I’ve been watching the Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips news unfold with my hands in front of my eyes, simultaneously upset at what they are promoting to young women as normal, but also with a reserved empathy for them. Empathy, because what they are putting their bodies through is so violent and traumatic; reserved, because much of the rhetoric both women have been spouting – especially Blue – is deeply misogynistic and reinforces so much of what is wrong about pornography.
I’ve been anxious to write about this topic because – as a feminist and journalist – it’s a hot potato. But as the recent news broke, with Bonnie Blue claiming to have set a 'world record' for having sex with the most men in one day (1,057 in 12 hours), I felt compelled to. We need modernised conversations around feminism, sex work, and pornography – ones that move away from the controversy of 'rad-fems' and include the new topics facing us all, like OnlyFans and porn for social media content.
As an almost-30-year-old woman, I was, until a few months ago, only peripherally aware of Bonnie Blue via the odd TikTok finding its way onto my FYP. Her name went from a 'who’s that again?' to someone embedded in social media discourse. I’ve found myself reading tweet after tweet about Blue.
For the uninitiated, Blue is a 24-year-old OnlyFans adult content creator. I think it’s fair to say that she courts controversy for views, but the line Blue toes is not a good one. Earlier this year, she went on a Freshers’ Week tour of UK universities, sleeping with as many students as possible “for free” on the agreement that she could upload the footage to OnlyFans. Blue claims to have made over £3 million from her OnlyFans account this year alone. She visited Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham and claims to have slept with hundreds of students, professors, and parents.
She reportedly encouraged 'virgins' and 'fresh 18-year-olds' to contact her. 'I gave everyone a time slot. It’s like you’re going for your hair,' she told the Daily Mail. 'I said you can do whatever you want to me in this slot, and then someone else is coming in.' Blue insists that she ensures everyone has valid ID and gets them to sign a consent form beforehand.
In a TikTok video yesterday, Blue said, 'This is what my face looks like after taking 1,000 men less than 12 hours ago.' Bonnie's press representative said there would be video proof of the event and that there was a documentary crew filming for an upcoming programme.
This is where it gets complicated and nuanced. Blue seeking out 'barely legal' teenagers to have sex with is predatory behaviour. Just because something is 'legal' does not mean it is moral – and pushing the legality of something to its absolute limits shows that Blue, on some level, is aware of this. She consistently uses dehumanising language in reference to herself and other women, seeing women’s roles as being pleasure-givers to men rather than autonomous people. This contributes to misogynistic violence, where women are dehumanised and seen as sub-human.
However, Bonnie Blue is also a product of the porn industry, not the creator of it. She does not exist in a silo, and therefore – although many of her actions are not excusable – to some degree, they are explainable.
Sex work, I believe, should be decriminalised globally and afforded the same rights as other workers – like unions – to ensure that it is safer and regulated. Porn, in its current form, is not something I am pro. There is a world where feminist porn could exist as the norm, sure, but that world does not yet exist.
Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips are examples of how, in fact, porn is just becoming more and more extreme to keep up with our desensitisation. On a recent episode of the podcast If I Speak, Moya Lothian-McLean said to her co-host Ash Sarkar that Bonnie Blue is the 'contentification' of pornography: 'Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have broken through to the mainstream because they’re extreme examples… What happened there was just when a body becomes merely flesh.'
It is not an exaggeration to say that porn is dangerous.
A report by the Children’s Commissioner, which drew together research from focus groups with teenagers aged 13-19 and a survey of 1,000, found that the average age at which children first see pornography is 13 and that 79% had encountered violent pornography before the age of 18.
Moreover, they found that pornography is not confined to dedicated adult sites: “We found that Twitter was the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen pornography. Fellow mainstream social networking platforms Instagram and Snapchat rank closely after dedicated pornography sites.”
Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, in Women On Porn, a book released last year, wrote: 'As much as we might not want it to be true, we know that some of the violence we see in porn is real.'
A study by the Behavioural Architects for the Government Equalities Office found 'an association between pornography and an increased likelihood of committing both verbal and physical acts of aggression, with a significantly stronger correlation with the use of violent pornography.'
I would love a world where pornography is just pleasure, where sex workers are treated fairly and safely, and where pornography does not trickle down into society and create insidious problems, violence, or deep bias. But it does.
So, for now, I’m pro-sex workers and the need for their increased protection on many fronts. But I am no pro-porn, and I am definitely not pro the extreme contentification of porn that those like Bonnie Blue are making popular. I hope that we are permitted these nuances, and that more vital conversations are had; because it’s imperative that young people know pornography is not sex. We must be clear that having sex with over one thousand people in a day is dehumanising and traumatic, physically and mentally.