Julie Burchill
Billie Eilish is right about our porn-sick society
You could have knocked me down with a snowflake when Billie Eilish slammed pornography on the Howard Stern Show this week. It is a strange paradox of Generation Woke, to whom Eilish is an idol, that while everything from brunch (the actor Alan Cummings said it reminded him of ‘white privilege’) to Brum (the mischievous TV toy car ‘who may reflect the language and attitudes of the 1990s’ as the BBC warned us) is deemed offensive, truly offensive things such as under-privileged women earning a living by being used as sexual meat puppets for the entertainment of men is now being framed as a perfectly wholesome pursuit. (Unless it’s your own daughter or mother, of course – they’re Special.)
But Eilish said:
“‘As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace… I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much… 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… I'm so angry that porn is so loved, and I'm so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay.’
Still only 19, Eilish is a product of a society so porn-sick that American Teen Vogue published a guide to anal sex and one Sunday Times journalist suggested that ‘entry-level pornography’ should be produced for schoolchildren.
It’s no mistake that this latest offensive in the war against women has risen alongside Woke culture, which (as I explain in my book, Welcome to the Woke Trials) while masquerading as revolutionary is actually reactionary. It believes that racial segregation is desirable, that the working classes are white trash/gammons and that the sexual perversions of men override the rights of women.
When a proud mum or dad presents their child with what we call a ‘smartphone’ at the age of 11 – as with Billie Eilish, when she and far too many children first see hard-core pornography – they are basically handing their child’s brain over to the sex industry. It’s ironic that this is a generation of parents who will insist that every morsel of food which passes their little darling’s lips must be pure in origin while effectively presenting that child the key to a chamber of horrors disguised as a gadget. And has such openness served to make this generation have a happier and healthier attitude to sex? Sexual attacks by boys on girls now regularly occur even in primary schools. Meanwhile the endless hysterical demand for no single-sex toilets in schools has, according to teachers and parents, led to a number of girls no longer using school toilets, thus harming their health. Is it surprising that girls are increasingly reacting to being treated as sexual objects by binding their breasts and begging to become boys?
But in the long run, it’s not just females who suffer from the normalisation of pornography. Around a third of young men (and they’re just the ones owning up to it) now experience erectile dysfunction; young women talk frequently of how they prefer vibrators to men. Pornography, not a third person, is increasingly cited in divorce cases. Older women seek artificial insemination rather than tie themselves to a man who may become a porn-addled zombie; younger women cling on to their virginity far longer than their mothers did, and repulsion at pornography is probably partly responsible. In Japan – a society which has long sanctioned extreme pornography while oppressing women – the government has forecasted an ‘imminent national catastrophe’ as nearly half of young women are ‘not interested in, or despise, sexual contact’ leading to a whopping one third plunge in the country’s population by 2060.
And yet not a peep about the pernicious effect pornography – I refuse to use the jolly-sounding ‘porn’ – has on society by the Woke Bros, probably because we all know what they’re using their free hand for when they abuse ‘Terfs’ on social media. The slyness of the sex industry in seeing through the pure-hearted pronouncements about human dignity which cover the age-old desire of many men to view and/or use women as masturbation objects produced an amusing situation when during the Black Lives Matter riots, Pornhub declared their support for BLM while having over-looked such choice items on their menu as ‘Black Slave Punished By White Master’ and ‘White Cops Bang Black Chick.’ No sooner had this been put right than Pornhub agreed under pressure from credit card companies to remove all unverified content which might feature underage and/or trafficked females and non-consensual sex – thus reportedly losing 80 per cent of their material in one fell swoop.
Some deluded males have made themselves believe that women in pornography enjoy it and that it’s empowering as they get paid more than their male co-workers - making it somewhat of a mystery why so many of these women die young. Maybe they’re expiring from pure pleasure overload?
The lame old excuses – ‘Porn prevents rape!’ – have been made a mockery of by what Dame Vera Baird recently called ‘the decriminalisation of rape’ due to the lowest recorded conviction rate. But don’t run and find a policeman if you believe a strange man is following you – Wayne Couzens, the Met policeman who murdered Sarah Everard, was openly nicknamed ‘The Rapist’ by his colleagues. As if this wasn’t damning enough, one study found that men who habitually use pornography are more likely to be desensitised to sexual violence and be more lenient towards rape, their porn-addled minds having come to believe that all women secretly crave violent sex with strangers.
We’ve been fed the narrative for so long that only killjoy and or/ugly women are against pornography. ‘Take an interest in your boyfriend’s hobbies’ was once the advice of agony aunts to teenage girls and while this used to mean getting one’s head around the offside rule, now it involves pretending to enjoy being choked during sex until the blood vessels in one’s eyes burst. This is what it takes to be The Cool Girl. And this is why it’s so vivifying that Eilish – the coolest of Cool Girls – has broken rank and pointed out that girls are now being actively groomed to enjoy their own torture.
Being a sexagenarian, I’ve had my fun – in my young years, we lost our virginity on the stroke of our sixteenth birthdays and dated men who could go half a dozen times a day. Only old men were impotent, which was as we agreed it should be, the dirty rotters! But I do want youngsters to know how brilliant sex can be, and not see boys made impotent and girls made disgusted by the purely-for-profit sex industry. Despite her use of blue hair dye, Eilish may well turn out to be the JK Rowling of her generation, pointing out the poisonousness of a Woke Culture which while instructing women to ‘BE KIND’ seeks to reduce us to a permanent underclass of violated semi-humans.
Maybe her generation will see how they’re being played by the billionaire pimps of the internet; increasingly, I’ve noticed that young women use the words ‘I don’t date men who use pornography’ on their social media profiles. Or maybe not, and the sexes will become ever more alienated, with men preferring women they will never touch and women preferring plastic penises that don’t demand rough sex.
How fascinating to think that the dream of stigma-free free love may end up not ruined by the Puritans – but by the sex industry.