Bonnie Blue, Andrew Tate and a new cult of sex extremism

Bonnie Blue said her parents are "so proud" after she allegedly broke the world record by sleeping with 1,057 men in 12 hours.

The adult performer has drawn widespread criticism since her recent stunt – an example of "sex extremism" that is "doing no one any good", said Elle.

'Extreme responses'

If "you'd landed on Earth" recently and "surveyed the sexual landscape" you'd probably feel "just a little confused", said the magazine.

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On the one hand, there's the "hyper sexualisation" of OnlyFans creators Blue and Lily Phillips, who "raced" to become the first to sleep with 1,000 men within 24 hours. But there's also a "growing movement" of heterosexual women giving up on men completely under South Korea's rapidly spreading 4B movement.

Both are "extreme responses" to our sexual culture. Blue and Phillips are part of a "normalisation of not just porn culture, but a social media-driven quest for clout by any means, while the "extreme" abstinence of 4B is "a response to shocking cases of male-perpetrated femicide".

But if part of incel culture's "damage to men" was that it "isolated them away from healthy and normal relationships", we can't ignore that "the same principle" could apply to women "sequestering themselves away from men".

For her part Blue – the Derbyshire-born 25-year-old whose real name is Tia Bellinger – is keen to dispel any notion that she's not in charge of her own destiny.

"People think sex workers have no brains and they've got daddy issues and they've got no family or some sort of trauma that's happened to them as a kid, and it's not the case," she told Mamamia. "You can do this job because you enjoy it, because it's a million dollar business."

She also said in a recent YouTube interview that her family supports her actions, saying: "You'll think I'm joking, my family are so proud of what I do."

'Unremittingly grim'

"This is all unremittingly grim," said Victoria Smith on UnHerd, because "once you've stripped every last trace of pleasure from sex" what you're selling is "barely even porn" – you're just selling "misogyny" and "dehumanisation".

But "one angle" seems to be "completely ignored", said Olivia Petter in The Independent – "what about the men?" The men in the queue to have sex with Blue were "buying into the idea of guaranteed sex with a young woman alongside several other men, treating her like some sort of strange commodity".

The idea that "groups of men" are "taking turns to have sex with a woman they don’t know" was the shocking reality of the recent Pélicot trial in France, making it "all feel a lot more insidious".

Some of the "queueing" men are "very young" and "potentially indoctrinated by manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate", said Glamour, but "that doesn't mean they shouldn't be held accountable".

Tate, the ex-kickboxer from Luton who now lives in Romania, has described women as "intrinsically lazy" and said there is "no such thing as an independent female", said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator.

So he and Blue "might not admit it to themselves", but "they have plenty in common". Both are "encouraging, and revelling in, very bad male behaviours". Their actions "horrify us" because we "mostly subscribe to a simple view" that men should treat women with respect. "To hell with the pair of them."

Although OnlyFans is "often touted" as an "empowering platform for women to earn huge amounts of money, contrary to historic power dynamics in porn", said Glamour, young women are "reporting degrading requests, abusive and predatory treatment", as well as "doxxing, so-called 'revenge porn' and stalking".