Moral Outrage - and rightly so
Why a questionable character and their shocking actions might tell us more about what’s wrong with the world around us.
Moral outrage — and rightly so. But I would argue that your moral outrage is slightly out of step, ever so out of place, and not directed at the root cause.
Bonnie Blue — if you’ve heard the name and know what she’s been up to, I too share your pain and disgust. If you haven’t, I suggest staying in that ignorant bliss. This isn’t typically the sort of topic Common Weal would cover, but after a team discussion, it’s clear that this is a subject weighing on people’s minds, and perhaps more related to our work than we initially thought.
Bonnie is a pornographic content creator — perhaps the most modern label — who has gained enormous traction through shock-driven stunts. Her most prolific feat: her self-declared mission to sleep with 1,000 men in 24 hours, which she claims she completed. It caused uproar at the time and has resurfaced due to a recent Channel 4 documentary and a profile in The Times. She is, in many ways, the embodiment of controversy — unapologetic in her hate-baiting, her tactics for drawing in young men, and her own self-degradation.
I fell into a rabbit hole. I read the interviews, watched the documentaries, listened to the podcasts. I think my reasoning mirrors that of true crime fascination — trying to work out how the hell someone could do such a thing.
The documentary was grim viewing, even though it barely scratched the surface. It failed to interrogate the deeply misogynistic and dangerous thinking that underpins her work. Watching it was like staring at a car crash — you know you shouldn't look, but you still do.
Like many, I’m reluctant to give her attention because that only boosts her reach and popularity. I’d rather pretend characters like her didn’t exist in our society. But they do. So we need to examine what has gone wrong, and how to stop it spreading. Much like Andrew Tate — who, unsurprisingly, appears in the same documentary — Bonnie Blue is emblematic of something much darker. That fact alone tells you plenty about the kind of moral landscape we’re navigating.
The outrage that followed the documentary was swift and loud. What almost shocked people more than the act itself was that she appears so... normal. You wouldn’t think twice about her if she passed you on the street. Raised in a nuclear family, which she describes as happy. Previously in a respectable job in recruitment. A homeowner at a young age. She doesn’t fit the stereotypical profile of someone who enters this world — and that, arguably, makes it even more disturbing.
Discussions around her have focused on moral decay, feminism’s failures, and whether she is the result of sex-positive feminism gone wrong, a lack of protection for children from adult content, or a deeply misogynistic culture. All fair questions. But I would argue that, aside from being a potential sociopath, Bonnie Blue is above all else a product of late-stage capitalism.
If you ran a capitalism simulation, you'd create a Bonnie Blue every time.
She justifies her work through financial gain. Yes, she cloaks it in vague ‘sex-positive’ rhetoric, and the term "empowerment" gets flung around without much weight or meaning. But look just beneath the surface and it’s all about money: what she earns, what she owns, the lifestyle she can afford.
“If you ran a capitalism simulation, you’d create a Bonnie Blue every time”
She began this journey because a 9–5 job, even with a decent income and good relationships, wasn’t enough. In a saturated capitalist marketplace, you can’t achieve quick and extreme wealth through ordinary means anymore. The more shocking the better. Her emergence was not only predictable — it was inevitable.
She has been sold a dream and is now reselling it. The expensive lifestyle justifies the means — or so she claims. Because she’s watched others online flaunt luxury, and a regular job can’t give her that. So why shouldn’t she have it too?
We live in an age of “get rich at any cost.” Individualism, image obsession, and the refusal to settle for the ordinary are at the heart of it. Bonnie Blue is not an anomaly, she is a natural product of this thinking, even if at the extreme end. So entrenched in the system that she herself has become the product. Her body, her attention, her controversy — all commodified, all monetised.
In this attention economy, everything is consumable — even the self. Younger generations have grown up in a world where worth is measured through materialism, and self-esteem can be bought — even if the pursuit of it leads to personal destruction. The influencer world only reinforces this. It sells lifestyles, products, and identities, and in doing so, keeps the cycle spinning.
The pull is strong. A recent study funded by LEGO found that most children would prefer to be YouTubers than astronauts. A US poll found that 57% of kids want to be influencers. UK research reveals the same trend. That’s no accident — it’s economic conditioning.
What’s more, we’re not just witnessing a cultural phenomenon; we’re seeing the long-term consequences of a system that rewards the extreme and somewhat shuns the mundane. We’ve built an environment where quiet dignity doesn’t pay, but outrageousness does. There’s little space left for subtlety when algorithms reward controversy, when viral equals valuable.
Influencers are now part of the economy, and while audiences are beginning to seek something more ‘authentic’, the obsession with image, wealth, and self-worth tied to possessions is not going anywhere.
So yes — be outraged. But be outraged at the machine, not just the operator. Bonnie Blue is not merely a shocking individual; she’s the culmination of a society that profits from degradation, thrives on spectacle, and teaches us to equate our value with our visibility.
We must be brave enough to go beyond surface-level moral panic and look deeper into the structures that make this possible. Capitalism that exploits attention, social media that thrives on polarisation, and a culture that commodifies everything, even people.
