[imagesource: @bunnydelphine]
Belle Delphine, born Mary-Belle Kirschner, is a 21-year-old erotic model, who moved from South Africa to the United Kingdom when she was 11.
She works as an internet celebrity who produces erotic content online on a number of platforms, including Instagram.
In 2019, she rose to fame when she started selling her used bathwater to fans. The gimmick was a response to a number of comments on her content from fans saying that they would “drink her bathwater” in response to images and videos of her.
The resultant storm was overwhelming, according to The Telegraph.
She was stalked, found notes attached to her and her mother’s doors, and decided to take a break from the internet for a year, to travel.
She has built her career entirely from London, where she is based, but was born in South Africa, in 1999. Her father still lives here, but by all accounts, they don’t get along.
“I think anyone who has an upbringing, or even South African parents, kinda know that there’s a sternness with South African people that is, I’ve never experienced it in the UK, but when I was growing up in South Africa and I’d go around my friends’ houses, I’d realise that there was definitely different personality traits there, that’s so stern, and he was always very, you know, no jokes, so serious,” she told the H3 Podcast.
You can watch that interview here:
To return to the bathwater, she was selling it to her fans for $30 (roughly R455) a pop, and it was wildly successful, she told The Telegraph in a telephonic interview.
Fans of Delphine, who are almost all male, posted videos of themselves drinking, vaping or cooking with the liquid, which Delphine insists was genuine. “I took a lot of baths,” she says.
She also has a massive online following, with millions of fans and thousands of paying subscribers who are charged up to $35 (upwards of R530) per month for access to regular intimate photographs.
Her online fame has earned her and her boyfriend around £10 million (more than R200 million), with their revenues now at £1 million (upwards of R20 million) per month.
“I’ll stay up on the internet really, really late, like 3am, and then I sleep in really late,” she says. “Then I’ll just basically be on the internet my whole day. Just being in the loop because it’s really important to know everything that’s going on.”
Her day typically starts at 2PM, and she has been known to spend up to an hour getting ready to take an erotic photo for fans.
The character of Belle Delphine has attracted notoriety for her outlandish stunts. As well as selling her bath water, she has posed in skimpy outfits with a dead octopus and sold autographed copies of the bible, something that Delphine was concerned might offend people.
The cost of fame is safety concerns. Belle and her partner have had to install CCTV cameras in their home and her mother’s home after obsessive fans figured out where she lives.
“It’s actually been quite a big problem,” Delphine admits. One of her earliest videos, a tour of her bedroom, was used by one fan to figure out where her family home was.
“It changes things because now I see comments on the internet and I kind of feel differently about it,” Delphine says. Internet harassment is at risk of becoming real-world abuse if stalkers continue to visit.
She believes that there is a clear line between genuine fandom and a stalker-like mentality.
“I think the line is where it impacts people mentally,” she says. “If their obsession with me is hindering their personal life and they don’t want to pursue girls in their real life because they think that I am the only girl for them, I think that’s a big problem.”
She describes her job as “just jokes”, and the internet as a place to play, because “people take it too seriously”.
While online celebrities like Belle have raised concerns as to the effect of their fame on younger generations, sex work like this is becoming more common.
It’s important to remember that sex work is a legitimate form of work, even if not all countries recognise it as such.
[source:telegraph]
