Never have I been so criticised for my choice of guest as when I interviewed - platformed, my critics tell me - porn star Bonnie Blue.
I was prepared for this because I had seen how viewers had protested the interviews she had done with my friends, such as Liam Tuffs. But it was intriguing to see that the sour reaction went beyond my subscribers and infected fellow journalists.
One former Heretics guest - known for little other than posing with her genitals out for money - was most vehement, which reaffirms that nothing propels political discourse like self-projection. Another upcoming guest reached out to criticise my choice and insist that there be breathing space between their episode and Bonnie’s.
When I suggested instead that we pull this person’s episode, they declined.
I encourage criticism on my channel and have never deleted a comment. Fortunately, most of my viewers realise they can simply not watch episodes they don’t enjoy or support. They are free, too, to leave disparaging comments about me or a guest.
However, when hordes of viewers publicly virtue signal that they are unsubscribing because I platformed a guest whose morality they deplore, this is cancel culture.
Not of me - but of Bonnie Blue.
Yet, it has only conspired to provoke more talk about her.
The other day, I did a quick sit-down interview on Lotus Eaters with Carl Benjamin, who politely challenged me for having Bonnie on Heretics. Carl, as a traditionalist, would rather she be flogged in the public square than platformed on a podcast.
Although I dislike shaming culture and would abhor violence meted out on a woman (although Bonnie might enjoy it), Carl is correct that an absence of shame can also spell disaster for a society. That said, the way that Liam, Julia and I spoke with Bonnie ensured that she was shamed - just look at the title of my video below.
Still, I pointed out to Carl that even by interviewing me about the Bonnie Blue cultural phenomenon, he was guilty of exploiting and promoting the same theme as the rest of us.
He took the point, but joked: “At least I don’t have to sit next to her!”
The finger pointing has consumed social media in recent days. Pundit Michelle Dewberry told off Julia Hartley-Brewer for hosting Bonnie, insisting that:
“If awful things like this were denied the oxygen of publicity, they wouldn’t be online so prominently for so many kids to see…”
This told me something: some women cannot fathom the male brain. Male brains - teenage or not - are not getting the horn from watching a political talk show on Talk TV.
This is evident in my analytics, which show that no one under 18 watched my interview with Bonnie, and only a tiny fraction of viewers were under 25.
Bonnie Blue, I am reliably informed, is already omnipresent on porn sites (whose demographics, unfortunately, include a higher portion of underage viewers than my show). But such is the vastness of the online library of degradation that even removing her entirely wouldn’t make the slightest of dents in porn’s all-consuming fabric.
According to a US survey, Mechanical Turk, 91 per cent of men report consuming pornography in the past month. An Australian survey reported that 99 per cent of men had done so in the previous 12 months, with almost half of them watching it daily.
Self-report bias means these numbers are likely underestimates. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of Pornhub consumption is thought to come from female viewers.
It is so overwhelmingly part of men’s (and one-fifth of women’s) psyche that it is largely responsible for progressing technologies, such as normalising entering credit card details online, pushing forward subscription models way before Netflix, testing the compressed video format later adopted by YouTube, improving webcam tech and advancing VR.
None of this means there aren’t dreadful problems with an industry that relies on trafficking and exploitation. Parents are rightly worried that their kids are able, despite the new age verification system, to access adult content, especially videos that glorify violent rape fantasies and objectify women.
I don’t come bearing solutions to these abhorrent issues - but simply pretending they don’t exist isn’t one of them.
As to why I platformed Bonnie, that was simply always going to happen. I grew up watching Louis Theroux and reading Jon Ronson. While my politics differ from theirs, I’ve always been fascinated by outliers - and these may include murderers, abusers or even paedophiles.
I’ve filmed 200 interviews in 18 months for Heretics, almost all of which have been about immigration, trans or elite abuse. These topics are close to my heart, but forgive me if I venture outside from time to time out of pure journalistic curiosity.
That curiosity does not imply endorsement of my guests. I believe Bonnie is on the psychopathy spectrum. What she does is quite obviously vile and a terrible influence for young people. Yet, it has made her a multimillionaire. She is a divisive issue at the centre of the culture wars, and in that sense, an archetypal guest for Heretics.
Those who claim I’m solely interested in views are, as usual, wide of the mark.
As I expected, her interview performed poorly on YouTube (ranking seventh so far in a list of my previous ten videos).
Interestingly, it has done far better on Spotify, where it is already my most listened-to episode. I wonder if this is because people don’t want to be ‘caught’ clicking on anything to do with a porn star on YouTube, whereas the listening experience of Spotify feels like a less risky experience.
This morning, however, I discovered a fascinating statistic in the analytics of my Bonnie Blue YouTube episode that turned everything on its head. Here’s what I found:
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