Bonnie Blue has sex with men on camera for money. Lots of men one after the other, to be precise, for lots and lots of money: the commercial niche she invented to distinguish herself from countless other amateur porn stars jostling desperately for attention on OnlyFans was inviting “barely legal” ordinary teenage boys (which in porn means 18-plus) to have sex with her on film, and flogging the results to paying subscribers for a fortune. Unusually, her model involves a woman making millions out of men generating content for free, which makes it slightly harder than usual to work out exactly who is exploiting whom if she turns up (as she did in Nottingham) at a university freshers’ week with a sign saying “bonk me and let me film it”.
But debating whether getting rich this way makes Bonnie personally “empowered” seems tired and pointless. It was with this old pseudo-feminist chestnut that Channel 4 justified last week’s ratings-chasing documentary on her attempt to sleep with 1,000 men in 12 hours, a film that finally brought her into the cultural mainstream. There’s more to this story than sex, gender politics or Bonnie herself, and whatever is driving her (which she swears isn’t past trauma, “daddy issues” over a biological father she never knew, or anything else you’re thinking: though she does say maybe her brain works differently from other people’s, given her curious ability to switch off her emotions). It’s at heart a story about money, the merging of the oldest trade in the world with a newer attention economy inexorably geared towards rewarding extremes, and what that does to the society that unwittingly produced it.
As her now-estranged husband explained admiringly to camera, though OnlyFans performers often invite a man to imagine he’s doing whatever he wants to them, that’s an illusion: really they’re out of reach. But Bonnie (real name Tia Billinger) isn’t. She actively encourages her fans to come and do it to her for real. She is the parasocial relationship – that strange confusion created when you think you know someone because you’ve seen so much of their life unfold on your phone screen, though in reality they’re a stranger – taken to its fantasy conclusion: a stalker’s dream made flesh. Like what you see? Then just reach through the screen and grab it.
Bonnie/Tia comes across essentially as a female Andrew Tate, telling teenage or otherwise vulnerable audiences that they have a right to sex – in one video urging men not to feel guilty about taking part in her stunts, she says it’s only what they were “owed”, the language of the incel forum – and that it’s hot to be slapped around or degraded; but, unlike Tate, with the apparent authority of actually being a woman herself. Channel 4 filmed the men queueing up to join her 1,000-men stunt mostly as a line of mute, anonymous shuffling feet. But we already know that watching near-ubiquitous porn online has changed the way younger generations have sex. What does being invited into the picture do? No wonder Ofcom is taking an interest, while the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, warns against TV normalising things that – as she put it – teenagers find “frightening, confusing and damaging to their relationships”.
Ironically, the biggest short-term beneficiary of such a storm may be Bonnie/Tia herself, already a dab hand at posting rage-bait videos expertly calibrated to provoke women who already can’t stand her (and are willing to explain why at length to their own followers on their own social media channels). Being hated is great for business, she explains chirpily: the more women publicly denounce her, the more their sons and husbands will Google her. Her real skill is in monetising both lust and rage, crossing the internet’s two most powerful streams to capture its most lucrative currency: attention.
“She’s a marketing genius,” her female publicist tells Channel 4, laughing as the team discuss how best to commercially exploit footage of an appalled mother trying to retrieve her son from one of Bonnie/Tia’s filmed orgies. OnlyFans performers can’t advertise as a normal business would, so they promote themselves by seeding clips across social media, ideally of them doing something wild enough to go viral: since people get bored easily, the pressure is always on to keep getting wilder and wilder, pushing way past whatever you thought were your limits.
That has long been the trajectory of porn stars’ careers, of course. But it’s also recognisably now true of so much contemporary culture, from fully clothed influencers to reality TV shows forced to introduce ever more cruel plot twists to stop the formula getting stale (this year’s Love Island has noticeably morphed from dating show into a kind of brutal sexual Hunger Games), and arguably even broadcasters such as Channel 4 fighting desperately for audience share in a world of almost infinite competition for eyeballs. When I finish watching 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story on catchup, the channel’s algorithm perkily suggests an episode of Sex Actually with Alice Levine. Like the sexy stuff? Want more? Please don’t leave me for YouTube!
As with Tate, if Bonnie was somehow shut down there would be another one along soon enough. She’s a feature, not a bug, the inevitable product of an economy relentlessly geared to giving an audience what it most reliably pays for – to feel angry or horny, or both at once – and then endlessly pushing its luck. But society does still have some limits to impose on what is in the end just another business model.
Her current nemesis is Visa, which processes OnlyFans payments and which she says declined to be associated with her 1,000-man marathon, leading to her being banned from uploading it and cashing in. (Legislators have long regarded mainstream financial services companies on whom porn sites rely to rake in their profits as the crack in their armour, more susceptible to public opinion and regulatory pressure.) Meanwhile, a new taskforce on pornography headed by the Tory peer Gabby Bertin, who formerly worked for David Cameron in Downing Street, is arguing for a ban on content likely to encourage child sexual abuse – which Bertin argues could encompass “barely legal” material or (as Bonnie has also experimented with doing, as her options narrowed) casting grown porn actors as schoolgirls.
Like Labour’s battle against Page 3 girls in the 1990s, which in retrospect seems an astonishingly innocent era, if ministers want to pick this fight with porn it will be brutal. But doing nothing might, in the end, be more so.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
