Adulting - Let's Talk About... Bonnie Blue

Episode Date: December 1, 2024

 Hello and welcome to Adulting, and the twentieth episode of Let’s Talk About… a broadening of Adulting... where that was about all of the things we never got taught in school, this is almost like seminars on life; where my audience (that's you!), get to chat anonymously about things they couldn't necessarily discuss over lunch with their friends, or feel like they don't have anyone to talk to about whatever it may be.  To get involved, follow me on Instagram @oenone, where every Tuesday we vote on a topic and every Wednesday we dig deep. Let’s Talk About… Bonnie Blue. The submission read ‘Bonnie Blue / OnlyFans/ Kate Nash move etc want some nuance around it all’ We ended up mostly talking about Bonnie Blue. If you don’t know who she is, she’s a British OnlyFans creator who is gaining notoriety for sleeping with ‘barely legal’ (her words) students. I hope you enjoy  as always, please do rate, review and subscribe!   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded. Or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. Hello and welcome to Adulting and the 20th episode of Let's Talk About, a broadening of adulting where that was about all of the things we never got taught in school. This is like seminars on life, where my audience, that's you, get to chat anonymously about things you can't necessarily discuss over lunch with your friends, or maybe just feel like you don't have anyone to talk to about whatever it may be. To get involved, follow me on Instagram at Anoni,

where every Tuesday we vote on a topic and every Wednesday we dig deep. Let's talk about Bonnie Blue. The submission read, Bonnie Blue, OnlyFans, Kate Nash move, etc. Want some nuance around it all. We ended up mostly talking about Bonnie Blue, and if you don't know who she is, I think you'll understand more throughout the context of this conversation, but basically she is a British OnlyFans creator who is gaining notoriety for sleeping with her words barely legal students. I hope you enjoy and as always please do rate, review and subscribe and I'm very sorry about my croaky voice. Some messages. I don't care how many different viewpoints I hear it's fucking gross and predatory and weird. It makes me feel icky even though I want to support other women getting their money, but I still judge.

We have to start the discourse of people succeeding thanks to sex work and not in spite of it. And she's got a point with people exposing their kids' private lives, being more questionable. The sad reality is that lots of people can't make a good living just doing one thing anymore another message found it so fascinating that men are rightfully going on about her behavior being predatory as the boys are described as barely legal like it hasn't been a way to describe young women in mainstream porn for decades i saw a snippet of bonnie versus Ashley James on This Morning and whilst it was satisfying to watch Ashley absolutely own her, it worries me that mainstream channels like This Morning are giving Bonnie Blue a platform. Some of the rhetoric she espouses is frighteningly similar to that of Andrew Tate and the alt-right movement. Perpetuating the idea that women exist

for men's pleasure is such a weird one to get my head around because I believe in sexual liberty and rights for sex workers but I believe that she's conflating that with this other much darker message. For me I don't think she's doing anything wrong in what she's doing i.e. having consensual sex with above legal age people and using it to make money. However I think the way she words things and the language she uses is quite damaging and very diminishing of women. She's perpetuating harmful stereotypes and using it all as rage bait to get more views on her profile. It's a very modern attempt at grabbing headlines. Going with the barely legal angle is definitely part of that.

If that's how she wishes to make money, then so be it, and she doesn't seem the type that will regret it later down the line. However, she may well come across men who will expect sex from her, which could lead to violence, etc. if she rejects them. I also agree that perhaps this pendulum on sex positivity has swung too far in this case. Casual encounters are fine, but this is too extreme. It's still an intimate act after all. I don't know how I feel about that last bit about it being an intimate act. You know, sex work is one of the oldest jobs in the world and in some cases although one of you did point out actually which i should read because i think it's important to remember we can't ignore the fact that most women in sex work are being forced to do so it's a huge privilege to make the choice to go into sex work yeah women

can make money from desperate men but it does uphold the idea that women are sex objects for men to consume and enjoy being sex positive does nothing for the women forced into sex work. And I think that's a really important distinction because, especially with OnlyFans and platforms like that, perhaps it is inherently slightly more safe for those women making content on there because they're in control of it. It's digital with bonnie what's interesting is because she's going out to the lay public and sleeping with random men as opposed to other porn stars or porn actors and some of only fans obviously could just be photos or whatever there is like perhaps an extra layer of safety compared to women and girls who've been trafficked

