Amy Hamm: OnlyFans model’s 101 men in a day ‘stunt’ is profoundly sad

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On the cover of the October 1969 issue of Playboy magazine is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman smiling demurely, a beach towel draped over one arm, and a plastic telephone receiver held to one ear. She’s visible from the midriff up, topless — this is Playboy, after all — but with her tanned forearms, long hair, and left hand covering her nipples, her breasts squished together to maximize cleavage. 

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It’s altogether tame, by today’s standards.  

Even the centrefold image, revealing the fully bare breasts of a pretty model named Jean Bell, looks positively pedestrian compared to what one can find within seconds of logging on to Meta-owned Instagram in 2024.  

Now, before you proclaim that naked breasts are not permitted on Instagram, I’ve news for you: they are. Earlier this year, several women discovered that they could expose their breasts — nipples and all — to current or would-be followers by holding a baby doll as though they intend to breastfeed the infant-shaped plastic lump (ironically, often using their own “plastic lumps”). Such women use their Instagram accounts to funnel potential customers to their OnlyFans page, a place where they no longer require a life-like doll to provide the figurative cover for their pornographic intentions. 

For the uninitiated, OnlyFans is a place where “creators” post subscription content online. The company, founded by Britain’s Tim Stokely, calls it “empowering.” Most of the site’s creators are young women producing and sharing sexually explicit material of themselves overwhelmingly for pennies, according to one analysis. They sell their privacy, dignity and self-worth for a pittance, hoping to break through the proverbial algorithm and make millions. Which does happen to a lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you look at it — few. Like Sophie Rain, 20, the self-professed Christian woman who pulled in a staggering US$43 million in one year on the site. 

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And then there is the U.K.’s Lily Phillips, 23, whose OnlyFans “success” story is more accurately, if we are being honest, an absolute bloody tale of horror. The world learned about Phillips after she said she had sex with 101 men in a single day, just for her subscribers back in October. In spite of the discomfiting footage of the young woman breaking down into tears after the “feat,” and admitting it made her dissociate from reality, she now intends to go even further. Phillips announced this month she wants to allow 1,000 men to penetrate her — like a “conveyor belt of c**ks,” to put it in her own words — in a day.  

Phillips is beautiful, educated, young, and from a well-to-do family that allegedly supports her journey into a pit of misery and debasement. There is no evidence that she is being coerced into abusing her body like this. And it is abuse: it is a grotesque form of self-harm performed for all of the world to see. Phillips half-quipped, in her breakdown video, that what she does is not for “weak girls”; but I’m not sure she recognizes that merely hearing her story is not for the faint of heart.  

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Back to the October 1969 issue of Playboy: Imagine my surprise to discover a published letter from the Gainesville Women’s Liberation Group of Florida in the “Dear Playboy” section. Was it a scathing tirade against Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s controversial and oft-maligned founder? No — quite the opposite. “Amazement and shock! In the closing paragraphs of his article, Robert Kaiser has in half a page written a better analysis of female psychology than has appeared in all the women’s magazines put together in the past ten years. It is another irony for women that this has been published in a men’s magazine. Women have been appallingly ignorant of how they have been ‘mutilated by their cultural conditioning,’ but we are now slowly coming to an understanding of the process. This understanding is the basis of a new feminism that is determined to eliminate the cultural patterns that are crippling females,” wrote the feminist group. 

On later pages, a book review of Robert L. Harkel’s “The Picture Book of Sexual Love” laments that Harkel “is at heart an old double-standard thinker, an advocate of the superior-male philosophy.” The review argues that young men and women would benefit from education that there is nothing shameful in “nonexploitative” and “consensual” sex. 

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Yet another page contains a news story about a pregnant single mother who went to a U.S. court seeking child support in 1967. The judge instead sent her before a grand jury that convicted her under a 1790 fornication law making it a criminal act to have sex outside of marriage. The evident purpose of sharing this story was to invite readers to gawk at the preposterous prudishness that the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s sought to conquer and raze. 

It strikes me (someone who has never opened an issue before) that Playboy magazine served a purpose, beyond the objectification of women’s nude bodies, during the sexual revolution. It was — at times, anyways — thoughtfully counter-culture during a period when the culture was too restrictive, too repressive, and too out-of-touch with the nature of human sexuality. The old refrain that men used about subscribing to Playboy “for the articles” doesn’t sound so glib, after all. 

None of this is exculpatory evidence to prove that Playboy was a net positive, or even of any benefit at all, for women’s liberation — it merely provides an incredible and depressing juxtaposition of the cultural forces that sexually objectified women in the 1960s versus today, 55 years after this Playboy issue was released. 

Playboy has nothing on OnlyFans. You will find no women’s liberation groups penning letters to OnlyFans’ CEO commending her for publishing a contemplative analysis of female psychology. 

There is no “viva la revolución” now that we can see where a sexual liberation movement with no terminus will lead all of us — and particularly women. It’s ugly, degrading, and profoundly sad. The sexual revolution has gone too far.

National Post

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