What exists on the Internet has often existed before the Internet, but usually on a smaller, less hyped scale. The Internet always amplifies the trivial, and makes mountains out of molehills.
Case-in-point: back in January 1995, a porn star named Annabel Chong starred in an adult film event called, The World’s Biggest Gangbang. Chong supposedly had sex with 300 men on camera.
That was back in 1995. Chong, then in her 20s, is now in her 50s. (Chong has left the porn industry and now works as a web developer. Good for her.)
In 1995, this was regarded as a fringe news story. I remember reading a very brief article about it in an edgy “arts and entertainment” magazine published in the Cincinnati area. (And no, I have never bothered to see the movie.)
Fast-forward thirty years, to the age of the Internet, social media, and the accursed OnlyFans. An OnlyFans entertainer named Bonnie Blue (we may assume that is a nom de guerre) reportedly set a new record by having sex with over 1,000 men in 12 hours.
The New York Post, to cite just one source, reacted as if Miss Blue invented the very concept of the stunt gangbang. (What is Annabel Chong, chopped liver?)
Also, of course, there is the inevitable pearl-clutching:
“OnlyFans star slammed as ‘revolting’ for bedding 1,057 men in 12 hours: ‘This is so sad’”
Sad? Perhaps. “Sore” was the first word that came to mind for me.
Our attitudes about sex veer to some odd extremes. Since 2020, the mainstream media can’t get enough of OnlyFans, and the women who autoporn on the site.
And yet, our government officials have some very different ideas about other forms of commercial sex. Earlier this month, I posted a piece about overly zealous prostitution stings here in Ohio. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, has declared war on sex-for-money in Ohio. You would think Yost was fighting al-Qaeda. A retired police lieutenant, no less, was caught up in one of AG Yost’s recent stings.
All fine and good, I suppose. (Though it seems like a waste of taxpayer resources.) But what is OnlyFans, if not sex for hire? And yet, OnlyFans is completely legal.
If our desire is to minimize the societal harm brought about by commercialized sex, OnlyFans would seem to be the biggest, and most logical, target. If one man pays one woman for one in-person sex act here in Ohio, that act is limited to them, two people. But Bonnie Blue’s Internet romps have reached thousands, perhaps millions.
The difference, of course, is money. OnlyFans now generates $1.3 billion annually, and most of that money is taxable. Moreover, OnlyFans has been sold by the mainstream media as a vehicle of female empowerment. In-person prostitution, not so much.
Just for the record: I’m not a fan, advocate, or consumer of either form of carnal commerce. I also sympathize with those who are dismayed by the existence of either one. But I don’t like obvious contradictions in the law, particularly contradictions that are so extreme.
During World War I, a wave of anti-German fervor swept the USA. German-language newspapers were shut down. The Kaiser was burned in effigy in American streets.
Things were renamed, too. Dachshunds were dubbed “liberty dogs”. Sauerkraut was called “liberty cabbage”.
Such actions, no doubt, really struck a blow against the detested Huns.
“Oh, but that was back in 1917!” you say. “More than a hundred years ago! People nowadays are so much more sophisticated!”
Really? In 2003, some Republican politicians and conservative commentators began calling French fries “freedom fries”, after the French government objected to the impending US invasion of Iraq.
And even more recently: between 2020 and 2023 we saw a wave of hysteria over Confederate names and statues. Americans who would struggle to name four major Civil War battles (or generals) suddenly claimed great offense at a previously unnoticed stone figure or place name.
The Biden administration was particularly amenable to such revisionism. Between 2022 and 2023, nine US military bases that were previously named after Confederate leaders were given new names.
Pete Hesgeth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has announced that he wants to undo the name changes. This would require congressional approval, and perhaps a protracted political fight, as well.
BREAKING: Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth is pushing to restore the original names of military bases that were changed in response to recent “WOKE” initiatives.
He believes that honoring history is crucial and calls for a return to the legacies these names represent.… pic.twitter.com/vOYOVn9qY7
As suggested above, renaming things as a display of political outrage is, in my view,one of the best ways to display one’s idiocy. A Confederate statue, covered with pigeon droppings in a forgotten park in Somewhere, Alabama, oppresses no one. Nor do places bearing the names of Confederate generals, especially when so few Americans lack even basic historical knowledge.
But once the name has been changed, does it make sense to reopen the can of worms and change it back again? Or would Pete Hesgeth, assuming he’s confirmed, be better off spending his time on actual matters of national defense?
One of the bases that got a name change was Fort Bragg, named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Fort Bragg is now Fort Liberty.
Would it have been better to leave the name alone in the first place? Sure. But Fort Liberty, to me, seems like a perfectly serviceable name. It isn’t as if they renamed Fort Bragg “Fort Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” or “Fort LGBTQ Pride Month”.
