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For those of you pure of heart and internet search history, Bonnie Blue (real name: Tia Billinger) is famous for being one of the most popular and highest-earning content creators to have appeared on more-or-less porn site OnlyFans. To fulfil her ambition of earning £5m a month from subscribers she needed a USP. She found it in pursuing “barely legal” sex – traditionally one of the most searched-for terms in porn – with the twist that instead of men searching for videos of other men having sex with teenage (or teenage-looking, depending on how many internet layers you’re prepared to sift through for your purposes) girls, Billinger offered herself to young men.
She had sex with them for free on condition that they gave permission for her to upload the footage to her OnlyFans account, where her subscribers pay to access her content. “She is a marketing genius,” says one of the team she has gathered round her to help administrate her growing empire. She has, in essence, introduced an entirely new way of doing porn-business. If she were working in any other field – if she had stayed in her previous job as a finance recruiter for the NHS, perhaps – and innovated to the same extent, she would probably be hailed as an extraordinary entrepreneur.
She also specialises in gang bangs, putting calls out on her social media channels for volunteers (“I’m in London, on my back, and I’d like your load”), with no shortage of willing participants. 1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue Story is a documentary by Victoria Silver, who became aware of Billinger’s existence through what the algorithm was serving up to Silver’s 15-year-old daughter on her social media feeds. It follows Bonnie/Tia as she prepares for (“1,600 condoms, 50 balaclavas, numbing lube”) and executes her most infamous endeavour – having sex with 1,000 (1,057, it turns out – “barely legal or barely breathing … come and rearrange my insides”) men in 12 hours. It proved too extreme for OnlyFans – or at least for Visa, who processes its online payments – and she has since had to move elsewhere to continue her campaign for lucrative online-world domination.
Naturally, the media – online, legacy and everything in between – has had a field day with all this. They’ve labelled her everything from predator to victim (she denies both, saying she has no “daddy issues”, no trauma in her past and none induced by her work since). She has been accused of being a traitor (“you’re giving into the patriarchy”), and has received multitudinous insults (“disgusting, deplorable slapper” is one we hear from an online commenter).
Although Silver’s six months in Billinger’s company doesn’t provide much in the way of decisive evidence or insight, it does show the star to be as steely in her approach to her career as she is Stakhanovite in her labours. When she needs to court attention, the easiest way is often to insult the wives and girlfriends of the men who watch her and come to her events. “I just loved … knowing I was doing something their wives should have done.” She recommends bringing their partners’ underwear along. “I’ll make them smell MUCH nicer”. And just remember, she confides to camera, “that if a girl says she’s on her period, there’s nothing wrong with her throat.”
But, Silver remains essentially unconfrontational in her approach, and no match for one as robust and unfazed by other people’s opinions as Billinger. The latter claims that her career is what feminism has fought for “for years and years”. So, if young girls are seeing her content and fearing that this is what they should be offering boys? Then it’s up to their parents to teach them that it’s not for everyone. The idea of a collective or social responsibility, any considerations beyond the purely individual and/or financial gain no traction. Silver rarely pushes back, even when Billinger recruits visibly nervous, deliberately young-looking female content creators for a video in a “sex education lesson” where performers roleplay students – she asks nothing about possible harms to them or in encouraging male fantasies around girls too young to consent. The basilisk Blue stare seems to hold her in its thrall.
There are only perhaps two moments that, for me, come close to revealing anything about Billinger, and even these are only a measure of – maybe – how deep the traits she has already willingly shown us run. The first is her comment: “Everyone says my brain works different. I’m just not emotional … If I don’t want to get upset, I won’t get upset.” It reminds me of the statistics that show a high proportion of CEOs and the like – and what is Billinger if not her own CEO – are technically sociopaths. And the second is that when she computes the risk of being insulted in the street she says: “At least they’re getting off the sofa.” This 26-year-old woman who spurned university as unnecessary, was driving a Mercedes C-class by the age of 19, and bought a house shortly thereafter. Hard graft seems to be a high calling, laziness the only sin.
Do I admire her work ethic and facility for business? Yes. Do I wish we lived in a world where the best option for realising those talents as a young woman was not through making online porn? Yes. Do I see where we go from here? Yes, I do. And Billinger will be fine. Beyond that individual? Not so much. Not so much.
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1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story is available on Channel 4.
