Blaming Bonnie Blue

Sex, Spectacle & $elf

Bonnie Blue: 1000 Men and Me is available to view via the Channel 4 website until 21st August. This image has been everywhere this week. I’m struck by how Melusineian it is.

I’m taking The Vestry’s life in my hands talking about Ms Blue. Last time I briefly mentioned this young lady and failed to point a crooked finger and judge her as an evil sinner and a harlot, it cost me subscribers.

But I’ve been thinking about sex and money for my big essay - Total Burn Reset - and also caught the documentary Bonnie Blue: 1000 Men and Me that aired on Channel 4 this week. So perhaps foolishly, I thought I’d share my opinion about Ms Blue’s endeavours. The big essay isn’t going to be ready next week as Anwen is visiting. I’m not going to be sat at my computer typing while I have a gorgeous little witch-woman in the house casting her spell. I appreciate your patience and understanding.

Watch the video if you prefer to have me read this to you (or listen to the article voiceover above if you want me in your ears but not your eyes).

Introduction

As some of you know, after I finished my degree at the London School of Economics in 2000 I decided that pursuing further study or seeking ‘something in finance’ was too boring. Starting a porn site with my (now ex) missus and her girlfriend was the way to go.

So that’s what I did. It was awesome fun. The vision I had for Naturalsex was to create something akin - to what today you’d think of - as an ‘ethical’ OnlyFans. Of course, I failed. The distractions were just too distracting. And sadly, being genuinely ‘ethical’ is just not the way businesses become successful. We’d have been much better pretending whilst relentlessly pursuing money and maintaining plausible legal deniability.

But over six or seven years we had plenty of joyful adventures. And for a time if any media company wanted to explore how the internet was changing our relationship to sex - they’d come talk to us. We appeared on all the major UK TV channels and were presented with an Erotic Award in 2002 by the late, great Tuppy Owens.

Back then, there was no social media to speak of. But it was clear to us that this was the internet’s direction of travel - it was obvious that regular updates and interactivity were the income drivers. Armed with such insights, and the opportunity to act upon them, it has taken considerable skill and commitment, on the part of your author, to find himself in the Autumn of his life, forced to drive a van to make ends meet.

What hasn’t changed between the noughties and now - what’s the same for Ms Blue today as it was for us back then - is the power of sex as spectacle.

We once organised a bukkake in aid of Comic Relief. A quarter century later my memory of it is a bit sketchy other than we gathered funds through a phone line, we made a big play on the word ‘donate’, and Comic Relief got a couple of hundred quid.

Now perhaps this is already TMI?

The difficulty for me is that I have these real experiences to draw on. And they impact the way I react to Ms Blue’s activities.

I’m also still quite committed to the idea and power of ‘Sex as Spectacle’. I’m blessed to have incorporated Sarah Kershaw’s beautiful and mesmerizing The Union of Oppositions in Ecstasy into Church of Burn’s service. (See my essay The Resurrection of the Body for more).

The Resurrection of the Body

And above all I want to be honest with you. I don’t want to couch things in euphemisms. Or not mention something because I’m worried I’ll offend you.

So if hearing the sixty-year-old High Priest of a Money Burning Church honestly sharing his thoughts and feelings about Ms Blue and her sexual exploits creeps you out, maybe look away now.

The Media Pile-on

Since Ms Blue’s documentary aired, plenty of articles by nice middle-class ladies have appeared in the mainstream press. What follows is a long but not exhaustive list showing just how much the media feeds on outrage — while simultaneously giving you plenty of options to reaffirm your view of Ms Blue if mine doesn’t chime with you.

Lucy Mangan in The Guardian : 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story review – the troubling tale of sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours
Lucy thinks Ms Blue could do better things with her talents and worries about what her huge success says about society and where we're heading.

Anita Singh in The Telegraph : I watched Bonnie Blue’s degrading documentary with her father. I’m not sure either of us will recover
Poor Anita was left feeling grubby and dirty. She definitely isn’t a fan of pornography and finds its shift to ‘acceptability’ depressing.

Kate Maltby in INews : Bonnie Blue runs ‘pick-me girl’ to breaking point
Kate basically argues that Ms Blue has internalised patriarchy and misogyny. She’s unconvinced by any of Ms Blue’s assertions as to her sexual enjoyment and sovereignty.

