A woman prostituting herself is the ultimate feminist power move. Right? It implies a reclamation of agency, a role reversal. A man does not make money from a woman’s body, as pimps have done for centuries. The woman gets paid cash for her enjoyment of sex! She is the ultimate #womaninmalefields!

 

Bonnie Blue appears to be an exemplar of this reclamation of power, at least at first. The 25-year-old influencer, real name Tia Billinger, began her content creation career on OnlyFans in 2023 as a webcam model. She later moved away from posting this type of content on the site, expressing distaste for its rough, highly edited nature. Blue soon established a niche: filming herself having paid-for sex with men ranging from 18-year-olds to their married fathers.

 

One could think of her OnlyFans videos as profitable sex tapes rather than porn, posted with the aim of depicting real sex that men “can see themselves in.” Each liaison is filmed and posted online, earning her upwards of £600k per month.

 

In posting real sex, Blue claims she is doing something revolutionary, separating herself from a site that so often posts scripted, fake content. OnlyFans sells a lie to each and every voyeur, thereby creating a harmfully unrepresentative depiction of intimacy. In a way, Blue is halfway there: content found on sites like these should be taken with a barrel of salt. Yet, the creator never fully succeeds in identifying the real evil because she, too, is a victim of it: OnlyFans thrives off centuries-old sexualisation of women, cooked up and seasoned to satiate men’s hunger. Misogyny festers where objectification sells.

 

OnlyFans has been ruthlessly criticised and pulled apart ever since its creation. It is not a ‘feminist’ platform, even if a woman makes money from it. In the first place, most creators only earn around $140 per month after taxes. These women are hardly self-made billionaires. Studies show that sex traffickers consistently use the platform to abuse and exploit women. What is even darker, though, is the underlying message: sex is commodified under the guise of ‘empowerment’; OnlyFans is fuelled by drooling men who can do whatever they want to—not with—us. Outraged TikTok comments paint Blue as a predator of younger men, but is a fallacy to claim that women can ever be in control here. Ultimately, we are prey.

 

Fair enough, Bonnie Blue has the full say in what she posts. No one is behind the camera, no one is choreographing the sex nor telling her how to ‘please a man’. But this hardly absolves her of any criticism. In numerous interviews, when questioned about the ethics of sleeping with married men, Blue responds that wives “can’t expect bills [to be paid] and the house to be cleaned… if you’re not at least going down on them”—hence why men are going off and cheating with Blue. Wives should thus watch her content (this being her sleeping with their husbands) because the creator can “educate them in the bedroom.” Talk about a gross misplacement of blame.

 

Bonnie Blue’s assertion that this is the way women think, that pleasing a husband is where our priorities lie, is beyond belief. I had to take a long, long pause.

 

Her attitude echoes 1950s housewife rhetoric, except I (like most people, I’m sure) don’t believe any woman’s mind would really work in this way. If you ask Blue, a wife is unquestionably slave in body and in mind to the husband. Not to mention, the creator implicitly assumes that within a 21st Century marriage, the husband is paying the bills, that his fidelity is contingent upon whether or not his wife will go down on him, that her main responsibility is to please him sexually. This sex is not a mutually pleasurable act. It is a blowjob. The wife doesn’t get off, except on her husband’s pleasure. This is more than enough for her.

 

By incorrectly placing the blame on women and issues in a couple’s sex life, Blue validates the excuse so many use to cheat: ‘men have needs’. They simply have to have sex, so much so that they would sleep with a random content creator before actually having an honest discussion with their wives. “I don’t know why some people are so shocked when their partners cheat,” Blue admits: sexual inadequacy in a relationship both explains and validates infidelity. The creator lies in wait, ready and eager to welcome married men, validating their internalised misogyny that blames a woman for all of their issues.

 

Blue appears to believe that because her content showcases real sex, she is providing valuable instruction for women and men on how to have it. She claims that this distinction between her methods and what one usually finds on OnlyFans is enough to validate her videos. But the problem with OnlyFans is not simply that the content isn’t real. It is a site rooted in misogyny, in a seedy world that sells and profits from the subjugation of women. Blue’s disregard for this, coupled with the way in which she speaks of other women, reveals her as a thinly disguised victim of the patriarchy and perpetuator of its rhetoric—not a symbol of liberation.∎

 

Words by Keziah McCann. Image courtesy of Holly Randall Unfiltered via Wikimedia Commons.