Love it or loathe it, you can’t help but be impressed. The TV documentary 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, which aired on Channel 4 late last month, told – and discreetly showed – the story of how “adult content creator” Tia Billinger had sex with over a thousand men in a London “event space” in January, in the space of just 12 hours.

Wow! I don’t know which is more impressive, the sheer durability of the lady’s lady parts or the men’s required shagging speed, given that on average they would have had no more than 40 seconds each. Even British guys, notorious for premature ejaculation, might have been hard pressed to get the job done.  Tia, professional name Bonnie Blue, said the actual number was 1,057 men because there were 57 still in the queue before the 12-hour time period was up, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. Isn’t that sweet? “I’m basically a community worker”, she says, and her conscientious approach suggests she is a very good one.

She isn’t picky either, accepting anyone “from barely legal to barely breathing”. At the daring “barely legal” end of the range she has done special sessions for students aged 18 upwards, and you have to think she would be happy to invite minors of any age, too, if she could get away with it. After all, she says her own active sex life started at 13 and she doesn’t regret it. She has also said she wants to do a session for the disabled and disadvantaged, including those with Down syndrome. It all makes her a paragon of diversity, equity and inclusion, so what’s not to like?

Well, you will not be surprised to hear she has no shortage of critics of her “immoral”, “depraved”, “end of days”, etc. performances. Feminist philosopher Kathleeen Stock, writing in UnHerd, was among the naysayers. Inevitably, the commercial aspect came into her critique. Bonnie’s “gimmick”, she said, was to have sex on camera “with what she calls ‘normal men’, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch”. Gotta love that sly “make”! The implication seems to be that Bonnie illicitly groomed these hitherto innocent subscribers, manipulatively cheating them out of their pocket money! Quite a lot of pocket money, as it turns out. She reveals to the documentary team who followed and filmed her life and performances that her earnings were up to £2 million for the most recent month.

Did the punters get value for money? The gangbang sex action is much too speedy to include sophisticated sexual gymnastics but that’s not the point. Stock is closer to the mark with the word “gimmick”. Bonnie is offering something new, something you wouldn’t get from the professional porn stars. The most appealing aspect of this from a MAP point of view is a lovely provocation in which Bonnie sets up a “lesson” (presumably “sex education” but the documentary steers clear of that) with a class of “pupils” in school uniform. Barely legal? Looks more like pre-legal. The “schoolkids” in question are indeed of age though. They were recruited from young OnlyFans content makers, this being the platform Bonnie herself used until she was banned for violating a rule against “extreme challenges”.  We are introduced to one of these young performers, who says she is 22 but could easily pass for 12.

Stock tells us that the day after seeing the Bonnie documentary she went to give a speech at an annual summer school run in memory of conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. She wrote:

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualising, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

I have read Scruton’s Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation, to give the  full title. It is a dense, difficult, 438-page tome that I have studied in depth and critiqued in an academic paper. Briefly, I am not impressed. The trouble with the idea of sex as “sacred” is the narrowness of the morality to which it leads. Scruton was a homophobic bigot who loved nothing more (except perhaps seeing animals torn apart in blood sports) than discerning “obscenity” and “perversion” in any erotic deviation from his ideal standard and denouncing those engaged in such alleged sexual transgressions as “vile” or “disgusting”.

Superficially, the idea of restricting sex to loving, committed relationships is attractive. Commitment is certainly a bedrock requirement for bringing up kids. They need stable homes, and it helps when parents love each other as well as them. But the mistake is to sanctify sex as a binding factor, a holy sacrament. Scruton’s writing is secular, but his tone is religious, and his thinking sits well with Christianity’s traditional suspicion of sex (a flame that must be extinguished where possible and sanctified when it cannot) from St Paul onwards. Sex therapist Olivia Fane has put her finger right on love’s missing G spot:

Sex is not about souls. We have sexual desire when we want to have sex, not when we love someone. If that wasn’t the case, it would be the oldies who were all having rampant sex after 40 years of a happy marriage, who’d be the writers of agony columns advising those poor young people how being kind and considerate and bringing a cup of tea to their partner in bed will really get the pulse racing.

Lust, as opposed to love, is often despised for its supposed baseness and animality. But why? It is not self-sacrificing, as love is; but it is not inevitably nasty and selfish either. Just because you have an intense desire for someone’s body does not mean you have no regard for their rights and feelings. Your attitude depends on other feelings you have, which may well include kindness and goodwill.

