Bonnie Blue is an It Girl. But she’s not an It Girl in the way we used to recognise them. Bonnie Blue is an It Girl because she’s written about as a thing, not a person. She’s an object, everything that’s bad about women, sex, modern life. She’s not really considered to be a human being, with hopes and fears and desires; her pronoun is It. But I can’t help liking her.

I’m not lying, and I’m not trying to be controversial; I’m just really keen on honesty, and so few people are really honest, even – especially – when they identify as honest. My own trade, journalism, is rife with faux-honest types – mostly female, with the odd over-sharing man – who, sell themselves on confessional writing, present a highly ‘curated’ version of the truth, usually one in which they are either poor little victims or adventurous vamps. When someone actually tells the truth about themselves – as I believe Bonnie Blue does – there is an outbreak of mass moral panic, as those who lie in order to live with themselves feel the sting of seeing what raw truth looks like.

In the interests of complete candour, I’ll reveal my own history with pornography. As I’m so old, there obviously wasn’t much of it around when I was a kiddy apart from the legendary top shelf magazines; you sometimes found them in fields where someone had obviously enjoyed a bit of solitary self-abuse and then guiltily abandoned the source of their pleasure, left to blow across scrubland like tit-tumbleweed. I grew up and in my twenties wrote a dirty book, Ambition, the paperback edition of which became a number one bestseller; it was very racy – somehow, I’d developed a pornographic imagination. (Getting married to the first man you have sex with will do that to you.) Then came the internet – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I became particularly enamoured of a performer called Mika Tan; I enjoyed watching pornography alone, but also while I was having sex with........

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