Fort Benning, previously named after Confederate General Henry L. Benning, was renamed Fort Moore. The new name honors the late General Harold “Hal” Moore, who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Once again, I don’t find anything objectionable about the new name. And I’m practically allergic to political correctness.
Names of places and institutions do, moreover, change all the time. Such changes do not always occur for reasons of political correctness. Nor are they always met with unanimous applause.
In 1985, city officials here in Cincinnati decided to rename Second Street “Pete Rose Way”.
This was decades before Rose’s death. Rose was only in his early forties and in good health. Then, as now, Pete Rose was known to have a checkered past, and was not universally admired. But there were some ardent Reds fans on city council at the time.
“Name an entire street for a living baseball player?” a lot of people said, scratching their heads. “I don’t even like baseball.”
But the name change went through, nonetheless. And it was never overturned—not even after a 1989 gambling scandal that left Rose ineligible for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
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Starting in 1967, Cincinnati had its Convention-Exposition Center. In 1985, the building was renamed the Albert B. Sabin Convention and Exposition Center, to honor the scientist who developed the polio vaccine. Most folks were happy enough with that—or at least they didn’t complain.
Then in 2020, the convention center got yet another name: the Duke Energy Convention Center. This honored not a scientist or a statesman (or even a baseball player), but the massive, unfeeling corporation that purchased our local electric company, Cinergy, in a 2006 merger.
Since then, our energy supplies have been controlled not locally, but from Duke Energy’s corporate headquarters in North Carolina. I actually would prefer to see our convention center named after AOC or Pride Month, rather than Duke Energy.
***
What is most annoying about political correctness? Not so much the underlying political beliefs, but the insistence on making a big deal over the trivial. The contrived urgency and the sham outrage. Like all the silliness over Confederate names and statues.
I don’t want to see the Trump administration spend the next four years arguing about place names that are perfectly serviceable, even if they’re names that were assigned for the wrong reasons, and with flawed motivations.
After all, I never saw the point of renaming Cincinnati’s Second Street “Pete Rose Way”. But I’ve been driving on Pete Rose Way, without protest, for going on forty years now.
John Lennon’s “Imagine” was played at Jimmy Carter’s funeral this week. There are videos all over the Internet of Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood performing the song. We can assume the Carter family was aware in advance and fully approved.
WHAT? Why would ANY Christian have that sung at their funeral? Imagining there is no heaven and no Christianity at a Christian funeral is dark, indeed. https://t.co/64IaRvlOmzpic.twitter.com/cr9kOP892p
“Why would any Christian have that sung at their funeral? Imagining there is no heaven and no Christianity at a Christian funeral is dark, indeed,” opined Mollie Z. Hemingway on social media.
Bishop Robert Barron, a conservative Catholic, wrote on X:
“I was watching highlights from President Carter’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I found some of the speeches very moving. But I was appalled when two country singers launched into a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’…Vested ministers sat patiently while a hymn to atheistic humanism was sung. This was not only an insult to the memory of a devoutly believing Christian but also an indicator of the spinelessness of too much of established religion in our country.”
I was watching highlights from President Carter’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. I found some of the speeches very moving. But I was appalled when two country singers launched into a rendition of John Lennon’s "Imagine." Under the soaring vault of…
I was too young to remember the Beatles (1960 – 1970) as a going concern, but I remember the final years of John Lennon’s solo career. I recall his tragic death by assassination in 1980, and how the 40-year-old Lennon, forever frozen in time, became something of a cultural martyr afterward. (This is not something that Lennon, who had a remarkably practical mind underneath all the hippie flimflam, would have wanted.)
“Imagine,” is a 1971 Lennon ballad that posits a humanistic utopia, where there are “no countries”, “no possessions” “no greed or hunger”, and “nothing to kill or die for”. A hyper-idealistic wish list, in other words.
Even Lennon didn’t take the song’s concept completely seriously. Consider the “no possessions” part. At the time of his death, John Lennon had a net worth of $200 million. That’s $760 million in today’s money. John Lennon with no possessions? Give me a break.
But where Carter’s funeral performance is concerned, the lines that caused ire were:
“Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try…Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.”
John Lennon was never an ideological atheist of the Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins variety. He never embraced the reductive materialism of that crowd. (This is not my extrapolation. Lennon said as much in interviews during his lifetime.)
Lennon did, however, actively question the monopoly of organized religion on faith and belief. While “Imagine” is not an ode to atheism, it is not a church hymn, either. (I could also note that since 1971, “Imagine” has become the most overplayed song on the planet, relative to its musical merits, but I’ll leave that one alone.)
