Bonnie Blue: an inconvenient truth about porn
Bonnie Blue
This week, for the first time in years, I watched pornography. Nothing remarkable about that: three quarters of UK men admit to having watched porn, with over a third using it at least once a week.
What’s different is that this time I watched it on Channel 4. The Bonnie Blue documentary, 1,000 Men and Me, isn’t Eurotrash-level titillation; it shows a woman getting — in her words — “railed” by hundreds of balaclava-clad men, interspersed with tepid exposition and a smattering of false jeopardy (“Will Bonnie’s career survive her OnlyFans ban? Find out after the break!”). The documentary has attracted a large volume of complaints, but also acres of commentary.
Is Bonnie Blue a red herring, a distraction from the wider issue of extreme, always-on pornography? On the contrary. I would say she — or, rather, the attention lavished upon her — exemplifies the pornography crisis. In fact, I’d go further and say there’s more wisdom to be found in this documentary than anything emanating from Westminster.
Parliament’s latest anti-porn effort is a taskforce(Glory to God!) to monitor online pornography. This body was formed in the wake of last year’s Bertin Review; this week, it announced its first major initiative: a clampdown on certain types of extreme pornography, including the “barely legal” content that Bonnie plans to make her new niche.
Baroness Bertin said she wants to make it illegal for online platforms to host content encouraging child sexual abuse, including “pseudo child pornography“ (PCP). “This content is pushing at the boundaries,” she said. “We will be trying to address the ‘barely legal’ aspect legislatively.”
“Trying” is the operative word, since it’s not immediately clear what sanctions the UK government can deploy to stop citizens downloading a VPN to access content hosted on an Icelandic server and owned by a Canadian venture capital fund.
I have no beef with the Baroness. She’s one of the few people in Parliament to take pornography seriously, and her review has good insight into where the industry might be vulnerable (for example, by putting pressure on ancillary service providers such as payment processors).
Yet her review and the taskforce’s approach both display a frustrating lack of strategy. They chip away at the edges, focusing on worthy but individual issues like strangulation or PCP. As Jo Bartosch and I argue in our forthcoming book Pornocracy, building an effective anti-pornography strategy demands an holistic understanding of the issue. The first step? Admitting we lost the War on Porn long before the first legislative bullet was fired.
Ministers and MPs will discuss the taskforce’s recommendations when the Crime and Policing Bill is read this autumn. They would learn much, much more about the pornography crisis if they watched 1,000 Men and Me tonight.
For starters, they might understand the scale of modern online pornography. Bonnie boasted more than 300,000 subscribers on OnlyFans, and claimed earnings of $2m a month before her ban. They would see that pornography has morphed from “merely” misogynistic objectification into unabashed sexual sadism. While the producers have pixelated penises, and though Bonnie puts on a brave face, the ghoulish camera lingers over her pain, degradation, and dehumanisation.
Most fascinating for me was how Bonnie is drawn to perform ever more extreme content. She acknowledges that gangbangs deliver diminishing returns; future stunts include a “human zoo” and schoolgirl-themed porn. This mirrors how desensitisation leads men to consume more extreme pornography, leading some inexorably to child abuse imagery. As sex offender rehabilitator Michael Sheath told us, most paedophiles today aren’t “born this way”; they were warped by porn.
Above all, I hope MPs would watch and understand the totality of pornography’s victory over society. It is not the scale, the nature, or the treadmill of extremity that chills; it is the normalisation. Bonnie’s mother remarks with casual certainty that anyone’s “morals” would go out the window for $1m. Distressingly young performers queue up to perform as schoolchildren for free, just for the exposure.
The most compelling evidence of porn’s normalisation, however, is when a free-to-air, publicly-owned broadcaster screens a “making of” documentary of this kind: a DVD extra masquerading as intellectual inquiry. Channel 4 has done us a service: it’s reminded us that viewers, even casual ones, are complicit in abuse — though it lacks the courage to query the effects on performers, masturbators, and women forced to live in a pornified society.
Policy is worse than useless if it does not understand what it’s trying to solve. Ministers should watch a bit of Bonnie Blue, then say whether they agree with what children are taught in schools: that porn is a piece of cake; a treat to be enjoyed, just not too much.
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