into sex work or women and girls who are working in much more dangerous scenarios which they are not doing in order to create shit tons of money. Bonnie reportedly says that she earns £600,000 a month. That is not the case for most women and girls who are forced into sex work. If anything, it's very much just something to get by. And I wonder if there should be some, in this conversation, delineation between those two things because someone else made another really good message so in the in the initial submission someone mentioned Kate Nash but we got very stuck on the conversation around Bonnie Blue but on everything is content we also did one of our bonus episodes everything conversation about Lily Allen selling feet pictures and we touched on this very lightly about how it's kind of great that she's

elevating shame from women profiting from certain forms of sex work. But then what does that do? Does it mean that it becomes more normalized? Because Lily Allen will have surely a kind of limitless number of fans who are interested in buying those photos because it's also even more heightened because she's famous so it feels a bit more exciting she doesn't really have to market herself in the same way these other only fans creators do so that's also a slightly more complex thing um but someone wrote in and said one of my friends did only fans and

is making so so much money but it took, so much from her mentally and physically. I think in one sense, all these celebrities who are starting OnlyFans, such as Lily Allen and Kate Nash, speaks for how profitable sex work, such as OnlyFans can be. But I think in another sense, some people don't have the freedom of choice

with regards to sex work. There are girls in the global South that are from provinces where their parents cannot afford to look after them and they're forced to move to the big cities to sell sex from such a young age. I support sex work but I also support safe regulated sex work that puts the safety and well-being of the sex workers first regardless of their gender. I don't think that it is possible for OnlyFans to do that in the current climate. I think it is almost deeply concerning that

celebrities are doing OnlyFans in such a meaningless way with younger, impressionable fans. I think it's really complicated, isn't it? Because every single person that wrote in was very sex positive, very generous about wanting to support sex workers' rights and their liberties. But I do wonder if, is there something to be said for not making sex work so easy access for younger women? Maybe if the shame has completely gone from it, maybe, and in a climate where it's really difficult to make money from any creative endeavor, if sex work can be so profitable, should we all be like, okay, that's absolutely fine for these young women to be doing it. It's not going to have these long-term impacts on their careers like it used to or are we actually maybe being a bit too generous in our read of sex work and we should be trying

to discourage young women from doing only fans i can't tell you the amount of like young creators i come across on instagram with millions of followers young women often in their 20s early 20s who then it turns out they're actually like really big on only fans they bought themselves a house through only fans and they seem pretty content with that. Maybe it's just a completely changing landscape. And obviously for the ones who do well from it, it's amazing. But there was an incredible documentary with a friend of mine, actually. So my friend Ellie Flynn did a documentary on BBC Three, which I'll link in the show notes, called Nudes for Sale. And it was from a couple of years ago. But what she touches on in that is that actually very few people genuinely make loads

of money from OnlyFans, not least because the only way to market yourself is by promoting your content on public platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. And with sex work, obviously, it's a very private thing. OnlyFans is behind a paywall. Those videos do get leaked. But if you have enough money, you can hire companies to make sure that it gets taken down. But lots of people aren't necessarily going to want to be advertising their OnlyFans with explicit content on parts of the internet which anyone could stumble across. have that level of it I think it takes a certain type of person in a certain type of situation to be able to share their work like that with Bonnie Blue her family are kind of like in on the business now she talks about how one of her videos got leaked quite early on and then so she went to tell them and now that she's making so much money from it her parents are happy for her happy that she's happy happy that it's safe I mean that's kind of incredible for her that she has that level of support and she is making astronomical amounts of money the interesting thing is the reason she's doing so well i think is as because one of you said she does these like

rage bait clips really pitting men against women calling women lazy saying that they basically owe men pleasure she's also trying to re-narrativize it and say that her porn videos are educational because the men that she sleeps with are virgins. That's what she said in the This Morning clip. But if you watch her on other videos, like Lottie Moss's or GK Barry, she is a lot more flippant and tries to be really funny about how much she loves taking virginity. So I think she's a master in advertising. I also think she's completely shameless, not in the fact that she does sex work, but in the way that she's quite happy to say completely provocative things that I think can be quite dangerous and doesn't seem to be that worried about the consequences. I guess we live in a very individualistic neoliberal society where perhaps it is every

man and woman out for themselves to the detriment of others. I don't subscribe to that, but that does seem to be the way the world's going. Another message read, I feel like this issue is getting absolutely zero nuance in the coverage. I think two things can be true at once. What Bonnie Blue is doing is really immoral and in poor taste, but at the same time, we must accept that these young men are also part of the problem. While we may be impressionable at 18, I don't understand why we aren't putting more of the blame on these young men be impressionable at 18, I don't understand why we aren't putting more of the blame on these young men who are waiting hours to see this woman. They're signing

consent forms, being breathalyzed, etc., which is significantly more than many young women and girls who are sexually assaulted or taken advantage of every year. Why is the emphasis on blaming one woman over asking where the responsibility lies outside of this? Instead of putting the responsibility on the men who are using Bonnie Blue to cheat on their wives, we are blaming Bonnie Blue. For what? Being there and saying women are lazy? Again, two things can be true at once.

