Bonnie Blue: taking clickbait to extremes

The phrase 'for the male gaze' could have been coined for self-proclaimed feminist Blue

(Image credit: Gilbert Flores / Variety via Getty Images)

"You know what would make this world a better place? More pornography." No sensible person has ever said that, yet every day, more pornography – more women encouraging men to use them like "old dishrags" – is what we get, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times.

Sometimes, there are "small panics" about this. Last week, Channel 4 caused a stir with its documentary about Bonnie Blue, a 26-year-old who has won a huge following by posting clips of her extreme pornographic stunts. It focuses on one last year, in which she supposedly had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. This is "squalid", "end of days stuff", said Carol Midgley in The Times. We saw Blue (real name Tia Billinger) inviting men to "treat me like your slut", and "rearrange my insides"; and a shuffling queue of volunteers, many naked save for T-shirts and "bobbling sports socks", waiting to take up that offer. That some wore balaclavas for their very brief contribution to this bleak (and barely pixelated) spectacle gave it an extra "'rapey' flavour".

Channel 4 claims it is opening up a debate, said India Block in The London Standard. But really, the film is just an excuse to show explicit sex and whip up a media storm. People accuse Blue of normalising violent porn and leading women down a dark path – yet it is men who create the market for sex work. I see her videos as akin to performance art, with echoes of Marina Abramovic. Either way, they're a logical response to the "attention economy". In a saturated arena, it takes increasingly extreme or outrageous content to attract attention and generate the clicks that translate into cash. Blue claims to make £1 million a month.

She says she is a feminist, said Pravina Rudra in The i Paper. Yet if a man did this, we'd still be "grossed out". She sells degradation, not sex positivity. The phrase "for the male gaze" could have been coined for her. And she makes misogynistic remarks about the wives of the men she has sex with to get more users to her sites (a tactic called "rage bait"). Her films are not art, they're marketing, and she is no manifestation of feminism; she "is the endpoint of capitalism, where everything can be laid to the side in pursuit of profit", including your own body.