Why Bonnie Blue and the policing of sex by Me Too zealots are two sides of the same coin
On the pathologisation of intimacy and the transformation of sex into a transaction
Have you noticed the paradox of living in a world where the pornographisation of society runs in parallel with the promotion of a hyper risk-averse attitude towards the communication of desire? On university campuses the normalisation of pornography coexists with mandatory consent classes.
Outwardly it appears that anything goes. Bonnie Blue can boast about her feat of having sex with 1057 men in the same day. At the same time spontaneous expressions of desire are in many instances treated as an heinous act deserving some form of punishment.
Take the case of Mark, a 16-year-old son of one my personal acquaintances. Mark went out on a date with one of his classmates. They went to see a movie, afterwards they went for a walk and like many normal young couples they kissed. Next morning Mark received a text from his date, which stated that she felt ‘uncomfortable’ about what happened the previous night. A day later, the police arrived at his house, took away his phone and computer and warned him that he might be charged with an offence.
It took almost 4 months for the police to get back to Mark, return his phone and laptop and tell him that they decided not to charge him with committing an offence. They never apologised for their imperious insensitive behaviour. For his part, Mark had learned a very important lesson! Do not trust your instinct and be careful of who you kiss. Just because your date embraced you and put her lips next to yours does not necessarily mean that it is ok to kiss her. Maybe getting your date sign a form consenting to kiss and embrace you is the most sensible way of managing your most intimate affair.
As far as the police who hassled Mark were concerned any form spontaneous sexual encounter can become their subject of interest. If someone complains that after reflection she felt uncomfortable about a kiss the police are more than happy to launch an investigation.
In the United States the situation is even more absurd and the policing of intimate relationship has become institutionalised on university campuses. This project is actively promoted through the formalisation of rules of consent.
The most grotesque example of the formalisation of consent is the idea of affirmative consent. Known in America as ‘yes means yes’ laws, affirmative consent demands that consent be explicitly expressed at every stage of a sexual encounter. From this perspective, the usual interactions associated with romantic and sexual encounters – eye contact, body language and other non-verbal signals – are no longer sufficient to signal consent. Instead, affirmative consent is arrived at through modes of engagement more typical of the business world than the bedroom.
Affirmative consent negates the very premise on which intimacy is founded. Through the displacement of spontaneous informality with formal rules, affirmative consent transforms a relationship into a transaction. A relationship now comes couched in the language of the market, of contracts and pledges.
Consent classes assume that intimate relationships, especially if they involve sex, can’t be allowed to develop spontaneously. This belief marks a break with the post-Enlightenment idea that people possess the capacity for autonomy, for self-determination – that they can and should be free to make choices about matters that affect their lives. Since the advent of modernity, it was assumed that adults possessed the moral resources necessary for consenting to acts proposed to them by others. The phrase ‘between consenting adults’ indicates the extent to which it has long been accepted that autonomous individuals should be left to negotiate the terms of their intimate relationships.
The formalisation of consent devalues personhood and individual autonomy. It assumes that young men and women are incapable of conducting their sexual relationships in accordance with their own experiences and desires. As a result, moral entrepreneurs promoting consent classes see spontaneous relations between autonomous individuals as a problem to be managed from afar. The main solution they propose is the ‘formalisation of consent’, the transformation, that is, of consent into a mapped-out, scripted affair, consisting of rules of conduct and codes of behaviour.
Does Mark need Bonnie Blue?
No doubt Bonnie Blue could claim that she is providing a public service to society[i]. Apparently, she is fighting loneliness in the male world. As the journalist Jenny Holland noted, in her interviews Bonnie Blue comes across as ‘obsessed with taking boy’s virginity’[ii]. ‘I want them to be young, innocent. I want to strip them of that’, she stated. Evidently the flourishing of her business model benefits from a climate where young men are warned off from the spontaneous pursuit of their desire. In her world young men do not need to bother with consent forms. All they need to do is queue up.
Had Mark joined Bonnie’s queue he could have saved himself the hassle of having to deal with the potential risk of a genuine intimate relationship.
Targeting Intimacy
Bonnie Blue, like the moral entrepreneurs who advocate consent classes and the Me Too zealots share one important impulse: hostility to the world of intimacy. In the contemporary western world, the private sphere in longer regarded as a haven from a heartless world. Intimate relations are regarded as potentially dangerous. In an era where experts frequently obsess about the ‘dark side of the family’ people are encouraged to share their private life in public. At times 21st century western culture appears determined to breakdown the distinction between private and public life.
The media treats privacy as a condition to be breached for the purpose of entertainment. Millions of people watch Love Island or the X Factor as they are drawn into the supposed intimate personal lives of the contestants. During the penultimate episode of each series, the contestants’ parents come on Love Island to offer their verdict on their children’s exhibitionist behaviour, often praising their public performance of intimacy for being brave and courageous.
One of the themes promoted through confessional television is that to heal, emotionally injured individuals need to let go of ‘private wound by sharing them with others’.[iii] The act of ‘sharing’ – that is, turning private troubles into public stories – strongly resonates with current cultural norms
One casualty of the breached boundary between public and private is the valued status of intimacy. During one interview, Andrew McMillan, competing to be an Oxford Professor of Poetry, boasted that ‘retired women at literary festivals will come up and tell me the most intimate details about their husbands or their sex lives’. His interviewer appeared to take the view that this was an admirable accomplishment, and observed, that McMillan’s ‘candour can inspire similar soul-baring from fans’[iv]. The ability to incite strangers to reveal intimate details of their sex lives is portrayed as a mark of distinction in an open personality. Bonnie Blue takes this ‘brave candour a step further and performs sex in public.