And even love is not beyond criticism. As philosopher Harry Lesser has pointed out, “Genuine love can have a very selfish element – a desire to control and dominate another person spiritually in ways that are much more exploitative than the mere temporary use of his or her body.” (quoted in Ethics and Sex, by Igor Primoratz).

Three cheers for Bonnie Blue then?  Not quite. Sure, she’s a breath of fresh air for barely breathing old-timers like me; and she offers a ray of sunshine for barely legal youngsters. Boys, especially, hear little except victim feminism’s depressing, demoralising, incessant drumbeat of puritanical drivel telling them sex is a poisoned chalice, and males are just a bunch of harassers and potential rapists. It’s great that Bonnie’s message is much more pleasure-positive and pro-male. So why deny her that third cheer?

If it were just about Bonnie, I wouldn’t hesitate to award all three. But it isn’t, because commending her work without identifying any downside would be to ignore a deplorable and dangerous aspect of the social media platforms, where she and other online celebrities compete for the viewing figures on which their fame and fortune depend. While competition is usually a good thing in commerce, driving the innovation that gives us useful product improvements and brilliant new inventions, the online attention economy has become notorious for generating extremism. In the battle to win the views, and keep ahead of the game, performers find they need to come up with new stuff all the time. And all too often the most obvious way of doing that is to repeat the winning formula but take it to the next level. If someone has shagged 10 guys in a gangbang video, you do a hundred. And when they’ve done a hundred, you whack it up to a thousand.

No big deal, you might say. Nobody is forced to take on that level of challenge. It’s an expression of personal freedom. We should celebrate that, along with the opportunity to make enough money to obtain lasting security and a decent standard of living. What worried me more, though, was when we heard about Bonnie’s latest proposed stunt. She would put herself naked in a glass box on public display in what she calls a “petting zoo”, inviting anyone passing by to do anything they wanted to her. Anything? We didn’t see the small-print T&Cs, but the documentary footage appeared to suggest people might be allowed to hit her. The project looks so reckless we have to wonder where it will all end. Bonnie tells us she gets death threats daily, hundreds of them. Her biggest fear is an acid attack.

Again, we might say it’s her face, her life, her decision. Much as we would be horrified to see her suffer a truly vicious, life-changing assault, personal freedom is not lightly to be curtailed just to keep us all safe. That would be to set us on a life-denying course that would soon rule out everything from rough contact sports to crewed space exploration.

We might, however, feel it is time to tackle the attention economy’s perverse incentive to produce ever more sensational and all too often harmful online content.

Some of those harms, to be sure, we should simply learn to live with, such as people suffering offence from so-called “hate speech”.  Being able to let off steam in strong language is an indispensable aspect of free expression in a democracy. Not that abusive language is conducive to reasonable discussion leading to deeper understanding. It isn’t. Which is why I won’t put up with it when moderating the comments here at Heretic TOC. If people want to be rude to each other, let them do that on Twitter/X or in a heated exchange at Wetherspoons.

Also, for fans here of OnlyFans and other mainstream “adult” content online, I think we can agree that tackling online “harms” should not include making it harder or impossible to visit such sites, including Pornhub and others. The UK’s Online Safety Act has rightly been under severe attack recently for having exactly this effect. When new age verification rules came into effect late last month, Reform UK called the Act a “dystopian” measure that would drive youngsters towards VPN use and take them a step closer to accessing the dark web. The first part of that prediction came true immediately with a dramatic rise in VPN usage. I suspect Reform leader Nigel Farage has shrewdly judged that plenty of adults of all ages will be turning to VPNs rather than giving details that risk revealing their identities when proving their age. It looks like a massive vote winner for him over the whole age range of the electorate, especially now that Labour has promised votes for 16-year-olds.

Labour’s desperation to avoid giving Reform a huge boost is to be seen in their aggressive language, with tech secretary Peter Kyle and others saying Farage must be a friend of paedophiles if he is against the Act. That would have come as news to Nigel, I’m sure! But Labour have been hoist with their own ultra-feminist, anti-porn petard. Their parliamentary and government ranks are crammed with killjoy ideologues. These “social purity” warriors have been itching for decades to close down all porn outlets, not just ones that give access to minors. The age verification scheme enabled them to bring that a step nearer, while hiding, as ever, behind child protection as an excuse.

But this is the easy stuff to talk about, the stuff we can agree on here. So what about the real harms the big platforms are failing to deal with, evidently because the unimpeded attention economy, with its algorithms that incentivise extreme content, is the only thing the greedy capitalist tech moguls care about? How else are sites to be brought to heel when they  permit really bad stuff, if not by something like the Online Safety Act? Stuff such as material that features and facilitates eating disorders including anorexia, plus self-harm, including horrific mutilation by cutting, and the promotion of suicide? Stuff that is  targeted at teenagers? And as if all that were not bad enough, the latest in the news this week has been sites featuring kittens being tortured and killed. I will not be checking to see if such sites really exist (I couldn’t bear to look), but I doubt anyone is going to tell me it is just an urban legend.

