Claire Hope from Vancouver has just turned 18. Her mother is a real-estate agent, her father a lawyer. Last week, Claire reportedly made more than $1 million in less than three hours, after announcing the launch of her OnlyFans “bday special” on Instagram with a picture of herself sticking her middle fingers up at the camera. She wears a cropped t-shirt embroidered with the phrase “porn star in training”, promising “all content shot at 12.01am on my 18th birthday”. Claire first became famous as a sweary child rapper on YouTube, performing under the name Lil Tay. It is this persona, a nine-year-old schoolgirl in a puffer jacket waving around wads of cash, which the buyers of her OnlyFans will best recall.
Tia Billinger is 26 and from Nottinghamshire. She didn’t know her dad growing up and was raised by a stepdad. She married young and took up a job in financial recruitment for the NHS. These days, she claims to make around £600,000 a month by having sex with men she doesn’t know on OnlyFans under the nom de guerre Bonnie Blue. Her stepdad watches her TikToks. Her mum works as her PA. She is a PR nightmare and a pornographer’s dream.
An old Facebook post shows Hope as a girl clinging about her father’s neck in a blue zip-up jumper, smiling sweetly. Another photograph dug up by sleuths on TikTok shows Billinger smiling with a group of friends in her early teens, decked out in quintessential 2010s British fashion — shorts over tights, dip-dyed hair, white Converses. These two images feel so removed from the polished, perfectly lit personas we see today, but are worth revisiting. Why? Because they more closely resemble those who suffer from a system which heralds sex on demand as a mark of progress. Open your eyes, and it’s anything but.
Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are entrepreneurs of outrage, flirting with progressively shocking taboos as a way of driving engagement. Blue, never one to miss a headline grab, has messaged Tay asking to do a “collab”, piling hype on hype. They have each carved out a USP: Lil Tay is the barely legal wild child, very much still baby-faced, trading in her existing internet virality for quick cash from the porn world; Bonnie Blue is all about quantity over quality (1,000 men in one day) and quips calculated to piss off girlfriends (those who don’t satisfy their men are “lazy”, she says). Both are engaging in a form of disaster capitalism, whipping up spectacles of moral crisis so intoxicating that their stunts leap from porn sites onto the pages of national newspapers. Their infamy is the result of curiosity: how can she do this to herself? It has us looking through our fingers at each sickly development, and shifts subscriptions so porn-buyers might “see what all the fuss is about”.
Since the spring, a series of lily-livered articles on Bonnie Blue have lamely framed her as a maverick in a respectable and empowering profession: Cosmopolitan claimed her critics were peddling “moral panic” at a time of sexual conservatism; she is in fact an “autonomous worker” and victim of misdirected rage.
Yet the fact is both Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are middle-class young women who have chosen to imperil those more vulnerable than themselves by glamorising pornography and prostitution — global scourges driven by the worst kind of men, who beat, traffick, drug, rape and hate women and children. For milquetoast feminists afraid to question men’s unimpeachable right to a fuck at any cost, it is the “stigmatisation” of “sex workers” that kills them. In reality, it is male pornographers, clients and pimps who grip women’s necks, pump them with sedatives, and grind their personhood into the mud.
Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, some women choose when to be filmed and bought and knocked around — but many do not. Many women, beneath the gleaming entrepreneurial tip of the iceberg, prostitute themselves to survive, to keep warm or high or escape a beating. For those who care to look, this reality is everywhere. Over the course of a single January night last year, Stuart Thomson raped three women, all prostitutes, at knifepoint in Manchester city centre, and attempted to rape another. He selected them as his victims because he thought they wouldn’t report him to the police. When Thomson was arrested, one detective sergeant said that in the interview, he came across as if “he didn’t think there was anything to worry about”. Perhaps this was because he didn’t think of those women as normal people with dignity, but instead as collections of body parts to be penetrated, proprietors of bargain assets which could be bought, sold and stolen without much thought. The acceptable face of this perilous, exploitative world are women like Lil Tay and Bonnie Blue.
“The acceptable face of this perilous, exploitative world are women like Lil Tay and Bonnie Blue.”
Amid all the chin-stroking about the role of camgirls in “the culture”, it is fashionable to be vague about the harms for which they are responsible. We wouldn’t want to be judgemental, would we? Yet all this appeasement is at the expense of clarity. Let me spell it out: Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay glamorise exploitation. We know that the subjects of porn translate into real-life encounters — like the 12-year-old girl strangled by a boy during their first kiss. “He had seen it in pornography and thought it was normal,” the children’s commissioner said. The fantasy of the porn lobby is that these videos are a sort of value-neutral shadowplay with no bearing on viewers’ behaviour. The reality is that it is already warping sexual dynamics. For this we should hold both “creators” and “fans” directly accountable. It really is simple: don’t watch.
In the case of Lil Tay, the moral waters are muddier. Her family life seems fraught; in 2018, allegations of abuse against her father appeared on her Instagram account. She later claimed she’d been hacked. Elsewhere, various magazines have suggested that it is her older half-brother, Jason, who has always directed, controlled and profited from her flourishing career in the attention economy. “You’re no good, it’s no good,” he would shout at her, a source told The Atlantic; “she was crying hard.” When she was a child, Jason was said to be the only one with access to her megabucks Instagram account. Who holds the passwords now? Is Claire Hope really in control?
The stakes for Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay may seem high but in reality, these women are rich and protected by fame, managers, wealth — more than can be said for the average “sex worker”. I consider their videos degrading in themselves; they might not, and that’s alright. But they are famous, and so are responsible for more than their own degradation. They are responsible for cultural shifts which encourage men to think of women as buyable, disposable and exploitable. They are responsible for normalising slinging women banknotes in exchange for their bodies. They toy with the frontiers of tolerance, pushing the envelope on what men can expect women and children to do for them.
All the while, they are engaging in a sort of sexual WWE: high-camp, high-gloss, low risk. Like stage wrestlers they adopt personas, vaulting between roles. Bonnie Blue is the cradlesnatcher (hunting for virgin freshers outside Nottingham Trent University in 2024) and the passive damsel (in her infamous “petting zoo”, for which she got booted off OnlyFans this summer). Lil Tay is the bolshy child gangster singing words she shouldn’t even know and then, as soon as it’s “legal”, the canny coquette. Yet in the real world, women and children are not able to put on different masks; they are pushed into porn-film formulas without wanting to be. Real women, real children, like the smiling little girl in her blue zip-up jumper, like the awkward teen in shorts over tights.