In other words, what would be appropriate at a mostly secular outdoor public memorial (say, in a park), would not be appropriate at a religious funeral inside a church. So I take the points of Ms. Hemingway and Bishop Barron in the context they were intended.
But please, don’t blame John Lennon for all of this. The guy just wrote a song more than 50 years ago. Lennon always said that his songs came from his personal experience, and might not have too much meaning beyond that.
Lennon didn’t ask the world to make far more of “Imagine” than its author ever intended it to be…as happened yet again this week at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
Anita Bryant (1940 – 2025) started out as a pop singer, beauty pageant winner, and brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission. What she will be most remembered for, however, is her involvement in the Save Our Children campaign, beginning in 1977.
During the late 1970s, Save Our Children was a political movement that sought to repeal recently enacted Florida laws protecting (gay) sexual orientation. (This narrow definition is not a coded message on my part. In the 1970s, “gay” was the only portion of the currently defined LGBTQ spectrum that got much awareness, at least at the public policy level.)
I was just a kid in the late 1970s, and completely oblivious to the specific controversy in Florida. I do recall, however, that this was a period in which Americans were rethinking the changes and excesses of the recently concluded 1960s, both for good and for bad.
Conservatism was making a comeback, and gay rights were far from the only topic of debate. Abortion, pornography, the ERA, laissez-faire capitalism, the death penalty, gun control, the war on drugs…both sides of all of these issues were constantly being shouted in the public space.
Sounds a lot like the 2020s, doesn’t it? And yet that was almost 50 years ago. Americans will constantly debate what individual freedom means, and what the right to privacy means. Where does the individual right to pursue happiness (as defined by an individual) end, and where do the greater needs of society begin?
As at least one recent post should tell you, I personally come down on the side of maximum freedom for consenting adults, where matters of the bedroom are concerned. I don’t care who sleeps with whom, or if they exchange money beforehand, so long as only consenting adults are involved. The way I see it, such matters are none of the government’s business.
But then, I am left of center on some issues, and right of center on others. I was never in favor of the maximum legalization of weed, to the point where legal marijuana has now become an industry. I also favor more gun control than most of my fellow conservatives would agree with.
As for LGBTQ issues? In the 1970s, I probably would have been regarded as a relative liberal on such matters. In 2025, my views (while mixed) would land in the Venn diagram sphere of “somewhat conservative”. But what the LBGTQ lobby is asking for today is not what the gay lobby was asking for in 1977. The context is different.
Today I’ve seen a lot of mean-spirited progressive virtue-signaling on social media about the death of Anita Bryant, a woman who hasn’t been active in the public sphere since Jimmy Carter was POTUS. Most of the people decrying Bryant as the Second Coming of Hitler weren’t even born in 1977. (In fact: I poked around on some of the X and Bluesky profiles that weren’t pure sock puppets. Many of those folks wouldn’t be born for decades.)
Could Anita Bryant have used her considerable talents and influence in a better way? Could she have championed a conservative culture without zeroing in on the issue of sexual orientation? Did she do more harm than good?
We could certainly have a spirited debate about all of that. But given the revisionist political environment of post-1960s America, Bryant was articulating positions that millions of American adults (most of whom are deceased at the time of this writing!) were already taking. 1977 was not 2025. Beware the pitfalls of presentism.
When struck with a pie by a leftwing activist at a 1977 press conference, Bryant asked those around her to forgive the man, then—her face still covered in pie—said a prayer for his redemption. That is the Anita Bryant I will choose to remember, to the extent that I remember her at all.
I live near Cincinnati, Ohio. This past week, a 58-year-old retired police lieutenant was arrested in a prostitution sting carried out at a Cincinnati-area hotel. This was a major news item, as the reader can imagine.
The retired lawman paid $200 for a voluntary sexual encounter with a known sex worker. He was not caught with his pants down, but arrested after the act. No word on whether or not the arresting officers allowed the woman to keep the $200. She definitely lost a future client.
If you live in Ohio, you’ve seen scores of prostitution busts on your local news reports in recent months. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, has made the elimination of sex-for-hire his signature policy initiative. No greenbacks for hanky-panky in Ohio. The hotel rooms and private bedchambers of the Buckeye State will be free from such iniquities.
This is not something that the voters necessarily asked for as a priority. Most of us are far more concerned about our sky-high residential property taxes, and the violent crime in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.
AG Yost claims that he is combatting a pandemic of human trafficking. But the attorney general’s results don’t square with his claims. Most of these busts involvefemale sex workers in their 30s, and even older male clients. Middle-aged people, in other words, engaging in consensual encounters. Yost has yet to provide hard, publicly available evidence of said trafficking. Certainly the taxpayers have been shown nothing that would justify such an outlay of public resources.
