‘Bonnie Blue’s grandmother and the first man Bonnie Blue ever pegged stand outside the Channel 4 offices, sharing a cigarette.’
What might sound like a joke setup was the very scenario I witnessed after attending Channel 4’s screening of the new documentary, Bonnie Blue: 1000 Men and Me, which airs tonight.
There were summer blazers and complimentary cocktails dyed a lurid shade of on-theme blue – but undercut by the slightly giddy tension of a crowd trying very hard not to stare at one woman.
That woman, of course, was Bonnie herself: petite, platinum blonde, bright white veneers flashing as she posed for photos, occasionally dropping to her knees to mime oral sex for the press. Her mother and grandmother smiled on, cocktails in hand.
The film, directed by Victoria Silver, follows Bonnie – real name Tia Billinger – through the planning and execution of a filmed gangbang involving over 1,000 men.
What sounds animalistic is actually strangely procedural: ID checks, condom stations, disinfectant bottles, and a clipboard-wielding queue manager. One shot lingers on the sock-clad toes of waiting men, fidgeting nervously on the stairs – a fleeting moment of vulnerability in a film otherwise defined by ice-cold business acumen.
Silver, who has previously made documentaries about artists and musicians, includes graphic footage from the event, only lightly blurred. Silver points out that she always includes artists’ work in her films about them. Why make an exception?
As for Bonnie’s own rationale, she wants to prove: ‘I’m not traumatised. I come from a beautiful family. I genuinely love my life, and I’m super grateful for it.’
It’s hard to overstate how radically she’s succeeded. Though OnlyFans banned the 1000-man video before its release, Bonnie became one of the site’s top earners, reportedly pulling in nearly £2 million a month at her peak, before being forced to change platforms.
I went into the screening expecting to see a victim of something – patriarchy or trauma.
I came out sure of one thing: Bonnie does not see herself as a victim, so who am I to call her one?
She discusses sex with clinical detachment: ‘My brain works different. I’m just not emotional.’
It becomes clear as the film unfolds that, for Bonnie, sex can be fun, but mostly it’s lucrative. And she seems to enjoy the power this gives her over people who insist on romanticising what, for her, is just a physical act akin to weight lifting.
She compares the gangbang to a marathon: not always comfortable, but a physical feat nonetheless. It’s hard to ignore the double standard – we glorify athletes who push their bodies, but recoil when she does it with sex.
Psychotherapist Lucy Beresford tells me that ‘a lot of sex happens in our head’, and how we frame our experiences determines how we process them. She adds, ‘It is perfectly possible this won’t be affecting her mental health.’
This raises a broader question: if we accept that sex can be emotionally neutral for some people and that consenting adults can do what they like, then what is it exactly that people find so disturbing about Bonnie?
For one thing, she refuses to make her choices more palatable. When asked if she considers herself a performance artist, she declines to offer pearl-clutching neo-liberals a Marina Abramović-style abstraction to retreat into. She is Bonnie Blue, and she’s doing this to get rich and because she wants to.
Surprisingly, I felt a strange sense of admiration. Perhaps she’s provoking us deliberately, not just to shock, but to force us to confront the discomfort we’d rather displace onto her.
The documentary presents a clear picture of Bonnie’s moral framework: It’s literal, transactional, and distinctly lacking in empathy or warmth.
This same logic underpins her work with ‘barely legal’ university students. After backlash over scenes filmed with freshers – many of them just 18 – Bonnie offered a familiar defence: if someone is of age, gives consent, and wants to perform, who is she to say no?
It’s a line of reasoning that echoes the logic of corporate exploitation, like a multinational insisting its factory wages are fair because they’re technically legal.
Indeed, Bonnie often speaks in the empty optimism of corporate marketing. ‘I couldn’t sell the video,’ she says of the 1000-man event, ‘but I wouldn’t change that. I love that I was able to connect with over a thousand fans.’
