In defence of the British woman

REVIEW: Ikoyi

Ikoyi is one of London’s best restaurants. It merges seasonal British produce and nouvelle cuisine with flavours from West Africa, which is ideal as you skip the part where you die of congestive heart failure because you had too much of the miscellaneous paste topped with palm oil and a side of jollof. It is also the only African-themed restaurant with two Michelin stars (though the Michelin guide won’t actually acknowledge it as African). Curiously, none of the diners were African, and being high-rolling ‘Igbo tech babes’ and ‘finance gurus’, it can’t have been down to the £350 tasting menu. So I opened up the lowest-rated reviews on Tripadvisor to find entire essays about it not being a ‘black-owned business’, and how outrageous it is that a Chinese-Canadian is cooking Nigerian food. Hopeless.

While a dining space full of eccentric white people curious about food is great, I’m also a sucker for ambience, so I saw fit to essentially pilot my own black-themed podcast with my partner for the night where we’d discuss all the canonical issues that they like to discuss. Faith, politics, family, body counts, and society… but mostly body counts.

Actually, it’s high time Pimlico Journal discusses body counts as well. At some point Bonnie Blue was brought up. My co-host could only describe her as ‘disgusting’. This is an opinion shared by anyone who has ever heard of her and her exploits, but it wasn’t until I started scrolling through TikTok that I realised it was in fact mostly feminists and women who appeared agitated. Without many realising, Bonnie Blue getting railed by a thousand men in one day has called into question sexual liberation itself, a topic even more verboten than immigration. So what, exactly, did they take issue with?

There were several objections, but none that were honest. Let’s dissect them.

Their first critique was a limp-wristed attempt to intellectualise their innate disgust with their fellow woman. Complaints ranged from the faintly Victorian (‘She’s set women’s rights back a hundred years’) to the unhinged (‘She’s teaching boys to rape’) to the positively theological, though implausible (‘She’s a predator’). This is all flimflam; like Pilko the Pinko lumping together graphs he doesn’t understand with incoherent and ambiguous statements about the world economy and concluding that de dolla is ded.

If Bonnie Blue has set women’s rights back, it is only because she has deployed her agency to the fullest and taken sexual liberation to its absurd (yet logical) conclusion, such that women are now on TikTok bragging about their virtues: ‘In a world full of Bonnie Blues, I’m the girl who doesn’t go clubbing to snog guys every Friday.’ Where priests, moralists, and Andrew Tate all failed, Bonnie Blue has somehow succeeded. She has become the first mover in dismantling the current consensus on relations between the two sexes. If a woman’s choices are hers alone, and we’ve separated the act of sex from morality (just as feminists demanded), then — by their own standards — Bonnie Blue choosing to get railed by one thousand men cannot seriously constitute a transgression.

That is, of course, unless there were unspoken caveats all along, which leads us to their second argument: that a thousand is simply too many. At long last, they’ve finally managed to derive a figure that would finally condemn someone to ‘slutdom’. But if getting railed by one thousand men in a night is degrading, then at what number exactly is it not? Invoking the favourite paradox of every dinner table bore, when does a heap of sand stop being one once you start removing the grains? You can’t define it, because it is entirely arbitrary and therefore worthless as moral reasoning.

Once the simple dignity of exclusivity and intimacy has been suspended, then it’s impossible to create a clear moral distinction between a dalliance with two men and a romp with a demographic. It is also the case that women are often feigning outrage because they’ve got their own skeletons in the closet. Imagine the embarrassment yer bird felt when she got with two guys for a bottle of Grey Goose at Ocean Beach, only to then see feminists on TikTok put down an arbitrary (and rather high) limit on what counts as ‘sexually liberated’ and what does not, validating their own sexual proclivities by making them look suburban, if not prude. We’ve now reached the point where other OnlyFans creators and adult actresses like Lisa Ann have the gall to turn around and draw a line at what is and what is not degeneracy, as if they’re not all in the same boat: ‘WHO REMEMBERS PROPER PORNSTARS?’

Some, conceding defeat on the other fronts, resort to the final fallback: it’s just disgusting. Fair enough, but disgust has never made a convincing raison d’être for moral judgement; it is, at best, a reflex masquerading as principle.

