'There is a real person in there, and some of the stuff does affect her.' Credit: Josh Pieters via YouTube.
There are a lot of shocking moments in the film I Slept with 100 Men in One Day. The most distressing is probably the one in which, post gangbang, the “star”, Lily Phillips, breaks down in tears as she admits that the experience was more “intense” than she had expected. But the most telling moment, to me anyway, is the one in which she shows the documentary maker, Josh Pieters, her spreadsheets.
When Pieters asks her earlier whether she thinks of herself as a businesswoman, she brushes the idea away: “People would give me a bit of stick if I said I was a businesswoman.” But as he looks at her laptop, Pieters realises that a businesswoman is exactly what she is, and he tells her so. More than that, she’s in a business that he understands very well, because (if you set aside the floor covered in condoms and the tax-deductible lingerie) it’s not so far from the one Pieters himself is in as a YouTuber.
His film, though, isn’t just an exercise in voyeurism. It wouldn’t be exactly correct to describe Pieters, aged 31, as non-judgemental. He grew up with online porn, and he considers himself liberal. Even so, he’s clearly alarmed by what Phillips puts herself through. He’s also compassionate: often the only person expressing any concern about Phillips’ wellbeing.
“As someone who’s been a content creator in the online world for 10 years, I’ve experienced some extreme measures taken to achieve online fame,” he tells me, mentioning the Logan Paul “suicide forest” video, in which the YouTuber Paul filmed the hanged body of a Japanese man. “And obviously I’ve taken some extremes of my own.” Actually, Pieters’ “extremes” were mischievous stunts rather than affronts on human decency: in 2020, a video went viral in which Pieters presented Right-wing agitator Katie Hopkins with a fake award in front of a screen with the words “Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy” (read the initials).
“I think all online creators have a constant pressure on them to keep upping the stakes,” says Pieters. “Gone are the days of production companies or studios or the music industry dictating what creators and artists can and can’t do. We now live in a world where creators are able to choose exactly what they want to do and how far they want to push things, which can obviously be great in some respects, because it opens up so much creative freedom.”
Freedom, though, isn’t an unalloyed good. When a creator is trapped in the economic cycle of delivering what their followers want (“audience capture”), it might not even really be freedom. Pieters’ move into long-form documentaries is a way to escape being permanently typecast in the limited role of “social media practical joker”. “I’m 31 now. I had my time doing pranks and being childish on the internet,” he says.
Getting into Phillips’ story appealed to him because of his own reaction to it: “I thought I was pretty liberal with my views on online porn and adult content creators. But when I stumbled across this story, I was taken aback and shocked.” He also realised that, while lots of podcasters and streamers were keen to talk to or about Phillips, “there was no real conversation happening. It was all clickbait and ragebait.” His own background as a creator, he says, meant he was well-placed to go beyond the voyeurism and try to understand why she was undertaking such a horrifying stunt — and what the effect on her might be.
“There is obviously a point at which it becomes dangerous and some of those decisions might be ones that creators regret,” he says. “What we’re seeing on OnlyFans now, or even just in the adult content creation business in general, is almost this same innovation we saw on YouTube.” That means, in Phillips’ case, an escalation from selling nude pictures to selling hardcore clips to outrage-baiting acts such as the 100-man gangbang.
Her next project, she announced shortly before Pieters released his documentary last year, would be to take on 1,000 men in one day. That stunt was originally slated to take place this month. It is now unlikely to happen on schedule, if at all, with Phillips saying she plans to work up to it with a series of (relatively) smaller events: “What’s the point in just going straight to the thousand? Then you’re not going to profit if you do 300, then 500, then a 1,000. It just makes a little more sense.” There’s that businesswoman again.
Meanwhile, Phillips’ ex-friend and fellow porn star Bonnie Blue claims to have already completed the thousand — and in 12 hours rather than 24. In case anyone thought this wasn’t an explicit act of competition, Blue made a concern-trolling swipe at Phillips: “Seeing someone cry after content is not nice, and not everyone is cut out for these circumstances, so I really wish her all the best.” Content. Such a bland, denatured word for a woman left bruised, sore and raw from repeated penetration.
But content is everything, and everything is content. The arms race (cocks race?) between Phillips and Blue is simply the fulfilment of the remorseless imperatives of the attention economy: a content creator does, or claims to be doing, something so horrifying, it’s impossible for people not to react; that reaction becomes the topic for news stories and commentary (including this); this makes more people aware of the creator, driving more reaction and further coverage. Somewhere in that outrage, the creator can expect to pick up a decent number of new subscribers along with the haters.
