SHE MD Podcast
There are no big little lies here.
Shailene Woodley recently got candid about her dislike for the way sex is portrayed in porn in the United States, describing it as “bacon hanging in front of a dog.”
“The way that sex is presented on the surface in this country is so fabricated,” the 32-year-old shared during Tuesday’s appearance on the “She MD” podcast with Mary Alice Haney and Dr. Thais Aliabadi, “and it’s such a performance instead of true intimacy, vulnerability and connection.”
Despite describing herself as a “very sexual person,” Woodley still stands by her opinion that most people don’t realize they’re consuming the fast food version of pleasure.
The “Divergent” alum explained, “I was talking to somebody else about this yesterday, about how if people knew what was possible with sex, they would look at porn and go, ‘Oh God, this is like junk food. Really? This is what we’re being sold when all of these other things are possible with my body because I’m like a magic machine?’”
“Pleasure is so important, and we just rip each other off of it because I think we don’t necessarily even know what’s possible,” continued Woodley. “And that’s my big beef with porn is I’m like, ‘You’re selling everybody McDonald’s when you could have like, whoa.’”
The “Big Little Lies” star came to this realization early on in her life after a positive experience with an ex-boyfriend.
“I was very lucky in my life as a young person discovering myself and my body to have a partner at the time who loved to dance,” Woodley recalled. “I always call [sex] a dance because it’s a dance. We’re exchanging energy.”
“Sometimes the dance is a really fast tango and sometimes the dance is a really slow groove and sometimes it’s loud and sometimes it’s really soft. And I had somebody that helped me discover myself because there was a sense of comfortability together,” she shared. And I think that I probably did the same for him.”
The “Three Women” star, who split from Aaron Rodgers in 2022, a year after the two announced their engagement, added that she hopes she can pass what she’s learned down to others.
“I wish, in a way, I could do sex ed,” Woodley admitted. “Not me personally—but go into a sex ed curriculum and be like, ‘How can we fix this? How can we change this a little bit?’”
The actress also opened up on the podcast about a mystery health scare she experienced while working on the “Divergent” films.
“I was losing my hearing. I couldn’t walk for longer than five minutes at a time without having to lay down for hours and hours and hours and sleep. Everything I ate hurt my stomach,” Woodley reflected, adding that she didn’t want to disclose what caused her symptoms because it “feels like a personal thing.”
“I’ve always eaten very healthy and I’m very athletic. And so, it was a confusing process for me to go, ‘Well, what am I doing wrong? Why am I passing out every month when I get my period? Why am I hypothyroid? Why am I all of these things?’ And one doctor being like, ‘It’s probably endometriosis.’ And another doctor going, ‘It’s probably this.’ And another one going, ‘It’s probably that.’ ‘You have a tilted uterus. You have a heart-shaped uterus.’ Every person I went to was giving me mixed information, and it set me on my own journey,” she told the hosts.
Woodley took her health into her “own hands,” and has devoted time to educating herself and “approaching it from an internal holistic place” and the health issue “ultimately physically resolved itself.”
And it worked, as the star is no longer on thyroid medication.
In fact, she is “not on any medication anymore. My hormones are so balanced. Everything is pumping in the way that it should,” she expressed before noting that is “very healthy now.”