Why Bonnie Blue and Andrew Tate horrify us

OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue claims to have broken a world record by sleeping with over a thousand men in twelve hours. I say “slept with” but obviously the euphemism doesn’t really apply to this dubious feat. Blue, who was born in England but now lives in the United States, added to the glamour of the occasion by uploading a video of the aftermath, where she walks the streets with her face covered in what appears to be a pot pourri of male ejaculate.

The reason Blue and Tate horrify us is that we mostly subscribe to a simple view: that men should treat women with respect

If the twenty-five-year-old adult star’s stunt was designed to get attention, she has certainly succeeded in doing just that. Blue has managed to shock even the most hardened internet user and get the world talking about her. In doing so, she has followed in the footsteps of Andrew Tate, the Big Brother contestant turned misogynist manosphere influencer. 

Blue and Tate might not admit it to themselves, but they have plenty lin common. Both are encouraging, and revelling in, very bad male behaviors.

Tate, an ex-kickboxer from Luton who now lives in Romania, is the kind of man who unites conservatives and progressives, a kind of achievement in these polarized times, even if we are made brothers and sisters in revulsion. He has described women as “intrinsically lazy” and said there is “no such thing as an independent female.” Tate makes one long for the return of the social mores that saw men horse-whipped in the streets merely for breach of promise. Blue engenders more of a kind of horrified pity.

To someone of my generation, reared in the late twentieth century with its liberating principles, the passing of judgment on the legal sexual activities of others feels very uncomfortable — and I’m not heterosexual, so that adds another distancing factor. When you’ve been judged for your sexuality and its expression, you really don’t want to cast the first stone or any of the subsequent boulders.

But, as they say, an onlooker sees most of the game. Gays like me can spot the stark differences between male and female sexuality by looking at what happens when you remove the opposite sex from the sex equation. Let me assure you, there are a lot of gay men enjoying chemsex parties and Bonnie Blue-style gang bangs. There are no lesbian chemsex parties or gang bangs.

Men and women are, after all, agreeing to very different things when they consent to sex. This is one of the few situations where our friends on the woke left, with their talk of differential power relations, are absolutely right, though their consistency of thought and methods of addressing those disparities are cuckoo. 

A quick flick through the most basic anthropological text will tell you all about the many and varied human cultural customs and rules that try to regulate for this difference, from the Taliban at one end, to the mild social shaming at the other end which is, or was, ours. Our end is very much predicated on legality and consent. This overlooks the fact that people often consent to all manner of legal but unpleasant or unwise things. Jo Bartosch says that “behind consent there is always a story, and always a power imbalance with the weaker party acquiescing to the stronger.” She’s right.

That is why shame and stigma are such important balances. But now we have done away with those too. We’ve replaced them with grotesque evasions such as “sex positivity” and “sex work.” Feminist writer Kat Rosenfeld describes this situation as “the unfortunate side effect of all our traditional sexual mores having been discarded in favor of vapid, anything-goes sex positivity with a monomaniacal focus on consent. We barely even have the vocabulary anymore to describe bad or cruel or execrable behavior that is wrong without being rape. Instead, we’re left with two categories of sex, consensual and criminal, the unspoken understanding being that you’re only allowed to complain about the latter.” It’s hard to fault her analysis.

Sex has, or it can have, all kinds of weird quirks and twists. These are a key part of its popularity. Some people enjoy being humiliated. Some people like cheapness and dirt and ugliness and power. I say “people,” but I’m not fooling anyone: it’s men who like those things. No women are tuning in avidly to Bonnie Blue. 

That’s fine, I suppose. Exhibitionism is the key issue here. If this was happening behind closed doors, it wouldn’t be so pressing an issue. But the internet has meant it is impossible to avoid such exploits; the ready availability and ubiquity of porn in the click hungry twenty-first century have pushed it — as the case of Bonnie Blue demonstrates — right in front of us. Exhibitionists and the quest for ever more novel sexual “content” were made for each other. Surely mystery and discretion are better seasonings for sex, particularly now we’ve seen right up inside everybody and everything? Good old-fashioned sexual hypocrisy begins to seem morally pristine.

We have been liberated from shame, yes. But like many of the freedoms achieved half a century ago, we are left asking ourselves a question; liberation from what, and to do what? The freedom of women like Blue to behave exactly as the worst kind of men want may possibly not have been the best idea; in fact, it is, put simply, just a different brand of subjugation.

The truth is that the reason the exploits of Blue and Tate horrify us is that we mostly subscribe to a simple view: that men should treat women with respect. That this has been tried and found difficult (and sometimes a thing we have failed horribly at) doesn’t mean it’s not an ideal to aim for. We live in an era of new freedoms and have shaken off the “old-fashioned” gender roles of the past, yet it’s hard not to wonder whether there might be a golden medium between these things. Wherever that is, it’s not with Tate and Blue. To hell with the pair of them.