From another perspective, though, what Phillips and Blue have done looks like a profound misunderstanding of how OnlyFans works. The porn star, freelance sex researcher and Substacker Aella broke down the business model in a recent post. As a successful camgirl, Aella signed up for OnlyFans early on, and wasn’t impressed. She was used to extracting large sums of money from a small number of men in chatrooms; the market rate for subscriptions on OnlyFans was too low to match her expectations.
Later, though, she realised what made OnlyFans work. During a camgirl session, the men viewing in the chatroom can see each other’s usernames and are competing for the camgirl’s attention: the more money they spend, the more attention she gives them, and the more incentivised they are to give even more money. On OnlyFans, though, the men are all invisible to each other. It also has tools for mass messaging, allowing creators to create the appearance of personal contact at minimal effort. Or as Aella puts it: “OnlyFans maintains the dynamic that made camming so successful — direct, live connection with a girl — but manages to make it feel individualised. Instead of having to pay a lot of money to rank against other men, you can pay a little money and enter a pussy paradise with not a single other man in sight.”
The nature of OnlyFans allows for contact at scale. More contact, in fact, than any one woman could reasonably supply. This, Aella explains, is where agencies step in: while a man believes that he’s chatting away with the hottie of his dreams, in reality, the messages are likely being crafted by a minimum-wage cubicle worker with a rudimentary crib sheet. For this service, the “creator” fronting the account might pay as much as 50% of her takings after OnlyFans takes its cut. In the most extreme cases, the woman is little more than a model fronting a character otherwise entirely confected by a manager.
The shocking thing to Aella was that there was barely any effort to make these chats read as the original output of the performer in question, and the men didn’t care. “It took a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that for most men, they don’t care about reality when it comes to their supposedly connective porn,” she writes. “They aren’t tracking you for signs of genuine enjoyment; to them, your personality is simply a vessel with which to certify that your breasts are genuine.”
Phillips and Blue are effectively forcing their bodies to stand in for the endlessly replicable, digital versions of themselves that OnlyFans allows them to generate. The men who subscribe to them are fundamentally uninterested in their reality or otherwise. What they are paying for is the simulacra of intimacy, not intimacy itself: a digital representation of a woman on which to practice a faint imitation of desiring and being desired, rather than a whole person with whom they might have a relationship.
To put your real, bruisable, nerve-filled body in the place of the avatar is to make a terrible, existential error. The men who have sex with Philips are little different on that account from the vitriol throwers of the manosphere who obsess about how her “body count” diminishes her value and call her a whore. So when Blue snarks that Phillips isn’t “cut out for these circumstances”, perhaps what she means is that Phillips has, despite everything, a stubborn persistence in believing in her own personhood.
“It didn’t seem like anyone had actually taken a moment to speak to Lily as a human being,” says Pieters. “And what we found was, she’s an incredible human being. A really smart, business-minded person. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that what she was doing would have some sort of toll on her, and as much as she ‘loves being a slut’, in her words. I think the documentary showed that there is a real person in there, and some of the stuff does affect her.”
Of course Phillips would cry when speaking to Pieters after her century. She has spent a day being screwed by men who see her, not even as an object, but as the token that stands for the object; and then she finds herself speaking to someone who sees her as wholly human, capable of being harmed and deserving of being cared for. That disjunction is an extreme version of the tragedy that everybody lives when they move between their thin, online self and the full, fleshy existence of the body. If we mistake the one for the other, we will all break the way that Phillips breaks.
Am I missing something about this story? Is there any substantial difference between 3, 5 or 100 men? Apart from some minor ( I hope) physical damage, how is it different being an object of a few or many penetrations? Gangbang is such a staple genre on p*** sites that I need more explanation why this story is worth of attention
About 10 mins each!
Yawn. Just another ‘content maker’ making a ‘piece of content’ about just another ‘content maker’ who’s made a ‘piece of content’ about just another ‘content maker’ who makes ‘pieces of content’. And here I am making a piece of content about it.
Welcome to the Information Age. Now please excuse us all while Humanity collectively disappears up its own a*sehole, an existentially terminal piece of content that might actually be of some originality and for which I might even consider paying.
Unlike watching a dull documentary about a dull woman who dull men pay to w*nk dully over.
And this content has probably already been scraped by several AI models so they can churn out some content based on this content.
Good business if you can get it.
I think plenty of people have sympathy for her, but it’s the sympathy one feels for someone who is wrecking their own life but either can’t, or doesn’t want to stop. And it is tempered by the fact that it is driven by money.
What hardens peoples hearts is feminist pieces (not this one so much) which try to shift the blame onto men and portray Lily as their victim. It’s a nasty business, and must take its toll, but she has chosen to do it, and it is sad, weak men who are being exploited by it. In much the same way that a drug dealer exploits addicts.