This is what happens when one political party becomes entrenched and complacent. Ohio used to be a “swing state”. In recent election cycles, however, Ohio has become aGOP stronghold, such that there is now very little competition between the two major political parties at the state level.
And Ohio’s GOP, now safely in control, has chosen to concentrate on sex, sex, and more sex, with AG Yost leading the charge.
The query “Ohio prostitution bust” yields many pages of results on Google News. Here’s a sample:
Yes, a college professor and a dentist! These reports always involve a lot of pearl-clutching on the part of the media and interviewed law enforcement officers. How could it be that “ordinary” men are drawn to the promise of illicit, no-strings sex? Quite shocking, isn’t it? As if any of this were a concept that hasn’t existed since the literal dawn of civilization.
But it isn’t only men who are getting in trouble over sex work. At the national level, we’ve all seen news stories about female public school teachers getting fired after they were discovered to be moonlighting on OnlyFans.The incidents of public school teachers engaging in OnlyFans side hustles have become so common in recent years that ABC News devoted an entire report to that sole topic last August.
I think we know what motivates the men. But why do women do this? At the end of the day, the incentive to engage in sex work would seem to come down to supply-and-demand. To be blunt about it: women can make a lot of money doing this.
A 2021 divorce case in NYC revealed that a surgeon’s (soon to be former) wife, who had won beauty pageants, made $700,000 as an “escort”—another name for acall girl.
In 2023, the New York Post interviewed an escort who sometimes made $34,000 per week, serving as a “professional girlfriend” to Wall Street bankers. The escort, Mia Lee, is a former accountant.
My gf: Are you going to do nothing again today?
Me: I wouldn’t say nothing… I’m trying to make a permanent imprint of my ass on this couch cushion. But wouldn’t ya know? West Elm furniture is surprisingly resilient 😆 pic.twitter.com/juUSEZCHGl
And then there are the women who have made six and seven figures on OnlyFans. Twenty-year-old OnlyFans model Sophie Rain claimed to have made $43 million in 2024.
Sophie Rain just revealed she made $43 million this year alone on 0nlyFans
There is a part of me that can understand a man paying to sleep with a beauty queen. I cannot understand why any man would spend money on OnlyFans. But gazillions of men obviously do. The sex business is a business with almost infinite demand, and there are many permutations of it.
I should also point out that while there are beauty queens in the business, a large number of the women interviewed in these articles (or exposed in news stories) are not beauty queens. In fact, the beauty queens seem to be relative outliers. The vast majority of these women are average looking, and many will never see the age of 35 again. (The aforementioned Mia Lee is 36 at the time of this writing.) In short, this is an economic opportunity that is available to almost any woman who is willing to partake.
The downsides, of course, are not insignificant. Ours is an era in which all forms of sex between consenting adults are on the table. But the minute one injects money into the equation, it’s back to Puritan times. Sex work side hustles can ruin women’s vanilla careers. Just ask the many teachers who have been fired for their OnlyFans accounts.
And, of course, not every woman relishes the idea of being the sex object of multiple, random men. In fact, we can safely assume that most women, when presented with the career options available in the male entertainment industry, are going to say, “No thanks.” (But then, not every woman wants to be a teacher.)
This is why Mia Lee, and the ex-wife of that NYC surgeon, can make such a killing. Demand for their services far outstrips (no pun intended) supply. In economic terms, that’s a recipe for high prices, and big payoffs to those who are willing to exploit market scarcity.
Does this mean that no women are being “trafficked” in sex work? Well, of course not. There are people being forced to work against their will in mining, the restaurant business, and textiles, too. In some parts of the world, children are regularly pressed into military service.
Yet somehow we manage to make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary labor in these industries and professions. No one claims that the textile industry should be outlawed, because textile workers have been exploited in specific situations. Instead we focus on eliminating those specific instances of abuse.
Why should sex work be any different? And how can a blanket human trafficking theory explain women like Mia Lee, who are obviously not trafficked (and who probably make more than some of their clients)?
***
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost seeks to change human nature, to eliminate demand by subjecting the noncompliant— both male and female—to legal penalties and public shame.
Yost is a conservative Republican. But in this regard, he has much in common with social engineers of any ideological stripe. Humankind will conform to his vision of how humankind should be…or else.
I’m not here to advocate that anyone participate in sex work, on either the demand or the supply side. I still don’t understand why any man would want to spend a dime on OnlyFans. Nor do I fully understand the mindset of those men who pay Mia Lee her princely $1,300 per hour fee (according to her website). I mean, jeez, you can get a laptop computer for $1,300. Or an airplane ticket.
But if you can give something away, you ought to be able to sell it. And if you can accept something gratis, then you ought to be able to pay money for it. Such transactions among consenting adults are none of the government’s business. Or so says the libertarian in me.
