But one must ask: What makes Bonnie Blue’s stunt more appalling than others on the platform?
But one must ask: What makes Bonnie Blue’s stunt more appalling than others on the platform?
T he depraved content platformed on OnlyFans is too obscene and voluminous to catalogue. As just one example, Lily Phillips, 23, went viral last year when she slept with 101 men in 24 hours. Phillips has since embarked on challenges, each more extreme than the previous one, to satiate her enormous audience and, as she describes it, her own sexual appetite. She has slept with old men in nursing homes. Right now, she’s preparing for a weeklong sexcapade in which she will attempt to have sex with 10,000 men consecutively. Some of her co-stars have been hospitalized because of injuries sustained during such stunts.
Phillips is one of the most famous OnlyFans creators, but she’s far from the only one to engage in such extreme behavior. Australia’s “most sexually active woman,” Annie Knight, slept with 583 men in one day. True OnlyFans success demands a creator’s willingness to engage in stunts of this nature. Individuals addicted to pornography have more extreme tendencies and fantasies the longer their addiction persists. To attract and keep a dedicated client base, OnlyFans creators need to constantly up the sexual ante.
Although the platform says that it “commonly” removes content that “involved nudity in a public place, or around animals,” “could be considered violent or extreme,” or “refers to creators and fans meeting in person, including raffles and competitions,” OnlyFans has allowed perverse stunts on its platform. Content moderation seems to rely on the company’s discretion, not necessarily on rules about what defines “violent or extreme” behavior. There’s gray area, in other words, as to what constitutes acceptable content.
But now, we at least know where OnlyFans is willing to draw a line: at Bonnie Blue. OnlyFans banned the 26-year-old from the platform this month after she advertised a “petting zoo” stunt in which she planned to put herself in a glass box on a street and allow 2,000 men to have at her.
Blue has in the past teamed up with Knight to bed as many age-eligible virgin high schoolers as possible. She also did a tour through U.K. universities in search of as many “barely legal” men as she could get her hands on. She was the first content creator to complete the “1,000 men in 24 hours” challenge (which became the “1,057 men in 24 hours” challenge, because a few extra guys showed up, and Blue couldn’t in good faith turn them away). In many of her videos, she has men conceal their identities. She publicly advertises these stunts online and crowdsources men, fans or otherwise, who are willing to participate. OnlyFans has allowed these events to be broadcast and promoted them on its site.
By condemning Blue’s latest stunt, the most significant social media site since TikTok has admitted that, at a point, the sexual depravity that thrives on its platform becomes too depraved. OnlyFans revolutionized the accessibility of sex challenges and the speed at which they escalate. For the platform to claim now that it has a red line — 2,000 men and a “petting zoo” — is rich.
What makes Blue’s latest stunt more appalling than some of the others? It can’t be the fact that the stunt would have been performed in public; Blue has been sexually lewd in public before, and other creators have filmed and posted public sex acts. It can’t be ethics; what’s the moral difference between sleeping with 1,000 men and sleeping with 2,000? It can’t be Blue’s desire to have men do whatever they want to her; she has let men use and abuse her in the past. It can’t be the fact that Blue invited strangers to have sex with her; she did the same at each of her prior sex marathons.
It’s possible to be an OnlyFans creator without ever exposing your nude body on camera (the app was created as a way for fans to chat privately with social media stars and celebrities), but creators who begin using OnlyFans under the guise of innocence are often drawn into vulgarity by the allure of cash. An outfit-of-the-day video turns into a sexy shot of the creator trying on leggings, for example, and so on it escalates.
On OnlyFans, women are rewarded for treating their body as their business. Although it used to be easy to call the traditional porn industry what it was (exploitative), OnlyFans stars don’t see their sex work as exploitative in the slightest — they are, after all, in control, and there is no barrier to entry. It’s not dramatic to call the promotion of complete bodily autonomy on OnlyFans the most powerful, perhaps dangerous, iteration of pornographic media yet. Maybe, just maybe, even OnlyFans has started to realize it.