The Inevitability of Bonnie Blue

Watching the handwringing response by UK commentators to the rise of OnlyFans porn star Bonnie Blue reminded me of a viral clip from the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother that I saw recently. In it, the character Barney Stinson is boasting to his friends about how many women he has slept with. But instead of the backslapping accolades he expects—after all, his friends are promiscuous, too—they express disgust. “That’s too many,” they tell him.

Stinson is understandably confused by this. What invisible line did he cross between his 99th and his 100th conquest? Nobody can explain. They just somehow know that “that’s too many.” 

The clip sums up the recent conversation between editor-in-chief of Unherd Freddie Sayers and his fellow columnist Kathleen Stock about Bonnie Blue’s recent documentary, in which she beds 1,000 men in a single day. In our hyper-sexualized culture, in which city centres are shut down and entire months set aside to ostentatiously celebrate sexual debauchery, Blue has accomplished something remarkable: She has managed to shock both the public and the commentariat. 

Blue’s seemingly insatiable sexual recklessness has made her very wealthy. She defends her on-screen prostitution against all comers, regularly doing the rounds on the podcast circuit, including in an interview with Chris Williamson and recent Christian convert Louise Perry (author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution). The less said about the specifics, the better, but one point that Blue makes consistently is particularly potent because it is very obviously true: How can you condemn me if everybody is watching porn?

Indeed. Chris Williamson noted—to her face—that Bonnie Blue is “the reductio ad absurdum of the sexual revolution.” Or as Perry observed, Blue holds up a mirror to the culture, and some, at least, have retained the capacity to be horrified by what they see. Many, many others, it must be said, have pumped so much pornography into their minds that they are utterly desensitized even to a documentary titled “1,000 Men and Me.”

The conversation between Freddie Sayers and Kathleen Stock illustrated perfectly why secularists and sexual revolutionaries have no answer to Blue’s challenge. Both are non-religious; both consistently reached for religious language as they struggled to process her rise. Stock called Blue’s documentary “depravity.” Sayers stated that it is “obviously disgusting and reprehensible.” But is it? Bonnie Blue is Barney Stinson, and Sayers and Stock are his friends, shaking their heads and saying: “That’s too many.” But why?

Stock, to her credit, confesses the conundrum. “Mainstream feminism doesn’t have the tools to criticize this because of choice,” she said. “It’s going to require us to have a richer vocabulary than ‘if I like it, it’s okay.’” Indeed, Blue insists that she loves her job and appears completely undisturbed by it, and so Stock cannot even make the case that Blue is harming herself (even Blue’s mother and grandmother attended the documentary screening). That is, unless Stock is willing to admit that Blue is doing moral harm to herself, and should be stopped on that basis. 

She gets close to saying it. “It degrades us all,” she told Sayers. “It degrades sex.” Both agreed that perhaps the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s book on intimacy has some answers because (and this is the important bit) he does not draw explicitly from religion but still argues that “sex is sacred” in a way that the nonreligious can understand. Scruton, Sayers notes, observed that sex is a “soulful sort of act.” He added, almost desperately: “But what kind of language can we use that’s not Christian?”

I have made the nonreligious argument against porn many times, including in public debate. But the truth is that if we are not created beings, we are just shifting piles of protoplasm making each other feel things, and none of it ultimately matters. If we are accidental products of evolution, then nothing we choose to do is degrading. Sex cannot be a “soulful sort of act” because we do not have souls. You cannot accept Playboy and Pride Parades and promiscuity but panic when Bonnie Blue shows up and says: Thanks guys. Love what you’ve done with the place. 

At one point, after having got precisely nowhere, Kathleen Stock stated that we are simply going to have to say that what Bonnie Blue is doing is wrong. She’s right. The fact that so many people see Bonnie Blue as different from the thousands of other porn stars or the roughly 4% of UK girls and women with Only Fans pages is because even in our porn-soaked, sex-crazed culture, there are still sideshows so extreme that our hardened cultural conscience can flicker with the recognition that this is wrong. Why? We just know. 

This presents an opportunity to ask questions far more fundamental than Sayers and Stock have the stomach for. We have allowed millions of people to destroy their relationships, their understanding of sex, and their lives on both sides of the camera not just by refusing to legally restrict behavior, but by refusing to pass moral judgements. Now, in the figure of Bonnie Blue, the logical moral product of that culture has arrived. We once had a moral framework that explains why our consciences are revolted by what she is doing. It is called Christianity.

Now, we have two choices. We can realize that we are more than animals; that we were created as ensouled beings in the image of God. Or we can accept that Bonnie Blue is not merely the reductio ad absurdum of the sexual revolution, but the foreseeable, if not inevitable, outcome. If you reject the first choice, then perhaps you shouldn’t look away from Blue in disgust. After all, you may not like the show, but you helped write the script.