(LifeSiteNews) — In my presentations on pornography to parents, I always emphasize one key fact: If you don’t teach your children about healthy sex and sexuality, the internet will. In today’s hypersexualized digital culture in which sexual imagery and information is almost omnipresent, we must teach our children — or the pornographers will.
A recent BBC interview with the infamous OnlyFans star Lily Phillips, who made her name through gut-wrenching, horrific stunts such as sleeping with more than 100 men in a single day, makes that fact crystal clear once again. UK stats indicate that the average age of first exposure to pornography is between the ages of 11 and 13, with many first encountering it much earlier. Philips was no exception.
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“I probably watched pornography first when I was maybe 11,” Phillips said. “So I’ve always known about it. I’ve always known it was a thing, and I always thought it was very normal to watch.”
“Right,” the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire replied. “But if you started watching it at 11, I mean — that is so young.”
“Yes,” Phillips replied, smiling.
“And you say it’s normal,” Derbyshire went on, visibly attempting to hide her shock. “Can you describe how it has influenced you and your brain and your outlook on sex?”
“You know what, it actually made me really sex-confident and learn a lot of things,” Phillips replied. “I mean, that’s mostly how I learned — through pornography. And I do think it has a positive effect on me, just in terms of like, understanding things a little bit more.”
“Right,” Derbyshire said. “But as we know, what we see in pornography online isn’t … it can be extreme, it is not normal.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Phillips said, laughing. “It depends what type of pornography you’re watching. That’s what I would say.”
“And when you look back and reflect on the fact that you had access to this pornography and were looking at it from the age of 11 and not just you, any Gen Z who’s got a smartphone, does that suggest to you that maybe your generation has been let down by politicians or the tech companies or even parents?” Derbyshire asked.
“I think it’s hard because sex is a part of life and I don’t think … ” Phillips began.
“But not when you’re 11!” Derbyshire interjected.
“But I think you should be learning from it from that age,” Phillips insisted. “I do believe that. Because that’s when you start to think about things like that.”
“But learning by pornography?” Derbyshire pushed.
“Maybe not, yeah, maybe not learning from pornography,” Phillips said. “But I do think understanding it more from that age would be helpful.”
Derbyshire finally asked the question: “Is there a direct link between you watching pornography as you grew up and the decisions you’ve made to do what you do now?”
“I think maybe,” Phillips admitted. “I mean, I don’t know a life without pornography, so maybe.”
Read that again, because Phillips speaks for her entire generation: I don’t know a life without pornography. True, not all ended up on OnlyFans as consumers or digital prostitutes, but millions of young people have been shaped by pornography in different ways, from their views on sex and relationships to sexuality and sexual violence.
And why? Because, as Victoria Derbyshire implied, everybody failed them. The politicians and jurists who decided that adult license and lust and perversion were a higher social good than protecting the innocent of the young. The tech companies and pornographers who pushed their products on young people, knowing it would harm them. The parents who handed their children portals to the entire digital world, in most cases not realizing what they were giving their boys and girls access to.
As I noted earlier, the Lily Phillips story is yet one more potent reason we should ban pornography — because we created the world that created her:
