Why Bonnie Blue Was Inevitable

You’ve probably heard of Bonnie Blue. Or at least, you will have seen her. Whether it’s her boasting about sleeping with “barely legal” male uni students, blaming women for their husbands cheating on them, breaking the world record for the largest ever gangbang, or planning a “human petting zoo,” she is inescapable. 

Blue–real name Tia Billinger–is a 26-year-old porn actress and one of the UK’s most regrettable exports. In a market oversaturated with both professional and amateur content catering to virtually any sexual preference or fetish you can imagine, it took a lot for Blue to stand out from the crowd. She managed it first and foremost by orchestrating a series of stunts, escalating in depravity, and leaning into the fury she provoked online. 

Last year, she went majorly viral for the first time. Standing outside Nottingham Trent University, Blue held a sign that read: “uni students bonk me and let me film it.” She offered this ‘service’ free for participants, but charged her fans to watch the video. On TikTok, she encouraged undergrads to pay her a visit over the following two weeks: “I cannot wait to pleasure you. And of course boys, congratulations on getting into uni.” She claims to have slept with 30 men in one day, beating her “personal record.” 

This would be nothing compared to her next stunt. In January this year, Blue set out to beat the unofficial world record for the biggest gangbang. To do this, she planned to sleep with at least 1,000 men—not fellow pornstars, but anyone who showed up. As with her freshers stunt, she put out the call to social media, inviting anyone, whether they were “barely legal or barely breathing,” to queue up outside a townhouse in central London and give it a go. In the end, she says she managed to get through 1,057 men, beating the previous record of 919. 

To most people (especially women), this all sounds positively dystopian. The idea of not only offering up your body to over a thousand random strangers like a sentient blow-up doll, but also filming the spectacle to publish online, rightly strikes us as incomprehensible. Why would someone do this? Many have speculated that Blue must have some kind of mental disorder or past trauma that makes her behave this way. But the woman herself has a far simpler answer: she just enjoys having sex. 

A recent Channel 4 documentary, 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, limply attempts to probe this question further—is Blue an empowered feminist or a degraded victim? While not being particularly interested in addressing this either way, Blue justifies her actions in line with the first camp. She previously worked a regular job as an NHS recruiter, which she says she found dull and unfulfilling. ‘Sex work,’ as it is euphemistically called now, gave her a sense of freedom she doesn’t believe she’d get from a normal nine-to-five. When asked by director Victoria Silver if she thinks she is “sending us backward” in terms of feminism, Blue responds: “A lot of the hate I get is from women who are not working—which is absolutely fine; you get the choice if you want to work or not—but are they not just taking it back in time?” At one point, she even claims that the ability to sell her body online is exactly what feminism fought for “years and years” for. It’s her body, her choice, as the mantra goes. 

It’s clear that Blue has no real understanding of feminism beyond these very surface-level ideas about ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’. To her, liberation means nothing more than the absence of anyone to tell her ‘no.’ And she is certainly not shy about spouting outright sexism herself (“If a girl says she’s on her period, there’s nothing wrong with her throat,” she tells men in one video). It’s no wonder she’s been likened to a female version of manosphere influencer and self-professed misogynist Andrew Tate. 

Yet Blue is still very much the product of 21st-century feminism. Let’s be clear: she is an adult woman who has made a decision about her own life. However, it’s impossible to divorce her choices from the culture of toxic femininity, girlboss feminism, and rampant ‘sex positivity’ that she was raised in. When Tate described her as “the end result of feminism,” he wasn’t wrong. 

Blue, aged 26, will have grown up surrounded by a peculiar brand of vapid, contorted feminism. She came of age in an era that railed against ‘slut shaming,’ normalised promiscuity, and fought to recognise sex work as ‘real’ work. With the aid of platforms like OnlyFans, women were encouraged to view their bodies as just another asset to monetise, and as another means to become a financially independent, free woman. In this climate, it’s hardly surprising that Blue sees porn as the way to self-actualisation. If she is going to be sexualised and objectified anyway, it may as well be on her own terms. 

The issue is that ‘her own terms’ still operate within a marketplace built on degrading women and pandering to male fantasies. Blue is not free, far from it. She relies entirely on attracting and maintaining the attention of men who want to sleep with her. Right now, this business model seems to be working for her—before she was banned from the platform, she was the highest-earning creator on OnlyFans. According to her, she still rakes in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds a month. But what happens when the outrage economy crashes? Blue has made her name through her ragebaiting and her increasingly depraved stunts, but the internet has a notoriously short attention span. 

This is to say nothing of the terrible example Blue is setting for other young women, which she feels virtually zero responsibility for. In The Bonnie Blue Story, Silver, who has a 15-year-old daughter, asks her if she is at all concerned about the influence she has over girls. This is a fair question, given that Blue often dominates the algorithm on sites like X and TikTok—Silver says she was prompted to make the documentary in the first place because Blue kept cropping up on her daughter’s social-media feeds. “But then it’s also a parent’s responsibility,” Blue replies, “to say: there’s people in the world that do mass murders—doesn’t mean you do that. There’s people in the world that do gangbangs—you don’t also have to do that.” 

In a way, she has a point here. Pornstars and prostitutes have, in some form or another, always existed. It is only recently that we have elevated them to be the subject of mainstream news coverage and constant social-media chatter. Porn was once something seedy and only found when purposefully sought out. Now, more and more women blur the lines between influencer and “sex worker.” Depending on your algorithm, you can have just as much chance of seeing Lily Phillips or Mia Khalifa on your feed as any other female celeb. For this reason, parents must shoulder more responsibility than they used to, when it comes to instructing their children that this lifestyle is not aspirational. 

The fact that Blue’s escapades still shock us as a society is a good thing. It means we are not yet so desensitised and porn-posioned that the sight of a young woman degrading herself in this way is no longer repulsive. But at the same time, it skews our gauge for what is considered normal or acceptable, especially for young girls. If Bonnie Blue can sell footage of her “human petting zoo,” then surely selling lewd images of yourself online isn’t anywhere near as bad? Publicly sleeping with 1,000 men in a day is outrageous, but it makes Tinder-enabled one-night-stands look positively wholesome by comparison. 

It’s difficult to know what to make of Bonnie Blue. Does she deserve the kind of social ostracisation and shaming that she’s been subjected to? Probably. Is she a terrible example to both young boys and girls everywhere? Absolutely. Is she an adult woman who has made autonomous, if objectively terrible, decisions about her own life? I’d say so. She also really is, as Tate pointed out, the end-game of modern feminism. When sex is devalued and demystified to the point where it’s virtually meaningless, why wouldn’t women film themselves sleeping with thousands of men to make money? As a society, we cannot treat sex as flippantly as eating or sleeping, while also clutching our pearls at Blue’s exploits. When women are told over and over again that selling their bodies is not shameful, but empowering, no one can be surprised when the likes of Blue take that to its logical conclusion. 

Bonnie Blue is both a symptom and a mirror. If we don’t like what we see, we should start by dismantling the culture that made her inevitable.