The exploitation of the men is the desperately untold story. Porn addiction is like gambling addiction and is just as ruinous but gets even less sympathy (if that’s possible). These girls are making a fortune from sad men who can’t afford it financially and who are hollowing out their own humanity in the process. But every article is about the (wealthy) girls.
Yet another article here on UnHerd about what all this means in relationship to the women pulling these stunts, and with the exception of the tangential comment in this one about the motivation of the male customers, no in-depth analysis about the rather peculiar (or is it in fact not peculiar at all) fact that they can get 100, 300, or 1,000 men to line up for two minutes of video debasement.
It seems to me that as we have abandoned the ages-old attempt to tame male “spiritedness,” and have replaced it with the attempt to re-invent masculinity according to feminist guidelines, that 1,000 men cued up for this weirdness proves the project of re-inventing masculinity is…ah…tits up (I believe that’s the UK expression, right?). Which means, of course, that we gave up taming men (teaching them restraint, moderation, self-control, and being a gentleman and to avoid boorish behavior) and are left with men who literally do not know how to behave.
The result is perhaps much worse than we might think. Untamed men aren’t just irresponsible with how they treat women, but with how they treat themselves and other men.
The project of re-inventing masculinity is an utter disaster.
Meanwhile, the project of reinventing femininity…… isn’t going too well either.
That was actually quite an interesting aspect of the documentary. Lily’s team really struggled to get 100 men to participate. There were a lot of guys who signed up and dropped out last minute and then her team were asking the participants if any of their friends would like to join because they weren’t getting the numbers they needed. It was also quite striking when Josh Pieters interviewed the guys after they had had their encounter. One of them was physically shaking and seemed on the brink of tears. It seemed like he hadn’t really thought about what he was doing until after the fact and there was definitely a lot of regret in in the immediate aftermath. This documentary was very eye opening but honestly I was disturbed for days after seeing it.
What I don’t get about Ms Phillips is the fact that she has all the raw materials to do well. Clearly intelligent. Apparently in good health. Good looking. Essentially everything a person needs to be successful. And she chose this as the vehicle for that success?!
Baffling.
If by success you mean making money, then it doesn’t appear to be going at all badly.
For some, prostitution is the last resort. For women who have few other skills to sell which will earn a better wage. Lily would be hard pressed to find any job, indeed any profession, which pays better.
Maybe the very huge amount of money and the fact that she employs five people has something to do with it?
She is making millions and I guess she sees that as worth the physical and mental sacrifice. She probably thinks she can cash out in a few years and have enough money for the rest of her life.
God’s teeth there must be something more interesting to write about than this?
Rachel Reeves?
” She has spent a day being screwed by men who see her, not even as an object, but as the token that stands for the object;”
And what exactly did she see them as?
I already have done! Where is it pray?
I think the analysis goes awry at this point. In order to differentiate themselves from pornhub, only fans creators must maintain a sense of their own reality as women. Not real women, of course, but “idealised” women who love sex in all its forms. Hence the (phoney) interaction and the real world stunts. This also acts as advertising and gains them a form of celebrity.
Indeed, with the arrival of AI, physical reality will be their unique selling point. A real woman, walking down a real public street with real —- on her face.
I don’t think they have misunderstood Onlyfans at all. Indeed they are making much more money from it than the average seller.
In terms of the “disjunction that everybody lives when they move between their thin, online self and the full, fleshy existence of the body”, i doubt anyone would “mistake the one for the other”. Subscribers to OnlyFans, and those who offer their services to it, are OnlyTooAware of its transactional nature. There may be many reasons why people subscribe, including for example males with a disability as well as those unable to connect at an emotional level with a woman.
The wider point is how we all now conduct a separate existence online; separate that is, from our physical and social interactions IRL and sometimes at odds with it. I wouldn’t even call OnlyFans an extreme version of it, merely a different aspect of our humanity but one which flags up some of our deepest desires which would otherwise lay hidden, or perhaps which might manifest in other ways. This is how sublimation has worked throughout our known history, and suddenly we’re no longer sublimating, or not in the same way. The effects of that on our futures is a great unknown. It may even have beneficial effects in the longer term: for instance, a lesser desire to go to war among young men. We don’t know yet – it’s too early to call.
A big question is why men pay for these services when Pornhub is free. Perhaps it is because Onlyfans does involve a rather pitiful, rather phoney emotional connection.
I feel tremendously sad for this young woman, allured, as she is by the prospect of ‘easy’ money. After all she’s never going to earn this kind of money in any job, no matter how well paid.
But as she’s just discovered, nothing in life is free. If only there’d been someone close to counsel her against this stunt.
