Trigger Warning: Contains details of sexual assault
In my opinion, Bonnie Blue is just… gross. There’s no other way to really define it. There is no formal legal definition that could possibly stop her from her present crusade on social media, and she seems entirely immune to social inculcation or deterrence. In fact, she rather enjoys the hate. This wouldn’t surprise, or even interest me, save for the fact that where hate serves for others as an advertising strategy, she does it completely for fun. After all, there just has to be an easier way to make internet money.
She nevertheless continues, much to practically everyone’s chagrin. Like a great deal of stories concerning exploitation, pornography and general human grossness however, a crucial element seems to be entirely missing. The biggest part. Men’s part.
There is doubtlessly a small section of Bonnie Blue’s fanbase that is female. Still, who is going to the damned meeting places in those videos. A stolid, despicable, underwhelming, turgid, wretched, greasy and desperate line of men. A singularly disappointing conveyor belt of flesh ejecta, numbering now in the thousands.
The reactions from women, particularly on social media, were definitive. Disgust doesn’t really cover it though. There’s something visceral and immediate about the issue at hand with Bonnie Blue, something that stakes the fate of human dignity at the centre. Especially now.
In 1974, performance art wasn’t “mainstream”, so to speak. It was seen as a fringe art-form, a weird collection of performative body hysterics and interpretative dance. Marina Abramović, one of the most influential and beloved performance artists of all time, resolved to change this perception. How? She stood still.
In her 1974 piece Rhythm 0, Abramović stood still in an art studio in Naples, Italy. Visitors were invited into the room wherein she stood, paralysed, and issued the instructions:
“There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object…
During this period I take full responsibility.”
For 6 hours, Abramović stood, expressionless, in the room. It started innocently. A kiss, a rose from the table placed in her hand, a kiss on the cheek. By the third hour, every thread of cloth had been cut from her body. Her neck had been slashed shallowly and the wound licked.
Abramović maintained her composure through numerous sexual assaults. A flash point came when a protective group formed to stave off some of the more experimental participants, one of whom pressed a gun to her head.
After the 6 hour runtime had elapsed, Abramović re-animated herself. Her most profound recollection of the event, she says, is the horrified and ashamed expression of the people who had violated her as she rose and walked out of the room, bloodied and in restrained tears.
The piece is largely considered a masterwork – and a genius experiment in the depth of depravity to which one can sink when they dehumanise others. A definite angle one can take however is that the work constitutes a uniquely feminist image of the female experience, the sexual violence of which is shared in each.
A profound and terrifying work that explores, amongst other things, the fearful indignities men can and will, with opportunity, visit upon women.
In other news, totally unrelated, Bonnie Blue is opening a public petting zoo for herself. I wish I was kidding about that.
She really is opening a public petting zoo, wherein she will sit, allowing people to… I don’t even know; I’m done.
The situations are not exactly alike. Abramović bears all the responsibility for the experiment, but none of the moral responsibility of the men inflicting horrors upon her. Bonnie Blue bears all the responsibility for her petting zoo, and a great deal for the extraordinary wretchedness visited upon her. The preeminent offenders in both cases are obvious though.
A good deal of people don’t care or are just too repelled to contemplate it. Some follow a feminist tradition of rejecting pornography altogether – in alignment with mainstream feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Cathraine Mackinnon – and view Bonnie Blue’s actions as contributing to a pall against women.
For me, the parallel, whilst not exact, is striking and nauseating. I can’t and will not define exactly why something between consenting adults (thousands of them, actually) is so abhorrent. I only know that it is, and it seems a great deal of women agree, perhaps for the aforementioned reasons.
Again though, where are the men in all this? Speaking as one: I wasn’t there, honest. Cause why in the name of sweet gentle christ would I be? Why would any of us? A whole thousand. What are we doing? Why is this so funny for some of us? Why aren’t we more grossed out? Why is one woman carrying water for the disgust of a generation and not men? Why aren’t we shaming each other, discouraging?
One final question: if your contention is that this is normal, it’s fine, nothing shameful, blah blah blah. Then, let me ask: why the f*ck do so many of these protoplasmic amoebas wear masks?