It sounded like a pitch written by ChatGPT for a CEO. That’s not a knock on her intelligence – she’s obviously clever, and it probably reflects poorly on me that I didn’t expect her to be. Still, her relentless branding is a reminder that even connection is a product and marketing angle.
She’s repeatedly asked about her interview with Andrew Tate – who faces charges for sex trafficking – during the Q&A.
She insists she didn’t want to judge Tate without meeting him, because she knows what it’s like to be misrepresented. ‘If you hadn’t met me and just read about me online, I’m a predator, a groomer, disgusting, vile,’ she explains.
Later, she points out that Piers Morgan interviews serial killers without agreeing with them. The implication is clear: attention is value, not endorsement, and Tate’s enormous platform was a definite source of attention.
Bonnie’s worldview isn’t especially humane, but it is aligned with an algorithm-driven culture where extremity outperforms nuance, rage outperforms empathy, and profit within the law is always legitimate.
As Bonnie’s mum puts it at one point in the doc: ’If you could make a million pounds in a month your morals would change and you’d get your bits out too.’
It’s also evident that Bonnie is very, very good at the business side of things. When a teenager’s mother dragged him out of the gangbang queue, Bonnie offered him a private session, then sold the story to tabloids, a stunt that provoked her publicist to call her a genius.
But there are valid criticisms of Bonnie’s work. The film shows Bonnie directing a ‘classroom scene’ with OnlyFans creators, most of them aged 18 to 21.
Many had never done partnered sex work until Bonnie approached them to participate. When asked if she feels responsible for any trauma they may sustain, Bonnie is clear: she explains consent to them before the scene, lays out the day’s schedule, and encourages them to speak up if uncomfortable. But she ‘didn’t join this industry to change the world.’
Beresford warns that we’re highly imitative creatures and what we see in porn shapes how we think about sex, so when the most visible sex online is extreme, misogynistic, and detached, that matters.
Still, she sees a possible upside to Bonnie’s visibility. ‘There are many women who feel shame around their desires,’ she says. ‘Bonnie is saying it’s okay to want sex… Do I wish it were being done differently? Yes. But the message matters.’
But there’s no happy ending here. By the end of the film, Bonnie is alone. She no longer goes out in public by herself. She knows someone may try to kill her, as she gets death threats daily: ‘Fair play to them,’ she shrugs. ‘At least they’re getting up off their sofa.’
It’s a bleak joke, but also telling. She is emotionally armoured, narratively in control.
She’s a tragic example of a woman who – like all of us – was sold the promise that success lies at the intersection of what you’re uniquely good at and what can make you the most money.
I wouldn’t want to be Bonnie Blue, but I can’t bring myself to condemn her either. She holds up a mirror to a culture that equates female empowerment with visibility and turns sex into a product.
And so I return to that image outside the Channel 4 offices. The man who Bonnie first pegged shares a cigarette with her grandmother. She takes a call mid-drag and says, in that sweet tone of a Northern matriarch, ‘It’s not the sort of thing I’d probably watch, of course, but yeah – it’s been a good day.’
Then, she quickly changes the topic, bragging about her granddaughter’s expensive new flat: ‘It’s dead nice. All the boats and all that lit up at night. Right on the river.’
Why wouldn’t it be a good day? The financial success of your children or grandchildren almost always overrides any discomfort about how that success was achieved.
The discomfort she provokes? It comes from the way her success crashes headlong into one of our deepest, least examined cultural beliefs: that a woman’s worth diminishes with every sexual encounter, and that the only thing worse than being undesired is being branded a whore.
At its core, the backlash against Bonnie might not be about consent, legality, or even extremity – it might be about something more intangible: a sense that sex should mean something.
Bonnie’s most radical act may be rejecting the double standard that lets men treat sex as casual or transactional while branding women who do the same as immoral.
She isn’t a role model. She isn’t a cautionary tale. She’s a mirror, and it’s up to us what we choose to do with that uncomfortable reflection.
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