Were we to rebuild social norms around what the public finds instinctively distasteful, many Bonnie Blue detractors would find themselves living in a society that would horrify them. There would be no gimp masks, no more getting pissed on in Berghain for seventy-two hours high on MCAT and pervitin, and no ‘free use’ holes in a Dalston basement. Sorry, Linda, but we’re detaining you at immigration. We saw the Gambian stamp in your passport, and after cross-referencing it with your Fabswingers profile and a suspiciously long weekend in Serrekunda, we’ve decided you’re no longer welcome back into polite society. You’ll be rerouted to a processing facility outside Calais, where you can await further instruction under a blanket of national suspicion — though I’m sure the company available there will be broadly in line with your recent travel preferences. Oh, and we’ve also sequestered your Moroccan toyboy in Customs. Equally, I struggle to see how Bonnie Blue having sanitised, safe sex with a thousand guys is inherently more ‘disgusting’ than yer bird contracting chlamydia from the hardest weapons in Kettering for a balloon.

Bonnie Blue, somehow, is the least likely of the people we’ve just listed above to come out with an STD from her ordeal. Have her detractors ever considered our NHS? If these people have nothing to say about massive chemsex parties, then I am also not interested to hear their opinions on the men who queue up for a smash-and-dash with Bonnie Blue.

They also managed to summon the claim that she was ‘exploiting barely legal teenage boys’, which is a feeble emotional appeal designed to place her behaviour on equal footing with male predation. A kind of rhetorical parity attempt; as if feminism’s credibility depends on proving women can also be ‘predators’ in the correct proportions. Personally, I’m not especially interested in hearing lectures on age gaps from the same demographic that bought fifty million copies of Lolita, misread a novel about psychological manipulation and child abuse as highbrow erotica, and then spent several decades defending their interpretation as ‘complex’. If your cultural response to Nabokov was arousal rather than horror, then you may wish to sit this one out.

If we understand dating, relationships, and marriage to merely be transactional, then feminism has sought to cartelise the market value of sex. By freeing it up for hundreds of sexless guys while not demanding much of them, Bonnie Blue has undercut the cartel. And what do cartels do to those who undercut them? Well, normally you’d be flayed, but in this case all people did was call for her to be sectioned. You see this in their supposedly principled opposition to prostitution and pornography, which ultimately tanks the price of sex. The rationale is that it’s ‘exploitative’ and ‘dangerous’ for women. Somehow, between a creator whispering to the camera that their client is ‘worthless’ and the guy on the other end paying her, they’ve concluded that it’s the FinDom who’s the victim here.

Moralists in good faith should make the argument that women shouldn’t make porn because it’s harmful to the viewer and society. Their riposte is that men should stop watching porn to remove the incentive for women to make it. Well, given that porn is as addictive as any drug, when will they be shooting heroin addicts on the street for their addiction? No gooner ever hassled me in public to fund his subscription to BallBusterBethany.

At last they’ve come full circle, straight up denying women their agency to browbeat men, and opening a whole new box of wasps about women’s role in society. Never mind inadvertently highlighting the absurdity of sexual liberation: they also want to undo everything the suffragettes fought for.

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Louise Perry made a similar argument in her article, putting the OnlyFans creators and their ‘need for attention’ on equal footing with porn addicts, while also (in effect) calling all British women ‘whores’ based on dubious figures plucked out of a boiler room in Bangalore. In the grubbiest accommodation since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, somewhere between the turmeric fluorescence of a podcast studio and the irony-sodden gloom of a leftist flatshare, a consensus has quietly and disgustingly congealed: that British women are fair game. Dumpy, drunk, scantily dressed, and cursed with indifferent dentistry, they are denounced with a zeal never extended to any other group, or at least none deemed fashionable to defend.

As with all transactional arrangements, both sides enjoy a positive-sum game. ‘Dirtbag leftists’ with Simpsons profile pictures get to indulge in a slightly more veiled form of Britain-bashing and, by extension, anti-whiteness. Meanwhile trads — usually closet cases — indulge in the mother of all displacement rituals. This article is a call to arms; a polemic in defence of the British woman, a broadside against Passport Bros, Tatcels, PIPtards, and ‘trads’ whose knee-time splits roughly 5/95 between the prie-dieu and the towel.

