I found myself down somewhat of a YouTube rabbit hole a couple of nights ago, and clicked on a documentary about a young woman named Lily Philips. The almost hour-long episode focused on the 23-year-old Only Fans ‘star’ and her quest to sleep with 100 men in the space of one day.
She accomplished that grim goal in October in a rented AirBnB in upmarket Chelsea, seeing the first man of the day at 9am and finishing the grim challenge at around 10pm that night. The clip from the documentary that has shot to major virality, I’d note, is one where the male interviewer gets to speak to Phillips at the end of her sex marathon with 100 strangers.
Once everyone’s cleared out of the posh apartment, she surfaces with bloodshot, watery eyes, looking absolutely drained and a far-cry from the immaculately presented, lively, full-of-beans Phillips featured earlier on in the documentary. There’s no sign of life in her eyes. Her demeanor has changed. The scene feels like a recreation of hell on earth.
Asked how it went, she tells the presenter, “I don’t know if I’d recommend it,” before crumbling into tears. Despite her obvious upset, Phillips hasn’t done a 360 – but has shockingly doubled down, announcing she will sleep with one thousand men in February. The casting poster is out, location yet to be confirmed. I despair.
I really wish I hadn’t watched the documentary. It was well made. The presenter clearly had admirable compassion for Phillips (he was the only one who seemed to care about her, while those around her were completely detached from the poor girl’s welfare). But some of it was too stomach-churning, too sad, too God-awful to watch. I skipped parts.
But what I did see offered a disturbing insight into the world of Only Fans, an internet platform turned phenomenon that has amassed some 130 million users, two million contributors, and billions in revenue. It was a raw and rare insight into what it can do to people. How anyone, let alone the roaring feminists who say they are all about women’s rights, can defend Only Fans after seeing the real-life horror stories it has produced, is beyond me.
I was most curious about Phillips herself after seeing her name trending on social media. The conversation has been raging all week, so I’m likely late to the party writing this piece. Still, I think it’s important to write about.
There’s no doubt she has achieved her obvious goal – widespread, wall-to-wall, internet fame, with the money in the bank to prove she’s ‘made it.’ But its come at such a massive cost. Droves of people have taken to the comments section of social media to express fears about how the young woman will cope in the years to come.
She is now known worldwide for bedding 100 men in 24 hours – and it’s not rocket science that her publicity stunt could only have attracted 100 of the very worst kind of men. (Those seeking to use her as a toy, those without any kind of a moral compass). Despite all her loose, tongue-in-cheek talk of empowerment and ‘I do it for fun,’ she is known, for now at least, as a woman willing to reduce herself to an object and a plaything. How will she deal with that, and the notoriety she has happily propagated from it, in the years to come, is anyone’s guess.
What will the impact be on her mental health? Does she want to find a decent man and settle down? Or would she like to have children in the future? How will her escapades, broadcast for millions to see forever, affect the relationship she has with her friends and family? There are just so many questions. Why would anyone put themselves through this being the most obvious one.
But I suppose that’s the slippery slope of Only Fans. Formed six years ago and headquartered in London, the subscription-based video service sells itself on “empowering creators to own their full potential.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But if we want answers, it’s always a good idea to follow the money trail. After all, some women on the platform earn more stripping than Premier League footballers. Could that be seen as empowering? Obviously, many Only Fans defenders think it is.
Sex work has undergone a rebrand to make it seem, especially to the younger generation, like an industry which fuels itself on girl-boss energy and good vibes. Irish Only Fans creators have even been given spreads in the pages of national newspapers so they can talk about how they make over €100,000 a year selling explicit videos and photos. They say it helps some of them support their children as single mothers, and it means they can buy their dream car.
Many boast about not being reliant on any man. Which of course is a ludicrous self-deception given the fact that it is debased men who call the shots and pay the salaries of these women. Anyone who calls out the debauchery is seen as backwards, perpetuating negative “stigmas” around sex work.
But there are real concerns, and Lily Phillips, a well-to-do girl from Derby who grew up dreaming about owning a wedding dress shop, only deepens those concerns. OF has been billed as a safe and consequence-free platform but based on the experiences of women who use it, it’s clear that the service is far from safe.
Irish OF creators have testified that they found the demands of men of the platform growing more and more lewd and obscene as OF grew. What started as selling provocative underwear photos in time turned to requests for full-blown porn. Male users make all kinds of disgusting requests, from asking for videos of women peeing to begging for underwear to be sent through the post. It’s clear the site attracts the worst kind of pervs. Other women who have thankfully ditched the wretched platform have found themselves on porn sites after their ‘clients’ screen-recorded videos and made pornographic memes out of topless photos.
There is often an outpouring of sympathy for these women, but how foolish do you have to be not to realise that what you post has the potential to remain permanently on the internet? Then there’s the impact on romantic and family relationships and friendships, many of which have been harmed beyond repair. I suppose the horror stories are evidence of the OF slippery slope which the lucrative platform will always deny exists.
In order to make any money, creators have to be willing to degrade themselves to the point of having sex on camera. Women who turned to the platform struggling for cash have had to stoop to acts of total degradation to make any money. Case in point is Lily Phillips, one of its top earners, who, to keep up with the competition, went as far as sleeping with 100 men in one day, her rationale being that it will boost her profile and help her rake in more cash. This slippery slope serves to show how degrading the porn industry is in practice.
The picture is broader, though, than the OF slippery slope. One of the things that stood out about the Phillips documentary was when the pretty 23-year-old said that she had, at one point, considered saving sex for marriage. She lost her virginity to a boyfriend when she was around 18, and then university hit. It was here she started going on nights out where she was “always sleeping around” with different young men. “I realised how much I enjoyed it,” she said, adding that it made her realise that “I wanted to do it more.”
It was at this point that she thought something along the lines of “I’m doing it anyway, so why not make money from it?” which prompted her to join OF. Herein lies the root of the problem. Sex is no longer an expression of love or commitment. It is recreational: a hobby or a sport or scratching an itch. It is an expectation. Long gone are the days when intimacy between two people was about unity and love and procreation. And it’s a man’s world. Men are allowed to use women, who in turn promise them they merely want no-strings-attached situationships when all along, they want to be loved and protected. Women use men too.
There is a wedge between the sexes that is widening. Marriage rates are declining and so are birth rates. There is little incentive to marry because sex is guaranteed anyway, and very many people have simply been around the block too many times to ever commit to one person. Divorce rates are up. Family breakdown is more common in Ireland.
The hurt and the damage so obvious in Lily Phillips’ countenance is a very magnified version of the pain many women (and men) feel because they bought into the cultural rot that promised them fun and pleasure but in the end, only brought them misery. Very many young people are part of the walking wounded, with low self-worth, feeling lonely and used.
The Lilly Phillips story is horrifying, and OF should be banned. But her story, how this was allowed to happen and was cheered on by those around her, is a flashing red flag regarding a culture that is broken. More and more people, when they see stories like this, call it degeneracy, and I’d agree it’s time to call behaviour like this out, on the part of men and women, for what it really is.
There’s another aspect in this that is rarely discussed: the role people like Lilly Philips (and her mother, who is her finance manager) play in debasing and demeaning other women. A society which increasingly sees women as sexual objects is a more dangerous society for all woman, of all ages, online and in the real world.
That’s an issue that all the fuss around Lilly Philips’ attention seeking rarely addresses. But it’s what eventually makes the biggest difference to women and to girls, not clicks, views or subscribers.