"Sex has become a competition"

Barcelona"The number of men matters relatively little to me. I would like to be able to talk to them and ask them what they get out of bragging about doing this, turning it into a competition. It seems like it's about money and popularity, which is what the world is about now," warns sexologist Elena Crespi in the face of the rise of extreme sexual content on television (real name Aunt Billinger) who published a video of how she had had sex with 1,057 men in twelve hours.

Crespi rules out questioning consent in the specific case of Blue –"we have to trust that if a 26-year-old woman says she wants to do it, it's because she wants to"– but warns that its content "may be corrupting other consents" due to its influence. "It's giving us a concept of sex that isn't real," adds the sexologist.

"In pornography, there is no such thing as consent. It's hard to see a scene in which it is explicitly raised whether we want to do this or that," warns Ester Barrios, pediatrician and co-author of a study on the influence of pornography on sexual consent in adolescence. Júlia Sánchez, director of the cooperative specializing in sexual education La Ciranda, agrees: "In general, it is a story where the Yeah and the No do not exist." And also Montse Esquerra –who together with Barrios published the study Sexual consent in adolescence. Influence of drug use new pornography in decision-making–: "A good part of the distortion that pornography causes is closely linked to the lack of consent, to the point that an element of violence is seen as something positive." She adds that this fuels the idea that a girl "says no, but actually wants to."

For Barrios, there is no room to consider behavior like Blue's as an act of empowerment: "Any behavior, no matter how voluntary, if it touches on a person's dignity, should not be considered valid." However, she warns that on these platforms there are many scenes of humiliating treatment: "There is a goal and the path to get there is irrelevant. She wanted to reach the record of a thousand men, and the path, which is to objectify herself, is secondary," she says about the actress.

Trivializing pornography

From the erotic magazines of a few decades ago, we've moved on to Onlyfans profiles, where pornography is no longer limited to professional actors and actresses. The evolution of the porn format has entailed more, warn the experts consulted. On the one hand, Barrios points out, when there's a company behind the production, there may be "more legal control, especially over what happens between actors and actresses," but this disappears when it comes to individual users on a social network. The big difference between social networks like this compared to previous formats, warns Esquerda, is that pornography "no longer depends on a group of actors and actresses who dedicate themselves to it," and for her, this has led to "the trivialization of being involved in pornography." On the other hand, according to Esquerda, on platforms like Onlyfans, there's "an element of incitement" to create pornography: "In a way, they say, 'Get started, the money is very easy.'"

The goal of gaining more viewers leads to an escalation of violence in content, the three experts agree. "Often, the transgression of certain behaviors is attractive, which means they end up attracting more people," Barrios points out. In fact, the Onlyfans platform itself expelled Blue when, after having sex with more than a thousand men, she announced a new challenge, in which she would be locked in a box "ready to be used" by 2,000 men.

"If you get caught up in the whirlwind of making more and more money, you'll surely end up doing things that don't entirely coincide with what you initially wanted," says Crespi, who sees Blue as "one more victim of this system." Sánchez adds that even in some recordings where suffering is evident, mainly that of a woman, "it is considered to be associated with pleasure because it is within the framework of audiovisual content linked to sexuality." This, he warns, influences "the construction of pleasure, desire, and consent."

Mental health

The sexologist also details how extreme practices can have effects on mental health, such as mood disorders. "We never know what's going on in a person's mind. This girl is officially bragging about the challenge, but perhaps at some point she may have her contradictions," she says, referring to Blue: "Without falling into the paternalism of saying that she'll regret it later, because perhaps she'll be proud all her life, but because of the sexual lessons we've learned."

What Crespi sees most clearly is that "one of the things that can mentally destabilize this person is being concerned about validation, the social impact of social media and challenges." In this sense, she says that there are certain people "with more narcissistic, histrionic, or borderline personality traits who are more likely to fall for all this, and the industry is also designed to attract profiles that fall for the tricks of these challenges."

Furthermore, Sánchez points to another problem: "We learn much faster through images than through speech." This dynamic, combined with the fact that consumption is more common among men than women, can end up making "the construction of desire or the culture of consent that is generated in men very different from that of women."