The NHS is to blame for Bonnie Blue

Spectator

2 days ago

Channel 4's documentary begins as the 'adult content creator' Bonnie Blue (real name: Tia Billinger, 26, Derbyshire) prepares to beat the world record of men shagged in 12 hours. Spoiler: she beats it, raising the bar to 1,057, though she was a bit nervous that no one would show up. You might wish to see her cry – because you despise her, or because you need some sign she's human – but the worst she suffers is a nasty flu.
Bonnie Blue was prohibited from selling the tape on OnlyFans – the porn website where, until recently, she was making more than £1 million a month – because it's considered an 'extreme challenge'. But she gets all the publicity she needs from an enraged press and social media. Sniffling into tissues, she plots with her cameraman Josh and publicist Emma how to keep the headlines coming. They spot an article about a man whose mother dragged him out of the 'gangbang' queue. Bonnie pitches the idea of offering him a one-on-one session. 'I like that,' says Emma, seeing gold.
Bonnie is also notorious for her deliberately infuriating 'ragebait' videos. She knows that rage equals hate-clicks equals Channel 4 documentary. Most often she's ragebaiting wives, who she blames for not having sex with their husbands and making them do the dishes, driving them into her arms in desperation.
When talking about the rage she incites in women – who claim she's 'setting feminism back a hundred years' – Bonnie is as enraging as ever. She consoles herself that the more women complain about her at the dinner table, the more likely their husbands are to subscribe to her. Is that what marriage is like? Bonnie herself has been married, we find, to her childhood sweetheart Ollie who gave her the confidence to do OnlyFans. In a recent interview she says they've grown apart.
The 'barely legal' stunts – sleeping with 18-year-olds in Australia who are celebrating their graduation from high school – are also, in a way, meant to enrage. Bonnie was banned from the country after 20,000 people petitioned to revoke her tourist visa. She claims to be borrowing the term from the press who used it against her, as if to say, if you want me to be a predator to sell your papers, so be it. Yet Bonnie also tells us – in earnest, I think – that shagging barely-legals is 'educational', teaching them about consent. She wants to show young people what 'ethical' porn would look like, which is apparently exactly the same minus the fake breasts.
We see snippets of Bonnie's life before OnlyFans, though these fail to demystify her or warm us to her. It, however, does somewhat clarify things to discover that she'd been an NHS financial recruiter (three dismal words). She kept the HR mindset, a sense that mindless corporate protocol is the key to the good life, or even the moral life. She's built a world of assembly-line penetration; constant checking of consent forms, IDs, breathalyser tests and STD results; new targets to hit (men shagged, millions earned per month). In her spare time, we see her doing a jigsaw puzzle and painting by numbers. When she's banned from OnlyFans for a planned 'petting zoo' stunt (glass box, 2,000 men, you do the rest), she is bewildered – she never broke the platform's rules.
One scene follows Bonnie as she gets ready for a sex tape set in a classroom. Presumably she has chosen her co-stars – other OnlyFans creators – because they look underage. In their uniforms, flustered and shy, they could be mistaken for genuine schoolchildren. No matter, their IDs have been checked. One girl acknowledges her smallness is what her fans like. You'd think that people who sell their naked bodies online have a great deal of confidence, she says, but no, definitely not. For her, and others, it's the first time they've had sex on camera.
There's something impenetrable (hear me out) about Bonnie Blue. Feral gangbangs – the snippets in the documentary gave me chest pain while watching – don't faze her. When asked uncomfortable ethical questions, she doesn't pause for thought. She appears to have an impermeable certainty that her actions can have no bad consequences. She's helping boys lose their virginity, but when they choke girls during sex, it's not her problem.
Nor does she suppose that the exposure of children to sex and pornography have anything to do with her. Tia lost her virginity at 13. Lily Phillips, another OnlyFans creator who had sex with 101 men in 14 hours, first watched porn at 11. Could this possibly have anything to do with the fetishisation of young girls? Bonnie seems to think it's normal. It might make parents uncomfortable but your 11-year-old, she believes, is already thinking about sex. Educate them, or she will.