A commercial instinct created her brand, a market sustains it and mainstream businesses profit. It’s a tale of very capitalist times
Bonnie Blue has sex with men on camera for money. Lots of men one after the other, to be precise, for lots and lots of money: the commercial niche she invented to distinguish herself from countless other amateur porn stars jostling desperately for attention on OnlyFans was inviting “barely legal” ordinary teenage boys (which in porn means 18-plus) to have sex with her on film, and flogging the results to paying subscribers for a fortune. Unusually, her model involves a woman making millions out of men generating content for free, which makes it slightly harder than usual to work out exactly who is exploiting whom if she turns up (as she did in Nottingham) at a university freshers’ week with a sign saying “bonk me and let me film it”.
But debating whether getting rich this way makes Bonnie personally “empowered” seems tired and pointless. It was with this old pseudo-feminist chestnut that Channel 4 justified last week’s ratings-chasing documentary on her attempt to sleep with 1,000 men in 12 hours, a film that finally brought her into the cultural mainstream. There’s more to this story than sex, gender politics or Bonnie herself, and whatever is driving her (which she swears isn’t past trauma, “daddy issues” over a biological father she never knew, or anything else you’re thinking: though she does say maybe her brain works differently from other people’s, given her curious ability to switch off her emotions). It’s at heart a story about money, the merging of the oldest trade in the world with a newer attention economy inexorably geared towards rewarding extremes, and what that does to the society that unwittingly produced it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
