Bonnie Blue deserves to be canceled

Dr. Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies, defines the “pornification of society” as a culture where explicit content isn’t just tolerated, but actively celebrated: the hardcore becomes mainstream, the shocking becomes desensitizing, the transgressive becomes ever more competitive.

Leading this race to the bottom is OnlyFans “model” Bonnie Blue. Blue, ever-the-expert in attention-grabbing stunts, has hit headlines again after she revealed her plans for a “dogging tour” of the UK, announcing this jaunt as casually as if it were just a couple of stand-up gigs.

We blame Andrew Tate, rightly, for teaching men to disrespect women, but where is the blame on Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips?

This is the same “mattress actress” who slept with over 1,000 men in a day, went to a university “freshers’ week” with a sign saying “bonk me and let me film it,” recently claimed to be pregnant, and, in a teaser for a video, said she would be “leaving here in a wheelchair.”

In our era of cancel culture and perpetual outrage, you would assume that Blue – who has boasted about using “barely legal” girls and boys in her videos and helping men cheat on their wives for a living – would be a demonized pariah. Far from it. She is a regular on podcasts and radio, and was even interviewed on ITV’s This Morning (which is ironic given how recently they fired their main presenter for inappropriate relations with a younger man). 

The same is true for Lily Phillips, subject of the documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, who was interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight last month about her experiences in the sex industry. Rather than being thoroughly challenged on the negative impact she might be having on younger audiences, Phillips was instead treated as an authority on sex and spokesperson for her generation, when the reality is she is clearly a deeply disturbed young woman.

Given the devastating damage pornography is inflicting on both men and women, why are Blue and Phillips not subject to more scrutiny? Why are they platformed and promoted and treated as if they are just regular, normal businesswomen?

It may be partly out of pity; there are plenty who see the girls as infantilized “victims,” exploited by the big bad patriarchy, and unfairly targeted compared to the men who appear in their videos. It may be because #girlboss feminism means that others have drunk the Kool-Aid that prostitution is empowering, and if objectification is inevitable, then you may as well make money out of it. It may be because we live in a world where content is everything and everything is content, and we accept that all content creators go to increasingly extreme lengths for views (remember when YouTuber Logan Paul uploaded footage of a hanging body in Japan’s suicide forest in 2018).

When campaigners warn about the dangers of pornography, the response – especially from the UK government – is usually apathetic shoulder-shrugging. Compare this to the high-pitch hysteria around the manosphere and misogyny: schools being explicitly told to talk to their students about Andrew Tate, to show the Netflix series Adolescence as if it were a documentary, to educate students about consent, and yet not care that porn is literally the monetized violation of it.

We blame Andrew Tate, rightly, for teaching men to disrespect women, but where is the blame on Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips? Blue and Phillips are not just porn stars: they are influencers. Every interview they give, every stunt they pull, every teaser they post on Instagram (yet another failure of moderation) normalizes the degradation of women. They – and the porn industry as a whole – are far more responsible for perverting young people’s perceptions around sexual intimacy and relationships than incel Reddit forums or right-wing podcasts. After all, Andrew Tate could only dream of having the reach Pornhub does (42 billion visits in 2019). 

Blue and Phillips may be exonerated because what they are doing is technically “legal,” but it doesn’t make it any more ethical. The fact that they have to find ever-more creative ways to demean themselves reminds us that porn is not so much about selling sex as selling transgression: as Mary Harrington writes, porn is about the “monetization of taboo.” The boundaries have been pushed so far they are no longer there at all: the easy accessibility of extreme content explains why we have a generation who have been exposed to scenes of sexual choking online long before they even have their first kiss. 

In their quest for viewers and subscribers, Blue and Phillips have turned pornography into an extreme sport: pushing their bodies to the limits, taking on increasingly humiliating challenges, and asking how far we are willing to go for a dopamine rush. It’s high time we stopped cheering them on.