It should be enough, without playing the blame game, to simply call the event what it was: sad and tragic.
Lily Phillips is a 23-year-old OnlyFans creator who had sex with 100 men in 24 hours. Documentarian Josh Pieters filmed the aftermath of and lead-up to the event in a short, safe-for-work film titled I Slept with 100 Men in One Day that has since gone viral. One scene in particular has hundreds of millions of views. It shows Phillips’s tearful reaction after finishing the challenge, as she says, “I don’t know if I’d recommend it.”
Phillips eagerly described the event as a sexual fantasy of her own before she attempted the challenge. She then appeared broken and vulnerable, shaking with bloodshot eyes, at the end of the film. Many online have taken this scene to mean that Phillips regrets her actions. The documentary tells a different story.
She cries because she is fatigued, she says. The only thing she says she regrets about the challenge is that not every man was given his promised five minutes with her, because of logistics errors that screwed up the day’s timing, she told TMZ in a recent interview. She plans to fix that regret next year, when she says she’ll attempt to bed 1,000 men in 24 hours. The OnlyFans creator’s next sexathon will be more organized and efficient, she says.
The documentary shows many moments of honesty. Phillips is worried that a man will never love her (though she admits she’ll have to find one who’s okay with “lending” her out to other men). She describes her moral boundaries (she rejected a man’s request that she put a bag over her head and pretend she was asphyxiating — but then said she would likely bend her morals if the man had offered her $1 million to perform the act). Phillips knows that her profession is taboo and can be harmful. But her career brings in money and attention and the ability, she says, to fulfill her own fantasies. When Pieters confronts Phillips after she says a vulgarity about enjoying lewd acts (“I don’t think you really mean that,” he says), she disputes his inference.
Some commentators have given Phillips “victim” status and have read a certain amount of hurt and regret into Phillips that she denies having. Andrew Klavan gave the 101 men who participated in the act a talking to on his podcast. Feminist campaigner Julie Bindel wrote in the Spectator, “shame on the men exploiting Lily Phillips,” and condemned “the men that drive the demand for such ‘content.’” She’s been promoted in liberal circles as a sexually liberated girl boss being exploited by gross men, and in conservative circles as a helpless victim of sexual perversion.
The uncomfortable truth about OnlyFans is that it can be an autonomous platform.
Phillips’s is a business built on and sustained by her willingness to film herself, promote herself, and sell herself. Others are complicit in this — it’s been reported that her own mother is her financial manager, and Phillips employs nine individuals, some of whom are other women who assisted her in filming and in coordinating her 100-men-in-24-hours stunt. The men reportedly do not get paid; Phillips finds her sexual partners by advertising to her fans and supporters online, instead of contracting out other porn stars.
This is a woman who seems acutely aware of her actions. She said in the documentary that she worried for other OnlyFans stars, because she knew that her stunt would force the rest of the platform’s creators to come up with more extreme, intense content. She’s “training” for 1,000, she said. She bemoans “objectification,” and the pressure women feel to have sex. She also brags about the fact that her father’s friends watch her videos.
In a partial response to Mark Wright’s post earlier this week, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill wrote:
Many are trying to explain the Lily Phillips thing in 20th-century terminology, and it just doesn’t work. Feminists say she’s being ‘exploited’ by men. I think most men will agree that the 101 men who queued to have sex with a 23-year-old woman as part of an online experiment are reprobates. But that’s no excuse for stripping Phillips of her agency, for denying her authorship of this sordid event. It’s a strange feminism that so glaringly infantilises women, that judges women less morally capable than men at weighing up the wrongness of an exhibitionist sex stunt. My view is that everyone involved — the woman who put out a call for men and the men who gleefully replied — have behaved terribly.
Blaming only the men says that Phillips’s desire to sell her body is acceptable, while a man’s choice to take advantage of that desire is not. Both are terrible. Repulsion at all behaviors that fueled this event — whether perpetuated by Phillips, her family, her friends, her team, or the men involved — is healthy. It should be enough, without playing the blame game, to simply call the event what it was: sad and tragic.