How the "female Andrew Tate" is pioneering a new frontier in right-wing media
Me, you, And Bonnie Blue
Content warning: Discussion of pornography and sexual assault
Is it 2002 again?
On Saturday night, my old best friend from college texted me. “What the fuck do we do now dude” she asked. There was no further context so I had no idea what she was talking about.
We don’t talk that often anymore. But back in the day, we had a friendship that was so close we could have nonsense conversations about nothing for hours, laughing our asses off at our own stupidity, and brought closer by the fact that no one had any idea what we were talking about, including ourselves. So I didn’t feel the need for any follow-up; I just assumed she was either talking about one of the two biggest problems in a millennial woman’s life: a man, or the climate crisis.
“I think just keep trying,” I responded with some universally applicable advice.
She clarified. “Why did we do this in Iran.” I hadn’t been online for several hours. I opened the New York Times on my phone and blinked at the all-caps headline: “US ENTERS WAR WITH IRAN.” Well, that’s not good.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” The president posted to his social media the following afternoon, sending a shudder down my spine. Like everybody else who was alive at the dawn of the Global War on Terror, it took me back. I was in second grade on 9/11 third when Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Here we are again.
It's not just bombs falling, though, Dayenu.1 The worst elements of aughts politics and popular culture are back again in the worst ways. It occurred to me again while watching a podcast debate between Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue, which as of this writing has 2.4 million views on YouTube.
Real name Tia Billinger, Bonnie Blue is a British pornographic performer and social media influencer going viral on TikTok and Instagram for her outrageous stunts and offensive commentary. She exploded in popularity after she claimed to have had sex with over 1,000 men in 12 hours to promote her OnlyFans back in January, breaking a world record. (It’s difficult for me to call this type of performance art “sex”, but I don’t know how else to describe it.)
The previous record was set in 2004. That year, a performer named Lisa Sparks had sex with 919 men at a competition in Warsaw, Poland. Sparks reportedly wrote on her website the stunt “is the one thing I regret doing in the 23+ years in the porn industry to this day.”
Blue was recently banned from the platform after she announced she wanted her next challenge would be “to be naked and tied up in a glass box and allow participants to do whatever they wanted.” On her social media, she posts videos of herself in extreme and suggestive situations, surrounded by dozens of men.
According to Pew Research, roughly 6 in 10 teenagers report using TikTok daily, and half do the same on Instagram.
This shit is all over my social media feed almost definitely as a result of my own depravity. I drew the connection between the 00s and today’s social media environment through Sophie Gilbert’s critique of aughts popular culture in Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. She writes in the introduction:
It fascinates me that so much of what I was trying to figure out kept coming back to porn. It’s the defining cultural product of our times – the thing that has shaped more than anything else how we think about sex and, therefore, how we think about each other. “Porn does not inform, or debate, or persuade,” Amia Srinivasan wrote in her 2021 book The Right to Sex. “Porn trains.” It has trained a good amount of our popular culture, as you’ll discover in in this book, to see women as objects – as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize.
Girl on Girl traverses the anti-feminist backlash of the time, tracing how pornography burst into the mainstream through a diverse array of cultural phenomena: Paris Hilton’s sex tape, Jenna Jameson’s mega-stardom, the 2005 horror movie Hostel, the photos from Abu Ghraib prison that shocked the world and beyond. Without retreading the sex wars, (I have mixed and conflicting feelings about it all) Gilbert’s observation that the genre is the “defining cultural product of our times” rings especially true.
Bonnie Blue feels like another turning point in that journey, the breaking of the fourth wall — pornography as public policy. The videos of men lining up for a chance to be with her suggest that any one of her fans could literally join in — and that is her whole point. “[OnlyFans] wanted me to not be open to the public,” she said in a video posted to her Instagram after her ban from the platform. “But that’s what I get off to. My main thing I wanted to do is remain open to the public.”
“The female Andrew Tate”
Her persona rhymes with everything happening in the right-wing media right now. OnlyFans is a Big Tech platform like all the rest, hospitable to extremism that drives engagement and revenue.
