Two years ago I was in the running to direct a Channel 4 documentary about Bonnie Blue. It came down to me and, I believe, two other directors. We were each asked to come up with our own take on the film. I spent a day and a half, for free, putting together a director’s vision for a job I ultimately didn’t get.

I thought Bonnie and I could have made a good pairing. I co-hosted a podcast called Brown Girls Do It Too, where my friend Rubina and I talked very openly about sex, something that is still stigmatised in the South Asian community. So I know a thing or two about having strangers call you a slag.

My pitch wasn’t really about judging Bonnie for what she did at the time. I wanted to explore whether what Bonnie was doing was empowering, exploitative, grotesque, clever or perhaps all of those things at once. And whether any of us watching from the outside could really know.

I’ve been thinking about this again this week, as Bonnie Blue announced the birth of her child in the only way she knows how – with a video that interspersed images of her newborn with cuts from an orgy and then recording a TikTok while on the toilet in hospital.

Shortly after that Channel 4 documentary aired last year, something in my head clicked. The stunts became repetitive. As the numbers got bigger, the acts more extreme, the outrage louder. Vaginal sex became anal sex, then came the “breeding” event, then urinating on her pregnant stomach. I realised it wasn’t really about sexual empowerment, or any of the things she’d professed when she first started out. It was about attention.

And now I’ve seen this business model elsewhere too.

For one, in Louis Theroux’s documentary about the manosphere. Bizarrely some of the men in it reminded me of Bonnie Blue. In fact she made an appearance with HSTikkyTokky. Their blueprint felt remarkably similar: say the most outrageous thing, get people really mad, get clipped, get shared, get likes, get people subscribing, make money, and then find something even more outrageous to say tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.

We’ve built an attention economy that incentivises people to become the most extreme versions of themselves. But it doesn’t stop with porn stars, OnlyFans creators and manosphere influencers – and it isn’t solely reserved for the online world.

Increasingly, this is simply how we communicate with one another. The reasonable opinion disappeared with the Nokia 3210 while the most furious take rises to the top. We have become intolerant of alternative view points and everything has become set in a culture war of right and wrong. Nuance and empathy don’t travel nearly as far as outrage, and everyone from politicians and influencers to sex workers and the everyday person on the street knows the formula.

Humans have always been fascinated by spectacle. We love being shocked. Sometimes it feels almost impossible to look away. The Roman amphitheatre didn’t exist because gladiators were uniquely screwed up. It existed because thousands of perfectly ordinary people bought tickets to watch them fight. “Are you not entertained?” shouted Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius in . Apparently not. We need more, we have a blood lust for spectacle.

Bonnie is simultaneously performer, entrepreneur and commodity. We can sneer at her, we can judge her, we can be disgusted by her but every furious tweet, every horrified TikTok, every newspaper column, including mine, feeds the same machine.

For all the hand-wringing about how far this woman is prepared to go, we can’t seem to look away. So perhaps Bonnie Blue hasn’t gone too far. Perhaps we’ve created an economy in which there is no such thing as “going too far”.

I made a documentary about porn and talking to a contributor about how quickly he would become desensitised to something he’d watched. Something shocks you initially, then you see it enough times that it becomes normal. So you need something harder to produce the same reaction. Then that becomes normal too. And on and on it goes.

The same thing seems to be happening to our entire culture. Yesterday’s outrageous thing becomes today’s normal thing, which means tomorrow’s thing has to be more extreme. The envelope has been pushed so many times we can barely see where it started. And the incentives are all pointing in the same direction. If outrage stopped producing attention, Bonnie would presumably stop selling outrage.

But we keep buying it.

That’s why I find all the moralising about Bonnie slightly disingenuous. We can call her vulgar, exploitative, shameless or whatever else makes us feel superior. But she understands the system perfectly. She knows what gets our attention and she gives it to us. The more uncomfortable question is what that system is doing to the rest of us.

Because I genuinely don’t know what Bonnie Blue could do next that would shock me. And I’m not sure that says anything particularly interesting about Bonnie Blue. I think it says something much more worrying about all of us.