Imagine you’re in a queue. Surrounded by men you don’t know, some of whom are just in their boxers, you find yourself waiting around for hours on the staircase of a £15m mansion. Perhaps you exchange some small talk with the man in front of you: he’s wearing a balaclava. Mostly, though, you just stand in silence, interrupted only occasionally by sounds of moaning from a nearby room somewhere at the top of the staircase. For now, though, you just wait until it’s your turn to be in that room yourself, having sex with a 25-year-old woman you’ve never met.
This was the situation facilitated earlier this month by OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue, who claims to have slept with a record-breaking 1,057 men in 12 hours. Blue, whose real name is Tia Billinger, has faced an inordinate amount of opprobrium for her so-called “extreme sex stunts”; she proudly talks about sleeping with fathers and sons simultaneously and encourages “grandads and husbands” to take part in her challenges. She has been labelled a sl**, a skank and a liar, with many decrying it impossible to bed that many men in the timeframe Blue alleges. The health risks have been pored over, as have her incentives for doing all this, with some calling it a bizarre cash grab while others have called it a trauma response.
All this is to say that the Bonnie Blue discourse is hardly waning any time soon, nor is it short of subjects. But one angle seems to be being sidelined: what about the men? This brings me back to the queue, video footage of which has been going viral on Instagram. In it, you can see men of all ages, truly just standing around, waiting to sleep with Blue. Whether there were really 1,000 or not is less important than the fact that they were there, buying into the idea of guaranteed sex with a young woman alongside several other men, treating her like some sort of strange commodity.
Interviews with some of the men have been shared on social media. “It was brilliant to f*** her,” one man in a blue balaclava told the TikTok creator, Beavo, later boasting about doing it “hard”. Another 42-year-old man named Ali told Mail Online, that it was “surreal”. “I was just amazed about what was going on,” he added. “I had been told it was one-to-one sessions, so I presumed you got into a room with her one at a time but when I got there it was a free-for-all. There were around 30 or 40 guys around her at any one time all taking turns. She was surrounded by guys.” Another man who claims to have taken part said he did it for “clout”.
It paints a grim picture, one that feels prehistoric; a depressing pornification of end times. This is particularly true considering Blue’s stunt was only capitalising on the proven shock value created by another OnlyFans star, Lily Phillips, who claimed to have slept with 100 men in a day. A short documentary of her efforts was made by YouTuber Josh Pieters and features interviews with some of the men who took part, one of whom had flown in from Switzerland especially. “This has got to be the most expensive shag ever,” he told Pieters, calculating that it must have cost him around £800 in total. Still, he insisted it was worth it.
Olivia Attwood has called out “people’s husbands, brothers, sons, colleagues” for taking part, and Katherine Ryan spoke about the men in an episode of her podcast, calling them “losers”. “What is wrong with men?” she asked her listeners, referring to the ones waiting for Blue. “I was transfixed on this queue of men just looking like f***ing idiots in their socks and boxers with their dumb hairy legs just sticking out in this corridor. Ryan added: “So everyone is calling her a sl**, of course, people love to sl**-shame women,” she said. “And the men aren’t even embarrassed at this point, they’re like, ‘I was Bonnie Blue number 304!’ And they’re making their own videos, because she’s like a celebrity to them.”
Both Phillips and Blue have announced their intentions to take on more “challenges” like this in the future. And I don’t doubt for a second they’ll struggle to find willing participants. What does it say about the state of these heterosexual men that so many of them are up eager to partake in something as objectively degrading as this? And that they’re equally happy to see these women as pieces of meat primed for their consumption? I’m sure they’re rationalising it to themselves through a combination of, “well, she’s the one who organised it” and “she’s profiting off it by using it for OnlyFans content”. But this trend, which sees groups of men taking turns to have sex with a woman they don’t know, was conceived of during the Pelicot trial, making it all feel a lot more insidious.
There might be nothing ostensibly violent about the sex that is happening because there is consent. But one woman being surrounded by a group of men she doesn’t know, having sex with her or engaging in sexual acts around her, is as good a gateway to sexual violence as any. In these scenarios, the women might think they have the power but physically and sociologically, they simply don’t. They’re just wilfully buying into a system that exploits them. Whichever way you look at it, it’s dark. And I find it hard to believe every single one of the men in that room only ever doing things to Blue that she explicitly consented to beforehand.
But the most concerning thing about all this has little to do with Blue or Phillips. It’s about the landscape their behaviour creates for other women, particularly teenagers who are seeing their content plastered all over TikTok and might not have even had sex yet. What message is this sending to them? That women are nothing more than their bodies? That we should be “up” for anything in the bedroom if we want to please our male partners? Maybe it’s that we’re mere tools for male pleasure because our own is irrelevant – Phillips has revealed that she didn’t have a single orgasm during any of her 100 sexual encounters.
Now consider the lives of these men outside of that queue. Even though Blue and Phillips might not feel victimised by any of them, who’s to say other women in the lives of these men won’t be? Because once the men have got what they came for, where do they go next? Back to their wives, girlfriends, and daughters? Back to their jobs with female colleagues? Or maybe they return on OnlyFans, scrolling through videos of naked women, hoping one might let them have sex with her soon.
