Jada Pinkett Smith recently revealed that she once had “an unhealthy relationship with porn.” The admission came in a recent episode of Red Table Talk, her Facebook Watch series in which she openly discusses all aspects of life as a woman with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Willow Smith, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones. The revelation of her porn use started out shocking, but deepened into a nuanced conversation about the role of adult entertainment in women’s lives. 

Before she married Will Smith twenty-two years ago, said Jada, she found herself using pornography more often than she felt was healthy.

“Back in the day, I had a little porn addiction,” Jada said. But later, she clarified, “I actually feel like I was using ‘addiction’ a little lightly. Now I would say that I had an unhealthy relationship to porn at one point in my life where I was trying to practice abstinence.”

When Willow asked where the compulsion came from, Jada replied, “It was actually filling an emptiness. At least, you think it is, but it’s actually not.”

The three women then went on to discuss how porn can lead to “false expectations” around sex and how women should “always be willing and ready. She should be ready to have sex however he wants, in any position, anywhere, and you should enjoy it no matter what,” said Jada. “There’s never a ‘no,’ so I can definitely see how that can create an unrealistic expectation.”

Adrienne added that she believes porn is an “unnatural” depiction of sexuality, but admitted that watching it has been “beneficial” for her. “”I grew up in a household that just created a lot of shame.” When she watched porn, she said, “There’s something about it that was freeing.”

The frank and, honestly, important discussion of the role of pornography in modern women’s lives was par for the course for the three stars, who later told Entertainment Tonight that the only topics they consider verboten on the show are politics and religion.

Jada Pinkett Smith photo by Dominick D; licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. It has been cropped, resized and padded with background color.