I woke up the other morning thinking about Bonnie Blue. This might surprise you, given that I’m a peri-menopausal 44-year-old with a husband.
Not exactly the target audience of the OnlyFans star, who hit the headlines earlier this year by trying to have sex with as many 18-year-old boys as possible.
The so-called ‘adult content creator’ slept with hundreds of teens at Nottingham Trent University Freshers’ Week. She filmed the encounters and then posted the footage on her OnlyFans account, which has apparently made her a millionaire.
The reason I was thinking about her is because I have a terribly unhealthy habit – no, not that kind. It involves immediately picking up my phone and scrolling through Instagram as soon as the alarm clock goes off. And while my feed normally throws me nothing more risqué than adverts for electric toothbrushes, that morning it delivered the remarkable news that a post I had made about body positivity had been liked by Bonnie, of all people.
I clicked on the handle to check it was really her – and lo, there was the 25-year-old from Derbyshire, in various states of undress, teasing her 195,000 Instagram followers with the very real possibility of sex.
I’m no prude. My own Instagram frequently features me wearing little more than Bonnie – it’s just that as a size 18 mother who wants to make women feel better about themselves, my motivation is slightly different.
Indeed, the post she had liked featured me running a 10k through London in my underwear. I wasn’t trying to look sexy – quite the opposite. I was trying to show what unedited, unfiltered bodies look like in the wild, and make the point that women don’t just exist to titillate members of the opposite sex.
So it felt ironic that Bonnie had liked it. But what bothered me more was the day-long spiral I was sent into, trying to work out what could possibly motivate her to do what she does, other than money. If she really did love sex, as she claims, why was she wasting her time sleeping with a bunch of clueless 18-year-olds, there to satisfy their own needs rather than hers?
Some have called her ‘predatory’, arguing that 18-year-olds are not thinking of the repercussions of having sex on videos that will remain online for ever.
More depressing is the realisation that Bonnie is hardly exceptional in the world of OnlyFans, with a similarly sweet-looking girl also from Derbyshire, Lily Phillips, being interviewed in this paper at the weekend about her new year’s resolution to sleep with 1,000 men in 24 hours. Like Bonnie, Lily claims to love her work. But a YouTube documentary released this week showed a very different reality, with the 23-year-old weeping after an ‘intense’ 14 hours involving sex with 101 different men.
And yet the more I tried to wrap my head round this new generation of so-called influencers, the more I realised I was part of the problem. Why wasn’t I calling out the creeps queuing round the block to sleep with them, the hundreds of blokes standing in line as if waiting to get their hands on the latest PlayStation?
Because by all accounts, these ‘events’ are attended by a lot of men, as opposed to the odd wrong ‘un in a Macintosh. They’re packed with ‘normal’ blokes, happy, proud even, to be featured on social media, camping out with lawn chairs, like day-trippers trying to get last-minute tickets for Wimbledon.
It would almost be laughable if there weren’t real-world consequences to this. Next week, the 50 ‘ordinary’ men accused of the mass rape of Gisele Pelicot will be sentenced in a French court, their identities so run-of-the-mill – firefighters, soldiers, journalists, doting grandfathers – that the Press call them Monsieur-Tout-Le-Monde (Mr Everyman). In Britain, meanwhile, things are so bad that the Government’s former extremism tsar warned this week that misogynist Andrew Tate is viewed positively by almost half of young men.
Dame Sara Khan said the rise of influencers such as Tate – awaiting trial on allegations of human trafficking and rape – was fuelling the ‘growing normalisation of harmful attitudes toward women among young men, particularly within schools’.
Her warning came after the National Police Chiefs’ Council released a statement in the summer saying that online misogyny was fuelling a ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls. The report found that offenders are getting younger, with the average age of a suspect now 15. ‘We know the influencers, Andrew Tate, the element of influencing of particularly boys, is quite terrifying,’ said Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth.
And yet still precious few men seem to be calling out this horrific behaviour. It is female commentators who have to point out the urgency of the situation.
It is Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips who are attacked, trolled, handed death threats, while the boys, who queue up to have their two minutes with them remain anonymous.
I may not agree with what these OnlyFans models do, but the fact the men get off scot-free says everything you need to know about the society we live in.
There is, so far as I can see, no Anti-Andrew Tate, no grown man standing up and telling his millions of followers that it is possible – desirable, even – to treat women with respect. When blokes do wade in, it’s inevitably to defend a pal they believe has become the victim of a witch hunt – see chef Ainsley Harriott this week describing Gregg Wallace as ‘fantastic’ to work with, his experience clearly negating those of the many women who have accused the former MasterChef presenter of sexual misconduct.
Where are the blokes speaking up against this kind of behaviour? Where are the fathers, leading protests to save their sons as well as their daughters? I know that there are huge swathes of good men out there, but they’re letting the side down. When I asked a friend why he didn’t say anything, he said that he didn’t think it was a good look for him to lecture females. But that answer was telling because it’s men and boys who need talking to, not women and girls.
The more I think about it, the more I understand why Bonnie Blue would like a post about women being able to exist in their bodies without judgment. Like so many of us, she must be tired of being held accountable for the behaviour of men who are perfectly capable of taking responsibility for themselves.
Phew! I wasn’t snapped at the Feathers Ball
I hope you all had a good cringe at the wonderful pictures of David Cameron and Tom Parker Bowles attending the Feathers Ball for teenagers in the 1980s.
Thankfully, no snappers caught me going to one at London’s Hammersmith Palais in the early 1990s, though I can assure you it featured just as much chain-smoking and snogging. A reminder, as I panic about my own daughter becoming an adolescent, that the teenage years have always been about breaking rules.
In a damning report the Women and Equalities Committee has found there is widespread ‘medical misogyny’ in the NHS. It’s nice finally to have an official statement from the powers that be on something that most women have known for years.
Kate’s ringing alarm bells
Kate Moss is said to have split from her boyfriend, Count Nikolai von Bismarck because she wants to ‘have fun’ ahead of Christmas, while he has chosen a more sober path.
It’s ringing all my alarm bells, and reminding me of something that Busted guitarist Matt Willis told me last week, during a live recording of my podcast, The Life Of Bryony.
Like me, Matt is sober – and delighted to have ‘swapped the fast lane for the bus lane’. It’s a piece of advice that Mossy could do with listening to, as she heads towards her 51st birthday in January.
My bedtime starts at 8pm
According to data analysed by Virgin Media 02, Brits started going to bed and getting up far earlier in 2024 than previous years. The average time for network traffic to drop off was 9.20pm, a whole 20 minutes earlier than 2020. But that’s a good 80 minutes later than I start my ridiculously long bedtime routine, to make sure I’m fast asleep by 10pm. Bliss!
Confidence clinic
How to enjoy a Christmas party without drinking? It’s one I’ve wrestled with over the years. I’ve found my best tip is to relish the fact you won’t be the subject of office gossip the next day. That, and wear a big pair of dazzling earrings to distract from the glass of water in your hands!
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