Bonnie Blue is benefiting from misogyny here, while these men are also. And another message read, Maybe snippets of Bonnie Blue's interviews made it seem to me like the men that go aren't fully consenting. She targets freshers and uni cities. She's commented on which societies come to her. If whole social groups are going, I could imagine some peer pressure there.

Yes, there are lots of steps they are taking to consent and be breathalyzed, etc. But it's recorded, and for the virgins, which she targets to, those less sexually experienced, are they really consenting if they don't know how they'll react i've thought a lot about her argument that we class 18 as an adult and we literally do so we might find it icky or uncomfortable but according to law they're grown men and she's using a sensationalist line to gain attention and market her business essentially like i said marketing genius we can't as a culture continually pick and choose when to infantilize adults and when not to so i think it's a valid counter argument from bonnie we should be

asking what is leading young men to want to queue for hours to have sex with the women excluding the obvious like i'm so curious as to the motivation on their part these interactions are also filmed for our content which is wild to imagine so many young men wanting to do that and feature someone else said the virality that bonnie blue is achieving through her controversial approach to her sex work is meant to be outrageous the more outrageous the statement the more people talk about her and are likely to subscribe to her only fans but regardless of gender recruiting freshly 18 year old boys to partake in her only fans content is absolutely insane you're so impressionable at 18. It's one thing using a sex worker, which I know happens, especially with younger guys,

but to be speaking about it in such a way online just doesn't feel as though it is helpful to sex workers. With regards to Kate Nash and OnlyFans, I saw a headline that she thought she'd made more from OnlyFans than on tour. And another person, thinking back to past conversations about age gaps, we've talked about how young women, 18, 19, 20 year olds, may choose to date or sleep with older men, but there is a fundamental power imbalance that's likely harmful to those women. I think that applies in this case too. Despite the young men consenting, this could still be seen as a power imbalance and be potentially harmful to them. And another message. I have so many thoughts on Bonnie Blue. I think it's interesting how people treat her as a predator when all she's doing is posting

her location. She isn't love bombing or grooming. The comments which say, if a man did this, he'd be a predator, are missing the fundamental difference between men and women. If a man did this, there would be no Q. All the men are overage and I can't believe anything they're being damaged. The discourse gives them no autonomy. The only possible issue I can see is that they might expect other women to want the same, which is unrealistic. It's the age-old hypocrisy about man-hating successful sex workers, but then they're the very ones keeping them in business. And someone replied to this saying, if a man did this, there would be no Q. Oh my God, this phrase is so bang on, and I feel like it cuts right to the heart of the issue. The Q of men exists because of the huge imbalance between men and women's sexual freedom. There is no shame attached to men if they can literally Q with hundreds of others. And I'm not saying they should have shame. It's just that shame is so intrinsically drummed into women from such young age that the opposite gender situation could never occur and this lack

of shame only acts to amplify the disproportionate sexual desire of young men who aren't being shown safe emotional mental physical boundaries to constrain this there's so much going on here because i think what's so interesting in the way that bonnie has marketed herself is she has aligned herself with the male gaze, with the male interpretation of women being sex objects. And in doing so, she's kind of like an ally to them, being like, well, if your wives and girlfriends don't have sex with you, come and have sex with me. And she's positioned herself as, in her own words, she says she's like a girl next door. It is, I mean, absolute marketing marketing genius but what I think is really

troubling to me but also interesting is that these young men seem to have no fear of having videos of them engaging in a sexual act on the internet forever as I said OnlyFans is behind a paywall but those videos will exist forever I'm sure it's not that hard for them to be leaked anyone can pay for bonnie's only fans i assume so anyone can see those videos and i think that everyone you know at a certain age is much more impressionable we're much less risk of us when we're in our teenage years and we make choices that we wouldn't make as adults because we have less understanding of the consequences and less lived experiences but what i also find interesting is that maybe there genuinely aren't as many consequences for women unless it's your line of work as I went back to earlier you know it's a massive consideration to go into OnlyFans and really think you're going to make this work