It’s one thing to dress/undress for an audience of the worst of the male species (I’m ashamed of men a lot of the time). It’s entirely another to allow yourself to be repeatedly brutalised in the name of more clicks or more money.
Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s exactly what was happeneing, she now has the rest of her life to regret what happened I really hope someone close to her can persuade her no to repeat this, for her own sanity.
“It took a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that for most men, they don’t care about reality when it comes to their supposedly connective porn,” she writes. “They aren’t tracking you for signs of genuine enjoyment; to them, your personality is simply a vessel with which to certify that your breasts are genuine.”
What self righteous b*****ks. Maybe the men concerned know that she is only doing it for the money and that in real life she would not touch them with someone else’s barge pole.
With advent of OnlyFans (is that supposed to be one word, or two?) and applications like Tinder, all the humanity is rapidly being extracted from the most intimate of human interactions.
I can see in just a short while the extinction of OnlyFans as a revenue stream for women, or men for that matter. With the advent of A.I. it will soon be possible to create visual avatars indistinguishable from real humans, and have them interact in ways that were previously only available through online chats with actual people.
Much more importantly, avatars don’t bleed, and absolutely any form of physical abuse is an option since the avatar isn’t real. The implications of this horrific possibility are left as an exercise for the student.
Couple this with the ongoing consequences of widespread societal misandry in the developed world, and the future of the entire Human race is approaching an existential crisis.
While I have sympathy for all the young women, and men, who choose this lifestyle because their tortured psyches assure them this is the best way for them to attain a love their empty lives so crave, it’s not going to last much longer.
And, I genuinely fear, shortly thereafter neither will our species.
Why do we need yet another article about porn on this site? We’ve got this author, we’ve got Poppy, and others incessantly writing about this in a highly intellectualized manner. To most people, it’s a simple matter. Everybody knows you can make a lot of money selling your body if you’re a woman. It’s an easy racket – men will pay money for sex or to watch you have sex. The cost is, of course, your dignity, your mental and emotional stability, your future, and your soul.. There’s a reason hookers, strippers, and porn actresses often end up alcoholic, drug addicted, diseased, and hopeless. The silly and willful young women who think they can be “girlbosses” by doing porn get drawn in and institutionalized by the tons of easy cash they can make. They think they’re “businesswomen” while they degrade themselves. The mental and emotional toll it takes on them to have to face the cold, loveless objectification and sexual depravity many men are capable of while having to continue upping the ante to keep the sick fucks paying them on the hook is devastating. Meanwhile, they’re making more money than they could make doing a normal job so they develop no marketable skills outside of having sex for money. After making this kind of cash, they’re going to do what, go and clean hotel rooms for minimum wage? This keeps them in the trap even if they want to leave. Never mind that choosing to do this has most likely alienated any family or friends they once had to support them. If they can make it to middle age, what’s left for them? They’re used-up husks of human beings, emotionally shattered, often with multiple monkeys on their backs. Some appear in documentaries after retiring tearfully talking about what porn did to their lives. You can’t help but feel compassion even though common sense should have told them not to do it in the first place. Tragically, many have been deluded by the moronic progressive platitudes they hear (i.e. “sex work is real work!”) that frame prostitution as empowering to women and, as usual, swap in utopian hogwash for a sober analysis of human nature.
What a truly horrible world young people
liveexist in now.No sane society would let this woman do this.
Thank you for this insightful essay. The author’s analysis is accurate and well-written. And it all points toward the tragic commodification of life in a society that approaches the end point of transactional possibilities.
“But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that what she was doing would have some sort of toll on her, and as much as she ‘loves being a s**t’, in her words. I think the documentary showed that there is a real person in there, and some of the stuff does affect her.””
This may appear an odd claim to make, but she’s not a s**t. That’s her porn-persona which is an essential component of her appeal: she has to make her fans believe that she’d still be just as hungry and promiscuous even if there were no OnlyFans, no cameras and no money.
But this is of course nonsense. Of course she would never behave like this except for the money. That’s not me being in any way judgemental here, all I’m saying is that she has made a similar deal with life that many people do when they spot a get-rich-quick opportunity: do 3 to 5 years exhausting work that burns you out for the rest of your life, but then spend that life doing what you want with enough money never to work again.
It’s not for everyone, but it’s not wrong either.
Why is that article on here?
Women see it as exploitation of the young women & men apparently see it as exploitation of sad incels. Which is understandable – it’s natural to empathise with your own sex. But it’s men’s sexual urges that starts this cycle. It doesn’t absolve the women of their own exploitative behaviour, it just shows the sexes joined together as ever in a cruel danse macabre that brings fulfilment to neither in the end.