The hundreds of men queuing to sleep with the porn star Bonnie Blue seemed to know, on some level, that what they were doing was shameful. That language tends now to be avoided as moralistic, but there were signs. In the 2025 Channel 4 documentary about the adult content creator, those in line turned their backs, covered their faces and avoided the camera. Blue herself (real name Tina Billinger) behaved differently. Granting interview after interview, she unflinchingly explained her ‘sex work’ in the language of empowerment: she ‘chose’ this life and was ‘happy’; it financed ‘fast cars’ and ‘flashy clothes’, and it was better than working in Poundland. With the notable exception of the ever-perceptive Kathleen Stock, leading critic of gender ideology, who posed the key question — ‘should we morally condemn Bonnie Blue?’ — and Kemi Badenoch, who said bluntly that Billinger wasn’t welcome in the Conservative Party because her stunts were ‘disgusting’ and clashed with the party’s beliefs in ‘standards,’ ‘family’ and ‘morality,’ much of the mainstream reaction foundered and stammered.

Liberal commentators who clearly thought something was wrong with Blue’s attention-seeking stunts faced a conundrum: how to argue against a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body, a freedom that had been hard won. Many swerved that problem by trying to find childhood trauma to explain her aberrational behaviour or to predict the harm she would suffer. Blue rejected this suggestion — the trump card du jour — on the Modern Wisdom podcast, hosted by Chris Williamson, a former contestant on the reality TV series Love Island. ‘You would waste your time,’ she said confidently. ‘I am not emotionally damaged.’

Blue’s decision to celebrate her apparent autonomy and refusal to be painted as a victim exposes a deeper tension at the heart of contemporary liberalism. On one side is a strident defence of unqualified personal choice; on the other, a growing critique, often from figures who began life in liberal milieus, that questions whether ‘choice’ and ‘consent’ are adequate frameworks for thinking about sex, responsibility and social harm, and whether women, in particular, can ever really operate as free agents.

A new cohort of critics of progressivism has emerged across the political spectrum. Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, reassess the permissive culture born in the 1960s. From right and left, they argue that sexual liberation has produced net harms for women. They question whether consent and personal choice suffice to guide or explain human behaviour.

Emba, a Catholic and post‑liberal, accepts consent as necessary but insufficient, arguing that elevating it ignores responsibilities to oneself and the community and masks how markets commodify intimacy. Perry and Harrington, both once firm liberals, stress biology, technology and market forces — most notably the contraceptive pill — as primary drivers of changing sexual norms. Perry, drawing on evolutionary psychology and biology, challenges liberal rhetoric of agency: feminism’s emphasis on choice is often a ‘fantasy’, she writes, since women are frequently pressured into decisions they later regret. Though she allows exceptional outliers, she doubts autonomy in cases such as viral performer Lily Phillips: ‘Agency?… I don’t believe it.’ Women, Perry argues, were not even the agents of the sexual revolution.

Racing to the defence of sexual freedom and liberalism, is Zoe Strimpel in her new book, The Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free. An academic and columnist, she wants young women to inherit the ambition and confidence of earlier waves of feminism. Born in the early 1980s and raised in New England, Strimpel recalls a time when women were told they could ‘have it all’, and is alarmed that many are now being warned off even trying.

Strimpel’s aim is salutary: she pushes back against what she calls a new culture of victimhood that treats women as fragile and in need of paternal protection. Alongside sexual freedom, she stresses the importance of economic and civic rights for women’s emancipation. She is against conservatives who advocate for women to return to the domestic sphere, and what she calls the ‘menstrual left’ – thinkers like Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. Together, Strimpel argues, ‘they want to return to the way they were when religion determined what you could do with your body’. Her lodestars are John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, whom she suggests would deplore this new Victorianism.

It’s certainly the case that victim-centred politics transformed public discourse and identity in the late 20th century. It initially gained traction on the right: from the 1960s to the 1980s, when US politicians, including Ronald Reagan, emphasised ordinary citizens’ fears about rising violent crime (for example, through initiatives like ‘Victims’ Week’). There was an uneasy meeting of minds between conservatives and the then marginal feminism of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who argued that pornography was not ‘moral pollution’, as the right once described it, but actively harmful: its words and images damaged viewers and demeaned women, and victims should be able to sue publishers. This view was rejected by liberal American feminists, such as Nadine Strossen and Nora Ephron, who defended female autonomy against attempted state censorship. For much of the late 20th century that liberal defence of autonomy prevailed. Now Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have reopened the question by emphasising biology and vulnerability and explicitly challenging agency.

Yet, as Strimpel rightly notes, women are told repeatedly that they are at risk at a time when, in many ways, life is safer than ever, with ever-expanding opportunities. She is perceptive about the renewed tendency to use sex differences as deterministic explanations: such narratives have historically justified inequality, confining women to biology and limiting education and public participation. She recognises sex differences, but in many cases, especially when it comes to the professions, notes that they are less important than ever before. More than that, she argues passionately and persuasively that women are being invited to interpret their lives as fragile and dangerous and that this is limiting. Even so, she tends to counterpose contemporary victim culture with another simplistic version of victimhood, stating that things were worse in the past, or directing her readers to examine the way Muslim societies treat women.

