why Bonnie Blue is neither a feminist nor a monster
- Written by Lexi Eikelboom, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University
The documentary, 1,000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, has made Tia Billinger – stage name Bonnie Blue – a household name.
Famous for her sexual stunts, including one in which she has sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours, Bonnie Blue fascinates us because we do not understand her.
Billinger claims to be an embodiment of feminism. She points out she is rich and independent, and says she has taken control of her sexualisation. Yet it is difficult to imagine how sleeping with 1,000 men in a day could lead someone to feel empowered rather than degraded.
Some have offered personality-based explanations for Billinger’s choices, saying she may simply be an opportunistic sociopath.
But explanations like these relegate her to the status of a social oddity, or a monster. And this discounts the social conditions that produce someone like Billinger – the same social conditions all women face.
The contradiction Bonnie Blue embodies reveals just how fraught a woman’s relationship to power and influence is. Women who seek power often encounter a double bind that leads them to use their power in a way that also curtails it.
Power through subservience
Power requires two ingredients. It involves autonomy and self-determination. It also requires being embedded in society so as to exert influence within it.
These two aspects of power work in tandem for men, and especially white men. But for women, and people with other marginalised identities, they often pull in opposite directions.
US feminist writer Andrea Dworkin described this situation in her 1978 book Right-wing Women: for women, power comes through subservience to male values.
For a woman, to be embedded in society is, by definition, to have her autonomy and self-determination restricted. As a result she is forced to choose: do what you want or have influence.
The reward for protecting men’s access to women
Billinger’s business model is striking. She makes enormous amounts of money by offering sex for free. The fact the sex itself is free enables her to turn around and sell a desirable commodity through subscription-based platforms such as Fansly – namely, the fantasy of female availability.
After her 1,000 men stunt, Billinger told her documentary film makers
I loved […] seeing how many men had wedding rings on. I just loved knowing I was doing something their wives should’ve done.
She tells men not to “feel guilty for doing something you deserved and you was, well, you was owed”. Despite appearances, then, Billinger is not autonomous at all. Her power is the result of subservience to male entitlement.
There have always been women who gain power by protecting men’s access to women. Consider, for example, US conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016). While Billinger is famous for her extreme sexual stunts, Schlafly could be considered the original tradwife.
Initially an expert in foreign policy, Schlafly was unable to gain political traction through her expertise, so she built a career opposing women’s liberation on behalf of housewives. She got the political power she wanted, but not in the field she really cared about.
Womanliness as a masquerade
Both Schlafly’s and Billinger’s personas map squarely onto one side or the other of what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called the Madonna-whore complex, in which a misogynistic society categorises women according to the kind of service they offer men – either as a saintly mother figure or as a sexual object.
Each of these roles also deflects attention by attacking the opposite side of the dichotomy.
Billinger positions herself as a rival to men’s wives, claiming her critics simply want to turn her into a housewife. Schlafly positioned herself as a housewife opposing equal rights because she considered such rights to be bound up with sexual promiscuity.
In reality, each stance relies on the other. And we’re beginning to see this manifest in the emergence of tradwife Onlyfans content.
In 1929, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote about a tendency in her female patients she called “womanliness as a masquerade”.
Riviere notes how women who exhibited traits socially coded as “masculine”, or who occupied positions historically reserved for men, attempted to hide this masculinity through a performance of femininity. She wrote:
women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.
To undertake a “masculine” pursuit of power, both Schlafly and Billinger uphold a particular ideal of femininity. And both women’s careers are logical – if misguided – responses to the messages women receive about where their value lies.
A never-ending tradeoff
Our systems punish women for wanting things such as power, money, or visibility, requiring them to turn against other women, give up their expertise, or make themselves infinitely available to men.
If women were allowed to pursue power without these sacrifices, it might curtail the harms other women face as a result of the masked pursuit of power.
Women should not have to choose between power, money and visibility on one hand, and community and liberation on the other. They should not have to choose between Madonna and the whore.
Yet as political gains continue to shrink around the world, many women are starting to feel this double-bind more forcefully. There may be more Bonnie Blues and Phyllis Schlaflys on the horizon.
Authors: Lexi Eikelboom, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University
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