The new campus culture wars may well surround sex and pornography

We’ve covered those poster sales that appear on campus, the chart stars that SUs used to be able to book, whether the activities on offer are “too middle class”, and the novelty acts that once entertained new students (including dogs, farts and regurgitated Rubik’s cubes).

Sadly, this year I find myself writing about “Bonnie Blue’s Bang Bus”, which is travelling between nine university cities right now, having launched on X/Twitter with the following announcement:

Freshers’ Bang Bus tour locations announced. Which city will fill me up with the most c*m?

Bonnie Blue (real name Tia Billinger) is a 26-year-old British “adult content creator” from Stapleford, which borders Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. After dropping out of her A-levels, she worked as an NHS recruiter before launching an OnlyFans page in 2022, posting videos of herself having sex with 18- and 19-year-old men.

This time last year Blue visited universities during “Australian schoolies week” and our own freshers’ weeks, posting her location online and offering to have sex with students for free provided they consented to filming for her OnlyFans content.

Those activities included what she called a “bonkathon” – and later in the (academic) year she gained international notoriety in January after claiming to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours, attempting to break a record previously held by pornographic film actress Lisa Sparxxx.

She then picked up quite a bit of coverage over the summer, when Channel 4 aired “1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story” – a film that followed Blue over six months as she prepared for and executed her world record attempt.

The documentary showed the queue of men waiting their turn, each given approximately 41 seconds, with many wearing only socks and some in balaclavas.

Critics argued the documentary failed to adequately challenge Blue’s claims about empowerment and feminism. Lucy Mangan’s Guardian review noted that director Silver remained “essentially unconfrontational” and was “no match for one as robust and unfazed” as Blue.

The film had, in theory, attempted to explore whether Blue was “an empowered feminist or a degraded victim” but provided little real insight. Blue effectively used the documentary as additional marketing, describing it as a “2-4-1 deal” for media attention while filming her stunts.

Three things to worry about

Some universities seem to have been taking the tour more seriously than others. Reporting in the Hillhead Review revealed that the University of Glasgow’s head of security briefing for student volunteers said that there are:

…three things to worry about during freshers week: drugs, alcohol, and Bonnie Blue.

Security officials classified her presence as a “safeguarding issue” and instructed students not to engage with her personally, directing them to report any sightings of Billinger or her “bang bus” through the university’s SafeZone app.

Local MP Joani Reid condemned the plans as “exploitation” that “put women at risk” and called for an outright campus ban, while students were told that Glasgow may have been chosen because “it’s more liberal” than other locations.

At the weekend, Bonnie Blue’s visit to Newcastle generated significant student attention despite reported restrictions, with the adult content creator being allegedly banned from entering bars across the city by Newcastle council – but still managing to appear at Flares nightclub where she signed “Loosecrawl” t-shirts.

The Tab reports that students “swarmed” Blue for selfies as her decorated “Bang Bus” drove slowly through the city centre, with one “female fresher” reporting that the male students she was with “all ran over to her” and abandoned their group, leading to “crowds of men flocking to Bonnie all night.”

The spectacle is said to have drawn mixed reactions from students, with some expressing surprise at seeing her treated “like a celebrity, with bodyguards and cameras following her around,” while Blue herself described the evening as “very, very wet” on TikTok, innuendo-referencing the rainy weather.

Students, clicks ands signals

We don’t worry too much about click rates on Wonkhe, but The Tab very much does – and the endless local and national coverage on Blue suggests that there is a very strong interest among students in Blue’s activities.

After a decade of allegations that students are overwhelmingly “woke”, does it signal a swing back towards the prevalent “lad culture” that was seen on campuses in the 90s and 00s? Not necessarily.

Digital-age sex work has complicated traditional sex-positive frameworks. Blue’s defenders invoke choice and agency – classic sex-positive arguments – yet her critics argue she’s corrupted those principles through spectacle and shock value.

The focus on “barely legal” participants and the transactional nature of her encounters – filmed for profit with minimal interaction time – raise questions about whether true consent and empowerment can exist within power-imbalanced, commodified contexts.

But for those keen to finger wag at some strains of student feminism, sex-positivity debates are left in a precarious position. At the very least, her popularity among some students suggests that purely individualistic interpretations of sexual empowerment – where any choice framed as empowering becomes unassailable – may be insufficient for addressing collective harm.

The case also demonstrates how commercial interests can co-opt feminist language while potentially undermining feminist goals, forcing a reconsideration of whether genuine sex-positivity requires not just individual consent but also broader ethical frameworks that consider social impact, power dynamics, and the commodification of sexuality itself.

She’s certainly creating debate inside FemSocs. But the various institutional responses reveal deep uncertainty about educational authority in the digital age. Universities can warn students about Blue – but can’t prevent legal adults from making choices that may undermine their own development. It exposes the limits of university influence when students arrive already shaped by influencer culture that valourizes extreme behaviour for attention and profit.

Lads will be lads?

For some, it all represents something worse than the “lad culture” of a couple of decades ago. Classic lad culture operated within social groups with shared experiences and some degree of reciprocity. Blue’s model is purely transactional and atomised – students queue individually for brief, filmed encounters that prioritise content creation over genuine social connection. It creates an isolated, pornified version of male sexuality that lacks even the communal aspects that once provided some social constraints.

As such, there’s reasons to be optimistic. Today’s students have grown up with more explicit discussions about consent, toxic masculinity, and gender equality. Institutional pushback and organised feminist criticism suggests there’s more resistance than during lad culture’s peak.

But her collaboration with Andrew Tate also signals a dangerous convergence of commercial sex work with organised misogyny that could accelerate the sort of male radicalization pathways that we know have been happening schools.

A podcast appearance with the accused human trafficker was both mutual promotion and ideological alignment – she validated core incel narratives by blaming women for male sexual frustration while simultaneously offering herself as the solution to their perceived deprivation.

It all creates a particularly toxic feedback loop for young men already consuming manosphere content – Blue confirms their grievances against women (calling wives “lazy” and women responsible for male infidelity) while providing the fantasy that sexual access is both available and justified.

Her victim-blaming rhetoric around Tate’s alleged crimes – suggesting women should “stick up for themselves” and examine their own responsibility – directly echoes incel talking points about female complicity in their own victimisation.

It’s not actually clear that “real” students take part – but if they do, there’s always safeguarding arguments to fall back on. Physical health risks include STD transmission given the high-volume, brief encounters with limited safety protocols, but reputational damage may be the most severe long-term consequence – unlike Blue’s stage persona, if students use their real identities in filmed content that becomes permanent, digital records can affect future employment, relationships, and professional opportunities.

That this is happening during formative freshers periods when students are establishing social norms risks making participation in commodified, transactional sexuality OK – while also exposing participants to communities influenced by the misogynistic rhetoric associated with Blue’s content and potentially leading to peer judgment, relationship complications, and harassment.

Maybe the social debates among students are strong enough to generate shame – but given the social isolation associated with incel culture, maybe that’s part of the problem.

Ultimately, Blue’s tour will be seen as a success precisely because it exploits the gap between traditional educational values – thoughtfulness, dignity, meaningful relationships – and a culture that rewards spectacle. It also forces universities to confront whether they’re preparing students for a world that increasingly rewards the very behaviours that educational institutions are traditionally expected to moderate.

If nothing else, the volume of students on https://www.reddit.com/r/UniUK/ who appear to be reporting anxiety and a lack of scaffolding to find friends (either because of a disability, their commuter status or a dislike of alcohol) suggests that universities and SUs still have some way to go to move away from “foam party wristband hedonism” and match the ways that we know many European student bodies help students to navigate the social aspects of joining higher education.