When I was pregnant, I went off sex.
Not for any of the reasons you’re meant to go off sex when you’re pregnant - you know, nausea, exhaustion, feeling like a beached whale - that kind of thing. I went off sex because I could not for the life of me stop picturing my partner’s penis poking my unborn child in the eye from the inside. Yes, you read that right. I went off sex because I developed an intrusive, unshakeable image of my partner's willy poking my unborn son in the peeper like some sort of grim game of Operation.
Of course I knew this wasn’t actually how wombs work - but it didn’t matter. There is, I would argue, nothing less arousing on God's green earth than that image. My partner could have come towards me with candles, Barry White playing, and a glass of my favourite crisp, chilled, sauvignon (New Zealand only!), and I would have immediately started shrieking “NOT THE EYES. NOT HIS LITTLE EYES. GET AWAY FROM HIS EYES!” like the Gingerbread from Shrek and his gumdrop buttons.
You could say this is one of (many) reasons I know that me and Bonnie Blue are never going to be mates. We are, as they say, living in separate worlds, singing from different hymn books, speaking different languages, operating on entirely different wavelengths, marching to the beat of two wildly different drums. If we were ships, we would not just pass in the night, we would be sailing in different oceans, possibly on different planets, in different millennia. You get the jist!
Because while I spent my pregnancy freaking out over an anatomically impossible image of my partner poking my unborn son in the eye with his dingdong, Bonnie Blue has been spending hers inviting a load of men she’s never met to have sex and urinate on her as part of a themed celebration of her pregnancy.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s lovely for you - now let me ruin your day.
Bonnie Blue - who you probably already know unless you’ve somehow managed to successfully avoid one of the internet’s most determined attempts at getting your attention - is a few months pregnant following her controversial (see also: find yourself a sick bucket) “400 man breeding mission” - and earlier this month, to mark the occasion, she turned her baby shower into what she called a “golden shower.” Now if that’s not the kind of branding instinct most marketing departments would kill for I don’t know what is.
112 attendees, several hours, sex with a select few, everyone else queuing up to urinate on her instead, and - somewhere in amongst all of that - nappy pong.
People are, obviously, cross about this.
This is the kind of story that gets Linda from Stoke-on-Trent who has a profile picture of a Yorkshire Terrier called Buster, and Bartholomew, whose profile picture is him holding a sign at a protest about late stage capitalism, agreeing on something for the first time in their online lives. Left, right, and the people who just shout at Question Time for once, united!
Aside from the obvious - what the fuck is wrong with her? - the general criticism is that this baby hasn’t even entered the world yet and has already become part of the content machine. People are uncomfortable with the idea of a child being involved in a spectacle before they’ve had any say in it. There are concerns about safety, exploitation, and what it means when a pregnancy itself becomes part of a public performance. There are questions about bullying, what it'll be like at school, and what this child is going to inherit once they're old enough to understand any of it.
It shouldn’t surprise you that I totally understand those concerns. As someone who burst into tears on Christmas Day when I was 8 months pregnant because my dad accidentally gave me a glass of proper mulled wine instead of the alcohol free version bought especially for me, I find the whole thing deeply uncomfortable. From the second I found out I was pregnant, my entire job was, as I understood it, to keep my unfinished person safe at all costs (including from things that weren’t actually dangerous as it turns out!)
So the idea of having some sort of piss fest with strange men while pregnant (or not for that matter!) for content sounds abhorrent to me.
While sex during pregnancy is, for most people, perfectly safe - this obviously doesn’t feel like that.
I’ve written about Bonnie Blue before, after her documentary 1,000 Men and Me.
I had a few “pick me girl” comments. Why are you kink shaming, Jennie? Let women have fun, Jennie. Not everything's about what men think, Jennie. Read a book, Jennie. You know the vibe.
I don't think I'll be getting those this time.
