Bonnie Blue: The sex superstar of the social media age
Bonnie Blue has become the most famous adult entertainer in the world. How has this girl next door become a social media sensation, both loved and despised?
Groomer, predator, prostitute, whore, are just some of the words that have been used to describe the world’s most viral adult star Bonnie Blue.
Bonnie Blue – real name Tia Billinger, a normal girl next door from Derbyshire who once wanted to be a midwife – earned this status due to her X-rated stunts that blew up all over social media. Her online fame has led her follower count go up and up and to appear on multiple podcasts and YouTube channels, even speaking with controversial misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate who she describes as a "nice guy", despite his very public and damaging views on women, especially promiscuous women like Bonnie.
Her speciality is having sex with strangers, her notoriety came from standing outside Nottingham Trent University holding a sign saying “uni students bonk me and let me film it”. The students got to fulfil a fantasy and Bonnie got to sell the content - charging her subscribers to watch the resulting videos.
She’d already done the same when living in Australia, looking for “barely legal” male students by holding up placards outside campuses on Australia’s Gold Coast emblazoned with the same offer made to the English students.
Although anyone who took part had to sign a consent form and bring ID proving they were of legal age, the stunt nonetheless led to an outcry and got Bonnie expelled from Australia. Bonnie was exploiting a morally grey area. Her critics posed the question, what damage would be caused if this was a male porn star doing the same?
She has since gone to America to meet college guys partying at Spring Break. The queue for selfies and more was as big Stateside.
@bonnieblue spend the day with me at spring break Miami
♬ original sound - Bonnie Blue
Bonnie’s sex stunts earn her anything between £500,000 and £2 million per month, but it is content that even OnlyFans has now deemed to be too extreme. Resulting in her being kicked off the subscription site.
These stunts led her to organise a gang bang which would involve Bonnie having sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours. The extreme stunt is the focus of new Channel 4 documentary 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story which shows everything that went down on that day, and when I say everything, I mean everything.
I was among around 70 invited guests and media who got to watch a preview of the film and speak with and meet Bonnie.
Interestingly, among those in attendance are Bonnie’s mother, grandmother and dad. All sat in the front row, one member of her entourage was even munching popcorn as though this is as normal as a trip to the cinema.
While many parents would be horrified or embarrassed by their daughter’s line of work, her mother Sarah Billinger is fully behind her career choice, even helping make the “bonk me” sign for Nottingham.
Sarah intelligently asserts in the film that “if you could earn a million pounds in a month, your morals would soon change and you’d get your bits out”, it’s hard to disagree. The presence of Bonnie’s family make her sexploits seem like a cottage industry.
Part of the documentary’s purpose is to make clear that Bonnie is not being exploited, she is not traumatised by sleeping with 1,000 men, she enjoys sex and she enjoys pleasing men – you could say that it’s her kink.
And it’s a kink that is being enjoyed by her hundreds of thousands of subscribers and fans.
Bonnie’s romps with strangers is something she considers to be a form of sex therapy for men who may have had negative sexual experiences or are lacking confidence due to how their wives and girlfriends treat them.
She said: “I don’t care whether you’re skinny, whether you’re fat, whether you’re experienced or not. Whether you can’t last long … Whether you’re short or long … I hate judgement.
“I would never judge someone.
“I don’t care whether you’ve got a girlfriend, a wife, whether you are feeling down or what, I just want to get to know you and however I can help I want to do that. Also, they don’t judge me.
“Some of them come and they’re having a laugh with their friends, it's like, ‘You know what lads, instead of going to the pub, let’s go rail Bonnie Blue today.’”
Despite being accused of promoting rape culture and setting back feminism, I can’t help but think this is a message of sex positivity.
I put it to Bonnie that the online hate she gets, mostly from women, is fuelled by simple jealousy. She’s 26, she’s petite (a size 6), she’s beautiful – her blue eyes are piercing in the flesh – and she’s a millionaire. If she retired from making adult content tomorrow she would be financially secure for life.
She agrees and it’s something she exploits with her “rage bait” TikTok posts which she deliberately makes to upset her haters and get her even more publicity.
“I like my bank balance going up. I like the shopping trips, the private jets and everything else. They’re not doing anything to better their life, I am,” she said. “They’ve got nothing else to do other than sit and watch these TikToks, and they get wound up and make a TikTok about me making a TikTok. I think if you don’t like your life, get up, do something about it. If you’re a woman and you want to be independent, go and get a job. Go and do whatever you want to do but you don’t need to rely on a guy and you don’t need to a stay at home.”
However, there is a darker side to the online hate, one that manifests itself in real life. One moment in the documentary shows Bonnie out with her bodyguards, she casually says, “I'm terrified of having an acid attack.” I put it to her that it’s a frightening way to have to live, but Bonnie accepts it as being a consequence of her career choice.
She said: “I think we're in a world where, unfortunately, things happen to people, whether they've got money or not, whether they're famous or not, and that's disgusting. It's terrible that we live in a world where bad things happen to people all the time. But, yeah, I'm fully aware that I get death threats every single day, so I'd be stupid to walk down the street without it [security], but I'm also okay with it. I'm aware that most of my hate comes from women that can't be arsed to get off the sofa, so I don't I don't ever feel endangered. When I'm out in person, honestly, everyone's so amazing to me. They're so sweet, they're so nice, so I don't feel scared. It's more just so that I can go out and I can be carefree.”
During the evening I spend some time with Bonnie’s mother Sarah, her eyes drawn to my elaborate choice of hat for the evening, a gold turban, one has to do something to avert eyes from beautiful Bonnie. It has the desired effect as she calls her daughter over to get a photo with me.
What is clear is that Sarah’s support for her daughter’s porn career is genuine. If anything she seems proud to be the parent of a self-made millionaire.
Bonnie is very disarming; witty, funny, confident. In the post-porn star era of adult entertainment she has made herself the new queen.
Her stunts have made her the adult star that comes alive from your phone screen. A porn babe that you could actually have sex with.
She is an adult performer for the social media age. And her next planned stunts will keep at the apex of the adult industry.
