The dirty truth about the OnlyFans economy Lily Phillips won't be the last to break

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.

---