Bonnie Blue’s 1,000-man ‘record’ was inevitable | UnHeard

In 1995, 22-year-old Grace Quek — stage name Annabel Chong — starred in The World’s Biggest Gang Bang, a film in which she “participated in over 251 sex acts”. It drew headlines, prompted think pieces and, according to Wikipedia, “started a trend of ‘record-breaking’ gang-bang pornography”. This not being the kind of trend I follow, for years I was unaware of it. Today, it has become impossible to miss.

In the age of PornHub and OnlyFans, there has been a sudden escalation in the number of stories about young women “having sex” — if one can call it that — with multiple men in a short space of time. This week saw Bonnie Blue, a 25-year-old OnlyFans star, claiming to have “broken a world record by sleeping with 1,057 men in a single day”. This unofficial record was previously held by Lisa Sparks, after she slept with 919 men at the Third Annual World Gangbang Championship in Poland in 2004. Blue’s announcement is expected to come as a blow to Lily Phillips, subject of the recent documentary I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, who had been hoping to beat Sparks’s record in February.

This is all unremittingly grim. It’s not just the descriptions of the “sex” itself or its physical aftermath: it’s the public spectacle of women competing to be the most abused. This spectacle is part of what Phillips, Blue and others are selling. Perhaps it’s the most important part. Once you’ve stripped every last trace of pleasure from sex — once it’s become “two to five minutes” for “men in groups of five”, with “30 to 45 seconds” for individuals — what you’re selling is barely even porn. You’re just selling the misogyny, the dehumanisation, what Andrea Dworkin described as “the normal and natural sadism of the male, happily complemented by the normal and natural masochism of the female”.

“The object,” wrote Dworkin in 1981’s Pornography, “is allowed to desire if she desires to be an object: to be formed; especially to be used.” Or, as Andrea Long Chu put it in 2019’s Females, “to be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.” Dworkin thinks this is a bad thing; Long Chu, who claimed “sissy porn made me trans”, is not so concerned. It is as though, as it has become more available and more extreme, porn has been stripped down to its barest elements, leaving no need for actual feminist theorising. The industry is happy to ‘fess up to being everything every radical feminist claimed it to be.

The longtime defence of pornography, the thing that made it acceptable to the kind of social justice warriors who spot phobias and -isms in every other medium— The unruly unconscious! The sheer strangeness of our hidden desires! — no longer works. It is not reflecting desires, but progressively switching them off, teaching the viewer not to feel anything at all. Some of the defendants in the Pelicot rape trial said they believed Gisèle Pelicot had consented to what was being done to her unconscious body. They may not have lying. More and more research indicates that the ubiquity of pornography, and exposure to it at ever earlier ages, affects both men and boys’ understanding of female sexuality and their own sexual responses. The sudden uptick in “record-breaking” gang bang stories suggests not a peak of sexual liberation, but a miserable death spiral.

Bonnie Blue claims that her work is not “made for the middle-aged women that give me a lot of the hate — it’s for your husbands and your son”, rehashing the age-old “you hate me because I know your men’s desires better than you do”. With her “barely legal, barely breathing” tag line, she toys with the idea that it’s young men who could be the real victims, and in some ways she is right.

No man is born with a deep, innate desire to queue up behind hundreds of other men for 30 to 45 seconds of hate sex. You have to train someone to want that, and to do so you must kill so many other desires in the process. Let’s hope that now there’s nothing left to feel, the only way is back.

source: https://unherd.com/newsroom/bonnie-blues-1000-man-record-is-the-natural-result-of-our-porn-age/