because you're going to have to hold your hands up and say look this is what I do I create adult content because the only way to promote it is to promote it on the internet in a way that means anyone, parents, family members, future bosses could come across it. And so I think for women, I can't think of any woman who isn't a sex worker who would actively participate in a porn video for no monetary gain, just for like the experience, for the clout. I think even that is just so interesting to think about in this day and age that these men are queuing up and think it's funny and as much as we've all spoken about we want women to be able to use their bodies and however they want and make money and however they want it worries me that if this many young men listening to her they're also going to believe that they have a right to sexual pleasure from their partners which can lead into quite dangerous behavior from men taking sex from their partners

non-consensual sex having this expectation saying well this woman said this so you know this is what i expect as someone else also pointed out we can't just blame bonnie blue for the whole of the patriarchy and for misogyny and for sexual violence against women I think it really is harder though when it is someone of the marginalized group kind of coming up against above the parapet and trying to dismantle everything that we've worked so hard against I think that's why we it's not a proportioning blame necessarily but it's why we feel so much outrage because we are used to men taking advantage of women we are used to men espousing certain views about women and when a woman does it it can feel very hurtful because it does feel like going against the sisterhood I guess another message

read I have a friend who is a sex worker by choice but it's her only stream of income it's a hard graft so much work in an overcrowded market, etc. She said that her and her other sex worker friends find it so hard that OnlyFans is becoming a place that celebs are starting to co-opt and turn to for additional income stream. It drives traffic away from those sex workers who literally rely on that cash. It also can undermine the reality of sex work and reduce it to a fun side hustle for extra income when so many sex workers have to work incredibly hard at the business aspect of what they do. It's complicated but think about how annoying it is for spying

writers that celebs just decide they would start writing fiction to earn extra cash and now so many bestseller lists are dominated by celebs making it impossible for writers who've worked hard for years to get a look in. Not the same but you see my point and I can see why it frustrates sex workers as it does my friend. And another message said, I think it says a lot of people are getting paid more through sex work than a traditional job. I wouldn't personally, but I kind of get it. This is something that I keep thinking about as well. In the changing landscape of, especially in sort of media, entertainment, music, music writing it's very hard to make money from directly from your creativity the best way to make money is through advertising

we've spoken about this countless times on everything is content and so when sex work becomes really one of the most profitable ways to make money and because of platforms like only fans and because if you have a level of celebrity I guess you can post softer type porn because it feels more salacious because you're already a famous person there's more of an appetite towards it whereas what happens and this is what Ellie Flynn discovered in her documentary as well is part of the appeal initially in the early days of OnlyFans I think was people thought you could just post kind of lingerie photos and that that would earn you a lot of money and I think it can at the beginning but as with any kind of porn and sex work people's appetites become increased to more hardcore type of content once they're exposed to

enough and so a lot of these young women that were starting off making maybe a bit of money from posting lingerie photos or stuff that was quite soft core in order to keep their audience interested and in order to make more profit ended up going into very hardcore sex, hardcore pornography, doing things that they perhaps had never imagined that they would be doing in order to carry on making money and then even then it might not be sustainable and then if it is unsustainable we go back to the beginning of that content still being online so while I never want to shame anyone and I think it is a really complicated time that we're living through and if this is how people make their money then absolutely go for it what worries me is should we be perhaps having a bigger conversation about whether or not we need to educate younger women about the possible difficulties of entering into something like this and how it might impact you later down the line. That being said, and we're going to do more of a deep dive on this on everything that's content, but Kim Kardashian famously released her

sex tape and it propelled her into great amounts of fame mia khalifa was a porn star for a short amount of time and now is on the front row of all the biggest fashion show weeks lana rhodes was a big porn star and now has gone into podcasting there is this new pipeline from porn porn actor sex worker, whatever you want to call it, into more mainstream success within certain industries. I still think it would be unlikely for you to be able to get a vocational role as a teacher, for example. But if you wanted to go into presenting or modeling or something more creatively, there is more of a pipeline. So I just don't know where to sit or stand on this because I understand how difficult it is to make a living right now and I think it's great that people are being shamed less but I do think it's worrying when sex work becomes the default choice

for people who are unable to make extra income and I also feel the same as some of you about is it good that Kate Nash and Lily Allen are elevating some of the shame on this platform? Are they just taking away work from women who have had to build up their audiences from grassroots places? I honestly don't know where I stand on it. Another message, which I think was really great, read, I think conversations regarding Bonnie Blue need to be part of a much wider conversation.