Pravina Rhudra in INews : Bonnie Blue is the endpoint of capitalism, not feminism
Pravinda claims that arguments about Ms Blue being the ‘ultimate manifestation of feminism’ or female sexual empowerment are spurious and that Ms Blue is above everything else an arch capitalist.

Rowan Pelling in The Telegraph : Stop the pearl-clutching over Bonnie Blue, she doesn’t deserve our condemnation
Rowan, I remember, was editor of the Erotic Review back in the day. As you might imagine she is a little more forgiving of Ms Blue than other columnists. But she’s dubious about the 1000 man claim and says Ms Blue’s stunts ‘repel her’.

Olivia Petterin The Belfast Telegraph : Bonnie Blue documentary is sad, uncomfortable and prurient viewing
Olivia finds Ms Blue impenetrable (no pun intended). She believes the documentary reveals only the slightest hint of the person behind the image.

Olivia Petterin on Substack - What Happened When I met Bonnie Blue Olivia is clearer in this piece about what she sees as the damaging effects of Ms Blue’s actions on wider society.

Janice Turner in The Times : Bonnie Blue: 1,000 men and the worrying normalisation of porn
Janice has an extensive and quite sympathetic interview with Ms Blue. She describes her as the Ayn Rand of porn and suggests that Tia (Ms Blue’s real name) is trapped by the porn persona she has created.

Faye Curran in The New Statesmen : Bonnie Blue has no limits and no one to challenge her either
Faye is critical of the documentary. She doesn’t think the interviewer did a good job of challenging Ms Blue. She echoes other commentators in arguing for intervention in the market for pornography.

For a meta piece about the writers writing about Ms Blue I recommend this Substack piece:

Ella Dorn on Substack : Everyone is getting off to Bonnie Blue
This is my favourite piece! Here’s a couple of lines to give you a flavour: “It’s the Lady Writers who are making the most of this. The men are at liberty to watch actual porn and be done with it. The women need to reconcile their own desire to Get Off with the demand for a legible article pitch…”

The most recent twist to Bonnie Blue: 1000 Men and Me is that Channel 4 have found themselves in the crosshairs for actually daring to broadcast the documentary. Visa and Smirnoff got a strop on. And Baroness Gabby Bertin of the Independent Pornography Taskforce is promising legislative action on ‘barely legal content’.

Do I have the right to have an Opinion?

In the articles listed above, criticism of Ms Blue activities (and it is mostly criticism) comes from a broadly secular perspective. No one cites millennia old texts to back up or explore their moral judgements. Still, there’s a strong sense that we ought to approach sex morally. This moralism is rarely defined, but it’s clearly animated by the idea that sex is, or should be, sacred. And so, its proper place is outside of market relations. Outside of money.

In the interest of gender and class balance, then — as you’ll have noticed, Editors wisely commissioned only female writers to serve as Ms Blue’s therapists-cum-firing squad — and because any argument grounded in the sanctity of sex surely calls for a priest, I’d argue that I do have the right to an opinion.

So I’m here: ready with my dog collar, my van-driver-sensibilities (Oi Oi, Sweetheart!), my penis and my porno past to pronounce on whether Ms Blue is the Great Whore of Babylon and we are in the end of times, or if she’s the Goddess Melusine incarnate, come to take us to the promised land.

Let’s be porno-positive!

You ready?

Content Warning:
Punches will not be pulled and nice middle-class ladies may be offended.

Have you lived out any of your sexual fantasies? I don’t mean has your partner run a bath for you? Lit some scented candles and sprinkled rose petals? I mean your real fantasies. Fantasies that may only manifest as vague feelings in the moment before orgasm. Have you ever told your partner about them? Have you verbalise them to yourself? Have you ever searched for porn that inflames or satisfies those desires?

For all the harm it does - and it can and does do harm - pornography, especially through the medium of the internet, has enabled people to explore and experience their fantasies. It’s allowed individuals to realise “Oh, I’m not the only one who gets turned on by that’’. It’s helped couples break free from the stultifying Judeo-Christian dogma of strict monogamy. And it produces a countless number of glorious orgasms every hour of every day.

Any balanced view of pornography should do more than take those positive outcomes into account; they should be its starting point. Yet the forces reigned against pornography are so powerful they anchor our minds, by a very short chain, to its negative impacts.

Rage-baiting

Now, please do not take my porno-positive declaration as an endorsement of everything Ms Blue does.

