Bonnie Blue and the Insufficiency of the Magic Word “Consent”

One of the great scandals of antiquity is the story of Messalina, beloved wife of the Emperor Claudius, whose alleged sexual exploits were considered a scandal even by the Romans, who were broadly tolerant of sexual incontinence.

The empress was alleged by contemporary authors – many of whom may have been motivated either by personal animus against her or a desire to ingratiate themselves with the powerful – to have been so determined to debase herself that she challenged a woman called Scylla, the greatest Roman prostitute of her age, to a competition to see how many men they could bed in a single afternoon.

Messalina, it is said, won. The score? 25 to 24 in favor of the empress, who later lost her head, figuratively and literally, when she married another man behind Claudius’s back and attempted to install him as emperor. Or as her modern equivalent Bonnie Blue might describe those events: a promising career cut short.

Messalina, of course, would be no match for Blue – real name Tia Billinger – whose exploits have become the subject of modern scandal, but also no little media fascination.

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A Career Built on Escalation

Blue’s adult entertainment career began in scandalous fashion in 2022, when she made her name by going to Australia to hand out her business card at so-called schoolies events attended by 18-year-old school leavers and offering them group sex with her, before filming the resultant orgies. She began regularly attending events populated by very young men, posing with her mother and a sign saying bonk me and let me film it.

These behaviours got her banned from Australia, but she continued the practice in her native UK. In March 2024, she had sex with 122 students at Spring Break in Cancun, before offering herself to 150 first-year students during Freshers’ Week at Derby and Nottingham universities in September.

Then in January 2025, she broke a world record by allowing 1,057 men to have sex with her in a single afternoon, with the event filmed for her OnlyFans and media reports showing men lining up – quite literally – around the block for their turn, each of which lasted just a few minutes.

Blue’s next stunt was so extreme as to get her permanently banned from OnlyFans, after career earnings in the millions: she proposed to have herself tied up naked in a public space, in a box, and permit any person who wished to have sex with her without her being able to object.

With her latest stunt, she may have finally gone too far.

Bonnie Blue is now pregnant – and, as with most things in her life, intends to exploit this for its pornographic value. She has announced that at an upcoming event, she will encourage men to participate in a "baby shower" to celebrate the impending birth of her child, in which several hundred men will be encouraged to "shower" her with semen and urine.

Blue’s conduct poses a question which conservatives have found hard to answer: what is to be done about somebody like her, whose conduct – though perfectly legal – is so transparently damaging not only to her, but to society at large?

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No Doubt About the Harm Bonnie Blue Does

For make no mistake, it is damaging.

Bonnie Blue’s conduct, and the fame she has acquired, come with costs that are not borne by her alone. Every single one of the millions of views her “performances” rack up equates to a man, or in a small number of cases a woman, who is being taught to view the female body as an object and a plaything. Each one of them equates to a person whose brain is being conditioned to find degradation of another person erotic. Every performance lowers the bar for what is extreme, sparking a dozen or more copycats and encouraging more young women – and some men – that the road to wealth and fame runs through permitting themselves to be performatively abused.

That word – “abused” – is not used enough when it comes to Blue. That is, after all, what her performances are about. Hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of men, each of them masked so that she does not know their identity, line up to use her body for their own pleasure. None of them appears to take any moment to reflect on whether what they are doing is for Blue’s benefit, or whether they are instead adding to a mountain of harm that has been inflicted both on her and by her, to her psyche and her well-being.

That a person can be consensually abused is neither here nor there. It is the act of abuse – using a person for your own satisfaction without any concern for their welfare – that is the point. In Blue’s latest stunt, that abuse extends, before the child has even been born, to her baby.

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The Line Between Sordid and Illegal

None of what is happening is illegal, nor would it be pragmatically possible to make it so. If it is not a crime to have consensual sex with one stranger, then it would be a strange law that made it illegal to have consensual sex with several hundred. Legislators would have a difficult time figuring out where the barrier between sordid and illegal was crossed.

But there is another set of laws, one that appears to have been largely forgotten in Europe, that should be used to address this issue. The laws in question relate to mental health.

It is not hard to see in Bonnie Blue behaviors that would be traditionally recognized as self-destructive. Amateur diagnosis is not required. All that need be said is that she is a willing participant in her own abuse. In eras past, such conduct may have been dealt with through the mental health system rather than the legal system.

Source: Keown et al., PLOS One; Walsh; Eurostat; Barbui et al.

Is Causing Such Harm a Civil Liberty?

There are, of course, major civil liberties questions here: Blue is a grown woman and a free citizen who is entitled, according to the dominant ideology, to live her life as she pleases. Certainly, institutionalizing her against her will would be an extreme measure, and not one to be entered into lightly.

Yet her behavior is extreme. It is, by any measure, damaging to society, specifically to its youth and its women. It is also now potentially seriously damaging to her child. If 1,000 people agree that her conduct is not rational, can it truly be described as just another “choice”?

Yet this has led to problems: what is observable, in the case of Blue, is a woman who is transparently acting in a way that permits herself to be the victim of abuse in a voyeuristic way. If readers were to consume a news story that told a tale of a woman locked away for years and forced to have sex with thousands of men, they would have no difficulty in labeling it as abuse. Blue, by contrast, is an eager participant, and under the moral framework of progressivism consent alone is deemed sufficient to transform abuse into something perfectly legitimate.

The Insufficiency of Consent

Across the West, some version of this ideology is now taught to young people in almost every country: that “consent” is a magic word that transforms degrading and damaging behavior into something fun and permissible. Consent, of course, is important, but insufficient: consenting to an act in the moment does not mean that the person who consents is fully cognizant of the damage that may be wrought later – which is why it remains illegal, for example, to consensually sell one’s spare kidney.

Yet lots of other things that may objectively cause serious harm are also permitted under the auspices of consent. In surrogacy, for example, it is considered permissible to immediately and legally and permanently sever the bonds between a birth mother and her child in many jurisdictions, simply because the mother has signed a contract consenting to it – often without realizing the deep emotional suffering that might be wrought when a bond she had never experienced until holding the child in her arms is suddenly rent asunder.

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In cases of assisted dying, where consent is all that is required for the state to kill you, we will never know if those who take that path regret their choice. That is the point: the harm is irreversible, even as the consent may be momentary or situational.

A society that prides itself on compassion and empathy, as the modern West does, is curiously callous when it comes to consent. It is as if one magic word suffices to permit what many others can clearly see to be harm inflicted upon a person. A teenager consents to have their breasts, or penis, or ovaries removed? Then it is made so, with nary a flicker of concern from those who would be horrified should such an act be depicted on the cinema screen.

Does a young person who consents to an extreme sexual act really understand the damage that might be wrought later, in terms of their own self-esteem? Or feelings of being used or degraded or damaged? Does consenting to be urinated upon by hundreds of men – as Blue intends – render the act, or participating in it, less sadistic?

It may, in fact, be more cruel and harmful not to intervene.

Some of that shift in society was a necessary correction to a time when people's freedom to live their lives as they wished was oppressed unnecessarily. Yet it is harder and harder not to conclude, as the world watches Bonnie Blue's stunts and other grotesqueries permitted by consent, that a culture which can recognize no injury unless the victim first withdraws consent is very far from compassionate.