Western civilisation’s greatest achievements include the printing press and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco painting in the Vatican. While genetics and environmental factors suggest that all but a few highly gifted and skilled individuals will be remembered for all time, some seek to leave their mark on history for other reasons.

Annie Knight is one such person. The OnlyFans model, dubbed ‘Australia’s most sexually active woman’, set herself a target of sleeping with six hundred men in 2024, double her previous record from 2023. She did it. Well done. Her 2025 goals include, ahem, to ‘get railed by 1000 people’ and ‘take 500 virginities’. It puts my New Year’s resolution to eat less cheese in the rather boring pile.

I’m often asked why I am not a libertarian. I believe markets are a great way to allocate scarce resources, but it should not be a panacea for all the world’s problems. Sexual neoliberalism conforms to the trickle-down effect, which states that the more people you sleep with the more degraded someone else must be. It’s a race to the bottom, (no pun intended).

Not long after Knight set a new ‘personal best,’ a British woman named Lily Phillips slept with one hundred and one guys in one day. The 24-year-old’s self-imposed challenge was shared with her 40,000-plus OnlyFans subscribers. A physical feat to rival humanity’s greatest achievements – Leif Erikson’s expedition to North America, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Edmund Hilary’s ascent of Mount Everest. But that’s nothing compared to Bonnie Blue’s world record of sleeping with 1,057 men in just twelve hours, which she set this week. This translates to around thirty seconds for each act of coitus. I’m unsure who should be more embarrassed: the men, or her mother. The 25-year-old is, unsurprisingly, an OnlyFans model.

Don’t these women need to rest? Following her record-breaking stunt, Blue informed her Instagram followers that her longest break was three minutes. Surely the Internet prostitutes union has something to say about working conditions? During her ‘600 challenge’, the Melbourne-based Knight told Edge breakfast, ‘Some days I might sleep with five people and then the next few days I won’t sleep with anyone, because I do get tired.’ Call me pedantic but isn’t that the point of sleeping? While we’re at it, can we ditch the sleeping euphemism?

Joking aside, there is a very sinister side to all of this. All three of these women are blonde and white, which has been the dominant genre in online pornography since its inception. It is one of the only female-dominated industries where there is no outrage about the lack of diversity. In numerous videos Blue is seen approaching young black men and asking them to sleep with her and what their favourite sexual activity is. Unrestrained sexual freedom contributes to a dangerous image of white women among other ethnic communities. According to data published in the UK Telegraph, foreign nationals are almost four times more likely to be arrested for sexual offences than British citizens. It’s not victim blaming; it’s simply dangerous and morally reprehensible.

Bonnie Blue and Lily Philip’s sexual exploits have made headlines at the same time as anger is growing over the grooming gang scandal and sexual abuse of young white working-class girls in the United Kingdom. During the Rotherham case, in which 1,400 girls were raped and abused by males of mostly Pakistani descent, the perpetrators saw the girls as easy sexual targets.

I would like to know Blue’s husband’s opinion of her career. But when he discovered she was an online pornographic content creator, they divorced. The lesson here is that, while she may have become wealthy, she is unlikely to find meaning in a long-term relationship. Call me a traditionalist, but someone who has had sex with hundreds of men is rarely someone with whom they establish intimacy.

Bonnie Blue is the latest example of a prevalent and damaging narrative that instils in young impressionable women the idea that wealth and fleeting fame are worth selling your body and soul for. Blue et al.’s reckless behaviour underlines a major issue that is typical of our time: a neoliberal, hyper-individualised, atomised civilisation in which attention is currency and popularity is sought at any costs. This transitory and predatory quality of modern fame is an aspect of culture I despise. I’ve said it before: fame has evolved into a ritualised debasement act, a Faustian bargain – and these women are selling their souls.

The horrible part is that this will inspire many young women to follow in her footsteps. If they want to be the next online porn star, they will probably be disappointed. For the majority of people, OnlyFans is not a suitable career. There is far more demand than supply – 3.2 million content creators to 220 million worldwide users, over 90 percent of whom are men. The majority of creators make an average of US $150 per month. The top 0.1 percentile earns over $100,000 each month. That means you have to do something outrageous and gross to attract attention. I refer to my previous statement regarding a race to the bottom.

I don’t care if these people make a lot of money. Pornography is destructive. When a remote Brazilian tribe was given high-speed internet access, many members of the indigenous community welcomed the technology, praising it for allowing them to stay in touch with distant family members. However, after discovering pornography, some teenage Marubo members began to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour. ‘We’re worried young people are going to want to try it,’ Alfredo Marubo, the village leader, told the New York Times.

Traditional cultures die when narcissism and neoliberalism arrive.