Bonnie Blue is a reflection of our pornified society

On Tuesday night, Channel 4 aired its documentary about the porn actress Tia Billinger aka ‘Bonnie Blue’, who has become infamous by performing extreme sexual content on OnlyFans, including having sex with over 1,000 men in a day.

The film is described as a much-needed commentary about attitudes to sex, porn and feminism. However, the director fails to address these topics meaningfully and simply glamorises Billinger's actions, neither challenging her attitude to sex nor examining if her claims of making £1m a month are true. 

Billinger boasted that many of the men who participated in her challenge wore wedding rings, saying on her social media channels that men ‘deserved’ to take part in a gangbang with her because their wives were failing to fulfil their needs. She has 850,000 subscribers on OnlyFans – clearly a worrying number men enjoy watching her content. 

Evidence shows that boys and men who view porn often request harmful sexual acts from girls and women. Repeated exposure to porn influences the brain and normalises sexual acts which were previously unconsidered or undesired, and in the minds of its viewers, reduces women to objects.

The director gently asked if she was ‘setting back feminism’ by allowing multiple men to treat her as a sex object, but failed to dispute her answer that she ‘enjoyed’ letting men abuse her body and was providing a ‘community service’ by taking the virginity of 18 year olds.

To save you the horror of watching it, here is a summary of the critic’s reviews, who variously call the film, ‘sad’, ‘prurient’, ‘banal’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘dangerous’. Even the former Page 3 model Nicola Mclean, writing in The Sun, describes the documentary as ‘deeply disturbing’.

Indeed, it’s more than disturbing that as a public broadcaster Channel 4 saw fit to show such a film which fails to outline the dangerous and degrading nature of the adult content industry without any need for viewers to verify their age, just days after the Online Safety Act was introduced. 

Billinger herself promoted the documentary on her Instagram account, saying ‘tonight my content is for all ages, the only restriction is your bedtime’, which is in keeping with her boasts of seducing ‘barely legal’ young men at universities in order to film herself having sex with them.

One scene in the documentary features young OnlyFans creators filming their first porn scenes, in which they dress up in school uniform and pretend to be teenagers in a school sex-education class. Although one of the young women is 21, she admits that she gets subscribers because she looks underage, which should give you an idea of just how dark this online industry really is. 

Billinger doesn’t pay them – they’re just thrilled to have the exposure that comes from being linked to her. This seems highly exploitative, and teenage girls might be convinced that OnlyFans is an easy way to earn money, especially considering the younger creators tell the director that their career choice is a ‘win-win’ situation because they ‘aren’t stuck behind a desk earning minimum wage.’

The Times journalist Janice Turner interviewed Billinger ahead of the documentary and said, ‘… For Bonnie or Tia, whichever you want to call her, she first saw online porn aged 12, she lost her virginity aged 13. What I was interested in is does Bonnie Blue and young women like her represent what happens to a whole generation that have seen porn all through their lives who have inhaled the narrative of porn, especially young women, and they have learned that this is what young women do – this is sex. How has that influenced their decisions? And is Bonnie Blue really just the ultimate reflection of our porn society?’

While the majority of sane people are outraged by the extreme stunts of OnlyFans creators such as Billinger and Lily Phillips (who recently beat Billinger’s record by having sex with 1,113 men in 12 hours), an increasing number of Gen Z young women believe that performing public sex acts online is an acceptable career choice.

The ‘Bop House’ in Miami is another OnlyFans account featuring eight young women aged 18 to 25 who’ve built massive social media followings and earnings by sharing sexualised content. Their content celebrates the term ‘bop’, a slang term referring to women with multiple sexual partners, which they say they have ‘reclaimed’ for the positive. The videos and jet set lifestyle have inspired countless comments from fans including “I want to be like you when I grow up” and “How do I join the Bop House?”

Clearly many of these young girls aspiring to a career in the adult entertainment industry are not considering the future implications on both their emotional and physical health, or the impact on their chance of future happiness in a relationship.

A 2008 study of the health risk exposure in adult film performers found that porn actors, especially women, are exposed to health risks that accumulate over time, including STDs, injuries, mental health issues and drug addiction.

A female porn performer said, ‘They try and break you and get you to the point where you just don’t care and you’ll just do whatever… I wasn’t a depressed person before I got into the industry. Now I’m considered bipolar.’

