Bonnie Blue is the most famous British woman not everyone knows. Ms Blue, a 26-year-old from Nottinghamshire, has become a mainstay of social media, her blonde hair and blue eyes beaming out from TikTok feeds, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. Her Wikipedia page gets more traffic than Beyoncé’s, and a little less than Taylor Swift’s, even if some still say “Bonnie who?” when her name is mentioned. She has become a frequent guest on podcasts that enjoy immense listenership, yet create barely a ripple in older media.
Why the disparity? Her fame is not family-friendly. Ms Blue is a porn star, famous for stunts such as claiming to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. Footage of the event is not erotic. It is by turns surreal and disturbing, like staring at a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Nearly all the men awkwardly queuing wear balaclavas; one man brought his mother. At the end, the final gentleman begins thanking the cameraman and crew before launching into a rendition of “You’ve Got A Friend In Me”, from “Toy Story”.
Luckily, attention rather than arousal was the aim. The video was to plug OnlyFans, a British website where customers can pay porn stars directly. Ms Blue said she earned £600,000 a month posting more orthodox videos than the marathon sessions that made her name. In terms of attracting notice, it worked. When some people picture Britain, they picture Ms Blue.
And why not? Ms Blue’s strengths are Britain’s strengths. Smut, scuzz and sin are fixtures of the British economy. Tobacco companies are among the largest in the ftse 100, along with booze companies. British gambling companies, though considerably smaller, are among the country’s best-run.
OnlyFans is simply another name on the list. In 2023 people spent a little under $7bn in total on OnlyFans—or roughly how much broadcasters paid in total to show the Premier League outside Britain from 2022 to 2025. OnlyFans, which takes a 20% cut, achieves pre-tax profits of nearly $700m, sending a wodge of corporation tax to hm Revenue & Customs. Now OnlyFans’ owner is looking to sell it, wanting $8bn for the company.
If it is sometimes confusing to work out how Britain makes a living, Ms Blue and her ilk provide an answer. In one gimmick, Ms Blue turned up at Nottingham Trent University offering to bed any student. The gambit was sponsored by Stake.com, an Australian gambling company, whose logo also adorns the shirt of Everton Football Club. An OnlyFans star, a low-tariff university reliant on foreign students, and a gambling company? Behold Britain’s thriving services sector.
After all, London is stuffed with advisory agencies staffed by smooth men with pinky rings who will tell any story for a fat monthly fee. Ms Blue simply did it for herself. If Britain has a world-class sin sector, its bullshit industry is second to none. Attention is a powerful thing and Ms Blue knows how to get it.
Without media Leviathans able to control who sees what, the battle for attention becomes a fight of all-against-all. This provides a gap for people such as Ms Blue who are willing to do anything to gain it. That is how Ms Blue wound up with the queue of men in balaclavas. After Lily Phillips, another British OnlyFans star, had sex with 101 men in one session, Ms Blue promised to breach the 1,000 mark. Extreme content generated extreme reaction. Hordes of social-media users declared themselves disgusted, but subscribers to Ms Blue’s OnlyFans account trickled in.
The system can be gamed, of course. Any self-respecting OnlyFans star relies on a network of accounts to spray content across people’s feeds. Synthetic attention can evolve into organic popularity. Every piece of content on a TikTok feed bears the scars of this constant, hidden struggle over the memes of production. It is a fight that Ms Blue and her team were able to win.
Such modern strategies were matched with a more traditional one. Ms Blue speaks in headlines. She fed journalists talking points, whether about sleeping with young men (“barely legal”) or old men (“barely breathing”). Ms Blue was welcomed onto “This Morning”, a wholesome daytime television show, because producers know that controversy and clicks will follow.
The result is that porn has merged back into people’s everyday media consumption, just as it did in the days when British tabloids used to run news from Westminster opposite pictures of naked women. Discourse has returned to the 1980s, when the Sun would happily splash outrageous headlines, such as “Freddie Starr ate my hamster”, without bothering to question precisely how true it was. Did Ms Blue really sleep with 1,057 men? Did Freddie Starr eat a hamster? Does it matter?
The medium is the message
A respectability of sorts beckons for Ms Blue. Channel 4, a highbrow-ish channel, is working on a documentary about her. There are limits, however. Even the most cynical of investors are wary of too much smut. OnlyFans kicked Ms Blue off the platform on June 9th. Promoting an OnlyFans account via extreme content, such as sleeping with hundreds of men in one go, violated the platform’s terms of service. When an $8bn sale is at stake, having Ms Blue as one of its most prominent figures would not do.
OnlyFans can cut Ms Blue loose, but Britain has no such option. Successive governments are obsessed with soft power, carefully husbanding the country’s reputation as its actual power wanes. “Britain is Great” adverts featuring Paddington Bear and Harry Potter gaze down on travellers in foreign airports. It is a vision free from the smut that also helps the country pay its way. Ms Blue is unlikely to join Paddington and Potter any time soon. There is no need. In 2025, if someone lies back and thinks of England, they may well think of Ms Blue. ■
