Can feminists be pro-sex worker rights and anti-porn? I think so.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-name” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”Black Han Sans|||on|||||” text_text_color=”#000000″ header_4_font=”|||on|||||” header_4_text_align=”center” text_orientation=”center” custom_margin=”||0px||false|false” global_colors_info=”{}”]
Words by Chloe Laws<\/strong><\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/flatplan-plus-content.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2025\/01\/Screenshot-2025-01-15-at-13.13.15.png” alt=”Bonnie Blue” title_text=”Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 13.13.15″ force_fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_image][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”] I\u2019ve been watching the Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips news unfold with my hands in front of my eyes, simultaneously upset at what they are promoting to young women as normal, but also with a reserved empathy for them. Empathy, because what they are putting their bodies through is so violent and traumatic; reserved, because much of the rhetoric both women have been spouting \u2013 especially Blue \u2013 is deeply misogynistic and reinforces so much of what is wrong about pornography.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been anxious to write about this topic because \u2013 as a feminist and journalist \u2013 it\u2019s a hot potato. But as the recent news broke, with Bonnie Blue claiming to have set a \u201cworld record\u201d for having sex with the most men in one day (1,057 in 12 hours), I felt compelled to. We need modernised conversations around feminism, sex work, and pornography \u2013 ones that move away from the controversy of \u201crad-fems\u201d and include the new topics facing us all, like OnlyFans and porn for social media content.<\/p>\n As a 30-year-old woman, I was, until a few months ago, only peripherally aware of Bonnie Blue via the odd TikTok finding its way onto my For You Page (FYP). Her name went from a \u201cwho\u2019s that again?\u201d to someone embedded in social media discourse. I\u2019ve found myself reading tweet after tweet about Blue.\u2028<\/p>\n <\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_code _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”] For the uninitiated, Blue is a 24-year-old OnlyFans adult content creator. I think it\u2019s fair to say that she courts controversy for views, but the line Blue toes is not a good one. Earlier this year, she went on a Freshers\u2019 Week tour of UK universities, sleeping with as many students as possible \u201cfor free\u201d on the agreement that she could upload the footage to OnlyFans. Blue claims to have made over \u00a33 million from her OnlyFans account this year alone. She visited Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham and claims to have slept with hundreds of students, professors, and parents.<\/p>\n She reportedly encouraged \u201cvirgins\u201d and \u201cfresh 18-year-olds\u201d to contact her. \u201cI gave everyone a time slot. It\u2019s like you\u2019re going for your hair,\u201d she told the Daily Mail. \u201cI said you can do whatever you want to me in this slot, and then someone else is coming in.\u201d Blue insists that she ensures everyone has valid ID and gets them to sign a consent form beforehand.<\/p>\n In a TikTok video yesterday, Blue said, \u201cThis is what my face looks like after taking 1,000 men less than 12 hours ago”, later explaining in an interview that she felt “fine” afterward. “It just feels like I’ve had a heavy day in the bedroom, which is exactly what I’ve had,” she explained. “I think if it had’ve continued how it did for the first three to four hours, I would’ve struggled.” Bonnie’s press representative said there would be video proof of the event and that there was a documentary crew filming for an upcoming programme.<\/p>\n This is where it gets complicated and nuanced. Blue seeking out \u201cbarely legal\u201d teenagers to have sex with has been described as not far off predatory behaviour. Just because something is \u201clegal\u201d does not mean it is moral \u2013 and pushing the legality of something to its absolute limits shows that Blue, on some level, is aware of this. She consistently uses dehumanising language in reference to herself and other women, seeing women\u2019s roles as being pleasure-givers to men rather than autonomous people. This kind of narrative contributes to misogynistic violence, where women are dehumanised and seen as sub-human.<\/p>\n However, Bonnie Blue is also a product of the porn industry, not the creator of it. She does not exist in a silo, and therefore \u2013 although many of her actions are not excusable \u2013 to some degree, they are explainable.<\/p>\n <\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”custom-quote” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” header_2_font=”Libre Bodoni|||on|||||” header_2_text_align=”center” header_2_text_color=”#333333″ header_2_font_size=”40px” header_2_line_height=”1.2em” global_colors_info=”{}”] Sex work, I believe, should be decriminalised globally and afforded the same rights as other workers \u2013 like unions \u2013 to ensure that it is safer and regulated. Porn, in its current form, is not something I am pro. There is a world where feminist porn could exist as the norm, sure, but that world does not yet exist.<\/p>\n Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips are examples of how, in fact, porn is just becoming more and more extreme to keep up with our desensitisation. On a recent episode of the podcast If I Speak, Moya Lothian-McLean said to her co-host Ash Sarkar that Bonnie Blue is the \u201ccontentification\u201d of pornography: \u201cBonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have broken through to the mainstream because they\u2019re extreme examples\u2026 What happened there was just when a body becomes merely flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not an exaggeration to say that porn is dangerous.<\/p>\n A report by the Children\u2019s Commissioner, which drew together research from focus groups with teenagers aged 13-19 and a survey of 1,000, found that the average age at which children first see pornography is 13 and that 79% had encountered violent pornography before the age of 18.<\/p>\n Moreover, they found that pornography is not confined to dedicated adult sites: \u201cWe found that Twitter was the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen pornography. Fellow mainstream social networking platforms Instagram and Snapchat rank closely after dedicated pornography sites.\u201d Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, in Women On Porn, a book released last year, wrote: \u201cAs much as we might not want it to be true, we know that some of the violence we see in porn is real.\u201d<\/p>\n A study by the Behavioural Architects for the Government Equalities Office found \u201can association between pornography and an increased likelihood of committing both verbal and physical acts of aggression, with a significantly stronger correlation with the use of violent pornography.\u201d<\/p>\n I would love a world where pornography is just pleasure, where sex workers are treated fairly and safely, and where pornography does not trickle down into society and create insidious problems, violence, or deep bias. But it does.<\/p>\n So, for now, I\u2019m pro-sex workers and the need for their increased protection on many fronts. But I am no pro-porn, and I am definitely not pro the extreme contentification of porn that those like Bonnie Blue are making popular. I hope that we are permitted these nuances, and that more vital conversations are had; because it\u2019s imperative that young people know pornography is not sex. We must be clear that having sex with over one thousand people in a day is dehumanising and traumatic, physically and mentally.<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-texts” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font=”|||on|||||” text_orientation=”center” global_colors_info=”{}”] Photo: <\/b>Imago<\/p>[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can feminists be pro-sex worker rights and anti-porn? I think so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":6065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"guestgrazia","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6062"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6087,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062\/revisions\/6087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/grazia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
‘Porn is becoming more extreme to keep up with our desensitisation’<\/h2>[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]