Drew Barrymore wishes that accessing explicit sexual images wasn't so easy in the age of the internet. The actress and talk show host shared a “very vulnerable” essay on Instagram reflecting on the effects of technology on children, in which she said she felt remorse for Playboy Photoshoot from the mid 90's.
“As children we shouldn’t be seeing these images,” she wrote in her post on Friday. “Yes, I was a fan of exhibitionism when I was younger because of the environments I was in. I considered it art, and I still don’t judge it.”
But when I did a chaste artistic moment in Playboy “In my early 20s, I thought it was going to be a magazine that was unlikely to come back because it was paper,” Barry-Moore added. (In fact, she did the shoot just before her 20th birthday.) “I never knew there would be an internet. I didn’t know a lot of things.”
In her post titled “Home Phone,” she noted that E.T. the alienBarrymore has spoken about the “fun situations” she's had at home and at parties, which she says left her “very self-conscious.” Now, as a mother of two, she wants to make sure her children are protected from these kinds of situations in their youth.
“How do we allow children to have this much access? To brains that are not fully developed? And to group messaging?” she wrote. “These messages can become very toxic, and we must protect our children from falling into scenarios where they cannot always control the multi-party dynamics of their speech that are recorded in the cloud only to haunt them.”
Barrymore has spoken of wanting to “disappear” as a teenager, when she “missed” at age 13 and appeared on the cover of several tabloid newspapers. (The actress was addicted to cocaine and attempted suicide at age 14.)
“I thought this would be my story forever. I wanted to disappear off this planet and never show my face again. But I put one foot in front of the other and got my life back on track, only to make more mistakes along the way, but that’s life,” she wrote. “We make mistakes. And people have been so kind to me. They’ve forgiven me. And they’ve encouraged me as I’ve grown.”
“So, yes, it’s also my generosity and my life’s work to encourage people in return!” she added. “We all fall and get up. Over and over again. Life is a roller coaster. And what a beautiful ride it is.”
