What Does Sleeping with 100 Men in One Day Do to the Soul?

For years, progressive activists have insisted that “sex work is work.” Simply googling the phrase now produces an AI-generated answer that affirms it: “Yes, sex work is work.” When I first heard this several years ago, I thought of Body Without Soul, Wiktor Grodecki’s 1996 documentary that follows a crew of impoverished young rent boys through the social and economic wreckage of post-socialist Prague. In one scene, Grodecki asks the boys, most of them underaged, how much it would take to buy their souls.

“You can’t sell it,” says one.

“I sell my soul together with the body,” says another.

The smallest says simply, “Two thousand crowns.”

A rosy-cheeked teenage Czech hustler, smoking a cigarette in bed, tells the camera, “The soul wants money. The body has to sell itself.”

Now, 28 years later, another documentary, I Slept with 100 Men in One Day, interrogates sex work again to a devastating conclusion. It has an artistic subtlety that eludes its clickbait title and a message similar to Grodecki’s—that selling the body means leaving it, if you want to survive.

“People call me anything—porn star, escort, OnlyFans girl—I don’t really care,” says Lily Phillips, 23, in a chipper, middle-class English accent. For the next 47 minutes, British YouTuber Josh Pieters follows the efforts of Lily and her staff to organize and ultimately execute Lily’s plan to have sex with 100 dudes in a single day.

Lily tells Pieters she started doing sex work while attending university. “I was being a slut anyway, I figured I could make a bit of money,” she explained. Her content, which she posted on OnlyFans, started out vanilla enough: “hand-bras [where a woman poses for a photo, covering her breasts with her hands] and panties,” she explains. Soon, though, she tells Pieters, the nature of her content became more extreme. “I kinda realized how much money you can make and also how much I loved it.”

In an internet awash in pornography of every conceivable kind, it takes novelty to stand out. Lily explains to Pieters that her previous record was sex with 37 guys in one day. “I genuinely can’t remember any of their faces,” she says. That video, and others, have nonetheless paid off. In the film Phillips has nine employees who help her produce content, and she’s apparently made around $2.5 million from her account. She calls her plan to have sex with 100 men in one day a “fantasy.”

As the day approaches, though, Lily seems increasingly apprehensive. She confides in Pieters that she feels too ashamed to tell her parents—who are generally supportive of her career—about her plans. As men send in applications, she admits that those who return negative STI tests are “prioritized,” but that she’s well aware that some of the men might be lying to her. On the day of the actual event, she shakes from apparent nervousness, but insists to Pieters that she’s “excited.”

After the 101 deeds are done—yes, one more than her original goal—Lily emerges from the shower, teary-eyed and exhausted. She shows the filmmakers the room. The cameraman gags from the smell. At first, she assures them that everything has gone well, but the facade quickly crumbles.

“It’s intense,” Lily says, looking despondent, her makeup washed off.

“More intense than you thought it might?” Pieters asks.

“Definitely,” Lily says, breaking down. Through tears she admits that, yet again, she cannot remember the faces of most of the men she’s just had sex with. At first, she pretends she’s upset because she feels badly that some men haven’t been satisfied despite traveling a long way and “supporting her.” But soon, what appears to be the real truth behind her grief is revealed.

“I think it was like. . . feeling so robotic.” She wipes tears from her eyes. “I’ve got this routine of how we were going to do this, and like sometimes you’d just dissociate and. . . it’s not like normal.”

In other words, she endured her ordeal by separating her body from her soul.

The way Lily describes her experience is virtually indistinguishable from the symptoms of rape trauma syndrome: mood swings, dissociation, self-blame, guilt, and sometimes, hypersexuality.

Maybe that explains why the film ends with Lily announcing her plans to have sex with one thousand men in a day this February. “This was just the warm-up,” she says in a self-shot video for her fans filmed days after the 100-man event. “I’m going to be the first person ever to reach four digits of guys all in one day.”

In 1996, when Body Without Soul was released, people didn’t need to be convinced that sex work was traumatizing. Today, it seems, they do. Grodecki’s rent boys hustled to survive, and abhorred their johns, largely German sex tourists who had money and particular tastes. Now, in the age of OnlyFans, sex workers are encouraged to think of themselves as part of a community with obligations to a fan base that will always push them further and harder. It’s not just a money trap; it’s a psychological one.

Not all porn is equally exploitative—and there will always be exhibitionist types who’d just as quickly make it for free. But OnlyFans isn’t a neutral platform; it’s a market designed to sell the body even if it means stealing the soul in the process. And what Lily Phillips just put herself though is not labor. It’s self-abuse.