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Madeline Fry Schultz joins Emily to talk about the case of Lily Phillips, a 23-year-old OnlyFans creator who had sex with 100 men in one day. After the recent release of a documentary about Phillip’s experience, Fry Schultz weighs in on what it means for our
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SubscribeSurely the obvious question about this stunt is whether it really happened? Did she really have full s*x (yes, I’m trying to avoid the Unherd moderation software deleting my comment) with 100 men? Did anyone witness the deeds or do we rely on her word? Was the guy who was interviewed shaking really go through with it? Was he truly shaking or just faking?
This whole thing strikes me as a massive publicity stunt and might say nothing about modern relations between men and women, but say a lot about how to play the clickbait game on the internet.
If Lily Phillips had indeed “slept with” 100 men in one day, then her mortal sin would have been sloth. Has she been paid, or will she be? If so, then, like Stormy Daniels, she has none of that topical thing, a prostitute’s caution. In discussing that, Woman’s Hour managed to find only a pro-prostitution MP and someone from “the English Collective of Prostitutes”. So much for balance.
There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in prostitution, including pornography, so there must not be a “free” market in general. We need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. The Universal Basic Income, and Modern Monetary Theory’s Jobs Guarantee, would remove any conceivable excuse for prostituting oneself. That would of course include filmed or photographed prostitution.
I think what Lily Phillips was unable to articulate was that she was experiencing the effects of a) being treated like an object over and over again and b) also, by virtue of the set-up, being the means by which 100 men were also being treated like objects. This whole thing, which is really a stunt, reminds me of those Jack-Ass films from from the early 2000’s where the young men deliberately set up situations that involved self-mutilation. I did not find them funny, I worried about the mental health and self-esteem of the young men. Lily Phillips is like a person who completely covers their body with tattoos and piercings: ok, fine, it was all her choice, she had agency, but what does that say about her, that she was willing to put herself through that for money? It is unhealthy and demoralizing to voluntarily put oneself in a position in which one is being treated like an object. It is dehumanizing. That’s what we are feeling in our guts about why this story feels so bad. There is no way we can rationalize her stunt and have it come out ok for that reason.