Because whatever camp you're usually in - sex work is empowering, sex work is exploitative, or somewhere in the murky middle - everyone seems to have arrived in the same place on this one. Even the people who'd normally rush to defend her right to do whatever she wants with her own body will admit this feels wrong. Including, as it happens, Bonnie herself who described the whole thing as “disgusting” which I think says a lot coming from someone who snow angeled on a floor strewn with used condoms after her 1000 man gang bang.
Anyway, none of this is really what I’m here to talk about. Let’s go on a journey shall we?
You're in your semi, telly on, cup of tea going cold, half watching Molly-Mae's Amazon Prime documentary because everyone's watching it so you might as well. And then her daughter, Bambi, is screaming. She's naked, she doesn't want to sit on the potty, and there's a room full of grown men standing around her with cameras. Minutes later, she does a poo in the bath instead. Also filmed. Also broadcast, to however many million people are sat on their sofas, watching.
Somewhere else, someone's laying in bed, their face is lit up with the blue light of their phone mid scroll. A toddler, mid-meltdown, face purple, fists clenched, filmed by their mother. The caption says something about “the truth nobody shows you about mum life” which is ironic because this is what everyone shows you about mum life. There’s hundreds of comments underneath, all saying a variation of “relatable”, “I needed this today!” and “Best advert for birth control I’ve ever seen”. Scroll down the same account a bit further and there’s the same toddler, doing a fart. A fart that was also filmed and also broadcast, to however many thousand people were sat on their sofas, laid in their beds, watching.
Somewhere else, someone's on a train, headphones in, thumb on autopilot, landing on an account they've followed for so long they can't actually remember why they started. There's the gender reveal, two years ago. The bump update, week by week. The hospital bag, packed and unpacked on camera. The birth itself. The first cry. The first nappy change. The first word. And then it just keeps going and going, because the baby became a toddler and the toddler became content, and now it's a video most days, a full and complete account of someone else's whole life - from utero. All filmed. All broadcast, to however many thousands of people sat on their sofas, laid in the beds, travelling on their trains, watching.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
No? Fine. Stay with me. I am, by my own admission, someone who cannot tell a story in under 17 years. Ask my partner. He has, on multiple occasions, asked me a simple yes or no question and ended up 45 minutes later somewhere around a childhood anecdote involving my nan, a school disco in 2003, and a full explainer of a woman called Carol who he has never met and never will.
I’m going to do that to you now - but I promise this has a point.
I’d like to take you back to 2008. I’m 16. I think I’m the coolest person who has ever lived. My fringe is doing exactly what I need it to do, and I am, in my own mind, untouchable. And then I’m on my mum’s Facebook for some unrelated reason and I find a photo of myself, age 11 or so, on holiday in the South of France - goggles on, looking like a deformed seal having some sort of episode in a paddling pool. I am, instantly, destroyed. 40 of my mum’s friends have seen this. 40.
At the time, this felt like social death, even though nothing bad was going to happen. No one I actually cared about would see it, but it felt that way because I did look very much like this man:
(Wait for my mum to arrive in the comments of this piece to tell me I looked beautiful despite knowing in her heart of hearts that did not).
Looking back, we had it so easy. So embarrassingly easy. 40 people. One (admittedly horrific) photo. A locked platform full of middle aged people sharing links to Friends Reunited. That’s the entire scale of what my generation had to deal with.
Children of mumfluencers don’t get one bad photo. They get the lot. The bump, the birth, the first of everything - every milestone and meltdown and unflattering bath time moment, uploaded in real time, captioned, monetised, sitting there forever, searchable the second they’re old enough to type their own name into Google.
Anyway. I told you there was a point to all this, and I am a woman of my word. Even if it's taken a paddling pool, a fictional man called Bartholomew, and a stock photo of an overweight man in goggles to get there, there I will get!
My point is this… Bonnie Blue might make you recoil but her latest stunt is simply the most extreme version of something thousands of mothers are doing online right now just with less urine and a Boden discount code in their bio.
“Woaaaaaaah there Jennie. Are you really comparing Bonnie ‘sex pest’ Blue to Mrs Wholesome, baking sourdough with her kids in matching linen aprons?”
Yes. Sorry. I am.
