Today I was compelled to recollect that I have been personally acquainted with two women who have attempted to break the world record for number of men serviced in a gang bang. Like Anton Chigurh says in No Country For Old Men, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
But seriously. It was 25 years ago next month that I travelled to Las Vegas and met up with David Foster Wallace, photographer Nathaniel Welch, and then Hustler magazine staff writer Evan Wright to chronicle the 1998 Adult Video News Awards. It was there that I was introduced to one Jasmine St. Clair, who was engineering a gang bang film in which she would take on three hundred guys (except it was thirty guys, and the footage got looped). Hell, I don’t blame her. In his essay about the event, Wallace wrote that Jasmin was “so incredibly heavily made up that she looks like a crow.” This did not sit well with Jasmin, and it didn’t sit well with Evan either, after he started dating Jasmin a few years later. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.)
Only a year later, at the Sundance Film Festival, I met Annabel Chong, a considerably more demure woman who, while a gender studies major at USC, thought it would be a swell idea to take on 300 men in one go This effort was chronicled in documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (now out-of-print). I was with Premiere magazine at the time, and Annabel (real name Grace) came to our photo shoot and did goofy poses with a store-bought chicken. At a party later in the week, I ran into the director of the documentary and he said, “So you met Grace?” and I said yes, and he said, “So did you fuck her?” and I said no I did not, it’s not really my line. I’ve never forgotten that exchange. You could almost say it haunts me.
Here’s a thing about pornography: the further out you get into its extremes, the sadder the whole thing gets. This is my very simplistic subjective take and I’m sure there are plenty of academics and anti-kink-shamers who could take specific issue with the statement but this is just how it is from where I sit as an old man. By the same token, while the Sadness of Porn is a real thing, practically an axiom, it’s also kind of a trite thing.
Which leads us to a new YouTube documentary called Lily Phillips: I Slept With 100 Men In One Day, about an OnlyFans sex starlet who undertakes the titular feat. I have to say the use of the phrase “slept with” trips me up — I understand the colloquialism but you’re not power-napping with the fellas, girl.
Porn is very different from what it was in the days of Jasmin and Grace, when the material was mostly consumed on expensive videocassettes. Now it’s more or less free, produced mostly by amateurs, and largely ubiquitous if you know where to look. Raincoat brigades aren’t a thing anymore. It seems like an oxymoron to mention production values in porn but the visual quality of most OnlyFans material makes one wistfully recall the mise en scene of Henri Pachard and Carter Stevens. (I know, but trust me.)
The Lily Phillips marathon, on the other hand, is more or less a phone-cam only affair. Lily herself is a reasonably attractive “ordinary” young woman. More ordinary than ordinary, really. As she explains her history and her rationales, she reveals herself as, well, banal. She trots out the standard “I don’t mind being called a slut” line, and then the standard “but I do consider myself a feminist” line. Oh honey, have I heard it before. From the Show-World-gigging dominatrix who hung herself circa 1986 to the college friend turned stripper who disappeared from the face of the earth in 1996. The field isn’t just sad. It’s dangerous. Or maybe not so much anymore, as it’s so ubiquitous. (This is perhaps the most opportune place to remember that two of my fellow Musketeers in porn explorations back in the day, Mssrs Wallace and Wright, were suicides. David in 2008, Evan in July of this year.)
“Here’s a thing about pornography: the further out you get into its extremes, the sadder the whole thing gets.”
There’s a scene where host Joshua Pieters accompanies Lily to a lingerie shop, but stands outside, and a nice little old lady asks what’s going on and he tells her everything and she says “Oh that’s interesting.” I remember doing production assistant work on an “adult movie” back in 1980 and setting up a light rig on a corner near Washington Square and somebody asking what kind of movie we were shooting and I said “a porno” and the person practically spat, “That’s disgusting.” Times have changed!
The movie doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of the shoot — the doc is so tame, in fact, that shots of Phillips in black bra and panties are blurred out. This could be an act of mercy. To say the performer doesn’t enjoy herself is a bit of an understatement. One gets two strong intimations: that of Phillips’ fundamental ordinariness, and that of her being a symptom of late capitalism. Despite saying she’s not a businesswoman, money is at the root of her motivation, not sensation. And the sensation with this number of men turns out to be unpleasant, indeed. “I’ve definitely seen some spunk today,” she observes, before she actually starts crying. Understatement of the year: “I don’t know if I’d recommend it.” The announcement of her next project, to take on one thousand men, sounds like a recipe for suicide. Find a new rule, Lily.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.