I find her rage-baiting distasteful. And potentially harmful. For those unaware, Ms Blue uses social media to taunt the wives and girlfriends of the men she fucks. This encourages hateful comments. And because engagement drives views, the nastier she is, the greater Ms Blue’s reach - and therefore the greater her income.

Within the framework of the attention economy and amoral capitalism this strategy makes complete sense and has proven itself to be very effective. Creating theatre out of heartfelt emotions is what the tabloids have always done. The Romans were masters at creating a pantomime of real life and death. Our capacity to dehumanise one another is not something that has started or will end with Ms Blue.

It was a temptation to push people’s rage buttons when I was doing Naturalsex. It’s all well and good believing that is not a behaviour you’d ever stoop to. When the financial pressure gets real, when your home and all you own is on the line, when everything is threatening to fall-in on you, dehumanising a few randoms might not seem like such a significant moral boundary. Unfortunately for us, we’d already scuppered ourselves by deciding to be all ‘ethical’ and sex positive. A very foolish financial decision!

Barely Legal

Here’s a general rule for you to follow in your life as an adult. Don’t fuck anyone under eighteen. And don’t use the law as a watershed so that everyone over the age of 18 becomes fair game.

Ms Blue is definitely guilty of using the law as a watershed. She seems to act like a corporation where it is the law and the law only that defines her moral boundaries. In mitigation I reckon her sexual encounters with young men are not the sort that are likely to fuck anyone up. They are too brief and functional. And the ‘deal’ is quite clearly laid out - “you are one of many, we fuck, I film it, you leave”.

The ‘barely legal’ oeuvre is distasteful, though. It’s not a trope we used in Naturalsex and I don’t want to position myself as defending it. We must recognise however that it signposts something that is present within our sexual psyches whether we want to admit it or not.

So to single out Ms Blue for condemnation on this issue is unfair. I remember the Sun doing ‘countdowns’ waiting for some young celebrity to turn 16. And I remember ogling Sam Fox’s tits in the Sun when she was 16 “Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels” (In mitigation I was only 17 at the time).

Again the key link is around dehumanising others in pursuit of a dollar and using the law - and nothing else - as our moral compass.

Group Sex

If my use of the word ‘ethical’ encourages you to think of a particular aesthetic, it's right that I should disabuse you of that notion. Naturalsex was not softcore, nor was it ‘erotica’. Like Ms Blue we made hardcore pornography.

And for me hardcore porn holds the moral high ground. It’s a more honest representation of sex than softcore porn or erotica. There is a case to be made that softcore porn - with which social media is completely saturated - does more damage than hardcore porn. And gives far less satisfaction to boot. Softcore draws forth desire without offering redemption.

So I’ve no problem with Ms Blue taking on a 1000 men. Plainly, it is a sex spectacle; an endurance test for an expert sexual performer. It is not sex as we normal folk know it. It’s like comparing your sprint to the bus with an Olympic 100 metres race.

The spectacle also, incidentally, shows the magical power of numbers. Recognising that 1000 would have an exponential impact was very astute on Ms Blue’s part. If she’d fucked 919 men (as did the previous record holder Lisa Sparks in 2004) we likely wouldn’t be talking about her. You wouldn’t think 81 more 40 second fucks would make such a difference - but obviously it does.

My experience with any multi-person ‘specified’ sex event is that there’s always a trade off between the number of participants and its intensity. The rate at which the intensity diminishes depends on the levels of trust, connection and desire. If you have a scene with say 30 or 40 men ready to engage with two or three women (all largely unknown to one another) it can quickly get very ‘sports and social club’.

People are generally polite. This is good in a sense. It diffuses tension and makes the space feel much safer. Following social conventions of politeness tends to do that. But it’s also bad precisely because it defuses tension. Oftentimes someone (usually with a camera in hand) will act as a sort of ringmaster, corral the participants and push them past the more redundant social conventions.

At events with a looser arrangement - where the sexual liaison is unspecified (and obviously this is not the case for Ms Blue) - things can get even more tricky. Social conventions need to be in place while whatever is going to happen is negotiated. Back in my day I tended to avoid Fetish Clubs who seemed more turned on by rules and conventions than sex. Each to their own, but I found it a passion killer. I recently read a piece on Slutstack about a sex club called ‘Red Means No’ where they have a host of tricks to maintain the intensity. For example, members try to do the ‘negotiations’ prior to the event.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that group sex events tend to be much more dizzying and intense in our imaginations than they are in reality. Don’t let that put you off trying. But do let it inform your view about all those nice middle-class ladies and their commentaries.

