OnlyFans creators are competing to have sex with as many men as possible in the shortest amount of time. It started in October last year, when twenty-three-year-old Lily Phillips had sex with a hundred men in twenty-four hours and recorded a documentary, available on YouTube. A now-viral clip from the documentary shows Phillips in apparent distress following the stunt. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it,” she says tearfully. And yet, shortly after, she announced a new goal: a thousand men in twenty-four hours.
OnlyFans creator Bonnie Blue, twenty-five, beat her to it in January. Blue allegedly bedded 1,057 men in twelve hours. In response, Phillips set herself another goal: anal sex with “as many guys as possible.”
This “OnlyFans Arms Race,” as a National Review article put it, is just another consequence of our pornified society. Porn consumption creates a recurring cycle wherein users require increasingly extreme content to feel satisfied—all the more so when it is practically everywhere: Porn is the most-searched online content, and algorithms designed to maximize engagement push it onto people’s feeds. Other forms of media have become hyper-sexualized, leading to widespread desensitization among the public. (R-rated films are freely available on flights, for instance.)
Porn has been rewiring people’s brains for decades, fueling the rift between sexual fantasy and sexual reality, and between mind and body. Phillips herself described her experience as “robotic.” Though she made excuses for her tears in an interview, claiming that she felt bad about not fully pleasuring each man due to time constraints, it’s clear her body and heart knew something her mind didn’t.
Graver still, these OnlyFans stunts replicate abusive scenarios promoted by the pornography and prostitution industries. For decades, women in porn have been sex-trafficked, lured into vulnerable situations under false pretenses, pressured into acts they didn’t agree to, and extorted. They suffer Stockholm Syndrome-like confusion, sexually transmitted infections, forced abortions, PTSD, and drug addiction. Those sold for sex endure nights of man after man in bed, without legal protections, pay, breaks, water, or the ability to say “no.”
United States law defines sex trafficking as any commercial sex act involving force, fraud, or coercion, or any such act involving a minor. While we assume the women on OnlyFans are not minors and are participating consensually, one would be naive to say that “sex work” is free of coercion. Pornhub was caught hosting videos of trafficked women. The more sexually explicit content is online, the harder it is to distinguish willing from unwilling participants, especially since 90 percent of porn depicts violence against women.
Sex-trafficking survivors have described prostitution as “paid rape”—as in, if money wasn’t being exchanged, the women wouldn’t willingly choose to have sex with the men. Are these OnlyFans stunts any different? Even if they skirt the legal definition of prostitution, the subscribers funding this content create a system that closely resembles it. In her documentary, Phillips states that she refuses requests to make videos where she’d be put in any danger—such as, for example, putting a plastic bag over her head and pretending to suffocate. “But what if someone offered a million dollars to do it,” the interviewer asks. “I probably would bend my morals for that, yeah,” she says.
The hyper-sexualized content on OnlyFans is a gateway to paid sex, which leads viewers to solicit prostitution. Online porn and OnlyFans content validates the belief that extreme sexual acts can happen in real life. And then they do happen in real life—when these consumers turn to escort ads to buy sex, living out their fantasies at the price of those who were often forced, defrauded, or coerced into the sex industry. What is touted as sexual freedom is the farthest thing from it.
When it comes to what drives the most clicks online, the weird, extreme, and grotesque always outpace the good, true, and beautiful. Never mind that frequent porn users face difficulty finding satisfaction in real-life intimacy and relationships, increased rates of divorce, addiction to abusive content, and erectile dysfunction before the age of forty. Objectifying clickbait has even corrupted women’s media. Young women are growing more depressed as they place their sense of self-worth in how men rate their attractiveness, and beyond that, how attractive they are based on the impossible and unhealthy beauty standards of online content—which takes its cues from pornography. This leads to unprecedented levels of anxiety, poor body image, low self-esteem, and suicide attempts.
The only logical outcome of the OnlyFans escalation is complete dehumanization for all those involved: the OnlyFans women disassociating so they can “go on with the show”; the male participants with blurred-out faces, reduced to little more than a number; and those who consume the content, who are losing touch with real human relationships. If one views sex as meaningless, it’s hard not to view as meaningless the people partaking in it—and those produced by it, too. Not for nothing did previous ages attribute great significance to sex, not only as an expression of intimacy and love, but as the very act that creates life and brings each of us into being. We’re better off going back to basics.
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