Shailene Woodley Opens Up About Her Sexuality and Her 'Beef' With Porn: 'This Is Junk Food'

Shailene Woodley is getting candid about her relationship with sex. The Big Little Lies alum opened up about her sexuality and her feelings around porn, particularly the way sex is portrayed in porn in the United States, likening it to "bacon hanging in front of a dog." "The way that sex is presented on the surface in this country is so fabricated," Woodley explained while appearing the She MD podcast Tuesday. "And it’s such a performance instead of true intimacy, vulnerability and connection." Woodley, who described herself as a "very sexual person," argued that most people don't realize that when it comes to porn, they're consuming the fast food version of pleasure. "If people knew what was possible with sex, they would look at porn and go, 'Oh god, this is like junk food,'" she said. "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." The 32-year-old actress continued, "And that's my big beef with porn is I'm like, 'You're selling everybody McDonald' when you could have like, 'Whoa.'" Woodley, who split from NFL star Aaron Rodgers in February 2022 -- one year after announcing their engagement -- said she came to this conclusion during a positive experience with an ex. "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 shared. "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 it's a really slow groove, sometimes it's loud and sometimes it's soft." Adding that she was able "discover myself because there was a comfortability together," the Divergent alum now says she wishes she could pass some of this wisdom down to others. "I wish, in a way, I could do sex ed," she said. "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?'" Elsewhere in the interview, Woodley opened up about the health issues she faced in her 20s that left her unable to walk, hear and hardly do anything without feeling ill. "I haven't spoken about exactly what it was because that just feels like a personal thing that I don't need to disclose," she told podcast hosts Dr. Thais Aliabadi and Mary Alice Haney, "but essentially I was in a position in my early 20s, it got to the point where 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. It was this conflation of issues and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things." Coming from a "very holistic background" and studying herbalism, Woodley said she decided to work with "real MDs" and "independent healers" in "just trying to search for some sense of comfort in my own skin." "And it was a long journey, about a decade of unwinding and healing and getting healthy, and throughout that decade a lot of other things came from feeling so much discomfort, which was 'My God, if everything I'm eating hurts my stomach, I'm now suddenly afraid of food,'" Woodley recalled. "And then going into the kind of mental f--kery that can happen with that of body dysmorphia and confusion about, you know, identity in feeling safe in my own capsule, in my own skin and what that meant and what that should be." She said the ailment ultimately physically "resolved itself" and she's now "very healthy." "I'm so happy to be able to say that," she confessed.