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New Statesman​

What Bonnie Blue and Andrew Tate have in common

Photos by Daniel Mihailescu/AFP and Gilbert Flores/Variety When Messalina, the third wife of Roman Emperor Claudius, was sure her husband was asleep, she would slip out of the palace and head to the brothels of Rome. Donning a blonde wig and adopting the stage-name Wolf Girl, she would spend the night entertaining clients who had no idea they were sleeping with an empress, staying until dawn when the pimps forced her to leave. She didn't do any of this, of course. The account of Messalina's scandalous urge to prostitute herself comes from the satirical poet Juvenal, born years after her death. A similarly sordid and fantastical tale of the empress challenging Rome's most notorious whore to a contest of who could satiate the most men in a night is told by Pliny the Elder, who would have been in his twenties during the events he claims to chronicle. Messalina wins, incidentally, with a score of 25 men. This might seem rather tame by today's standards. Young women competing to outdo one another in terms of sexual depravity is a moral panic at the moment. OnlyFans, the site for content creators to profit off their fans, has created an arena for the kind of acts Roman authors had to dream up in their fevered imaginations. Derbyshire-born pornographic model Lily Phillips became something of a household name last year with her documentary on sleeping with 100 men on camera in a day (four Messalinas, if you care to measure that way). And that's one tenth of the figure claimed in January by fellow Derbyshire OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue – a woman who rose to prominence posting videos of herself having sex with 'barely legal' men. Blue (a pseudonym, of course – Messalina would approve) is in the news right now for two reasons. First is her latest attempted stunt: a 'petting zoo' where (she says) she intended to be tied up in a glass box in central London and invite any men passing by to use her however they chose. Cue a wave of online backlash, and OnlyFans suspending her account. There will be no petting zoo event – but, as with the Lily Phillips documentary, the incident ensured that a whole lot of people who had never come across Blue now know her name. If that wasn't enough to shock you, Blue is in the headlines again after announcing a collaboration with manosphere influencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate. The pair have apparently made a podcast together, and posted to social media teasing their fans about the upcoming content. Tate, the poster boy for 21st century toxic masculinity, hardly seems a fan of Blue, tweeting to his followers: 'Bonnie is the end result of feminism. She is what The Matrix wanted to create.' At first glance, it's hard to see what porn actress who specialises in taking depravity to new heights under the banner of female empowerment and sex positivity and a former kickboxer who teaches impressionable young men that women are objects and is facing criminal charges in both Romania and the UK would have to talk about. Not unless they admit they're in the exact same game, anyway. And that game is winning at the attention economy. Both have made careers out of hacking the algorithms that run our online lives: Blue by turning pornography into extreme performance art, Tate with a mix of get-rich-quick tutelage and old-fashioned misogyny repackaged for an era of lost young men (leaving aside his side hustle recruiting webcam girls to make money for him). Both have had to push into ever more eye-catching territory to keep the clicks coming: Blue with increasingly creative stunts, Tate by branching out from his usual oeuvre of insisting women exist purely for male pleasure to arguing that it is 'gay' to enjoy food. Both assert they have made millions from OnlyFans and other online platforms: Blue claimed her income was $2.1m a month (one reason OnlyFans is highly likely to reinstate her account – and if it doesn't, there'll always be another platform that will), while Tate's content is so lucrative YouTube is continuing to profit off it despite banning him in 2022. Those platforms, by the way, know exactly what they're hosting. Their aim is to lock users into the sites for as long as possible, regardless of the content keeping them there. The degradation of X since Elon Musk's takeover in 2022 lays this out: you can still find genuinely stimulating discourse and debate there, but you'll have to wade through the crypto scammers, incendiary tirades, fake stories, conspiracy theories, AI photos and pornographic videos to find it. The latter isn't just you, in case you were wondering. Porn on Twitter isn't new, but it has become so ubiquitous that MPs have been warned not to scroll on their phones during parliamentary debates in case adult content pops into their feeds and they face the fate of Neil Parish (the Tory MP forced to resign for exactly that offence). True, the algorithms serve you what they think you want to see, but so many accounts are posting salacious photos and videos to grab attention and boost engagement figures that the odds it'll turn up in your feed whether you've ever searched for such content before are too high to risk. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe If that's entry level, the collaboration announced between Tate and Blue is top-tier attention hacking. What could spark more outrage – and therefore more clicks – than a podcast between arch anti-feminist Tate and a woman he claims to despise? As one Tate fan pointed out: 'you just gave her 1000's of new onlyfans subscribers.' Much less hassle than her petting zoo plan. The Roman authors who helped turn Messalina into a by-word for female promiscuity were playing a similar game two thousand years ago, amplifying the contrast between her royal status and her debauched behaviour as a shock tactic. (In the end, she was executed for adultery, and the way ancient writers discuss her tells us a lot more about Roman anxiety to a new imperial regime than it does about her actual life, but that's another story.) Those outraged by Blue's antics, whether out of disgust for the work she does or revulsion that she is associating herself with someone like Tate, are handing them both the very currency they trade in. [See more: Geoff Dyer's English journey] Related