Obviously her stunt and a sourdough video aren't the same thing on the surface. Nobody's weeing on anyone in the bread video - but underneath it the basic transaction is near identical - a child who never asked to be part of any of it is being used to build someone else's audience, income, and brand.
I put it to you that the difference isn’t the act - it’s the woman.
Bonnie gets to be the villain because nobody was rooting for her reputation in the first place. There’s no fall from grace to be horrified by, because there was no grace there to begin with. In the words of Joey from Friends:
Mrs Wholesome doesn’t have that problem. She’s not a whore, she’s a mother. A good one. She’s not selling content, she’s sharing her journey. So the exact same swap - a child’s life, for clout, for cash - breezes on through, because we’ve decided being a Good Mother is a kind of moral immunity, and nobody fancies being the person who points out that, actually, it isn’t.
And before someone begins furiously typing to tell me I am, in fact, the photo police, and have personally ruined Christmas by suggesting their nan can't post a snap of little Henry in his Rudolph costume - I am not the photo police. If you want to share some nice pictures of your child with your 200 followers, most of whom are your actual aunties, carry on.
We are proud of our children. I think my son is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life (he is I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules), and I do post photos of him sometimes set to close friends. I am proud of him. I want people to see his face. That is a completely normal, healthy thing for a parent to feel, and I don’t think wanting to share that makes anyone a monster (though with AI now destroying our lives I think it’s something we all, unfortunately, need to mull over).
There is a difference between this and mumfluencer content - and the difference is the bit where the child stops being a person you’re proud of and becomes the business. Where the account exists because of them. Where the algorithm needs them to keep performing.
The critisism that Bonnie’s unborn child can not consent to what they’re a part of is true. But neither can any of those on your TikTok FYP. Ultimately, none of these children asked for any of it. Not Bonnie’s, who’s still in utero and already the centrepiece of someone else’s disordered content calendar. Not Bambi, naked and crying in front of a room full of strangers with cameras. Not the toddler with the purple, furious little face, labelled “the best advert for birth control” by hundreds of people who’ve never met her. Not the child who’s been narrated, week by week, since before they had a name.
They’ll all grow up eventually. They’ll all, one day, type their own name into Google, the way we all eventually do, out of boredom or vanity or morbid curiosity, and will they like what they find?
I don’t know what they’ll deem worse - that a stranger weed on their mum at a party, or that their entire childhood was a business and nobody stopped to think for a moment about how that might one day affect them.
And because I can already see someone sharpening their keyboard, this is not me saying Bonnie Blue is somehow a misunderstood pioneer of motherhood content. If she is that then I am Morgan Freeman.
The woman has spent the last few years turning sex, outrage and people’s inability to look away into a business model. The whole point of what she does is that people are horrified, people talk about it, and then she gets exactly what she wanted - attention. Turning a pregnancy into another chapter of that is why people are rightly angry. It’s worse this time because it’s not just a woman doing something people find sexually shocking but a child being used as part of a story they did not write, did not agree to be in, and one that they will eventually have to live with.
But underneath all of that she has inadvertently made the thing we are usually happy to ignore completely impossible to ignore by taking the whole concept of children becoming content, putting it in a wheelie bin, setting the bin on fire, and then livestreaming herself standing next to it in a gimp mask.
It is very easy to point at Bonnie Blue and say what kind of person would do this? Much less comfortable to admit that we are all much better at spotting something when it looks completely fucking unhinged. When it is a woman doing something so extreme that even Bonnie Blue herself admits it’s disgusting, well, everyone can agree.
The conversation gets much more awkward when it’s someone we like who seems normal. Someone with a nice kitchen and a ring light and a caption about motherhood being hard but beautiful.
Anyway, that’s my TED Talk. Please feel free to send me hate mail for likening your favourite mumfluencer to a woman who looked at the concept of a traditional baby shower and thought “lovely, but what if everyone was naked and someone brought a jug?”, but if you could avoid mentioning my 11 year old holiday photo again, I’d appreciate it, I’ve already suffered enough.
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