How Bonnie Blue porn on Channel 4 helps fuel dangerous attitudes towards women among young men
As England’s women’s football team provided positive female role models for the young generation, a Channel 4 documentary followed Tia Billinger, known as Bonnie Blue, as she attempted to have sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours
What are we teaching our children? Last Sunday night, I suspect even die-hard Tartan Army fans cheered on the England women’s football team as they battled against Spain to win the 2025 European championships.
Chloe Kelly, the hero of the team’s 2022 Euro victory, is once again the nation’s darling, her blonde ponytail bouncing with joy as she scored the vital goals that kept England in contention. And she has been joined in our affections by a newcomer, 19-year-old Michelle Agyemang from Essex, whose two equalisers were equally as important.
Every player in the England squad is a positive role model for our girls and boys. The very best of British and the champions of a feminist revolution that saw women’s football transformed from a laughing stock to the most popular sport for girls in less than a generation.
‘I’m a girl boss’
Fast-forward to Wednesday night and Channel 4. The public broadcaster aired a documentary which made my skin crawl. The film, 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, followed 26-year-old Tia Billinger (Bonnie Blue) as she attempted to break a world record by having sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours. Or to be more accurate, she lay on her back while queues of ‘ordinary’ men, many wearing balaclavas to hide their shame, queued up to ejaculate over her face.
The female director, Victoria Silver, took a very uncritical stance to her subject. Even her question to Billinger about feminism was a polite, almost hesitant attempt to interrogate the impact of pornography on young women and contemporary culture. “In terms of feminism, are you not maybe sending us backwards?” she asked tentatively. Billinger was robust in her answer, declaring that her lifestyle as a self-employed porn star was what feminists had been working for. “I’m a girl boss, an entrepreneur,” she said.
Sorry Tia, but no feminists I know, or any I hold in high regard, have ever argued that sex with 1,000 strangers for cash, or even just one, is empowering, or has anything remotely to do with the social and economic liberation of women. Quite the opposite.
There is a school of thought among some ‘liberal’ feminists that selling sex is work, in the same way that being a nurse or civil servant is employment, but their wrong-headed, naïve analysis doesn’t bear close examination.
Prostitution and pornography are exploitative and abusive, whether they involve a vulnerable teenage girl offering oral sex for sale on the back streets of Edinburgh or an emotionally stunted woman urging men to “treat me like your s***”, as Billinger did on her OnlyFans site.
Boys’ attitudes to women
The Channel 4 documentary highlights something even more worrying than the long-standing argument among feminists about prostitution. It exposes a culture which has dehumanised young women, where their only value is as a sexual vessel for men. In the week the country celebrated the achievement of some of country’s most talented sportswomen, a porn star was elevated to something akin to a national treasure, at least by some sections of the media.
Little wonder that young people, male and female, are confused about sex and their respective roles in society – with girls believing that choking during sex is ‘normal’, and many boys viewing women as little more than sexual objects. And right on cue, a Glasgow University study published this week shows that a third of boys believe that skimpy outfits meant that girls were “asking for trouble” – attitudes reminiscent of the 1970s when rape survivors were told they were “asking for it” because they wore a mini-skirt or walked home alone at midnight.
And the same proportion of boys said they would “judge” a girl more than a boy for having sex with lots of people. Kirstin Mitchell, professor of social sciences and public health at Glasgow University, who worked on the study, said its findings gave an indication of the “general culture” behind serious incidents of violence against women and girls.
Channel 4 tried to justify commissioning the Bonnie Blue film by saying its role is to tell stories “at the edge of modern morality”. This would be almost acceptable if the documentary results in a public debate about the parlous state of our collective morality, and the mixed messages that we are giving our children.
The sewer we are swimming in
But I fear all the film has done is provide late-night titillation for teenage boys, and many older men who should know better. Worse, it elevates Tia Billinger and her ilk as role models – implying to susceptible teenage girls that sexual degradation is something to aspire to, not dread.
One of most unsettling moments in the film – and there were many – was when Billinger’s mother said: “If you earn £1 million a month, your morals would change and you’d get your tits out.”
At the risk of sounding like Mary Whitehouse, the art teacher turned conservative campaigner who argued in the 1960s and 70s that the media was partly responsible for a fall in the nation’s moral standards, I fear for our society.
Have we really reached a point where personal degradation is a price worth paying for fame and fortune? And how can any mainstream broadcaster, let alone one funded by taxpayers, justify promoting a lifestyle based on exploitative pornography to young people?
Billinger’s descent into a cesspit of group sex may make an interesting topic at a metropolitan dinner party. However, I hazard a guess that very few parents, no matter how progressive, would want to see their own daughter selling herself to a crowd of strangers.
Nor would they wish to see their son queuing up to abuse a woman in the full glare of a web-cam. But this is the sewer we are now all swimming in – it feels very uncomfortable. And dangerous.
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