After receiving a flood of backlash, Bonnie Blue has cancelled her most recently advertised event, an extreme ‘petting zoo’ where she is the “animal on display”. Although Blue’s event will not be going ahead, its mere conception – creating an event comparable to Marina Abramović’s performance art piece Rhythm 0 – has revealed some uncomfortable truths.
Bonnie Blue is an adult film star who controversially rose to fame after allegedly having sex with over 1,000 men in only 12 hours, setting a world record. This month, in an attempt to beat her own world record, she endeavoured to make her sexual challenges even more public. On her now-deleted website, Blue stated that she would be tied up and naked in a glass box for 24 hours, “ready to be used”. Blue would be both physically restrained and publicly displayed, providing male participants with the opportunity to do whatever they wish to her, with “no limits”. There was no discussion of safety measures or personal boundaries being put in place, enabling Blue to become a willing victim of potentially extreme sexual violence.
The event was set to take place in London on the 15th of June, and Blue stated that she intended for around 2,000 men to sign up in order to beat her own record. However, before the website was taken down, over 10,000 men had signed up to take part, a figure four times greater than what was expected. The significant number of men who signed up for the event demonstrates just how high the demand is for sexual domination over women.
These figures demonstrate that, by organising events such as this, Bonnie Blue is supplying for a demand that already exists.
Men are conditioned from childhood to both enjoy and expect sexual domination. The average age of a child’s first experience of pornography is only 13, 5 years before the legal age. Additionally, 88% of pornography includes acts of physical violence, such as choking or smacking, with 94% of violent scenes portraying the woman as the target of the violence. By being exposed to content where men receive pleasure by performing violent acts, such as Blue’s own adult content, boys learn from an early age to associate violence against women with sexual gratification. This association leads men to actively seek out violent pornography. For example, 36% of a sample of young people admitted to having sought out violent sexual content. This appetite for sexual violence is likely what led to the disturbing demand for Blue’s ‘petting zoo’.
Bonnie Blue has appealed to this demand by proposing her ‘petting zoo’, an event intended to reinforce the dehumanisation of women. For her proposed ‘petting zoo’, Blue stated that she planned to transform herself into
an “animal on display”, directly playing into patriarchal fantasies of women who are submissive, silent, and sub-human. The event’s title alone demonstrates that Blue does not intend to portray herself as a person. Just like an animal at a petting zoo, Blue intends for the men attending her event to perceive her as a creature with no autonomy over where she can be touched, or how she should be ‘played with’. Comparing a sexual event to a petting zoo reinforces the pornographic notion that women are merely creatures who live for the purpose of entertaining men.
Blue herself has taken to TikTok after a previous sexual stunt to inform her followers of how the men involved “used (her) as a toy and forgot (she) was human”. By placing herself in the glass box “bent over (and) begging”, Blue is once again not only consenting to, but encouraging, male fantasies where women are not people, but merely things.
Implications of the event
When content creators like Bonnie Blue encourage the dehumanisation of women, it becomes easier for society to rationalise the same being done to others. One influential woman consenting to sexual violence can normalise sexual violence on a wider scale. When someone with a platform like Bonnie Blue states that women should enjoy dehumanising and violent sexual acts, people will believe her: a consequence that would be extremely detrimental to women societally.
Not only would the ‘petting zoo’ have been harmful to women at a societal level, but it would have harmed Bonnie herself. Blue’s statement that men could do whatever they wanted to her without limitation placed her in real danger. The cage set up, additionally, removes her ability to withdraw consent at any time. The men attending the event could perform any act of sexual violence on her, and, by being tied up, Blue would be in no position to prevent them from doing so. Not only would Blue not be able to physically prevent sexual violence, but she would have already consented to sex with “no limits”, meaning that perpetrators of sexual violence would not have crossed any prearranged boundaries.
How the event compares to Rhythm 0
Her sexual stunt immediately draws comparisons to Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, a 1974 performance art piece where Abramović stood motionless for 6 hours and allowed members of the public to do whatever they wished to her, using a selection of 72 objects. The objects ranged from innocuous items, such as a feather and a rose, to dangerous items, such as a knife and a loaded gun. Some members of the public did approach Abramović with kindness. However, others did not. One man sliced her neck with the knife and proceeded to suck the blood from her wound. Another man held the loaded gun to her head. By the end of the performance, Abramović’s clothes were cut off, and she was covered in both blood and tears. Abramović believed that she could have died, and left the experiment convinced that the only reason she was not raped was because the majority of men were accompanied by their wives.
Rhythm 0 revealed horrifying truths about human nature. When people, — men in particular — are given control over a submissive woman, they will push societal boundaries and quickly resort to violence. Rhythm 0 fulfilled Abramović’s aim of exposing the relationship between a performer and an artist when there is a power imbalance. While Abramović’s performance provides an informative commentary on the power imbalance within society, Bonnie Blue’s proposed stunt sexualises and aestheticises that imbalance. While the two events are diametrically opposed in intention, the risk to the safety of women would be the same. By planning to put herself in a similar situation to Abramović, Bonnie Blue intended to directly put herself in harm’s way, showing no concern about history repeating itself.
Bonnie Blue as both a perpetrator and a victim of the patriarchy
Yes, Bonnie Blue’s proposed stunt risked significant harm to herself and to the wider conversation around sexual violence. But Blue cannot be solely blamed for society’s sexual dehumanisation of women. As well as being a perpetrator of the patriarchy, Blue is a victim of it. Before Bonnie Blue completed her first extreme sexual stunt, the demand already existed; the commodification of the female body dates back to around 7000 BC. Bonnie Blue’s events did not create the market for women’s bodies; they have just provided a service that caters for the pre-existing market.
As long as women’s bodies are perceived as a commodity to be bought and an object to be used, women like Bonnie Blue will continue to provide services to accommodate and profit from the demand. Bonnie Blue is not the architect of the patriarchy, but just a pawn within it. While her actions are certainly deserving of criticism, it is understandable why a woman in our society would act as she does. When a woman’s value is decided based upon how desirable she is, she will prove just how desirable she can be, and when the female body can be used in exchange for money and fame, women will continue to utilise that.
While Bonnie Blue’s events may be deplorable, she is one woman who is accommodating the violent desires of thousands of men. The insane demand for her event exposes just how normalised sexual violence is within society. Thousands of everyday men are both willing and eager to publicly degrade a bound, naked woman. The 10,000 men who signed up to “use” Bonnie Blue are not all violent convicts and basement dwellers. They are fathers, sons, shopkeepers, police officers, students, and teachers. The 10,000 everyday men who signed up for the ‘petting zoo’ are only those willing to sexually degrade a woman publicly; the number of men who would do the same in private would likely be much greater.
Bonnie Blue’s proposed event (whether she intended for it to go ahead or if she was merely ‘rage baiting’) brings up an important question. What is more alarming, that one woman is willing to offer herself up for public degradation, or that thousands of men are eager to accept her offer?
Just as is the case for many other societal problems, it seems that the root cause is what should be addressed, and not the resulting behaviour. Although Blue’s behaviour is alarming and poses a serious threat to women’s safety, the unwavering appetite for sexual violence is the primary concern. In order to prevent events such as this from taking place, we must ask ourselves why there is such a demand for sexual domination over women, and how this demand can be addressed.
