How do you solve a problem like Bonnie Blue? The pornographic actress, 26, has struck gold with a daring business model: staging increasingly queasy stunts which push the boundaries of what a woman’s body and spirit can withstand. Blue, who first tasted ultra-virality when she slept with more than 1,000 men in a day, is an object of hatred for many women, one of morbid curiosity for many men, and an existential problem for liberal feminism. She is also the ultimate ragebaiter. This month, she was kicked off OnlyFans for staging a “petting zoo” in which she lay on a mattress surrounded by men who shoved and fondled and prodded her. Wearing head-to-toe white like an asylum patient, lying on a patterned bedspread, she looked nothing short of scared.
Blue publicises her own violation in ways that are unusual in traditional pornography, with its closed sets and narrative formulas. She demystifies how porn is created, hosting public events where masked men queue up to “have a go”. She is no bashful industry starlet — she is a self-made brand, a camgirl disruptor for whom discomfort is not a problem: it is the point. She has well understood that OnlyFans, Reddit and PornHub are oversaturated: big followings can no longer be won by being the hottest, the youngest, the most shiny and waxed and inflated. The trailblazers of the 2010s, infantilised e-girl Belle Delphine and hijabi porn star Mia Khalifa, showed that controversy was now the best way to build a brand.
In pursuit of further controversy, Blue is now on a podcast with Andrew Tate. The misogynist influencer — who faces 10 criminal charges in Britain, including rape, actual bodily harm and sex-trafficking, and who promotes a business model of acquiring “girlfriends” who can then be pimped out on porn sites — appeared in a promotional image with Blue and podcast host Rob Moore. Tate wears wonky sunglasses and a shirt open to his navel in the style of Jack Sparrow, looking like a man who spikes drinks in Popworld; Moore, who describes himself as a “creator/ranter/rebel”, stands awkwardly next to Bonnie Blue, who is kneeling on the floor with her tongue sticking out. In a teaser on X, Tate wrote: “Bonnie is the end result of feminism.” He is completely right.
“Blue is an object of hatred for many women, one of morbid curiosity for many men, and an existential problem for liberal feminism.”
Blue, who is my age and from near where I grew up, is the product of a feminism which has encouraged young women to prostitute themselves — and I worry for her. I see her degrading stunts as acts of self-harm. Half of her job is to receive the emissions of the worst cross-section of men in society, film it and smile about it; the other half is telling society she enjoys this, along with volleys at the women who resent or pity her. In the podcast, she discusses “what men want”, the hypocrisy and laziness of wives and girlfriends, the myriad ways “sex work” is good for society, and why it’s alright for men to override women’s consent with money. She also says she believes Tate is innocent of the charges against him (“well, why would he?”). He naturally encourages this world view, bleating a line which will be familiar to any survivors of bullshit liberal feminism. Bemoaning the men who chastise Blue for her sex stunts, he tritely says: “It’s your body, your choice, right?”
Unfortunately, Blue struggles to hold her own in the conversation. She is useful to Tate insofar as she can appear to legitimise his business model, but really she means less than nothing to him — in fact, he views her with a kind of erotic revulsion. Tate says he would not allow a daughter of his to follow Blue’s path, nor would he want a son to sleep with her. She is a useful pariah: she, like him, has understood our sexual culture better than most, to great professional acclaim. But unlike him, she has no admirers (public ones, at least). It must be lonely.
The personal consequences for Blue in the years to come are uncomfortable to consider: we can already see the psychological cost of her lifestyle ticking up like a taxi meter in her glazed blue eyes, in her monotone voice, in the frightened look on her face as she is shoved around on that bed. But she is an adult, and she is responsible — alongside Tate — for accelerating a sexual culture which has enriched her and which will harm and mislead thousands of women and girls. I have known young women who have chosen, entirely without financial need and through a vague sense that it is empowering, to set up shop on OnlyFans; one, who did it aged 21, had the standard experience: she burned through the couple of grand she made, quit after a few months and now must live with the fact that pictures of her naked body and faux-ecstatic face will be circulated around the internet forever. How many young women across the country share her experience?
But there are other consequences, too. Worse ones; ones that pertain to the magma of sex violence coursing through modern Britain, ones that begin in the low-lit bedrooms of tween boys and end in dark alleys and dorm rooms, in the bruised and violated bodies of the girls of the future.
Last week, a primary school-aged boy was filmed shouting at a woman sunbathing in her own garden in a bikini: “Give us a bit of fanny… I’ve been craving it all day. Suck my dick. Get on your knees. Give me your minge. Bend over.” In the background, a companion made moaning sounds. They cannot have been older than 10.
The video upset me for hours after. Something irreplicable about childhood, something critical about the respect between adults and children, men and women, has been spoiled — probably forever — by degrading pornograpy. And Bonnie Blue is partly responsible. That these boys’ instinct was to sexually intimidate a woman they saw only as a potential porn star; that they themselves have been exposed to that sort of language and material; that the generation of girls forced to sit in classrooms with them will face problems none of us ever did, is no less than disastrous.
When children are exposed to pornography, it burdens them with psychologically troubling ideas about the women they know in real life: that they all belong in a hidden sexual world in which men turn them into pretzels and fuck them unconscious, and that they secretly enjoy it. Our safeguards against violent sexism are hopeless: primary-school boys are scolded for pulling girls’ ponytails at break time; they are given history lessons about Cleopatra and Boudicca; they sit through assemblies about women’s football and Florence Nightingale. But all of this soft-touch equality conditioning is undone the moment they see a naked woman strangled, beaten and humiliated on a screen. And how could it not be? The absorption of the worldviews of Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue is nothing short of radicalising. Blue and Tate, and the pornography industry they represent, are directly to blame for the way Generation Alpha girls are being treated in the playground now, and will probably be treated for their entire teenage years. They will come up against a supercharged strain of misogyny which women my and Bonnie Blue’s age cannot even begin to understand.
We cannot rely on bullshit 2020s feminism to fix this — the boner-advocacy brigade which refuses to ask any difficult questions about who it represents or what it is for. As things stand, the young women of the future will be forced to fend for themselves, with Gen Z having utterly disappointed on the critical questions of gender, prostitution and pornography. So what can be done? Perhaps the only hope is that the 2030s will mark a turning point: that youngsters then will finally realise that the excesses of liberal feminism — the dogma that every choice a woman makes, however violating, is feminist — must be swept away if they are to survive this radioactive new breed of woman-hatred. Perhaps they will finally lobby politicians to accept that society simply cannot be trusted with extreme pornography; that, like other radicalising material, it should be restricted, and that this fact is a matter of life and death. With moves to criminalise strangulation on porn sites made last week, there is a glimmer of hope in this regard. I hope that young girls of the future will view Bonnie Blue in the same way that Tate so clearly does, as a stooge for failed feminism. I hope for their sake that they do, because our culture, as it stands, will not save them.