In her attack on Bonnie Blue’s work, Kathleen Stock focuses on something rather less extreme but also disturbing for some of us. She notes that Bonnie is a “big fan of being choked”. I worry that this dangerous practice is becoming increasingly common among young people, and my guess is that the online world has done much to make it fashionable – with guys at least; not so much among girls, I would think. Bonnie said it was just a matter of being vocal about consent. Stock again:

But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

While I do not think the practice is a matter to be choked off, as it were, by restrictive legislation, I do feel Stock has a point on this one.

As for whether the Online Safety Act is overall a good thing or not, I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with Farage: the age verification strategy is terrible and needs to be dropped. I find it much easier to support the government’s aim of discouraging self-harm, etc., sites, but whether the Act is the right vehicle for that is extremely doubtful. The government’s stated aim of cracking down on material that is judged harmful but not illegal looks like guaranteeing the law will be applied with oppressive overreach. But we need to see how it works in practice over the next year or two.

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A MAGA MYSTERY IS EXPLAINED

Researching Michael Jackson, as I did for many years while working on my book about him, I didn’t find it difficult to get a handle on his psychology. Many found him deeply puzzling, an unfathomable enigma. But to me (and I’m sorry if it sounds arrogant or overconfident to say this) his heart and mind were an open book. His family background explained much; and, as I shared his attraction to young boys, it was much easier for me to understand this than it would have been for your average writer on pop music or celebrity culture.

What I have found much tougher in recent years to understand has been Americans’ weakness for bizarre conspiracy theories that cast paedophiles as a hidden elite, malignly running the deep state. It surfaced in 2016 with Pizzagate, when top Democrats including Hillary Clinton were alleged to be running a child sex ring involving a  pizzeria in Washington, DC. QAnon soon followed this up with related allegations.

Now the situation had morphed to a MAGA obsession with Jeffrey Epstein, a theme that at least has the merit of not being a total fantasy. Epstein was a real person, who had an undoubted interest (like literally billions of other males) in teenage girls, and he was an elite figure with elite friends. However, he was nowhere near to being “a paedophile”, as traditionally defined, i.e. having a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children, so his lifestyle can hardly be taken as evidence that paedos are in control of everything (or anything). But that is a detail that doesn’t interest the MAGA folks.

It has all seemed completely bonkers and incomprehensible to me. Until now. In an article called “Critical Pedo Theory: Understanding one of the core tenets of the modern American Right”, Scott Greer explains everything. He is on the Right himself, being a contributor to The American Conservative, and is no fan of paedophilia. But just as it sometimes takes a paedo (me) to know one (Jackson), Greer knows the Right from within, and I find his explanations convincing. You can see his full article here, but you can get the gist from an extract:

This issue is important to much of the Right due to the belief in “Critical Pedo Theory.” This notion imagines that the world is ruled by a pedophile cabal and “systemic pedophilia” is inherent to the current order. These elite pedos are evil by nature, which is why they use space lasers to cause forest fires and wield their weather machine against red states. These right-wingers hoped Trump would battle the cabal as president. QAnoners thought he did so in his first term, clinging to fake news stories about the admin secretly arresting and executing prominent child molesters.

The Epstein announcement came as a shock. Here’s their leader telling them that a core element of their worldview isn’t true. Rather than follow Trump’s advice and move on, they’re up in arms, with some threatening to ditch MAGA altogether. It illustrates how fundamental CPT is to a large cohort of conservatives. Trump bombing Iran and implying he may be open to some form of amnesty didn’t elicit anywhere near this kind of backlash from his base. For a significant number of Trump voters, the pedo cabal matters more than anything else.

Critical Pedo Theory emerged in the mid-2010s. It gained credence as a response to the Left. For years, liberals would condemn right-wingers as racists. Racism is one of the great taboos in American society. The other is pedophilia, so right-wingers began calling leftists kid diddlers to defang racism accusations. The Right’s embrace of conspiratorial populism transformed this rhetoric into CPT. Conservatives were no longer just calling the Left pedos to defend against racism smears – they now concocted an entire worldview centered on pedo cabals. Pizzagate and QAnon soon followed.