You’ve seen the videos: TikToks or YouTube clips of young women out in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, wearing short skirts, heels; sometimes drunk, often laughing. And, without fail, some greasy account from a VPN in Hyderabad or Casablanca will comment: ‘Western degeneracy.’ What you’re looking at is a normal Saturday night in a functioning country, where women can stand free, unveiled, and unconfined. Our homegrown Salafis throw around hundred-year-old British Pathé clips of women walking around with their heads covered under the delusion that this had anything to do with modesty and not to protect their scalps from the elements. They are visible, and visibility remains a virtue and they are far more interesting conversationalists than any of the aforementioned. Serenading them with Nigel Forrester’s newsletter scoops is ‘good chat’ (this really did happen, so make sure to subscribe). Elsewhere, you’re being scolded for having an AMG and not a Brabus — or for not ‘eating arse’.

Let us also address the tedious pseudo-statistical case against British women. Contrary to popular belief, British women are significantly less obese than — to give just a few examples — their American, Saudi, Turkish, or Mexican counterparts. While our obesity rates are indeed relatively high by European standards, the gap has closed substantially in many cases (with some outliers like Italy) and they are only marginally higher than many European countries. Some recent data actually suggests that they are now lower than countries like Russia. Although reliable data is extremely scarce, especially by sex and especially outside of Europe, the data that is available suggests that British women are wholly unremarkable by global standards in terms of their average lifetime number of sexual partners by both European and global standards.

In terms of looks, the UK has produced some of the world’s most recognisable beauty and fashion icons. Our cougars are world beating: Kate Moss was the beauty standard throughout the ’90s and ’00s — until Barack Obama was elected and we handed the keys over to African-Americans who gave us Nicki Minaj, Latto, and GloRilla as aesthetic ideals after decades of whinging about the ‘Eurocentric’ beauty standards. Then Trump won, and Sabrina Carpenter and Sydney Sweeney are now the faces of modern of pop culture. Remember that next time you attack British women, you’re implicitly defending the culture that pretended for years that Hamilton and Kendrick Lamar are cool.

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But why is any of this important? Bonnie Blue, exposing the internal contradictions of sexual liberation and collapsing the market logic behind modern intimacy, has cleared the ground for a necessary renegotiation of the social contract between men and women, which is essential to increasing British fertility rates. After sixty years of destroying the institution of the family and handing the power of sexual selection over to women alone, no amount of tax breaks, childcare subsidies, and other futile economic instruments will ever solve it. It hasn’t worked anywhere it has been tried, except for a certain minority in Eastern Europe which has sought to game these policies. Consider, for example, that the TFR of women between 35-39 has actually been increasing. This is also the age at which women can no longer afford to price themselves out by getting the ‘ick’ from trivial nonsense, as they might have when they were in their twenties. The chooser is now the beggar — and voilà, more bundles of joy in our world.

Fortunately, Britain and Western Europe are actually better primed to reverse declining fertility rates compared to anywhere else in the world because it is the only part of the world with a metaphysical concept of love that doesn’t serve as a function of life or as an undesired by-product, but as its purpose. Consider the wealth of literature Europe has in this regard that treats love as an existential condition worthy of tragedy, artistic preoccupation, and philosophical introspection: it is endless. By contrast, the rest of the world remains rather malnourished. As in a previous article on a rather different topic, it will be useful for us to find out what words different places have for love, and from that we can reverse-engineer and find out just what exactly their concept of it is because it will help explain a great so many things.

Predictably, many places simply do not have a word; others don’t associate it with romance, and fall short; and still others do, but the speakers fail to use it.

