Kanye West has a Porn Problem – And Doesn’t Know What “Trafficking” Means

Kanye West, whose album Jesus Is King was released last week, has spoken publicly (very publicly—like Jimmy Kimmel publicly) about his porn habit before. He’s been such a fan of smut that he even art-directed the 2019 Pornhub Awards. But, in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1 Radio last week, he revealed that “Playboy was my gateway into full-on pornography addiction.” He continued, “My dad had a Playboy left out at age five, and it’s affected almost every choice I made for the rest of my life.”

In fact, he blames a lot more than just his porn habit on that fateful magazine. “You know, that Playboy that I found when I was five years old was written all over the moment when I was at the MTV awards with the Timberlands, the Balmain jeans…and the Hennessy bottle. It’s like that was such a script out of a rock star’s life…Some people drown themselves in drugs. And I drowned myself in my addiction [to porn].”

We guess he meant that Playboy gave him a glimpse of a life of worldly pleasures, including designer clothing and expensive liquor…and porn, maybe…but it’s not entirely clear. 

West also believes that advertisements like the ones he saw all those years ago in Playboy are part of a larger issue around sexuality in media. “When you see all of the billboards, the traffic billboards. When I say ‘traffic,’ I’m talking about the billboards are actually sex trafficking,” Kanye said in the interview. “On one side of the street it’s a billboard with spirits, which is alcohol, and on the other side it’s ‘Call this number’ or it’s a picture of a woman on a billboard and [it] says, ‘Come to this strip club.’ So there are all different layers of trafficking.”

We’re not sure that the self-proclaimed “greatest human artist of all time” knows what the word “trafficking” means, exactly. But whatever the case, he seems determined to beat his porn addiction with the same thing he’s been talking about nonstop recently—God. 

West has been calling himself a born-again Christian since this summer, holding weekly “Sunday Service” concerts-turned-church-services around the country. Now, he says that God has helped him beat the porn addiction that Playboy—and whatever “trafficking” means to him—started. “When people have been addicted to something, like, if you ask somebody that’s a drug addict, it’s like you say, ‘Are you still addicted?’” he said in his interview with Lowe. “Well, yeah, you turn it off actually. It’s like, with God I’ve been able to beat things that had a full control of me.”

Sure, Kanye. If pornography was playing a harmful role in your life, we support you taking control over the problem. And, heck, if God helps you feel better about sexuality, that’s fine by us. But let’s be clear: Playboy doesn’t cause porn addiction, and strip club billboards aren’t sex trafficking. Those sound to us more like problems with impulse control, vocabulary limitations, and the conflation of very different issues. And it’s frankly tiresome to see yet another celebrity  mixing them up and blabbing about it on the internet. 

But, hey, Yeezy. You do you.

Kanye West photo by David Shankbone, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license