Earlier this week, YouTuber Josh Pieters dropped a 47-minute documentary that followed 23-year-old OnlyFans star Lily Phillips as she planned for and completed her goal of having sex with 100 men in 24 hours as a stunt for her OnlyFans page.
While she is certainly not the first woman to clear these numbers (in 2004 Lisa Sparks broke the world record by sleeping with 919 in one day), it is nevertheless a grueling feat that took months of planning and a team of assistants to accomplish. Any sex worker can tell you that simply getting 100 men to upload their identification for screening is a job in itself.
Since she announced the project earlier this fall, Phillips has received online harassment and blowback from both civilians and other OnlyFans performers alike, who have accused her of being everything from morally bankrupt to attention-seeking and unsafe. The program itself, which follows her journey from naive excitement about her fantasy project, to the tearful exhaustion at its completion, has sparked online discourse about the porn industry and its impact on the lives of young women.
As a long-time sex worker in various sectors of the industry, I know from experience that we are inclined to hold our cards close to our chests, afraid that sharing anything about our work lives that is not uniformly positive will be used against us by those eager to see our industry abolished — a standard workers in other industries are not expected to meet. Her tears, in this regard, are political and controversial. But should they be?
One of the strengths of the documentary is the attention Pieters gives to the work that goes on behind the scenes of any sexual transaction, and the respect shown to Phillips as a successful businesswoman. We are given a tour of her toy closet; we are told about her complex profit/loss spreadsheets; we follow her as she shops for the big day (noting that her lingerie purchases are tax deductible); and we watch as her phone displays an overwhelming number of notifications from men applying to be part of the experience. (The film is entirely SFW, it should be noted, going as far as to blur out images of sex toys and bleep any word that indicates intercourse — the video of the act itself is only available behind a paywall on Phillips’ OnlyFans site.)
While she self-deprecatingly calls herself a slut throughout the documentary, she also makes it clear that what she is doing is work. “I do [porn] because I enjoy it,” she says. “I’ve only ever felt empowered by the fact that I’m making money off something that all guys are going to do anyway; all guys are going to sexualize me anyway.” While Pieters sweetly, and perhaps naively, responds, “Not all guys…,” Phillips remains steadfast in the refrain I’ve heard from many sex workers (and that I’ve also, at times, said myself): The sexual objectification of our bodies is something that we can cash in on only if we are willing to live under the public scrutiny that choice provokes.
Certainly, Phillips is aware that living under stigma is the price she pays for the astronomical amount of money she earns (a number so high that both Phillips and Pieters are embarrassed to say it aloud) and the “empowerment” she feels. “Everyone is praying for your downfall,” she says, in one particularly honest moment. She talks frankly about having her physical appearance and life choices picked apart by an audience of online trolls, saying, “No one likes what you do and everyone just thinks less of you.”
Despite this, Phillips still goes into the experience bright-eyed. “I don’t think people realize how happy this makes me,” she says. Several times she alludes to the fact that having sex with 100 men in a single day is a fantasy of hers, though she doesn’t say exactly what the fantasy is: the actual sex, the challenge, the money, the attention? It seems plausible that it could be any or all of these things or something else entirely. This is, after all, a stunt that falls into a broader context of both the history of pornography and the culture of online content creation. (Would MrBeast be worth half a billion dollars if he wasn’t constantly upping the ante?) Pulling off a stunt of this magnitude and bringing an audience along for the ride is certainly one way of standing above the competition on OnlyFans.
On Nov. 18, 2024, Phillips exceeded her goal of having sex with 100 men in one day (she got to 101) but admitted that it was harder than she had anticipated. The documentary wraps up with a post-coital interview of Phillips, a segment of the video that has gotten a ton of negative attention on social media. In it, she comments through tears, “I don’t know if I recommend [having sex with 100 men in a day].” When Pieters asks her if she has had time to process the experience she says, “Not yet, but I won’t forget this day. Jesus.”
A clip of the final interview with Phillips — largely taken out of context from the rest of the documentary — has sparked outrage on social media.
Josh Pieters/Goon Squad Productions via Youtube
Pieters ends the film with an open-ended statement: “Maybe what we witnessed that night is just someone overwhelmed with emotions after completing such a monumental challenge. Or maybe we saw the true toll this career can have on a person.” As someone who has worked in the sex industry for 10 years, and had other careers before that, I’m more inclined toward the first reading. And yet it is this second possibility that so many folks online (including in the comments on the YouTube video itself) clung to, especially since she announced that she’s planning on breaking Sparks’ record next spring by having sex with 1,000 men in 24 hours. Whorephorbia and sex-work stigma are so pervasive that it is easy to blame the sex industry for the possible harm that this stunt caused her, but she is an adult who works independently and can make decisions for herself about how she uses her own body and assuming otherwise undermines her autonomy.
OnlyFans models are independent creators who, for the most part, run their businesses according to their own dictates. This story made the news precisely because it is not industry standard — in particular, much has been made of the fact that she left STI tests up to the individuals (she says in the doc that she prioritized participants who provided medical documentation) and that she seemed surprised when Pieters told her that HIV could be transmitted via ejaculate in the mouth. And it’s true, she broke from industry precautions that are typical: she didn’t have any of the participants conduct STI tests through whatever the U.K.’s version of our PASS system is, she used condoms for vaginal sex but not oral sex, she didn’t run background checks the way escorts would when sleeping with civilians, she didn’t have participants shower beforehand, and she used an Airbnb even though it could well get her banned from the service. If anything, this reveals her youth and inexperience, and what happens when content creators eschew the decades of trial and error that go into establishing standards for such heavily regulated industries.
The entire ordeal was put together in a somewhat haphazard way that seemed consistent with her age and experience. Despite having nine people on her team, things didn’t run smoothly: Phillips and her team were late, men dropped out at the last minute, and everything took longer than expected. Yet anyone who has run a large production (a conference, an event, a party, a gang bang) can tell you that there are always things you have to improvise at the last minute — especially when it’s the first time. Most of us working in the sex industry learn how to manage client expectations, our own emotions, logistics, and money by doing the job. But this is true of most jobs.
Sex workers often talk about the fact that one of the hardest things about the job is that we have to constantly perform happiness and fulfillment, lest we be judged harshly for our choices. In my area of the industry (full-service, in-person work), we only have two tropes: the down-and-out worker or the “happy hooker.” Sex workers have no space to express ambivalence or complex feelings about their work. When anti-porn feminists and conservative Christians are both chomping at the bit to shut our industry down, we are loathe to be honest when we have a bad day on the job, fearing that this information will be used as ammunition.
Perhaps the remarkable thing that Phillips did in this film was not have sex with 100 men, but rather break the fourth wall, allowing people outside the industry to see her vulnerability and her complex feelings about her labor. She allowed us to see her learn on the job, and work through her feelings about it, while still asking folks to recognize her humanity and agency simultaneously. Maybe by going to the extremes, she showed the world just how difficult and nuanced this line of work really is. Perhaps more of us should be this brutally honest about the complexities of our jobs.
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