The comparison to Tate has been bandied about by Blue observers across the internet. I’ll give a brief biography for the uninitiated: Tate is a former kickboxer and reality show contestant turned mega-viral face of the modern manosphere. In December 2022, Andrew and his brother Tristan were arrested in Romania on suspicion of rape and human trafficking before being formally charged in June 2023. In February 2025, the Trump administration reportedly pressured the Romanian government to lift travel restrictions imposed on the brothers, allowing them to come to the United States.
Tate is known online for his extreme right-wing views, especially on gender roles. He has advocated for violence against women and blames victims for their own rape. A 2023 survey in the United Kingdom found that “one in five young people have a positive view of Tate.” This man and his message are a genuine cultural phenomenon.
Blue sounds just like him. “Women go around, use sex to their advantage but are happy to cry about it straight away,” she said in the appearance with Tate. “Saying oh, he took advantage of me, it’s like you’re the one that wanted to do sex, have like the job promotion, or you’re the one that wanted to have sex to get more attention or try to be more liked but then they cry about it, and that’s what I get frustrated about.”
She also made clear politics is for men and she doesn’t vote, which thrilled Tate. “If you said to me, Andrew, fix society, all the women can either vote or be like Bonnie, I’d be like make them all like Bonnie, give the men the vote back, we’ll fix the whole country.”
The intersection of right-wing media and pornography
I recently attended Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, where conservative media figures told high school and college-age girls there is something wrong with them if they prioritize career and education over finding a husband. At the event, Charlie Kirk interviewed a young woman named Nala Ray who claims she was a top creator on OnlyFans before finding God and a husband.
Kirk has said he would make porn illegal. Yet he can’t stop talking about it. He repeatedly probed what specifically Nala Ray was doing to make money on OnlyFans, why she used to “dress promiscuously,” and what role her father played in her life. He said women who post bikini pictures on their Instagram are guilty of “jezebel-like behavior”: “If a man sees that, not only is the respect go down, he only will view you for your flesh. And women want to know, ‘Why can’t I find a husband?’ Because you’re dressing like that. You’re dressing like an OnlyFans model.”
For all his moralizing, his worldview largely overlaps with Tate’s. Christian fundamentalism and crass manosphere misogyny are of a piece. Tate condemns pornography while being accused of running an online sex trafficking ring. Kirk condemns pornography while going over its machinations in detail on his radio show. Blue exalts pornography while condemning women who don’t recreate it in their own lives. The topic never seems to quite go away.
Tate brings it all back to feminism. “You are the perfect end result of feminism,” Tate told Blue. “In the world I believe, in the conservative, traditionally masculinely ruled world, a man would be in charge of his daughters until they’re handing over to their husbands or boyfriends and there would be a degree of masculine guidance. But feminism didn’t want that.” In the 00s and now, popular media depicts feminists at best as sexless killjoys, at worst lying “jezebels.”
Right now, conservatives have a near total monopoly over the definition of feminism. There was a brief moment in the ‘10s, perhaps right when Beyonce stood in front of a giant LCD screen at the VMAs and declared herself to be one, when culture was telling a different story. But millennial and Gen Z women tired of “girlboss” feminism that demanded that we recreate the systemic inequalities of market capitalism but this time for our own profit. Where are we now? Yesterday was three years since Roe was overturned. Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, which right-wing media heralded as the death of the #MeToo movement, concluded three years ago this month. We all heard now Vice President JD Vance’s thoughts on “childless cat ladies.” And lest we forget who is president.
Annnyywayyyy here’s what I’m into:
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Mamdaniiiiii?!?! That’s that NYC, baby.
I use this timed lockbox to help me focus while writing my book. I call it phone jail. Sorry for the Amazon link.
This section is getting harder to maintain because I genuinely don’t buy shit besides the necessities right now. My next big purchase is probably going to be a tattoo. Guess what you think it’ll be.
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A Passover saying meaning “It would have been enough.”
This is a perfect example of internalized misogyny. Sadly, these are highly paid famous influencers indoctrinating vulnerable young women and men. I say quit social media. It’s done enough damage to society at large-social engineering. Also read the book “Female Chauvinist Pigs” by Ariel Levy. It came out in 2004, but it started to examine the influence of raunch culture in the mainstream. I highly recommend it. I am looking forward to reading “Girl on Girl”. Definitely need it now.
interesting read; i’ve definitely been thinking about the concept of the manosphere and how to protect young boys from falling for it (particularly my two young nephews as they grow up :(