Belle Delphine lives in a mock Tudor house in a gated community in Hove. It’s necrotic, and soothing. You could be anywhere, and this is apt. Belle lives on the internet, where she entertains her subscribers, who pay $35 a month through the website OnlyFans. She is 21, and she grew up on the internet. ‘It raised me,’ she says.
I watch one of her films before we meet. It shows her dressed as a Disney princess in a long pink wig and small clothes. She attacks herself with paint and rides a fluffy unicorn while shouting. Is the unicorn the internet? Is she the unicorn? I hate the film — the childishness makes me uncomfortable — but it isn’t for me. I make my husband watch it and demand he describes his emotional response. He makes a strangled noise. I make a male friend watch it too. He buries his head in his iPhone and vapes furiously.
Belle isn’t a garden-variety performer. She’s almost a performative artist and the joke is almost on the punters, who pay for a ‘girlfriend experience’, which means she delivers updates on the life she doesn’t have because she is faking one for them. But she plays with them. She promises a video of herself ‘stroking a big cock’. It is a chicken; a hen actually, because she can’t find a cock. She sold jars of her used bathwater for $30 (she looks very clean, though I doubt people who worry about hygiene order bath-water from women in Hove on the internet). They sold out in three days. Belle is an internet archetype because she is so open to it. Other vloggers (video bloggers) posted videos of themselves vaping the bathwater. A Spectator colleague drank some, but he’s young.
This interview is arranged by her partner, whom she asks me not to name.
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