And instead of focusing on what Bonnie Blue is doing as an individual, I feel we should be looking at how women in general are viewed in the world, including within sex work, given the rise of conservatism, far-right fascism. Although I disagree with Bonnie Blue's approach to sex work and think she's partially doing it for the outrage factor, etc., how she operates didn't come from a vacuum. in some ways i feel sad for her not because she does sex work but because to me she's a victim of the patriarchal and highly misogynistic world we live in a climate which seems to be worsening i fully support sex workers who approach sex work from a place of being empowered safe and staying true to themselves

etc whereas what bonnie blue does in my opinion centers around catering to men and being at their disposal it's like when you're making porn made with women in mind versus stereotypical porn catering to cishet men and it's a completely different thing i'm interested in this too i mean i keep flip-flopping because it's like are we all eventually just going to end up being sex workers? And whilst I have no, I'm really pro safe sex work and women working in sex work, that's what they want to do. But it does worry me if that is literally where women are finding their value in this world is through sex work. Then again, I do also think sex work can be a form of resistance and a form of feminism because as we know pretty much every single woman you'll ever speak to has been in some ways sexually violated assaulted or exploited has experienced some form of sexual assault or rape or sexual violence

from minor to huge and that those things go happen from a young age right up until you're an adult we only have to look at the Giselle Pellico case so if and not in Bonnie Blue's case because I do agree I think the way she's doing it is fundamentally flawed it's not a form of resistance if anything she is backing up the argument of incels and Andrew Tate's and it's actually really unhelpful I think which is where my issue is is there an argument to be said that if women finally profit from sex and it's in their control and it's done in a safe way is there something to be said that that is a good thing because for so long it has been the thing that we are valued for the most and so punished for the most because of the ways that the patriarchy and

misogyny operate. This is such a non-fully formed thought. I find it really complicated, basically. And I think about how much money she's making and I think, God, well, maybe I should just go and do that. Another thing that's so interesting is about her age. She says she's 25, but she also says she's been married for 10 years and that she had five sexual partners before she got married. I don't know how that adds up. And lots of people kind of like contesting whether or not she is 25. She looks like she might be older, but I also think that might just be because she's had quite a lot of like Botox, which can sometimes make you look a bit older. Again, none of this would be an issue if she wasn't kind of targeting this big,

barely legal audience. As everyone has pointed out, it kind of doesn't work in reverse, like if a man was doing this, because, I mean, unless it was a celebrity as opposed to a porn star, I guess if Harry Styles said, meet me here, freshers girls, I'm going to sleep with you and you're going to film you, that's the only kind of scenario where I could think that this role would be reversed and if he did do that everyone would think it was completely exploitative but that would be because he had so much power and as a famous man and he's much older and I guess the argument lots of people are making is that even though she perceives she has this power fundamentally she doesn't really It's men kind of this camaraderie. She has power because she's aligning herself with their views, because she's giving herself power from them by being like, I'm one of the lads. I agree with what you're saying. I think your wives and girlfriends are lazy.

I think you do deserve the sexual pleasure. So she does have power, but it's in a very warped way. I really don't think this is going to be the end of the conversation, whether or not Bonnie Blue is going to cash out and just disappear in the next couple of months, next couple of years. This conversation around sex work becoming more prominent, more normalized, less shameful,

and whether or not that's net good or net bad, I think it's going to be something we're going to be talking about for years, especially with the rise of the far right, the rise of trad wives. And this kind of idea that women are there for sexual pleasure. If they don't give it to you, you go and see a sex worker. It's a very old fashioned idea which completely ignores female pleasure, female safety, equality and parity between heteronormative couples, it's certainly not going to go away. And I do think it's complicated with Bonnie Blue. I never want to shame an individual woman, but I do very much disagree with a lot of things that she espouses. I am grateful, however, that we are living in an era where we are able to have such open conversations and where we can talk very candidly about the importance of safe sex work about female pleasure

I think it's so interesting these two things are happening at once so we can talk on a public platform and feel so free to talk about these things I think that is really great it's just such a shame that it's happening in opposition to something which feels very scary. But I'm grateful for all of your thoughts on this. I'm sure we can talk around this another time. Everything is content. We're going to be doing a full deep dive on porn specifically and sex work. So when that is out, you will obviously know via my Instagram. But I hope you enjoyed this episode and this conversation and I will see you here next week. Bye.

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