In China, they have the word ai (爱), which does translate to love, but this falls short in a number of ways. Firstly, this only came about in the early twentieth century. It also doesn’t factor in the concept of romance, which at best is considered gauche, if not a plague to society. For Maoists, moonlit yearning was a bourgeois indulgence that got in the way of the real issues, like sparrows. The Confucian model of family was a marvel of social engineering that certainly worked for China, but when ‘love’ and marriage are centred around filial duty, honour, and the nation, then it has no answers for a modern society — after all, if ‘romance’ is being shunned, then why do the Chinese need to have babies if they’re not being compelled to by the state? Even adjusting for purchasing power, the cost of living isn’t particularly high. What will it take for them to pair-bond and mate? Nothing and everything, and it’s why they’re headed to oblivion, along with South Korea — where men and women are about to take up arms against each other — and Japan.

No online rightist worth his salt has avoided a ‘trad phase’ of yellow fever; the concubine in the kitchen and geisha in the bedroom fantasy. You know the type: quiet, demure, high-cheekboned, dressed in a seifuku. The reality, however, unveils a deeper truth. East Asian societies place great value on preserving face and maintaining appearances. In this context, silence emerges as a calculated strategy; a tool for navigating relationships through subtle manoeuvres rather than direct confrontation. You may find yourself quietly edged out of a relationship, much like Lee Kuan Yew deporting a bureaucrat to the People’s Republic. One morning, you wake up and realise the relationship ended three weeks ago.

The image of the submissive, loyal Asian wife remains a fantasy. Japan records some of the highest rates of female infidelity in the developed world, with nearly 40 percent of married women admitting to affairs. In China and Korea, entire service industries cater to discreet adultery. The Daily Mail frequently publishes stories of British men who fall in love with Thai bar girls and lose everything. Those seeking escape from chaos soon discover a different kind of conflict: quiet, methodical, and far more unnerving and in divine retribution may poison you in your sleep, GI.

Moving on to the Arab world, they certainly do have a lexicon relating to love as we know it, but it is usually the preserve of Sufi mystics. This has yet to permeate down to the masses, quite obviously: your bank balance and the year on your plate take precedence over any yearning you might have for the woman you’re infatuated with. Some of the most vocal critics of British women come from ‘akhis’, men who accuse Western women of degeneracy while watching enough Pornhub to make a data centre sweat. As before, marriage remains a transaction — just in the currency of camels this time. In any case, when you peer over the ‘romantic’ poetry written by Arabs, you realise much of it is an allegory for boy love, which would also help explain the Arabist streak among Tories for the last century.

The attitude of their diaspora is even more diabolical, as their transactional approach to relationships clashes with Western expectations. Temperamentally, Arab women, particularly those from Iraq or the Gulf, often blend the emotional intensity of Latinas with the volatility of North Africans. They can be hot-blooded, dramatic, suspicious, and prone to loud rows. They’ve been raised in cultures where men dominate, but women can compete via pressure, rumour, and psychological edge. Western men aren’t used to managing this. As for expectations? Let’s just say they don’t always match the narrative. A friend of mine once dated an Iraqi woman who was deeply confused that he expected monogamy. In her words: ‘If I wanted a husband who told me who I could sleep with, I’d have married an Iraqi.’ She assumed, like many from that world do, that Westerners live in a moral free-for-all: no fidelity, no obligations, just vibes. When she realised that, here, fidelity is the baseline, not an imposition, she was stunned. And this isn’t rare. Any culture where marriage is arranged, family-bound, or policed by male relatives does not produce women well-adjusted to Western ideas of personal partnership. They may dress the part, but their expectations — and resentments — run deep.

Latin America is perhaps the most tragic example, because it is a society that was given a language which does have a word and a concept that matches up to our idea of love. And yet somehow, despite the existence of the Spanish word for love, amar, they use the phrase ‘te quiero’ instead, meaning ‘I want you’. Two quite different concepts, but a linguistic tic that tells you everything you need to know about Latin American society (and why we no longer need to do sociology over there because I have done it for you).

This preference for desire over romantic love is vividly reflected in the behaviours of Latin American women, often misconstrued through a lens of idealised femininity: Latin American women are often praised for their femininity, soft-spoken, nurturing and sexy (half-life: Francium-223). But every man who’s been in a long-term relationship with one knows what else comes with the package: endless sulking, weaponised silence, jealousy disguised as passion, the line between psychological warfare and romance often blurry. Two of my friends married Latin women. One has been ground into such fine powder that he now listens to The Rest Is Politics unironically. The other hasn’t had sex with his wife in six months following a major row.

