What Porn, Extremes, and Performance Reveal About Us.
I didn’t come across Bonnie Blue by chasing headlines. I came across her through the work of sitting with a client struggling with porn addiction.
When you sit with addiction, you see how culture feeds the hunger. You hear the rhythms of shame, the restless drive for sensation, the endless scroll for novelty. And in that search, her name appeared.
Bonnie Blue
the woman who, in front of cameras, orchestrated sex with over a thousand men in twelve hours.
The newspapers called it a record.
The internet called it either empowerment or degradation.
But from a systemic lens, it is something else:
a mirror of the field we are all standing in.
The Systemic Field
Systemic therapy teaches us that no one acts in isolation. The field is always moving through us, and the most extreme among us often carry the truths the collective cannot bear to hold.
Bonnie Blue is not just herself. She is an expression of a culture that has confused freedom with excess, and vitality with performance.
She embodies the unmet hunger of men who seek sensation over intimacy.
She stands in for the despair of a society that has commodified eros, stripped it of reverence, and fed it back as spectacle.
She is not the sickness but the symptom.
She is the wound-bearer.
The Systemic Field
When we look deeper, we see that this is not new. Throughout history, certain figures carried eros on behalf of the community. In ancient temples, the sacred prostitute or priestess embodied sexuality as a portal to the divine. Her body was not a commodity but a bridge between spirit and flesh.
What happens in a culture where reverence is stripped away?
The same archetype falls into distortion.
The wound-bearer becomes the scapegoat, carrying collective shadow in ways that no single human can contain. She acts out what the culture cannot admit: that we are starving for intimacy, desperate for meaning, and terrified of stillness.
Bonnie Blue is not a priestess. But she is entangled in the same archetypal current, forced to carry a weight that belongs to all of us.
The Numbing of a Culture
And what of us, the witnesses?
The numbers are reported. The footage is consumed. We scroll, we gasp, we debate, and then we move on.
This is perhaps the most chilling part. Not that it happened, but that it no longer shocks us. That we can watch without trembling.
This is collective desensitization:
a nervous system dulled by endless exposure,
a field that can only be roused by extremes,
a society that has lost its capacity to feel intimacy in its raw depth and truth.
The Mirror Turned Toward Us
Systemic work does not moralize. It listens. And if we listen here, what emerges is this:
- Our culture does not know how to hold eros with reverence.
- Our society places unbearable burdens on bodies to carry collective pain.
- Our longing for meaning is diverted into performance and consumption.
But the question is not only about culture. It is about us.
Where in ourselves have we become numb?
Where do we reach for stimulation instead of connection?
Where do we perform rather than allow ourselves to be seen?
A Practice for Re-Sensitizing
If you want to feel this question in your body, pause for a moment now:
Close your eyes.
Bring to mind the word eros.
Not pornography, not performance. Just eros the life force that stirs when you are touched by beauty, by presence, by intimacy.
Notice what arises in your body. Is there openness? Contraction? Fear? Absence?
Breathe into whatever is there. Let yourself feel.
This is the work of re-sensitizing.
To let eros return to the body as something alive, not something consumed.
The Way Forward
The way back is not through more extremes. It is through returning to simplicity.
Slowing down. Choosing intimacy over performance.
Reverence. Remembering that eros is not only sex but the pulse of life in all things.
Embodiment. Practices that awaken the nervous system—silence, nature, ritual, touch, breath.
Bonnie Blue does not need our condemnation or our applause. She needs us to see what she reflects: a field that has grown numb.
The real question is not what we think of her.
The real question is:
What must we feel again, so that life and sexuality no longer need to appear in such distorted forms?
Author’s Note
I write here because these questions matter to me. My work with plant medicines and systemic therapy has shown me, again and again, that what looks personal is always collective. Addiction, numbness, and our struggles with intimacy are not private failings but expressions of the wider field we all live in.
This Substack is where I share reflections like this not as answers, but as invitations. Invitations to feel, to question, and to remember what it means to live awake in a culture that so often lulls us to sleep.
If this piece stirred something in you, sit with it. Let it move through your body. And if you wish to walk deeper with me, this space will continue to be a home for these explorations.
