From Bonnie Blue To Boysober: Why Sex Extremism Is Doing No One Any Good
If you’d landed on Earth in the past week and surveyed the sexual landscape you may well be left feeling just a little confused.
On the one hand, there’s the hyper sexualisation of OnlyFans creators like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, who have raced to become the first to sleep with 1,000 men within 24 hours. On the other, there’s a growing movement of heterosexual women swearing off men completely, taking up Korea’s rapidly spreading 4B movement, or going ‘boysober’.
Of course, these movements are cultural, rather than statistical; we have no reliable way of telling whether Blue, real name Tia Bellinger, actually completed that challenge, and there’s no way of telling how many women have completely sworn off of men. But both are highly-publicised and extreme responses to our sexual culture.
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Bellinger has given hypersexualisation a figurehead. She told her X followers in one video shot after the 1057th man had finished last Saturday; 'I don’t need a wheelchair, I am, like, fine.' Phillips has since upped the ante by promising male fans on her TikTok account: 'Have you ever gone in the back door? if not…I’ll change that.'
These two women, although criticised and abused by many - not least because Bonnie’s eagerness for 'barely legal' men has seen her take more flack than any of the grown-up men who’ve long made millions from the commodification of young bodies - aren’t outliers. They operate in conjunction with the many men complicit and crucial to these challenges; it takes, um, 1001 to tango. And all of it is set against a backdrop of the normalisation of not just porn culture, but a social media-driven quest for clout by any means.
Counter to all of this is an extreme kind of abstinence. Korea’s rapidly extending 4B feminist separatist movement is itself a response to shocking cases of male-perpetrated femicide and centres around 'bisekseu' (no sex with men); 'biyeonae' (no dating men); 'bihon' (no marrying men); and 'bichulsan' (no having children). It grew in popularity across the world following Donald Trump’s re-election as President and his affiliated podcast bros posting on X 'Your body, my choice'. Celebrities such as Julia Fox have also extolled the virtues of celibacy as part of a perhaps more gentle 'boysober' approach.
Women not wanting to sleep with men is hardly as damaging as women wanting to sleep with as many men as possible. And for many reasons, it makes sense that a woman might want to de-centre men from their lives. This is happening after decades of social conditioning telling young women that their value is in their sexual appeal to men, and after rising rates of male violence against women and girls.
Plus, unlike the male-dominated incel movement, women maintaining abstinence has never been associated with murders and killing sprees. However, if we’re to believe that part of incel culture’s damage to men was because it isolated them away from healthy and normal relationships, we can’t just ignore that the same principle could apply to women sequestering themselves away from men.
As shocking as sex extremism can be, it’s all just modern mutations of the old sexist stereotypes. Encouraging boys and girls to have vastly different interests by cordoning gender neutral activities like football or dressing up into arbitrarily gendered categories does wonders for capitalism - you’re going to have to buy your daughter a whole new set of toys and clothes, her brother’s hand-me-downs won’t do - but it’s harming us all. How are young men meant to engage with young women when they don’t actually have stuff in common with them? Add to this a thoroughly modern, screen-fuelled context; boys and girls are algorithmically fed vastly different social scripts.
Toxic masculinity is alive and kicking; through free online porn, a steady growth of manosphere influencers who insist that men’s empowerment comes at the cost of women’s disempowerment and the normalisation of these ideologies through the mainstreaming of anti-diversity right wing politician. But remnants of those Bang on the Door style 'boys are stupid, throw rocks at them' slogans persist in a lazy 'men suck' discourse that does little to change the structural issues facing women - political, financial and social - and everything to drive clicks and perhaps sell tat.
Breaking through the middle of this adversarial sexual landscape, alternative sexual scripts are emerging. Although the film Babygirl reinforces the notion that powerful women must seek out punishment to redress some sort of balance, it is shot with Romy's (Nicole Kidman) pleasure at its centre. It's all about what she gets from sex and how to ask for it better. It’s a thrilling fantasy for women to feel validated by when their own sexual proclivities are mirrored on screen.
Sex is never simple, and look, I’m a lesbian, I never have to consider doing what the late feminist Andrea Dworkin phrased 'share a bed with their oppressor'. I definitely have had to eye roll as female friends and acquaintances tell me they’re going to start dating women, just because men are so crap. I’d very much prefer my community to be festooned with women who are there out of adoration, not desperation.
As grotty as so many men can be - I shiver at the thought of those cowards queuing barefoot to treat themselves to a moment of a young woman’s body - I don’t know if swearing them off completely, on a widespread level, will improve our lot. Surely careful selectivity about the men we do choose to spend time with sends notice to other men out there what it is we truly want from them? Surely assuming the worst by dint of their sex offers opportunities for misogynists to do the same of us? Surely if we’re to progress into a better world, we’re going to have to do it together? I know so many couples raising feminist boys who understand boundaries. That wouldn’t happen without some sort of bridge across the divide, now, would it?
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