Further on, Greer briefly highlights how the definition of paedophilia has been stretched:

Age gap relationship hysteria demonstrates the strength of the taboo around pedophilia. Women now call men who date younger women pedophiles, despite both parties being adults, because they know it’s the worst label one can receive. They hope it will shame men into dating women their own age.

I am sure he is right about this, but there is much more to be said on the subject. One writer who delves much deeper into it is another figure on the Right, Richard Hanania, a buddy of JD Vance. His article has the merit of drawing on an evolutionary perspective. Here’s a brief taster:

There’s been a cultural shift over the last two decades in how we think about human sexuality, one in which we’ve simply lost touch with biological realities. The idea that teenage boys can be victimized by older women, like the demand that men only be attracted to women of their own age, can only exist in a culture in which many aspects of heterosexuality are repressed, if not demonized.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

Sentences in England and Wales (and probably the rest of the UK) for “sex offences against children” have more than tripled in length in the 30 years since the mid-1990s, according to an AI trawl through Ministry of Justice figures. Back then the average was just under two years whereas now it is over six.

This will come as no surprise to those of us who have been around long enough to see the long-term trend emerging from a steady stream of cases reported in the media over the years, and who have seen new laws brought in to increase maximum penalties.

It is possible that much of this upward trajectory has been on a smoothly rising curve, but what catches the eye is the occasional case when a judge goes mad and suddenly takes draconian sentencing to a whole new level, taking us ever closer to the US “carceral state” model . That is what happened a couple of months ago in the case of leading LGBTQ+ activist Stephen Ireland, co-founder of Pride in Surrey, when he was given a whopping sentence of 24 years for the “rape” of a 12-year-old boy, along with related lesser offences.

Had it been a real rape Ireland would have had little cause for complaint when we bear in mind that rape carries a maximum life sentence. But it was plain that the boy had been actively seeking out sex with men – he met Ireland through the gay hookup app Grindr, for fuck’s sake (literally!) – and that in a sane world there would have been no prison sentence at all for this de facto consensual encounter. The kid even lied about his age in his bid to get laid, initially telling Ireland he was 17. Jurors heard that Ireland described him in a message to his partner as a boy who “wants to play with men’s bodies”.

But in flat contradiction of the obvious fact that the boy was up for it, Judge Patricia Lees claimed Ireland “took advantage” of “a vulnerable child”. Instead of admitting the boy was highly sexed, just like almost every male adolescent, this presumably feminist judge chose to put her own spin on it by describing him as “highly sexualised”. In other words, his sexuality was somehow not his own but the result (as she explicitly speculated, without evidence) of prior “grooming”.

In my view, this is one of the most egregious cases of unjust sentencing since Oscar Wilde was sent down 130 years ago after one of the first celebrity trials. As Wilde was one of the great literary figures of his day, it was to be expected that the trial outcome would be a public sensation, attracting huge publicity.

Ireland’s fame is nothing like as great, but he was a flamboyant, high-profile figure in Surrey and it is striking that his lengthy incarceration has not generated much of a public response from the LGBTQ+ community. Where is the shocked reaction? Where are the placards and protest marches? All we’ve had is a stunned and possibly embarrassed silence. What a sad and sorry sign of the times that is!

DON’T DISMISS DAWKINS

Late last year, and in January this year, Heretic TOC did a two-part blog, the first called “Time to get real: woke is broke”, the second being “Clearing up the conceptual confusion”. The first looked at how woke identity politics, especially on trans issues, may have cost the Democrats the US presidential election and ushered in a second Trump term. Part two examined the conceptual muddle that had allowed such dubious politics to thrive.

My intention, as I said at the time, was to unravel some knotty conceptual areas of confusion, not to trash the trans cause but, among other things, to strengthen it by giving it a foundation grounded in reality rather than the ridiculous and dangerous fantasies then being peddled by extremist activists.

This second part was the most difficult, intellectually challenging blog I have ever done, but I am in no doubt it was worth the effort, not least as regards investigating the non-binary aspect of sexuality. Note that I say “sexuality”, not sex. What I argued was that gender is non-binary (and so is our sexuality as individuals) but that sex is not. Sex is strictly binary, and we get into all manner of difficulties if we try to ignore or obscure this fundamental fact.

Now, I am delighted to report, the legendary evolutionary biologist and science communicator Richard Dawkins has given us a new essay on the subject that explains it all with far more authority and eloquence than I could muster. Dawkins is something of a hate figure on the woke left, rather like JK Rowling. This is unfortunate in both cases, but especially that of Dawkins, whose values are civilised and humane and who, above all, really knows his stuff. Accordingly, I would invite everyone to check out his new essay in UnHerd.