Sex and the Media Class

It would have been fairer if one of those nice middle class ladies had begun her critique of Ms Blue by revealing her own sexual proclivities. “I once fucked two guys, and the experience was…”. It would have evened up the playing field and lent weight, wisdom and self-awareness to their dissemination of Ms Blue and her activities.

The takeaway for both me and the ex-missus from our time talking to media companies and journalists about our sex life was that you can’t talk about sex without being sexual. That to talk or write or make a film about sex is - in a sense - to engage in sex. There is no objective stance. Your sexuality directs your line of inquiry and your reaction to revelations.

It quickly gets complicated, too. You talk to a journalist who has their own predilections. Their Editor may have others.

The piece which put us in the public eye in 2001 was by Simon Garfield. It was a cool piece. To me, Simon seemed open-minded if a little ‘mono-normative’. But plainly his Editor had decided that anyone making porn must be a victim or a hustler or both (pretty much the same story for Ms Blue’s representation in the media). So the headline they used for us referenced Cynthia Payne and the photographs cast the ex-missus as a pretty (of course) but rather scared looking woman. Neither we nor Simon had a choice about how his piece was framed.

So I don’t blame Ms Blue for being ‘steely-eyed’, giving nothing away and sticking to the script.

Sermon

So seeing as I’m the one in the dog-collar I best step up.

Sex holds both the sacred and the profane. In a different reality Ms Blue might be regarded as a servant of the Divine. A Temple priestess devoted to spectacles of sexual excess. Excess, after all, inheres within the sacred. It is utility that creates the profane.

Sex that maintains a relationship, that procreates, that is just enough to keep desire from overwhelming us - is profane! Wild, passionate and intense sex is the sacred stuff. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Sexual liberation is how we gain true knowledge of ourselves.

While writing this piece I watched the BBC2 documentary on The Jesus Army. Purity, abstinence and chastity were regarded and enforced as supreme virtues. They almost always embed themselves in Christian religious cults — with only rare exceptions. Collective repression is such a powerful tool of control. Ideals of purity seem to easily stick to and smother our psyches - both individual and collective.

And almost invariably what is the result of the extreme repression of sexuality within religious cults? Do I need to tell you? Child abuse.

Ms Blue is not the enemy. I do worry that she may have a tragedy written into her future. But that will have as much, if not more, to do with our reaction to her activities as it will to the activities' effects on her. So I have sympathy for her. Even though there is no doubt that she is complicit in creating the outrage that surrounds her.

I am as disappointed as the most middle-class of all the middle-class ladies at Ms Blue’s association with Andrew Tate. But huffing, tutting and puffing over that will not solve anything. Their fame - their infamy - is a result of their ability to exploit the new media ecosystem. This system seems to reward a total commitment to outrage. And making that total commitment costs the individual their moral sovereignty. In this sense the individual becomes like a corporation for whom the fecundity of money is enshrined as their primary purpose.

But again, we see this dynamic all around us. Our national purpose is economic growth. We are committed as a nation to the fecundity of money.

Young people especially, want to escape the grip of capitalism. That was an obvious theme in Ms Blue’s documentary. The young ladies whom Ms Blue had recruited to film with her were there because they didn’t want what life under capitalism had laid out for them - a mundane job and aspirations limited to modest material gain.

The entertainment industry thrives on dangling the dream of escape in front of us. And if we fail? Well, then that has to be down to us surely? We weren’t prepared to make the sacrifices necessary. We weren't prepared to subjugate ourselves to the ideology of capital in order to escape capitalism. You see the trap?

Tate and Ms Blue are at the sharp edge of a culture that subsumes everything to money. But all of us are guilty of confusing sexual union with possession. This is not exclusive to modern life. It has been the eternal condition of humankind.

We must understand that the repressive forces which bind our behaviours are not inherently ‘good’ - they may do ‘good’ because they constrain desires which might cause harm and rupture the social body.

But ultimately repression will kill us.

Liberation through love — that’s how we’ll live.
That’s the escape from capitalism and its death wish.

Sex and money are the only problems.
All else is symptom.