Many OnlyFans creators, including Billinger and Phillips, say that it’s easy to get caught up in a cycle of creating more extreme content in order to stay at the top of the subscription ratings, meaning that young women joining to post racy pictures in their underwear are on a slippery slope to performing sexual acts on demand and risking becoming victims of sexual abuse.

The UK has the dubious fame of being home to one of the highest concentrations of OnlyFans accounts in the world, with 280,000 mainly young women aged 18-34 signed up to the platform. But why are they doing it?

The addiction to smartphones and social media is part of it, with many young girls seeking and receiving attention by posting sexy photos online. OnlyFans takes this a step further by allowing women access to sexual attention and money from thousands of men.

 

This hasn’t happened overnight; decades of degradation of sexual norms and the erosion of shame have led to this gruesome point where online prostitution is not only socially acceptable but something to aspire to.

The sex education lobby has successfully integrated itself so far into government that organisations such as Brook have been able to advise on RHSE policy and hand out free condoms to children. Materials used in schools teach children that casual sex is normal, virginity is a social construct and watching porn is natural.

If you teach children that you can have sex whenever you want, with whomever you want as long as everyone consents, it’s a natural step for young women to feel that monetizing their bodies is empowering. Indeed, some universities have even published ‘toolkits for sex workers’ to enable students to fund their studies through prostitution, with the message that ‘sex work is work’ and should be supported.

Channel 4 states that the film reflects modern Britain's ‘changing attitudes to sex, success, porn, and feminism in an ever-evolving online world’. But as the author Louise Perry says in her excellent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century: ‘We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.’

Many young people use social media to discuss how high a ‘bodycount’ is acceptable for both women and men. There are various videos online discussing whether it’s socially acceptable to have sex with 20 or more people, with differing opinions about how many is considered too many.

The only thing that seems to matter in today’s liberal mindset is consent. So why is Bonnie Blue getting death threats? She states in the film, ‘If I consent to something and it’s above board, who are you to say I can't do that?’ 

She has a point.

In answer to the director’s question about if she’s setting back womenkind, Billinger says her message to women is: ‘... you’ve fought for women's rights for years and years, for women to be in control of their own body and be empowered. I’m now living that and suddenly you want me to shut up, have a couple of kids, get married and stay quiet. But I don't want that...if anything I'm the image of what you’ve been asking for, for years and years, but suddenly you see it and think f**k we don't want this woman to speak proudly of sex.’

The documentary ends ahead of Billinger's interview with Andrew Tate, who she describes as 'misunderstood' despite the fact that he is accused of multiple accounts of rape and human trafficking. Tate in turns describes Bonnie Blue as the 'perfect end result of feminism' adding that he doesn't understand why men say that she shouldn't do it because it's 'your body, your choice...this is the world we now live in, it's the end result of feminism.'

Andrew Tate may be a terrible role model for young men and boys, but he also raises a valid point.

At heart, most decent people realise that sexual promiscuity is not going to lead to positive outcomes in the long-term. As well as the physical health risks, evidence shows a correlation between promiscuity and mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The constant cycle of short-term relationships can lead to feelings of instability and insecurity, particularly among women.

One in four young women now say that they are mentally unwell; it’s time that we looked deeper into what’s causing this tidal wave of distress.

Radical feminism that promotes sexual immorality as desirable and marriage as old-fashioned does not benefit women and girls. Multiple studies show that saving sex until marriage leads to a more stable relationship and a more satisfactory sex life than couples who have had multiple sexual partners. Yet instead of teaching the facts that a loving and faithful marriage is the best way to enjoy sex, the media and schools continue to promote casual sex as a sign of a healthy and happy life, even running regular stories on the benefits of polyamory and ‘open marriages’.

We cannot allow our children to continue to be corrupted by the message that sex is meaningless, marriage is outdated and the natural family doesn’t matter. Our founder Dr Stanley Ellison called on the ‘decent men and women’ to stand up against the permissive society when he began our organisation in 1971.

FET’s first Director Valerie Riches spoke out in the early 90s about the correlation between the rising teenage pregnancy rates in schools which had embraced sex education and was mocked by the liberal press. Sadly her predictions about where this would lead us were correct, meaning that it's even more important to continue to fight back against the tide of sexual immorality.

It’s time to join together again to combat the forces that wish to destroy the family – we need your support!