The pattern of cultural misconceptions about women’s roles in relationships extends beyond Latin America to regions like Eastern Europe, where surface-level impressions obscure deeper pragmatic realities. Yes, Eastern European women are often stunning. Yes, they often present as traditionally feminine. But do not mistake aesthetic softness for inner softness. These women are ruthless. Raised in cultures of economic precarity and social calculation, they will smile sweetly while mentally tabulating your salary, passport status, and long-term utility. If you’re a loser in London, you’ll still be a loser in the Lublin — just one who’s about to get cleaned out in a foreign jurisdiction.

That leaves Africans and South Asians. I will skip the usual tirade about ‘kinship’ and tribal structures because — as we shall find out — it’s doesn’t tell us everything about their relationship patterns. Again, varying words for ‘love’ come up short compared to ours. Pyar in Hindi and Punjabi is an imprecise, catch-all term that is indiscriminately applied to anything from familial affection to friendship or to a fleeting infatuation, devoid of the solemn oneness and exclusivity that defines our idea of it. Anbu in Tamil prioritises selfless care, but this is redolent of communal obligation more than anything else. Bhalobasha in Bengali, though occasionally used in a romantic sense, is diluted by connotations of general goodwill. Urdu has the word ishq, but this is an Arabic loanword via Persia, meaning it is a relatively recent importation, and though close enough to our concept of love, it veers into mystical territory. Sanskrit, despite being the root of many of the region’s languages, comes close but falters with prema (spiritual devotion) and kama (sensual desire), still not as nuanced as ‘love’.

The literature also pales beside Western masterpieces. The Gita Govinda’s portrayal of Radha and Krishna’s love is more mythological allegory than genuine human passion. Modern South Asian literature and media lean heavily on melodramatic tropes, clichés, and hyperbole. You could throw billions at Bollywood, and it would never be able to replicate something ordinary like The Notebook, never mind anything more haute. Of course, in a society where marriage is still of economic value for all those involved, you can prop up birth rates. However, as soon as they are exposed to the libertine free-for-all of the Western dating market, their birth rates collapse in an even more dramatic manner than ours.

So you don’t have to, I took the time to scour through Muzmatch and various other sites platforming female ‘marriage CVs’. They list requirements, which is fair enough: women deserve rights. But these requirements amounted to ‘connecting beards’, ‘a monthly allowance’, and ‘£25,000 mahr’. Keeping up with their side of X is will radicalise you far more than any discourse surrounding ‘burka bans’. The women will engage in the mother of all Quranic exegesis to emasculate their own men, from ‘The prophet halted his entire army so Aisha could find her necklace’, to ‘and we created you in pairs’, to misconstruing various hadiths into quotes about love and heartbreak as a coping mechanism for their failed (and very haram) relationships. Consider that many of the most profound love stories in the Western canon often involve a penniless man striving for a well-to-do woman: Titanic, mediocre in my opinion as it was, left tens of millions of women in tears. I’m not sure whether ‘The trials and tribulations of Asif’s journey with minoxidil’ would evoke similar emotions or reach box office status. None of this is in the vernacular of the British woman. Sorry, I will not grow a beard: I will remain clean-shaven because I am a citizen of Rome.

Ultimately, Asians — certainly in this country — can only prop up their birth rates by sectioning themselves off from the rest of society. Nor is this meaningfully ‘traditional’: they merely have their village economy paid for here by the welfare state. In most places, there’s an actual economic incentive for a villager to have children: sons to work as farmhands and daughters to barter off for livestock (or mahr if you live in Whitechapel or Karachi). But once forced into the liberalised dating market, their birth rates will collapse because they don’t have any tradition for forming relationships autonomously like the British do.