Strimpel is so determined to insist that everything is fine, that she dismisses all contemporary concerns as mere rearguard arguments to keep women in the home. But more is going on in the work of thinkers like Emba, Harrington and Perry than a rehash of old ideas: for a start, a falling birth rate, concerns about which she has suggested are ‘hysteria’, is probably not a sign of a healthy culture of free agents: a people that does not want to reproduce may indicate fear of the future and misanthropy, rather than liberation. Contemporary culture needs a more substantial response to these developments beyond: ‘everything is rosy if you choose it’. Not least because reactionary feminisms have found traction among sections of younger people, who do not yearn for a Victorian or ‘trad‑wife’ model but seek responsibility, community and meaning. Meanwhile, a broad unease about sexual culture runs across left and right. Recent data suggest a ‘sexual recession’ among 18-29‑year‑olds: sexual inactivity in the US roughly doubled between 2010 and 2024, with similar declines reported in Britain and Japan.

In zealously reclaiming women’s freedom, Strimpel eschews any moral judgment, and this reticence weakens her appeal to those who can feel in their bones that something has gone wrong. Her stark defence of choice does her liberal credentials a disservice at a moment when liberalism needs robust defenders.

Strimpel’s narrow focus on consent and choice and her aversion to moral judgment is most evident in her defence of porn performers and those selling content on OnlyFans (is this really what defending women’s freedom comes down to today?). She uses Bonnie Blue as a litmus test in her defence of promiscuity, arguing that such women ‘are neither objectively morally terrible nor objectively morally great and, in a sense, it doesn’t matter’. Female promiscuity, she contends, should be protected as one of the core values of liberal democracies. Those who judge these women infantilise them; she suggests they want to drag society back to the dark ages of shaming and jailing and stoning. She observes that if Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill were teleported to the present, they would be surprised to find such strong parallels between their era and ours.

Liberalism is a very broad church with many different congregations, but it’s difficult to see its most serious advocates, people like Mill and Taylor, taking a libertarian, laissez-faire attitude towards the tsunami of hardcore pornography that has flooded the public sphere. A great deal of printed pornography circulated in the 19th century, but it was confined to the private realm. It wasn’t broadcast on television or streamed 24/7.

Most importantly, liberals defend the right to choose because decision‑making fosters personal maturity. In What Is Enlightenment? Immanuel Kant defines immaturity as the inability to employ one’s own understanding without another’s direction; maturity (Enlightenment) depends on a society that permits individuals the freedom to use reason. Mill and Taylor elaborated that true freedom and moral development demand a space in which individuals may make mistakes and learn from them, where they can practice ‘experiments in living’. They had a keen sense of moral judgment and argued freedom was the only way to really develop as a moral subject: Mill’s On Liberty is as much about self-improvement as it is about resisting state interference and the stultifying pressure of custom.

The contemporary debate thus polarises into two impoverished ideas of agency. On one side, the project of post-liberals and reactionary feminists leads them to attenuate, or even deny, female agency, interpreting most choices as illusory – outcomes of structural social pressures, biological impulses, or market forces. A woman’s ability to freely decide what to do with her body is a mirage; people are at best semi-autonomous actors shaped by larger forces. Ergo, Bonnie Blue’s intimate encounter with several hundred men is not immoral; it is not freely chosen. Whatever she says, she knows not what she does.

Conversely, writers such as Strimpel vigorously defend choice but shy away from moral evaluation. Her fear of paternalism and the deeply uncool charge of prudishness is so strong that she is unable to say when choices are degrading or have a corrosive effect on human flourishing. One side strips autonomy from moral responsibility and denies the possibility of freedom; the other insulates choice from moral judgment and in so doing, empties freedom of meaning.

What contemporary culture often mistakes for freedom is all too often a retreat from moral judgment. Permissiveness has come to be understood as a rejection of any morality, but this is a mistake. Defending freedom does not require unconditional approval of how freedom is exercised. Endorsing permissiveness does not suggest that individuals will always choose wisely; rather, it affirms their ability to decide, while acknowledging that they must also accept responsibility for those choices. Which also means not endorsing said choices.

All of which brings us back to Bonnie Blue. It is possible to defend her legal right to work as she chooses and to oppose coercive regulation of consenting adults, while also treating her choices as open to scrutiny. One can still ask whether an economy that rewards sensationalism and monetises intimacy is healthy for a democratic civic life and intimate relationships. Moral judgment need not be punitive; it can be conversational and part of a public culture that helps people reflect on what constitutes a flourishing life. What most of us wanted to hear, I think, was someone to explain why what she is doing might be better than working in Poundland, but it is still wrong.