Who is Bonnie Blue? Is she the provocative adult content creator cheerfully banging her way through man after man in one of her infamous stunts? Or is she Tia Billinger, the girl from Derby who likes doing jigsaws at home?
She doesn’t seem to know – and by the end of 1,000 Men and Me, the new Channel 4 documentary about her own life, neither do we.
The documentary, which is presented, directed and narrated by Victoria Silver (whose face we never see), seeks to dive into the life of a woman who has made a career out of shocking and outraging the public.
Yes, there’s footage – a lot of footage – of her sleeping her way through a thousand men. The documentary starts with this, assuming (probably correctly) that this is the main reference point most of us have for her, and takes us through the prep (1,600 condoms have been ordered, we’re told, and 50 balaclavas) all the way to the event itself, which makes for exceptionally grim viewing. Prudes, look away: there is a lot of sex on show here, and the production team pixelates barely any of it.
Given that this is the title of the whole documentary, where does it go from there? Off-course, is the answer. We find out (in depth) about the tactics Bonnie uses to shock and titillate her audience; we find out about her ongoing struggles with OnlyFans, who eventually ban her from the platform for being too extreme. We also find out why she’s made a USP out of sleeping with “barely legal” young men: “it’s realistic, it’s relatable, my subscribers can go, ‘My dick looks like that, my body looks like that, I last nine seconds as well.’” Ouch.
Throughout it all, Bonnie seems keen to project an image of a confident, sexually liberated woman earning shedloads of cash (a million just from her ‘thousand men’ stunt, we’re told) from doing what she loves.
She repeatedly tells the camera that she loves her life, loves her career and cheerfully bats away questions about whether or not she feels responsible for fostering unhealthy attitudes towards sex in the younger generation. She blames parents, poor sex ed classes and porn rather than herself, and the director doesn’t seem interested in challenging her beyond that, which is a shame. She also brushes off any negative press; in fact, she seems to relish it. One of the episode’s more stomach-churning sequences shows her staging a porn production in a classroom, with younger content creators acting as students.
What comes across more, though, is how desperately sad her life seems to be. After the ‘thousand men’ stunt is over, we see Bonnie holed up in a rented house in Los Angeles with the flu, doing jigsaws and surrounded by her team. Towards the end of the documentary, she’s in London, now doing arts and crafts while talking about the fact that she rarely leaves the house alone for fear of being attacked. In the process of getting divorced from her husband, the only people she seems to have any meaningful interactions with are her family and her team.
There’s also the dark flipside of being in the porn industry. Despite Bonnie’s repeated assertions that she loves what she does, there’s no escaping the fact that to try and stay relevant, she has to take part in increasingly outrageous sexual stunts to keep the hype going.
This culminates, towards the end of the episode, in a gangbang she takes part in with a hundred other male porn stars. Seeing her after this – the façade cracked, while her assistant describes the experience as her being “beaten up” – is sobering; the final minutes of the series, where she excitedly tells the camera about her upcoming podcast appearance with Andrew Tate, is even more so.
The director tells us she decided to call time on filming the show here, which speaks volumes in itself. Where does she go from here? Yes, she has money in the bank. But what is she going to have to do to keep that money coming in?
1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story is streaming on Channel 4 from 10pm