This has already happened to our beloved ‘small-c conservative’ Caribbeans and this country’s nascent West African communities. It is particularly important we take a look at their social mores when it comes to ‘love and relationships’ given the outsized presence they have been handed by the media. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the reason for the number of single-parent households in Caribbean and West African communities might have something to do with the collapse of ‘family values’, but in reality, the absence of any concept of love is even more obvious in their home countries. As in most places, marriage is an economic transaction between families. Occasionally, they will throw around a vague idea of ‘love’, but it is an infantile concept. If you dive into the darkest corners of Lagos and Joburg Twitter (the app hasn’t updated to X yet over there, their operating systems apparently don’t even have a screenshot function yet), you’ll see the demands that men and women have of each other: ‘nyash’, ‘generational pum’, ‘wood’, ‘monthly allowances’, women straight up questioning men why they should have sex if he’s not paying, and brides not smiling until she has a sufficient amount of money thrown at her in the wedding (this is a real marriage tradition in Nigeria).

The result? Jamaica and Nigeria have some of the highest rates of paternity fraud in the world. Some research suggests it goes into the double digits, but this is impossible to prove. There are countless incidents of pastors in Nigeria fathering many children with married women, offering superstitious housewives (who happily celebrate this) ‘favour with God’ in return for ‘some nyash’. ‘Father’ in Nigeria is a double-entendre then; triple if you believe this is all ordained by Our Father in Heaven.

In London, this transmutes into nonsensical ‘icks’ — like getting the ‘ick’ if he orders dessert, blows on his food or ‘only has a 9 to 5’. It’s obese podcasters browbeating 16-year-old children for not taking their girlfriends out to Hakkasan, and now poor old Obadiah, a very good boy according to his mum, suddenly goes missing for three weeks (he is in St Albans interning for crack dealers to finance his dates). The absurd scale of hypergamy renders the 80-20 rule true for them at least, culminating in absurdities like two-year ‘talking stages’ and ‘situationships’ (sex with many women without commitment, familiar enough).

Worryingly, this sort of nonsense winds up on our TV screens. After years of being criticised by their most loyal cadre of viewers for not fostering ‘black love’, Love Island finally decided to go the mile to couple up a police officer from Manchester with Leanne, ‘The Queen of Walthamstow’ (Profession: Baddie). By week two she had gotten the ‘ick’ because he was obsessed with her. The British public promptly booted her out simply because it is Love Island, not Talking Stage Island or I’m just getting to know people it’s only week three Island or What do you bring to the table Island. Since then, the producers source most of their black women from places like ‘Dunfermline’ in the hope that they will have been socialised around broader circles that might temper their approach. Quite radicalising was watching black podcast hosts and hyenas pushing forty commenting on another contestant, Will the Farmer, who was quite clearly on the spectrum and socialised rurally, lambasting him for not having ‘game’, a child-like demeanour, and making strange remarks about the couple’s apparent lack of sexual chemistry: ‘Can’t imagine them doing backshots on the balcony.’ He and the Australian surf instructor he was coupled up with are still together after two years — remarkably long for a Love Island couple.

(Growing up where I did, I have spent better part of a decade watching these people describe white women as ‘grey tingz’, ‘plain’ out of envy and racial animus, and making crude comments about ‘using white women’ until they’re all hitched up to their cousins. Yes, really. So if you’re finding this to be a bit acerbic, don’t worry: it’s all reciprocal.)

Bonnie Blue’s reckless gambit, then, has exposed the sexual revolution as a hollow farce, its promise of freedom collapsing into a cesspit of excess and alienation. Yet the backlash she provoked reveals the steely virtue of British women, slandered by gutless critics too weak to face their own failures. Britain stands poised to reverse its fertility decline, its culture of romance arming it with a resilience foreign to societies peddling transactional lust. East Asian face-saving, Arab camel-bartering, Latin American sulk-fests, Eastern European scheming, and the mercenary antics of South Asian and African communities crumble in the liberalised dating market, their shallow concepts of love impotent against the demographic abyss.

While other cultures flounder, chained to soulless deals and petty envies, Britain’s romantic soul ensures its triumph, a defiant rebuke to a world too craven to love deeply, groping in the darkness instead.

Oh, and Ikoyi was good also. Five stars.

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This article was written by Henry Reynolds Skelton and Lao Cai Larry. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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