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I woke up the other morning thinking about Bonnie Blue. This might surprise you, given that I am a 44-year-old perimenopausal woman and have a husband.
Not exactly the target audience for the Onlyfans star, who made headlines earlier this year by attempting to have sex with as many 18-year-olds as possible.
The so-called ‘adult content creator’ slept with hundreds of teenagers at Nottingham Trent University’s Freshers’ Week. She filmed the encounters and then posted the images on her Onlyfans account, which 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 picking up my phone immediately and scrolling through Instagram as soon as the alarm goes off. And while my feed doesn’t normally throw me anything edgier than electric toothbrush ads, that morning I got the remarkable news that Bonnie, of all people, had liked a post I’d made about body positivity.
I clicked the handle to check that it really was her, and lo and behold, 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 not a prude. My own Instagram frequently shows me wearing little more than Bonnie; It’s just that as a size 18 mom who wants women to feel better about themselves, my motivation is slightly different.
In fact, the post he had liked showed me running 10km across London in my underwear. I wasn’t trying to look sexy, quite the opposite. I was trying to show what raw, unfiltered bodies look like in nature, and make it clear that women don’t exist just to titillate members of the opposite sex.
So it seemed ironic that Bonnie had liked it. But what bothered me most was the all-day spiral I was sent into, trying to figure out what could motivate her to do what she does, besides money. If she really loved 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 instead of hers?
Bonnie Blue, 25, made headlines earlier this year for trying to sleep with as many 18-year-old students as possible in Nottingham.
Bonnie recently liked one of Bryony’s Instagram posts about body positivity, which she describes as “ironic.”
Some have called her “predatory,” arguing that 18-year-olds don’t think about the repercussions of having sex in videos that will remain online forever.
More depressing is the realization that Bonnie is not exceptional in the world of Onlyfans, as an equally sweet girl also from Derbyshire, Lily Phillips, was interviewed in this newspaper at the weekend about her New Year’s resolution to sleep with 1,000 men in 24 hours. hours. Like Bonnie, Lily claims to love her job. But a YouTube documentary released this week showed a very different reality, with the 23-year-old crying after 14 “intense” hours of sex with 101 different men.
And yet, the more I tried to understand this new generation of so-called influencers, the more I realized that I was part of the problem. Why wasn’t he calling out to the guys lining up around the block to sleep with them, to the hundreds of guys lining up 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 occasional misguided man on a Macintosh. They are full of “normal” blokes, happy, even proud, to appear on social media, camping out with lawn chairs, like day-trippers trying to get last-minute tickets to Wimbledon.
It would be almost ridiculous if this didn’t have real-world consequences. Next week, the 50 “ordinary” men accused of the mass rape of Gisele Pelicot will be sentenced in a French court; Their identities are so common (firefighters, soldiers, journalists, doting grandparents) that the press calls them Monsieur-Tout-Le-Monde (Mr. Ordinary). Meanwhile, in Britain things are so bad that the government’s former extremist tsar warned this week that almost half of young people view the misogynist Andrew Tate positively.
Dame Sara Khan said the rise of influencers like Tate, awaiting trial over allegations of human trafficking and rape, was fueling the “increasing normalization of harmful attitudes towards women among young men, particularly within schools”.
His warning came after the National Police Chiefs’ Council issued a statement in the summer saying online misogyny was fueling a “national emergency” of violence against women and girls. The report found that offenders are becoming younger, with the average age of a suspect now 15 years old. “We know that influencers, Andrew Tate, the element of influence particularly on children, is quite frightening,” said Deputy Chief of Police Maggie Blyth.
And yet, there are still very few men who seem to denounce this horrible behavior. It is the commentators who have to point out the urgency of the situation.
An equally sweet girl from Derbyshire, Lily Phillips, was interviewed in this newspaper at the weekend about her New Year’s resolution to sleep with 1,000 men in 24 hours.
It is Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips who are attacked, trolled and threatened with death, while the boys, who line up to have two minutes with them, remain anonymous.
I may not agree with what these Onlyfans models do, but the fact that men get away with it says everything you need to know about the society we live in.
As far as I can see, there is no Anti-Andrew Tate, no grown man who will stand up and tell his millions of followers that it is possible – even desirable – to treat women with respect. When the guys intervene, it is inevitably to defend a friend who they believe has become the victim of a witch hunt; See chef Ainsley Harriott this week describing Gregg Wallace as “fantastic” to work with, and her experience clearly negates that of many women who have accused the former MasterChef host of sexual misconduct.
Where are the guys who report this type of behavior? Where are the parents leading protests to save both their sons and daughters? I know there are lots of good men out there, but they are disappointing. When I asked a friend why he didn’t say anything, he said he didn’t think it was right to lecture women. But that answer was telling because it’s men and boys they need to talk 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 being judged. Like many of us, you must be tired of being held responsible for the behavior of men who are perfectly capable of taking responsibility for themselves.
Phew! I wasn’t photographed at the Feathers Ball
I hope you all cringed at the wonderful photos of David Cameron and Tom Parker Bowles attending the teen feather ball in the 1980s.
Fortunately, no snapper caught me going to one at the Hammersmith Palais in London in the early 1990s, although I can assure you it included both chain smoking and smooching. A reminder, as I panic about my own daughter becoming a teenager, that adolescence has always been about breaking rules.
In a damning report, the Women and Equalities Committee concluded there is widespread “medical misogyny” in the NHS. It’s nice to finally have an official statement from the powers that be about something most women have known about for years.
Kate’s alarms are ringing
Kate Moss is said to have split from her boyfriend Count Nikolai von Bismarck because she wants to “have fun” before Christmas, while he has chosen a more sober path.
It’s setting off all my alarm bells and reminds me of something 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 “traded in the fast lane for the bus lane.” It’s advice Mossy could do with hearing, as he approaches his 51st birthday in January.
Model Kate Moss is said to have split from her boyfriend Nikolai von Bismarck, the couple pictured here at the Hotel De Crillon in Paris in 2019.
My bedtime starts at 8 p.m.
According to data analyzed by Virgin Media 02, Britons started going to bed and getting up much earlier in 2024 than in previous years. The average time for network traffic to slow down was 9:20 p.m., 20 minutes earlier than in 2020. But that’s a good 80 minutes after I start my ridiculously long bedtime routine, to make sure being fast asleep by 10 pm Bliss!
trusted clinic
How to enjoy a Christmas party without drinking? It’s something I’ve struggled with over the years. I’ve found that my best advice is to enjoy the fact that you won’t be the subject of office gossip the next day. That and wear a pair of big, dazzling earrings to distract you from the glass of water in your hands!