Why a ‘feminist’ on OnlyFans plans to have sex with 1,000 men in a day

One, it’s designed so creators can turn their followers into paying subscribers rather than working for nothing. And two, it’s a self-described “adult” network, for over-18s only. The site boasts that it has some of the strictest age verification in the tech industry.

Phillips celebrating her 22nd birthday in 2023

LILY PHILLIPS/INSTAGRAM

Of course, “adult interests” could mean lots of things, as the chief executive Keily Blair has explained: “Lots of people who are over 18 like sex, but they also like comedy and sports and music.” And when I visit the site myself (for strictly journalistic reasons: I’m not a subscriber or, I’m sure you’ll be disappointed to hear, a creator), there are plenty of different kinds of content on display.

For example, a female golfer delivers course ratings. While wearing a teeny-tiny skirt and a cropped top. A post from a rider offers advice on buying a horse in person: her photos show her posing around a stable in bra and panties. If you’re interested in fitness, there’s a recipe for a high-protein snack — made, inevitably, by a woman in a barely-there bikini. Sex is at the core of OnlyFans.

Founded in 2016 by British father and son Guy and Tim Stokely, it was originally pitched as the place “where having fans, PAYS!”, with no mention of erotica. But as sites such as Tumblr clamped down on NSFW content, and the porn industry grew ever more brutally competitive, OnlyFans turned into the destination for sex workers and their customers. In 2018 it was bought by the Ukrainian-American porn entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky.

Kate Nash uses OnlyFans to help pay for her tour expenses

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Radvinsky has a few shady spots in his past. His first company, founded when he was 17, was called Cybertania Inc and ran a string of websites promising users access to “illegal” and “hacked” logins for porn sites. Some of those sites offered material including children or bestiality, although a Forbes investigation found no evidence that such content was actually available through Radvinsky’s sites.

OnlyFans’ moderation rules are clear: nothing illegal is permitted. Nonetheless, it doesn’t have a spotless record. In 2021 the BBC reported that under-18s were circumventing the age-verifying process and selling explicit pictures and videos. A couple of months later, OnlyFans announced that it was banning sexual content entirely — then reversed the decision within days.

None of which has stopped it from relentlessly expanding. Lockdown was a boom time for the platform. Men who had been either furloughed or told to work from home were looking to alleviate their boredom. Meanwhile, for women worrying about how to pay their bills, OnlyFans seemed to promise easy money and total control. (This is when Phillips signed up to the site.)

It’s also benefited from some plum celebrity endorsements, including a money-can’t-buy namedrop from Beyoncé on the 2020 remix of Savage with the rapper Megan Thee Stallion. The same year, former Disney star Bella Thorne got in on the game, and rang up $2 million in subscriptions within a week.

Bella Thorne courted controversy with her time on the site

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Then it turned out that the “nudes” Thorne was selling weren’t nudes after all but rather lingerie shots, and the whole thing ended in a flurry of dissatisfied customers. Rank-and-file creators blamed Thorne for a raft of unwelcome changes to the service, including a cap on charges and a move from weekly to monthly payments.

That controversy did little to deter other famous names from signing up. Kate Moss’s half sister Lottie Moss has said she’s earned up to £30,000 a month from OnlyFans. This year, the pop star and actress Lily Allen joined the site as a creator, specialising in foot fetish pictures: based on her subscriber count, she could be making £10,000 a month. So did the singer Kate Nash, who won the Brit award for best female artist in 2008. “I enjoy taking pictures of my bum. Always been a bit of a flasher,” she explained.

• I met the woman who runs OnlyFans. It didn’t go well

In both cases, there was more to the decision than “empowerment” and “self-expression”. Both have spoken about the harsh economics of the music industry: streaming services pay artists as little as $0.003 per play, while the costs of touring are prohibitively high. In other words, they need the money. (It’s worth noting that, despite boosting the site in her music, Beyoncé has never had an OnlyFans.)

Lottie Moss has said she’s earned up to £30,000 a month from OnlyFans

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Lily Allen joined the site as a creator, specialising in foot fetish pictures

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But OnlyFans can be bitterly competitive in its own right, especially for those like Phillips who aren’t well known to begin with. A move from offering sexy pictures to offering actual sex wasn’t enough to drastically increase her income. Like many OnlyFans creators before her, she discovered that you need to do something extreme if you’re going to stand out.

She had early success with a competition where the prize was to have sex with her (the winner’s girlfriend waited for him to finish in the room next door). Her big break, though, was her first “gang bang”, in which she recruited 100 men to have sex with her in the same day. She has said she fancied about 30 per cent of them, but it would have felt “quite cruel” to turn any of them away. By 60, she was almost ready to stop.

That makes her decision to go for the thousand even harder to understand. Logistically alone, it’s a huge challenge. Even assuming no breaks for Phillips, she’ll need to get through each man in under 90 seconds. Even for men who think this is their ultimate fantasy, that’s a big strain on their performance.

And who will these men be? The application process involves sending a photo of themselves holding their ID, and all will need to wear a condom and take an HIV test on the day. Otherwise, Phillips hasn’t described any form of vetting — despite her experience of some men trying to push the boundaries during her hundred.

Phillips calls herself a feminist, but there’s something unavoidably bleak about her launching this in the shadow of the Pelicot rape trial in France. Phillips is an eager participant, but one of the horrors of what happened to Gisèle Pelicot at her husband’s hands is how many men were utterly disregarding of consent when they got the chance to be a “porn star” as they were filmed having sex with her unconscious body.

Even without that backdrop, though, Phillips shows how market forces distort sex. Once you make the decision to sell yourself, the inevitable pressure is to go harder, further, more extreme. If she manages the thousand, where can she go next?