Intimacy has become the victim of a relentless drive towards public exposure. There is a powerful trend to ‘normalise’, routinise, and demystify the domain of sex. The boundaries that historically shielded intimate relations have becomes less and less effective, to the point where the consumption of pornography is regarded as a taken for granted feature of a modern lifestyle. Pornography has become a culturally, even socially validated fetish. It totally resonates with the tendency to devalue the private sphere.
Once fiercely defended as a private matter, sex has become a constant topic of public deliberation by supposedly open-minded television hosts, sex educators and ‘agony aunts’ – reinforced by the widely-held consensus that the open disclosure of emotion has important therapeutic benefits. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel warned, ‘once a convention of privacy loses its grip, there is a race to the bottom by competing media of publicity’[v]. The depths to which this race to the bottom now goes was strikingly illustrated by the announcement of a programme aired on the UK’s Channel 4 in 2006, devoted to the promotion of masturbation. Once upon a time, masturbation in public was seen as a form of unpleasant behaviour by sad old men wearing raincoats. Channel 4 and the organisers of Europe’s very first ‘Masturbate-a-Thon’ event rebranded this display of exhibitionism as the ultimate expression of responsible open sexual behaviour. The broadcaster enthusiastically embraced this opportunity to promote yet another of its ‘brave’, ‘pioneering’, ‘agenda-setting’ and ‘taboo-breaking’ reality shows.
It is worth noting that Channel 4 is not what is euphemistically referred to as an ‘adult content provider’. This is the mainstream TV channel that had previously organised a programme on designer vaginas, and also a ‘Penis Week’. The promoters of this spectacle stated that their the objective was to encourage people to ‘explore safe sex’ and ‘talk about masturbation and lift the taboos that still surround the subject by coming to a public place and coming in a public place’. Sexual health charities also promote the message that openly discussing masturbation is an important feature of an overall enlightened sexual etiquette. According to a leaflet produced by the fpa (formerly the Family Planning Association), titled ‘Masturbation – Support Notes’, talking about it ‘encourages safe and non-judgmental environments in which people can explore their sexuality’. Like the widely-celebrated Vagina Monologues, the publicity material promoting Channel 4’s Masturbate-a-Thon claimed to ‘raise awareness of, and dispel the shame and taboos’ surrounding this ‘natural and safe form of sexual activity’.
Is it any surprise that in the interest of ‘raising awareness’ Channel 4 has recently decided to air a documentary ‘1000 Men and Me. The Bonnie Blue Story’?[vi]. Nor should we be astonished to learn that Channel 4 is not just interested in promoting smutty pornographers but also the ideology of consent. Check out its series Consent, which it heralds as a bold drama ‘that captures what it feels like for young people in an environment where sexual expectations are distorted by the instant access to porn and where the lines of consent are minimised’[vii].
It is possible that the folks who run Channel 4 are unaware of their complicity in creating an environment that actively encourages the devaluation of privacy and intimacy and thereby contributes to the pornographization of culture. Unfortunately, Channel 4’s addiction to taboo breaking helps feed a culture that validates the detachment of sex from love. In such a world the warm bonds of intimacy are displaced by a cold calculating transaction. A transaction which has become a subject of voyeuristic interest by the police.
[i] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/bonnie-blue-onlyfans-documentary-b2796228.html
[ii] https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/24/andrew-tate-and-bonnie-blue-monsters-of-online-culture/
[iii] Kathleen Lowney, (1999) Baring Our Souls;TV Talk Shows and the Religion of Recovery, Aldine de Gruyter, New York p.19.
[iv] Tristam Fane-Saunders, The Daily Telegraph; 18 June 2019. ‘Andrew McMillan interview: ‘Retired women tell me the most intimate details about their sex lives’https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/andrew-mcmillan-interview-retired-women-tell-intimate-details/
[v] Nagel, T. (1998) ‘Concealment and Exposure’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 1. p.4.
[vi] https://www.channel4.com/programmes/1000-men-and-me-the-bonnie-blue-story
[vii] https://www.channel4.com/press/news/channel-4-commissions-factual-drama-consent
The song "As Time Goes By", in the film Casablanca and later by Frank Sinatra, begins: "You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss...". But that was then.
In my day when at the end of a date a young lady embraced you with her lips in kissable position that was understood as assent and an invitation. The account does not say whether she kissed him back or merely passively endured the 'discomfort', but she seems not to have recoiled or turned her head to avoid the incoming.
It seems nothing else happened and the kiss was just a kiss. But it was also the opportunity for victimhood and attention, the new status marker.
Interestingly, the opening lines to the orignal (1931 - Herman Hupfeld) were omitted in screen versions:
"This day and age we’re living in gives cause for apprehension, With speed and new invention and things like third dimension. Yet, we get a trifle weary with Mister Einstein’s theory, So we must get down to earth, at times relax, relieve the tension. No matter what the progress or what may yet be proved, The simple facts of life are such they cannot be removed."
Hupfeld never foresaw that the simple facts of life can indeed be removed.
Well opined Frank. I think it is pretty safe to say that 'sex as a taboo' in the days of olde was just a little too restrictive for what is actually a normal God-given biological and enjoyable activity. But like most social and moral developments, it has clearly swung way too far the other way. The private has indeed become public! Media prurience is rife and commonly now (online) newspapers & magazines run so called 'lifestyle advice' or 'opinion' columns that consider weirdo deviant sex-related conduct as completely typical of everyday life. Nothing appears to be off-limits. I am no wallflower puritan, but if I am unlucky or stupid enough to read some of this crap, it makes me feel genuinely ill. What normal person engages in such oddball activities? I guess when you give the deviants an inch, they take six of them and do something very strange with it.