In the totality of human existence, so goes the cliche, the best time to be alive is now. I believe it. We can gesture to a kind of ambient liberalism, a better organising principle for society than anything else we have managed to come up with so far.
Then there’s all the stuff about literacy rates, women’s suffrage, epidemiology and declining crime. There have always been war, pestilence and suffering, but in sum there is just less of it now than ever. I hold this idea as foundational to my thinking.
Well, nothing has come along to shake my commitment to the principle more than a 26-year-old porn star from Derbyshire in the English midlands. Perhaps I did not cling to the axiom as robustly as I once thought if the whims of just one person can make me question it.
But forgive me and all the moralising prudishness about to spill out, because I suspect my feelings on the question – as visceral as they are – will be shared. If not, perhaps everything is even worse than I thought.
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The innocent among us might not be familiar with the name Bonnie Blue, a nom de plume for Tia Billinger. She is a former recruitment agent and NHS staffer who turned to porn out of professional boredom.
She makes her money – sometimes as much as an estimated £2 million (€2.3 million) a month – on the “content creation platform” OnlyFans, where she charges a fee for people to watch her increasingly extreme sexual stunts. She is now permanently banned from OnlyFans.
The latest stunt saw 1,057 men line up to have sex with her over the course of 12 hours. Another saw her offer free sex with fresher students at Nottingham Trent University, so long as she could film it and dispense it on her OnlyFans account.
OnlyFans finally baulked and refused to host her next planned stunt – whereby she would be tied up in a glass box in public at the mercy of any sexual act anyone wanted to perform on her. I am glad they found a limit somewhere, even if that proverbial line was crossed years and miles ago.
The phenomenon of Bonnie Blue, however, is not too far for Tuesday night’s Channel 4 documentary 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story. The broadcaster said it wanted to tell stories at the edge of modern morality. And I applaud their interest in doing so in the abstract.
The Bonnie Blue problem, however, is that everyone who engages with it is simply too credulous and forgiving.
Take, for example, the tiniest effort made by the director to push back on Billinger’s chosen career path. “In terms of feminism, are you not maybe sending us backwards?” she asked the “actress”. I don’t know if I have ever heard a challenge quite so mealy-mouthed and equivocating.
Look elsewhere: thousands of words of think pieces dedicated to the woman and her sexual deviancy, asking meandering questions about whether Billinger is a champion of libertarianism or a victim of latent patriarchy. The Guardian signed off its review of the documentary with this: “Do I admire her work ethic and facility for business? Yes ...”
One long interview in the London Times last weekend complimented her manner and expressed discontent at her promiscuity, but never quite said what it clearly wanted to: this is all nauseating, horrifying, wrong.
If this is the best the commentariat can muster then I’ll say it. There are no qualifications to be made here, no actuallys, no chin-stroking: there is nothing redemptive about the Bonnie Blue story; we do not have to credit her work ethos out of some nonsense commitment to balance and fairness; there is nothing of value to all of this pretend nuance.
This is something only a villainous society – with no sense of shame or mutual care – would prohibit. Bonnie Blue is a victim of sexual forces she has helped foment. She has abettors, but she is as responsible as they are.
The men involved are gross: this much is easy for anyone to recognise. They are also suffering the extent of this warped, sexually permissive culture. I could dig deep into my soul and still find nothing positive or neutral to say about any of it.
Billinger is not the first to reveal the immutable flaws of liberal feminism, though I suspect she has helped turbocharged its demise. Women used to cherish the mantra “my body, my choice” as a shorthand for these gently liberating politics. It was a rhetorical route to necessary and long-denied rights.
Well, here we are – thanks to Bonnie Blue; thanks to OnlyFans; thanks to anyone who explains all of this away as just a function of market forces; thanks to the internet and the virality machine – with “my-body, my-choice” exploited for totally immoral ends, and the principles of liberal feminism abused beyond use.
And we are left in search of a new system, because any one that has led us here is irredeemably corrupt.
