‘The Rise of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips: Sex work, Empowerment and Feminism’

‘When publicising your hospitalisation increases the sales of your ‘content’, we need to resist the misogynistic urge to vilify the women involved and broaden our gaze, focusing instead on the industry, as scapegoating Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips ignores the root of the problem, that ‘mainstream pornography’ has become increasingly violent and non-feminist’

In one quick scroll through the ‘hub’, you can expect to see a variety of violent sexual acts directed (mostly) towards women. This content is now considered ‘mainstream’ pornography in 2025. Engaging in rough sex with a consenting partner is not a non-feminist action (I’m not here to kink shame), however, I would argue that the mass normalisation of hurting women in sex throughout ‘mainstream’ porn, is. For those unaware, Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue are popular adult film actors who have become renowned on social media for their controversial content. Most notably, both women have completed ‘sexual challenges’ for their Only Fans (OF): Lily Philips hosted a 101 men in 12 hours event in December 2024, and more recently a 50 men ‘back-door challenge’ in March of this year, and Bonnie Blue hosted a similar event in January 2025 where she allegedly slept with 1057 men in 12 hours. I believe that the rise of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, and their ‘sexual challenges’, is a culmination of this violent trajectory. Let me explain.

The events both women host require them to push their bodies to extremes, and arguably, there is a substantial risk they might severely harm themselves in the process. As the threshold for what a ‘normal’ level of violence a woman should experience during sex rises, I believe that sex workers are having to put themselves at risk to match demand. Moreover, in an industry where hurting women has become the baseline, creating ‘shocking’ content has become a way to retain a steady stream of income. A stark example of this is Lily's most recent event, the ‘back-door challenge’, which she hosted with fellow sex worker Wisconsin Tiff. In follow-up videos, Tiff claimed that, because of the challenge, she had to undergo reconstructive surgery. Tiff shows a hospital bed, before panning to herself and whimpering, ‘every moment hurt(s)’. Her hospitalisation alone is demonstrative of the accelerating level of violence permissible towards women during sex and the extremes sex workers are resorting to; however, more harrowingly still, as Tiff exclusively promotes her OF content on her TikTok account, it’s hard to shake the feeling that her hospitalisation is a continuation of some twisted sexual fantasy. Put more succinctly, the desire her audience has in seeing her body (and by extension the female body) broken in service of their (male) sexual pleasure.

Is this conclusion so far-fetched? Aside from the ‘challenges’, I have spent hours scrolling on Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blues' social media account, and content alluding to violence is laced throughout both their pages. For example, a common theme for both their content is to show the ‘aftermath’ of their adult films. The ‘aftermath’ ranges from general dishevelment to highlighting their eyes: red, stinging and bloodshot. These clips serve as sanitised advertisements for their OF accounts, and yet even when censored by community guidelines, both women understand that the key to sales is to highlight their discomfort and the aggression of the sexual act. Similarly, both Bonnie and Lily use objectifying language, Lily continuously self-describes as being ‘run through’ while Bonnie calls her collaborators ‘more holes’. I don’t blame either woman for this, as derogatory phrasing has become so normalized in ‘mainstream’ porn. They are simply repeating the language that sells. Sexual agency does not exist within a vacuum, and whether or not Bonnie and Lily enjoy their jobs and find them empowering (which is entirely possible), they have become part of an industry that capitalises on the fetishisation of female pain. The internet has been quick to vilify both women, and although I don’t believe that they are completely blameless (Bonnie Blue and her continuous promotion of ‘barely 18-year-olds’), I believe misogyny (internalised or otherwise) is causing critics to miss the bigger picture. Is it really surprising that, when ‘mainstream’ pornography is continuously derogatory and aggressive towards women, extreme challenges are on the rise? My worry is, as sex work becomes increasingly oversaturated (due to the accessibility of OF), will people who engage in sex work, specifically those who are using their income to make ends meet, feel compelled to engage in increasingly dangerous actions to keep up?

Let's remove our focus from Lily and Bonnie and highlight the non-feminist actions that have become ingrained within the ‘mainstream’ porn industry. As a society, we are far too keen to scapegoat women without looking critically at the systems surrounding them. If violence towards women continues to be normalised in porn, what other extremes will people engage in? How many more women will end up in the hospital in service of a sadistic audience? While the buyer, like the masked men who line up for Bonnie and Lily’s content, are completely unscathed.