Pop

Billie Eilish had a major revelation last year while working on her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft: she loves women. Like a lot. “I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina,” the 22-year-old singer tells Rolling Stone in a new cover story.
The profile delves into some of the songs on the album, including the second one, “Lunch,” described as a “sexy, bass-heavy banger where Eilish is crushing on a girl so hard she likes sex with her to devouring a meal.” It was while recording that song that Eilish says she became acutely aware of who she really is, recording some of it before she’d ever been with a woman and the rest after her first same-sex experience.

“I was never planning on talking about my sexuality ever, in a million years. It’s really frustrating to me that it came up,” she says of a 2023 Variety magazine interview in which she mentioned that she was attracted to women “for real.” The quote went viral around the globe and on a red carpet a month later Eilish was asked if she had intentionally come out in that story, telling the interviewer, “no, I didn’t,” but then thinking to herself, “‘wasn’t it obvious?’”

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She followed up with an Instagram post thanking the magazine for her Hitmakers award and also for “outing me on a red carpet at 11 a.m. instead of talking about anything else that matters. I like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares.” Eilish has typically kept her love life private and was only ever publicly linked with men, including The Neighbourhood’s Jesse Rutherford, who she broke up with in May 2023.

Now, Eilish says, she think the post was a bit of an overreaction. “Who f–king cares? The whole world suddenly decided who I was, and I didn’t get to say anything or control any of it,” she says. “Nobody should be pressured into being one thing or the other, and I think that there’s a lot of wanting labels all over the place. Dude, I’ve known people that don’t know their sexuality, or feel comfortable with it, until they’re in their forties, fifties, sixties. It takes a while to find yourself, and I think it’s really unfair, the way that the internet bullies you into talking about who you are and what you are.”

For such a global megastar, Eilish is refreshingly candid in the cover story about sex, saying it is what she likes to do to decompress. “I basically talk about sex any time I possibly can. That’s literally my favorite topic,” she says. “My experience as a woman has been that it’s seen in such a weird way. People are so uncomfortable talking about it, and weirded out when women are very comfortable in their sexuality and communicative in it. I think it’s such a frowned-upon thing to talk about, and I think that should change. You asked me what I do to decompress? That s–t can really, really save you sometimes, just saying. Can’t recommend it more, to be real.”

And then, Eilish goes on a deep-dive into another favorite, often taboo topic for women: masturbation. She says pleasing herself has boosted her confidence and is an “enormous, enormous part of my life, and a huge, huge help for me. People should be jerking it, man. I can’t stress it enough, as somebody with extreme body issues and dysmorphia that I’ve had my entire life.”

In case you had questions, Eilish also describes liking to masturbate in front of a mirror, partly because “it’s hot,” but also because it allows her to have a “raw, deep connection” to herself and her body. “And have a love for my body that I have not really ever had,” says Eilish, who notes that at this point she should basically have a “Ph.D.” in onanism. “I got to say, looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking ‘I look really good right now’ is so helpful. You can manufacture the situation you’re in to make sure you look good. You can make the light super dim, you can be in a specific outfit or in a specific position that’s more flattering. I have learned that looking at myself and watching myself feel pleasure has been an extreme help in loving myself and accepting myself, and feeling empowered and comfortable.”

Having lived in the hot spotlight for nearly her entire adolescence and young adulthood, Eilish says while others have been dissecting and contemplating her sex life for “years and years,” she is only now figuring it all out. “And honestly, what I said was funny, because I really was just saying what they’ve all been saying,” she says.

Given the chance for a do-over, the singer says she would have ignored the question, even though she knows it could have been way worse. “I’m lucky enough to be in a time when I’m able to say something like that and things go OK for me,” she says. “And that’s not how a lot of people’s experience is.”

The interview also touches on how her upcoming third album is a return to the darker sounds of her 2019 debut, When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Hit Me Hard and Soft is due out on May 17.