Meet Messalina, Bonnie Blue's ancient inspiration
A (heavily abridged) history of the gangbang 🫦
I really never thought I’d be sitting down to write about gangbangs. I know my content can be on the saucier side but this seems oddly specific at the very least. The ongoing media circus surrounding Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips is one thing but this topic has been a point of discussion across all parts of my life (my cousin asked my sister and I if we had a specific take on it as Australians, I simply did not know how to respond 🦘). The more conservative people in my life are, unsurprisingly, horrified and disgusted while my more sex-positive friends are grappling with their own mixed feelings about the actions of Blue and Philips.
For those of you that have been living under a rock, blanket, or some other gigantic object that has somehow protected you from this truly viral moment, Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips are both OnlyFans performers who have both, to varying degrees/extremes, attempted to break the world record for the biggest gangbang by sleeping with a hundred or a thousand men in rapid succession. There has been EXTENSIVE coverage of this—including some rather haunting mathematic calculations)—so extensive that I’m not even going to bother linking any mainstream writing as a cursory google will start vomiting the coverage at you.
Now a few much needed acknowledgements.
I am not a sex worker and therefore I’m not qualified to and have no intention of speaking for them. (If you are a sex worker and want to speak on the topics discussed in this newsletter I’d love nothing more, please comment or shoot me a message).
I am (tragically) not a historian of sex and sexuality so I will not be taking you through a full history of the gangbang (I’m aware this makes my newsletter byline a smidge misleading but think of my open rate pls). If that’s what you’re after, I’d highly recommend reading a piece written by
back in December:
It’s a great read which I am about to borrow from heavily.
What I AM however, is an ancient historian, so I want to put our ~ current cultural moment ~ (what a sickening phrase) into historical context. Ray does a great job of covering the last few decades but I want to take you back a few centuries. 20 to be exact. To ancient Rome, where we meet the star of this newsletter, the infamous empress Messalina.
Third wife of emperor Claudius, born sometime before 20 AD and dying in 48 AD, Messalina endures as a licentious, ruthless, murderous figure, a nexus for patriarchal anxieties surrounding an uncontrollable, insatiable woman. I’m not going to give you a full biography—instead I will direct you towards the far more capable hands of
who literally wrote the book on Messalina (and very kindly sent me specific line numbers/sources for this newsletter)—but what you need to know is that yes, Messalina had a slew of well-attested affairs, but she was also powerful, calculating, and deadly, assassinating those that crossed her (or even those that might hypothetically one day cross her). She was a true, if not the ultimate, femme fatale.Now, back to gangbangs.
Pliny writes that Messalina challenged one of the most formidable brothel-workers to a now notorious competition. With 24 hours to bang as many men as they could, Messalina walked (or hobbled) away victorious, sleeping with 25 men in 24 hours (I don’t know if this makes Blue and Philips more impressive or more concerning). Juvenal also writes, in rather salacious detail, about how she frequented brothels disguised as an employee, gilding her nipples, calling herself a she-wolf (shorthand for prostitute), delighting in every stroke of her paying customers, and leaving hungry for more.
While entertaining and provocative (and pertinent to the discussion of Blue and Philips), the accuracy of these stories is another thing entirely. The reality of Messalina and her life (and life choices) remains difficult to access. As
writes;“Messalina's legacy in Western cultural consciousness is hardly surprising given her treatment in the ancient sources. Following her execution the empress suffered damnatio memoriae; her name was chiselled off monuments, her statues were destroyed and her reputation was rendered unprotected. Left to do their worst, male historians, poets, even scientists, had a field day, accusing Messalina of adultery, greed, prostitution, bigamy and murder and working through anxieties about women's morality and power in the process.”
What we can discuss with a shred more certainty, however, is why this is all so titillating.
To quote
,“As long as people have been interested in sex, people across genders and sexual orientations have been pulled in by the curiosity of the gangbang.”
We had Lucy Phillips with 100 men, Bonnie Blue with 1000, and Messalina two thousand years ago with a somewhat measly 25 partners (allegedly). While vastly different scenarios (again, I’m not going to get into the shifting economics and power dynamics due to the advent of OnlyFans but it does seem broadly positive), what this ancient example and these two very modern ones have in common is the absolutely hysterical hubbub that surrounds all three.
Shock value plays a huge role obviously, but it seems clear that fascination does as well. What is it about the hypersexual woman with a glut of partners that is so relentlessly fascinating? (This is not a rhetorical question, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts).
Not to get too theoretical here (watch me), but it vaguely reminds me of an idea put forth by Noël Carroll in his work on Monster Theory. He argues that there are 5 major tropes that are drawn upon when creating a monster, one being “Massification,” the idea that the sheer quantity of something is enough to make it disturbing, whether it’s puppies, snakes or spiders. There’s something about excess that is so enthralling. Might some version of this be at play here?
When discussing the history of the gangbang (which is not what I did at all), I’d be remiss if I didn’t give the Greeks a brief look in. In their case, a picture really does say a thousand words.
This rather harrowing image dates back to around 500 years before the time of Messalina and is found on a kylix, a shallow drinking bowl used at the symposium. As you drank from it, this image would’ve been pointed at your fellow guests—perhaps as a titillating joke or, depending on how diluted or not-so-diluted the wine was, as a suggestion.
Here’s a bonus red-figure kantharos just because. The guy on the right (Side B) looks like he’s about to smack his female companion with his bloody sandal which I really cannot bear.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for a far more romantic/less scandalous newsletter next week in celebration of Cupid’s birthday 💘💘💘💘💘💘
Sources
Pliny. Naturalis Historia. 10.83.
Juvenal. Satire. 6.114-132.
Cargill-Martin, Honor. Messalina. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror. Routledge, 1990.
Clack, Jerry. “To Those Who Fell on Agrippina’s Pen.” The Classical World 69, no. 1 (1975): 45–53.
Joshel, Sandra R. “Female Desire and the Discourse of Empire: Tacitus’s Messalina.” Signs 21, no. 1 (1995): 50–82.
Welp, I must be living under a blanket with a flashlight and a copy of Suetonius because the only name I didn’t have to look up was Messalina.
Thanks. That was just plain fun.