The Bonnie Blue documentary 1000 Men and Me, which aired on Channel 4 this week, answered one question I have long had about the 26-year-old adult film star, who has become (in)famous for stunts such as sleeping with 1,057 men in a day and taking freshers’ virginities.
Couldn’t she have taken up, say, arts and crafts to alleviate the boredom she suggested she felt at her old life as a finance recruiter in the NHS? But there, interspersed with footage of her surrounded by men in balaclavas, or her face covered in bodily fluids, were scenes of Blue carefully arranging beads on a canvas and slotting together jigsaw pieces.
The documentary could not, however, answer the question every interviewer and critic is desperate to ask: “What was so disturbing about Blue’s childhood that made her pursue the life she does now?”
Blue’s level of emotional detachment, or even relish when it comes to extreme sexual acts, is the sort of thing that can point to a troubled or traumatic upbringing. But by all accounts, her’s was a happy, ordinary one – a sleepy village in Derbyshire, nice middle-class parents, competing in the British Street Dance Championships. The most expansive profile of her recently, in The Times, described her childhood as “warm, close, loving”.
If there is no apparent pathology and Blue’s parents aren’t to blame, people must hold society – modern society – liable. It doesn’t help that Blue defends her work by saying, “This is to a certain degree what feminism has asked for, a woman that can take control.” Many commentators blame the rise of Blue on “sex positivity”, and corners of third-wave feminism which suggest that any woman making money from sex work and porn is “liberated”.
At the extreme end, you have Andrew Tate’s quote on an infamous podcast he did with Blue, where he described her as the “perfect end result of feminism”; likewise, Jedediah Bilah, the right-wing podcast host, suggested she is the “ultimate manifestation of modern feminism”.
But it is not just radical voices. The Times article also describes Blue as the “Germaine Greer” of sex-positive feminism; a Spectator piece blames Blue’s actions partly on the “grotesque evasion” of “sex positivity”; another journalist links her to “the excesses of the sexual revolution”.
Third-wave feminism does not always have satisfactory answers on porn and sex work. But the idea that Bonnie Blue is in any way a manifestation of any wave of feminism, is a joke. A back-of-the-envelope test for whether something is feminist is, I’d argue, how we’d feel if a man did it. And I think we’d still be pretty grossed out by a man performing the stunts Blue does.
Sex positivity is chiefly about women being able to enjoy sex like men can: yet Blue doesn’t even care for her own orgasms; her content is overwhelmingly based around her degradation. She was forced to cancel her “petting zoo” event which would see her tied up and treated as an animal, while after another of her stunts – where she had sex with 100 porn stars in a day – her videographer coolly said “she basically just got beat up for a few hours”. It feels like the phrase “for the male gaze” was invented for Bonnie Blue.
Blue appears agnostic, when pushed, to the plight of young girls who may see her content online and think that it represents a normal way to have sex with men, saying it’s up to parents to educate their kids. She says her favourite thing is seeing wedding rings on the men she sleeps with; that the content she enjoys making the most is with “the barely legals, the students, the husbands”. It’s not giving “women supporting women”.
For all the keenness to try and understand Blue through feminism or her seemingly non-existent childhood trauma, the answer of what drives her is staring us in the face. The one time you see Blue truly downcast on the documentary is not when she has the worst flu of her life (after the 1,000 men), nor when she describes being unable to go out by herself due to safety concerns. She is, however, stirred to frustration when OnlyFans bans footage she creates with “normal people” (as opposed to adult performers), and thus a revenue stream.
As the quote every thinkpiece repeats from Blue’s mum goes: “If you could earn a million pounds in a month, your morals would soon change and you’d get your bits out.” Blue self-avowedly encourages outrage, particularly from women, because it drives clicks. She earns £1.5m a month, but that is not enough: she states her ambition is to get £5m a month. This isn’t a woman trying to get by; this is greed.
Bonnie Blue is not the “ultimate manifestation” of feminism, she is the endpoint of capitalism; where everything else can be laid to the side in pursuit of profit, including other women, and including her own body.
When you examine closer, everything Blue does is performance art in the service of advertising. Yes, she might sleep with men for free but she never does so secretly, it’s only ever “content”. She has marketing slogans: the tongue-twister “1000-man-gangbang” is repeated so much on the documentary it starts to feel mundane (which is some feat), ditto “rearrange my insides”.
When Blue says “my kink is gangbangs”, she means it’s her cash cow. Ultimately, Bonnie Blue is not about female empowerment; she is about Bonnie Blue empowerment. It’s intellectual dishonesty to link her to anything women are striving for.