.
Maybe Billie Eilish fancied herself a Cool Girl once. The Grammy Award-winning musician recently spoke candidly with Howard Stern about her fixation on pornography, how she started watching it when she was 11 because she wanted to be “one of the guys.” Instead, she ended up being traumatized, suffering from night terrors and sleep paralysis.
“I thought I was one of the guys and would talk about it [pornography] and think I was really cool for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad,” Eilish, now 19, said during the interview. “I didn’t understand why that was a bad thing. I thought it was how you learned how to have sex.”
There’s nothing inherently bad or wrong with pornography, according to much research. Many adults use it for entertainment and to promote intimacy and pleasure in their relationships. It can be empowering. But pornography is one of the most common ways many young people learn about sex, as well as gender roles and relationship behaviors. And there’s a problem when girls feel pressured to consume pornography or, worse yet, model their behavior on it when the acts depicted aren’t in their sexual comfort zone.
While the porn industry is becoming more inclusive in depicting different kinds of bodies, sex educator Lola Jean noted that “most porn is catered to the male gaze because that’s where largely the commodification exists.” The pornography industry is still overwhelmingly run by men and marketed to men. According to a 2017 census of visitors to PornHub conducted by the site, the audience is 75 percent male versus 25 percent female.
The images that tend to get portrayed are also ones that can reinforce the worst aspects of the gender divide, such as the violence Eilish observed. As a preteen, she said her taste in pornography became more graphic and eventually warped her conceptions of sex.
“It got to a point where I couldn’t watch anything else unless it was violent,” she explained. “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.”
Work led by Indiana University sex researchers Bryant Paul and Niki Fritz found that out of 4,009 scenes available on two major free pornography websites, 35 percent on one site and 45 percent on the other depicted violence, and women were the target of that violence 97 percent of the time. One study suggested that the younger a man was when he first viewed pornography, “the more likely he was to want power over women.”
Of course, each of these studies is not comprehensive and has its own flaws, including questions of causation versus correlation. People often see issues relating to pornography in black and white instead of with nuance — which is a hindrance to productive conversations.
Porn literacy programs can address some of this lack. They have the goal of teaching young people about healthy relationships as well as intimate partner violence and have thankfully started becoming more popular in schools in the context of sex education, such as the Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships initiative at the Boston Public Health Commission. Part of a porn literacy curriculum might include discussing porn scripts and whether they seem realistic or if they have gendered double standards.
Erica M. Butler, a sexual health educator and founder of Happ E. SexTalk, explained that porn and sex literacy “helps youth navigate the violent parts of porn, the nonrealistic aspects of porn and the harmful images that could stick around like Billie was referencing in her comments.” Butler said age 9 to 10 is a good time to start these conversations, and these discussions should begin with trusted adults.
Porn literacy allows room for the complexities of sex media to exist. It understands that young people are sexual and are curious about their bodies and sexual identities. And it provides a basis in sexual education that can help young people identify harmful situations and navigate topics like consent.
After all, pornography is not created with preteens in mind. Yet preteens are a market with easy access to sex media, and they won’t necessarily feel comfortable having conversations about porn with their parents. Preteens also don’t typically have a grasp on their own sexual identity, let alone understand the complicated dynamic at play in pornography, including power and the role of gender, or the economic plight of and discrimination against sex workers.
For young women learning to navigate their relationship to their bodies, it can be particularly difficult to confront pornographic images at this vulnerable developmental stage and then speak up about the discomfort they feel. Young women don’t want to be called prudes — I certainly didn’t when I was hanging out with my guy friends and privy to their conversations about women’s appearances.
It took a disturbing experience masquerading as a good time to make me willing to prioritize my comfort over my male companions’ titillation. During my sophomore year, my college held a “naked run” for some kind of charity. People came for the spectacle, not to support altruism. Standing on the green, watching the participants, I finally had it with my friends’ comments about so-and-so’s breasts or who looked surprisingly fat.
I got into a fight with my boyfriend about what he and his friends were saying and ran off crying — not a very Cool Girl thing to do. The event was supposed to be fun, but their objectification just made it feel sad and creepy. While not traumatic like Eilish’s experience, the naked run made me wonder if women could ever exist without the male gaze burdening them.
A lot of us can relate to Eilish’s confusion about sex and gender dynamics, about the pressure she felt to consume media, observe sexual behavior and engage in it herself even though it wasn’t fulfilling or healthy for her.
While the sexual landscape in pornography is shifting to encompass a wider array of gender identities and preferences (including feminist porn), there is still misogyny and messages about what it means to be cool, sexy and pleasing to men. Pornography doesn’t need to be banned, but we do need to prepare young people to critically engage with it so they don’t wind up feeling traumatized or pressured to mimic it.