In the liberal West, short of rape, paedophilia or bestiality, sexual behaviour is beyond judgement. ‘Yucking’ someone else’s ‘yum’ marks you out as ‘sex negative’, possibly even a social conservative. What is an averagely vanilla woman then to make of Bonnie Blue?
Writing about Bonnie Blue and her thousand-penis gangbang, the subject of a Channel Four (where else?) documentary, has fallen to women journalists and the ones I’ve read (Lucy Mangan, Janice Turner) have been bemused and even disgusted.
In what mode would a male journalist write about BB? Applauding her libertarianism could come across as self-interested lechery; to judge would be ‘anti-feminist’, if you understand feminism to mean empowerment through lots and lots of gonzo sex with random men. (Hint: I don’t.)
Unlike previous sexual extremists, such as Annabel Chong, BB has no back story of trauma. When her competitor, Lily Philips, burst into tears after her puny hundred-wang gangbang, she seemed to confirm the carefully non-judgemental view that being ‘railed’ by large numbers of random men in one go was not a normal, fun, healthy thing to do. Or perhaps it was just very, very tiring.
BB is as vulnerable as a crack team of assassins. There is total lack of affect in her steely blue gaze. (She has lovely eyes.) Her ‘team’ – her staff – admire her determination and clarity of purpose. She mocks those, the cheated-on wives especially, who presume to judge (‘hate’) her. She could just as well be an arms dealer or the leader of a particularly brutal revolution. She exists beyond conventional morality.
Bonnie Blue (her nom de porn) is a paradoxically fresh-faced woman of 26 with a dancer’s body and the full lips and sculpted brows of her generation. She’s made her fortune on OnlyFans by proclaiming herself a ‘slut’ and offering herself to anyone. She targets ‘barely legals’, most notoriously during freshers’ week at Nottingham Trent University. This is her USP. Other ‘content providers’ diddle themselves with dildos or perform with other professionals. BB does young civilians. Any of her ‘fans’ can have her. But the 1,057-man gangbang, held in January 2025 in a mansion off Oxford St, was too much even for OnlyFans, who wouldn’t allow her to post it. What a waste of hard work and numbing lube. (Yes, there is such a thing. Why should it be necessary, one asks.)
Sidenote: writers are constantly advised to own their own online real estate, because platforms can change the rules or disappear. Asked by the interviewer why she didn’t have her own website, BB said it was too much trouble to set up. I have struggled mightily with WordPress, but with her millions of pounds and her team of pros, surely this would be worthwhile business investment for BB.
Sex-positive feminism, an outgrowth of the sexual revolution, called into question the nature of female sexuality. Freed from the burden of religious morality and social mores that decreed ‘good’ women to be asexual, shaming and repressing female desire for millennia, women could now have sex ‘like men’, in a purely physically, emotionally detached way. Men, after all, are the default standard for most things, from bulletproof vests to medical research.
Having sex ‘like a man’ works for some women (and good for them) but not for a lot of us. I’d argue that this new model of female sexuality is as damaging as the old one. Also, while men have benefited from female sexual availability, old attitudes persist. These days, a woman can be judged just as harshly for being ‘sex negative’ (‘frigid’ or ‘uptight’ in last-century language) as for being ‘easy’.
A friend once criticised a draft novel because I had failed to include a ‘positive’ portrayal of casual sex. As a gay man, he had very firm and prescriptive views on modern, ‘liberated’ female sexuality. My attempt to explain that casual sex, for women, wasn’t necessarily an unproblematic, risk-free exchange of pleasure, was simply stonewalled. Overall, my depiction, as a woman writer, of female sexuality, of female behaviour, was decreed ‘backwards’.
There is no point continuing a conversation with someone who won’t listen, and I didn’t bother. We’d been friends for a long time.
BB claims to be the logical outcome of feminism, exercising total autonomy through self-subjugation. In her complete lack of discrimination and sexual enthusiasm, does she represent the far extreme of ‘sexual empowerment’ feminism? If so, is it fair to say she’s also an extreme outlier in terms of female sexuality?
She obviously enjoys the attention and the money. She has professionalised her sexuality. Women have always done this, for various reasons. Before it banned her, OnlyFans had enabled her to monetise her body to an extent historically limited to royal mistresses, without having to pander to a single, controlling male ego. This seems like progress, of a sort.
And what of the men: the average Joes queuing up, some wearing balaclavas, all of them wearing trainers, to be one of the 1,057? What does this say about male sexuality? Or are our expectations of it so low that no special comment is required? Many of them, crows BB on one of her social media feeds, were wearing wedding rings. She claims she’s giving them something that their wives don’t. What, bare-bum exposure on the internet? Thirty seconds of rumpy before moving over for the next bloke?
As a secular product of the late twentieth century, I’m no prude. I don’t see sex as intrinsically immoral or dirty. It can be sublime or very ordinary. Perhaps we ascribe it far too much importance.
So why does BB’s gangbang cause a visceral disgust in me? To process all those anonymous men through her mouth and vagina (but not the ‘back door’, a curious boundary for an ‘adult content provider’ set on busting limits) would seem to require an essential hardening of the boundaries, both physical and psychological. ‘Rearrange my insides!’ she challenges her viewers. Letting someone else put their body inside yours is a unique form of intimacy; BB reduces it, laughingly, to messy surgery. I say this as someone whose insides have been ‘rearranged’ by a hysterectomy. It wasn’t funny.
To treat sex so casually seems, to me at least, to diminish it some crucial way. If sex isn’t special, if it’s just a meeting of body parts, the plugging of orifices, followed by fleeting sensation and the emission of fluids, then why does it matter? Why are people (men) making BB a millionaire?
Or, by insisting that sex is special, do we miss out on limitless opportunities for physical pleasure? Like eating only one kind of cake? In a world of infinite choice, why subject yourself to such limitation? This goes against the contemporary imperative to seek maximum fulfilment.
After the gangbang, BB and her team hole up in a sumptuous LA Airbnb, plotting how to get around the OnlyFans ban and keep the money rolling in. BB admits she can’t go out alone. What she fears most is an acid attack from one of the ‘haters’. ‘Don’t talk about it,’ says one of her team, visibly flinching.
After sitting through this documentary, I had some very disturbing dreams. Advisory warning: don’t watch this just before bed.
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