Bonnie Blue is an It Girl. But she’s not an It Girl in the way we used to recognise them. Bonnie Blue is an It Girl because she’s written about as a thing, not a person. She’s an object, everything that’s bad about women, sex, modern life. She’s not really considered to be a human being, with hopes and fears and desires; her pronoun is It. But I can’t help liking her.
I’m not lying, and I’m not trying to be controversial; I’m just really keen on honesty, and so few people are really honest, even – especially – when they identify as honest. My own trade, journalism, is rife with faux-honest types – mostly female, with the odd over-sharing man – who, sell themselves on confessional writing, present a highly ‘curated’ version of the truth, usually one in which they are either poor little victims or adventurous vamps. When someone actually tells the truth about themselves – as I believe Bonnie Blue does – there is an outbreak of mass moral panic, as those who lie in order to live with themselves feel the sting of seeing what raw truth looks like.
In the interests of complete candour, I’ll reveal my own history with pornography. As I’m so old, there obviously wasn’t much of it around when I was a kiddy apart from the legendary top shelf magazines; you sometimes found them in fields where someone had obviously enjoyed a bit of solitary self-abuse and then guiltily abandoned the source of their pleasure, left to blow across scrubland like tit-tumbleweed. I grew up and in my twenties wrote a dirty book, Ambition, the paperback edition of which became a number one bestseller; it was very racy – somehow, I’d developed a pornographic imagination. (Getting married to the first man you have sex with will do that to you.) Then came the internet – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I became particularly enamoured of a performer called Mika Tan; I enjoyed watching pornography alone, but also while I was having sex with my new young boyfriend (now husband). I only realised I had a bit of a problem when one day he said politely ‘Julie, does it ever occur to you that we could have sex without pornography on?’
I’ve never had many sex fantasies because if I fancied doing a sex thing, I did it. But the one recurrent one I had in my twenties and thirties was what I thought of as The Queue; a parade of faceless men lining up to do the deed with me. I was hazy about the actual number; somewhere between 12 and 20, I’d guess. (Not a thousand – I was a good girl!) I never got around to it and in my fifties, what with the menopause and deciding against being pumped full of hormones to keep me ‘do-able’, I lost interest in That Side Of Things. It didn’t bother me; the vast majority of women by the time they get to 50 have had all the sex they wanted and some they didn’t, whereas men – unless rich, handsome and/or famous – have not. I’m convinced that this disparity is what makes so many men hostile towards women, and is at the root of the incel movement.
Another reason I stopped watching pornography is the same reason I stopped taking cocaine ten years ago. Everyone wants to believe that regardless of the misery and broken lives which litter the production of everybody else’s kicks, the source we alone opt for is magically free of exploitation. Like most purchasers of illegal drugs, I was partly responsible for the untold misery – probably even the deaths – of impoverished strangers, just for some fleeting fun. I got away from cocaine without doing lasting damage to myself – but I’ll never know what I did to others by creating the demand, and that’s something I’ll just have to live with. The pornography trade is far worse, preying as it does mostly on poor, vulnerable girls; the trafficking, the torture, the average age of death for a performer in pornography being 37 with a suicide rate six times higher than a civilian.
But none of that is true of Bonnie Blue. I’m pretty damn sure she’ll live to a ripe old age. Not trafficked, not tortured, not bothered by feelings of shame or sorrow; maybe that’s exactly what bothers some who pretend to criticise her on moral grounds. There was a lot of twaddle talked about ‘ethical porn’ and ‘feminist porn’ awhile back; though the phrases are up there with ‘friendly fire’, no one can deny that she is her own boss.
When someone actually tells the truth about themselves – as I believe Bonnie Blue does – there is an outbreak of mass moral panic
I believe that Bonnie Blue – who comes from a loving and respectable family, unlike many porn performers – is doing what she does partly because she enjoys it and can make masses of money from it, but partly as a flight from boredom, the fear of which is so extreme in some people that they will do anything to avoid it. I have a friend who spent quite a lot of time in the place where Tia Billinger (Blue’s real name) was raised, and describes it as ‘a very traditional area – the whole place is full of wedding-dress shops and wedding venues.’ (Lily Phillips, Blue’s less interesting competitor in the head-count sex racket, comes from around there too.) Billinger was by the age of 22 a married woman working in recruitment for the NHS; she has said that she was ‘bored of living in the nine to five.’ She’s not bored now. She is filthy rich, rich enough at 26 to never work again, but you sense that she’s having the time of her life. I can imagine her retiring at 30, utterly triumphant and smug.
Maybe there is a tiny bit of envy in some of the criticisms? This may cause some commentators to say the silliest things. ‘She’s set feminism back a hundred years’ say people who hate feminism anyway. Others shockingly compare it to the Gisele Pelicot case; the crucial difference being consent, or else one may as well compare one-on-one sex to rape. When she announced that she planned to put herself in a glass-box petting zoo and have sex with 2,000 men, an OnlyFans creator, of all people, called it ‘a circus.’ ‘Dead behind the eyes’ is another accusation – what exactly does it mean? She has nice eyes; she invariably looks back boldly at her questioners because she has nothing to hide. The idea that she is OK seems to perturb people enormously; the journalist Sophie Wilkinson wrote of her: ‘She is a cog in a far bigger machine, and I just want to know who hurt her.’
If you don’t use – and what a giveaway the word is – pornography, you can criticise Bonnie Blue all you like and not be ridiculous. But if you use it and criticise her, you’re a clown. An addle-pate. A pitiable, illogical hypocrite. I’ll bet you’ve watched gang bangs – if not four men, why not five? If not ten men, why not 11? At what head count does consensual adult pornography stop being acceptable? (I’m reminded of the story about George Bernard Shaw and the actress. Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds? Actress: My goodness. Well, I’d certainly think about it. Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound? Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?! Shaw: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.) And who are you to judge, sitting there self-abusing yourself into stupefaction like a blank-eyed ape?
You’d think that Bonnie Blue invented pornography, the way she’s being castigated. But the industry was fully formed, built on the random desires of men, long before she was born. All she’s done is use it for her own ends. Do I think the availability of online pornography has made society worse? Yes. Do I think it has made the relationship between the sexes worse? Yes. Do I think it has scarred childhoods, blighted marriages, ruined lives, made young men impotent with young women when they should be having the best sex of their lives? Yes. But still, I can’t help liking Bonnie Blue.
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