Watch this and Chill

The recent news that UK-based porn star Bonnie Blue was denied entry from a Nottingham football game last week. But it was only the newest piece of controversy to have hit the celebrity. No stranger to dissent, Bonnie has only to appear in an edited interview on social media to be then met with the kind of comments normally reserved for rapists and paedophiles.

But this is just an example of the latest in slut-bashing. A popular sport which anyone can participate in and the target is any young woman that enjoys sex and has her own agency. Everyone knows what a slut is and every woman has an idea of what behaviour gets you called a ‘slut’ and what you should do to avoid being categorized as one.

A slut is generally a derogatory term, alhough it’s recently had a tendency to be given an additional meaning as a ‘liberated woman’; nevertheless, most people are using the word slut with the derogatory meaning when they use it to discuss Bonnie.

Never mind that Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips just sit on the more extreme end of what most women are doing in their own homes every week. There can be no acceptance of what they do because it doesn’t sit with most people’s ideas of appropriate female sexuality.

The idea that a woman can enjoy sex as much as men is not something most people are comfortable accepting. Yet women suffer when they continue to suppress healthy expressions of sex.

Women may take longer to become sexually aroused; once they get there they are no less interested than men. And so women are seeking out men for sex. And some women are going further, doing stuff that would have been fairly hard to imagine even a few years ago.

Whilst the numbers of Only Fans creators are in the millions, it’s still niche enough for the women doing it to be remarkable, or at least notable. But it pales in comparison with the number of women who would be eligible for it. Maybe the reason more women aren’t making Only Fans content is because they don’t want to. Or maybe they would like to do it, have thought about it, but the judgemental condemnation is too much. Whilst its not necessarily the same as being a slut, there are women who can flirt with everybody. and there are women who flirt with men they find attractive, and then there are women who don’t flirt with anyone at all.

Then there are women, mainly sex workers, who have sex with men for money, not because they necessarily find them attractive. Much as Bonnie and Lily are sleeping with a lot of men who maybe they don’t find attractive, but it’s not enough for us to decry them and shame them as fallen women.