Bonnie Blue, the 26-year old British porn star born Tia Billinger, has the nation clutching their collective pearls once again. Her latest sex stunt, catchily named Bonnie Blue’s Petting Zoo, was perfectly pitched to generate outrage. The plan? Get tied up in a glass box in central London and invite men to use her how they saw fit.
Obviously, this was never going to happen. What council would have approved that planning permission application? But the mere concept caused another explosion of interest in her. Columnists are losing their minds in an orgy of prudishness over a woman offering their body up to men in a public display of debauchery. She’s reportedly had her OnlyFans account deactivated for breaching their content guidelines.
Why does she do it? Well, money, duh. The content creation arena has reached saturation point, and to cut through to people’s eyeballs — so valuable for advertising revenue generation — one has to push the boundaries.
In the attention economy, a good stunt is the equivalent of a flash-bang grenade. Stage spectacles designed to horrify yet grip you. Where Evel Knievel once jumped his motorbike over cars (and threatened to have a go at the Grand Canyon), now content creators compete to find even more exaggerated ways to use frail human bodies to shock people so hard they can’t look away.
The petting zoo may have backfired somewhat — if her OnlyFans is indeed deactivated she loses a major income source — but it also adds a further element of taboo to her already eye-catching career. Banning something only makes it more interesting, as if there could be some lost snuff footage of Blue in the glass box out there. See, you’re already imagining it.
Public discourse feminism has become increasingly sex negative and anti sex work recently, as the political pendulum swings right, and Blue has become the bogeywoman of tiresome debates over porn.
Personally, I interpret Blue’s stunts as something akin to performance art. The petting zoo plot obviously cribbed, as pornography has repeatedly done in the past, from mainstream art. In this case from David Blaine, whose 2003 work Above the Below saw the American artist encased in a Perspex box suspended over the Thames. Blaine spent over six weeks in the box, refusing food and surviving on only 4.5 litres of water a day. He pushed the human body to the limit, and was hospitalised immediately afterwards.
We proved how obsessed we are with bodily functions and temptation when they’re put on display. What would have happened if the petting zoo went ahead? Would she get bathroom breaks or simply go where she was tied up like an animal?
I saw echoes of the artist Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 in January this year, when Blue staked a claim to having consecutively copulated with 1,057 men in 12 hours. It was a theatrical affair. The men were drawn into the performance of the sex marathon, as they made their sheepish pilgrimage to penetrate the porn artist. In behind-the-scenes footage you see them shuffle in a line, hiding their faces with balaclavas like they’re in a hostage video.
It was ritualistic, with social media onlookers apportioning increasing levels of shame as the number of sexual partners ticked up. Everyone watching or commenting joins in too. There’s even a cottage industry of other women content creators “discovering” their partner has participated in a Blue performance, as they perform their outrage and humiliation for front-facing phone cameras.
Blue performs sex acts, the men cross from audience to participant. It is men, after all, that are the ones helping to produce and ultimately purchasing this content. Blue is the one subject to censure, and accusations of leading young women down a dark path into porn influencing. But the popularity of OnlyFans shows how sex workers have had to adapt to become digital courtesans, curating a brand around their wares to stand out from the seething crowd of on-demand nudes.
Tellingly, it is not just the pay-to-view pictures and videos that sell best on the platform. Many porn creators and models offer a subscription “girlfriend experience” where they chat to men about their days and offer emotional support. We think that only women are emotional about sex, but it seems like in the male loneliness epidemic it is companionship men also crave. Well, a sense of companionship with a woman who looks hot in photos and won’t tell you off for leaving wet towels on the bed. It doesn’t sound satisfying and healthy for men, even if it’s an income source for the women everyone’s pretending to worry about.
Of course, even the “girlfriend experience” is performative — and sometimes pure smoke and mirrors. OnlyFans was sued earlier this year when two subscribers filed a class action lawsuit after they began to suspect the models they were paying to chat with had outsourced the personal messaging to agencies. I don’t feel too sorry for the men who were duped, but it does prove that sex work is work if it can be outsourced to contractors.
If it sounds as though I positively endorse Blue’s work, that’s not entirely true. I believe it does reveal something morally wrong in modern British society, but not because one woman is selling sex on the internet with flashy stunts to get the punters in the door.
Britain has the highest number of OnlyFans content creators — 280,000 — after America’s one million. We don’t know how many of those are selling intimate pictures, videos, or the apparently lucrative “girlfriend experience” (aka making bank from the male loneliness epidemic), but it’s clearly a tempting option for young women.
Unsurprising, when our salaries are so crushingly low and the cost of living so gaspingly high. There are very few creators who could earn enough — with OnlyFans’ cut taken into account — to make ends meet. Instead it functions as a side hustle, where young women top up their incomes by playing digital courtesans. Along with pitiable pay, Britons also have some of the worst work/life balance options in Europe. A toxic combination that makes part-time sex work a tempting option.
I’d rather no one had to participate in dangerous or humiliating stunts to make money, that influencer of any kind wasn’t such an attractive career choice. But until we address more fundamental issues in society — fair pay, equality, housing — pointing the finger at figures like Blue and Only Fans is a distraction. If you’re still watching the show, it’s time to get off your high horse. You’re already part of the performance.
India Block is a London Standard columnist
