At first, it was the Airbnb proprietor I felt sorry for. I as soon as had a good friend who rented out her flat for a 12 months whereas she was overseas, and got here again to find it had been used as a brothel in her absence. Deep cleansing doesn’t even start to cowl it. And so when the latest YouTube documentary “I Slept With 100 Males in One Day” went viral lately, I might solely think about how the owner of the luxury London condominium the place Lily Phillips carried out her stunt may react.
“After the day was completed, Lily, below her personal identify, left a evaluate on the Airbnb itemizing, saying, 10 out of 10, would one hundred pc advocate,” the documentary’s host, Josh Pieters, informed me. Phillips was, nonetheless, much less keen about her feat of endurance intercourse. The explanation the movie has develop into so talked-about is that one quick clip—seen 200 million instances on X—exhibits her crying within the aftermath of the stunt. “I don’t know if I’d advocate it,” she says.
Phillips is 23, and Pieters is 31. Watching one younger content material creator current one other in a manner that invitations such a simple ethical judgment seems like a generational shift. Having grown up in an period when the worst factor a very good liberal might be was “judgmental” about pornography and different ostensible vices—and feminists who criticized the intercourse trade have been dismissed as prudes—I used to be shocked by Pieters’s undisguised skepticism about Phillips’s feat. (Pieters confirmed his topic the documentary earlier than broadcast, he stated, and she or he didn’t contest her portrayal.) Maybe, I questioned, the relentless normalization of on-line porn has created more room to be open about its excesses. Instantly, I considered Billie Eilish, then 19, telling Howard Stern a couple of years in the past that watching porn as a baby had “destroyed” her mind.
And positive sufficient, the overwhelming response to the documentary has been revulsion, not solely amongst conservatives—the commentator Ben Shapiro stated that Phillips had “made herself right into a intercourse robotic” whose soul was stained—but additionally amongst feminists. The British columnist Tanya Gold claimed that Phillips “just isn’t very brilliant and can quickly not be very nicely.” Among the best-rated feedback on YouTube, with 36,000 upvotes, known as the documentary “one of the best anti-porn movie I’ve ever seen.” The previous intercourse addict turned exuberant Christian influencer Russell Model confirmed up in a leopard-print cardigan to supply a uncommon notice of empathy, saying the stunt was an try and “defibrillate divinity down right here on the decrease ranges.”
Phillips’s aesthetic is that of the lady subsequent door, moderately than cartoonishly inflated grownup performer. She’s an OnlyFans star who sells $9.99-a-month subscriptions to her express content material, and makes 1000’s of {dollars} extra by recording bespoke movies for her followers, and taking their telephone calls. Her recruitment technique for the “100 Males” stunt—providing to sleep with any man who crammed out an utility and took an STI take a look at—brings the claustrophobic, intimate nature of web fame to its logical conclusion.
Pieters stated he owed it to his viewers to point out them his real response to her work. “I grew up within the era of porn being obtainable to us as youngsters on the web,” he informed me. “It could take lots to shock me or upset me, however I feel the extent of type of extremity, and the extremes that we witnessed whereas making this documentary, definitely made me really feel uncomfortable and was one thing that was utterly new for me.” The documentary even has room for that the majority stigmatized of human feelings towards intercourse: disgust. When Pieters enters the bed room within the rented Airbnb after Phillips has completed her feat, his cameraman gags on the odor.
As a pure artifact of web tradition and social mores in 2024, “I Slept With 100 Males in One Day” is tough to surpass, beginning with the truth that all of the dangerous phrases are censored within the YouTube model as a result of the video platform demonetizes obscene content material. (Sure, a documentary a couple of self-professed “slut” bleeps the phrase slut.) Then there’s the facility dynamic between Pieters and Phillips. This isn’t an omnipotent journalist attending to outline the status of a hapless topic. Each are content material creators working within the consideration economic system, and each are conscious that Phillips’s stunt might assist their careers. Pieters, who moved to Britain from South Africa to play cricket, first turned well-known via political pranks reminiscent of tricking the far-right provocateur Katie Hopkins into accepting a pretend award in entrance of an offensive slogan in 2020. Ultimately, although, he determined to alter the main focus of his channel to creating documentaries, and “100 Males” is his first try.
In his movie, Pieters is unsparing in regards to the lack of glamour concerned in Phillips’s stunt. Afterward, Phillips recounts that one man guilt-tripped her as a result of she was operating behind, and couldn’t give him the total 5 minutes—5 minutes!—he had been provided. “I suppose whenever you’ve promised one thing to individuals who assist you, it’s kinda exhausting to allow them to down,” she says.
“However it’s as much as you, proper?” Pieters says. She sniffs, holding again extra tears.
That line is typical of Pieters’s demeanor within the documentary, and it’s one of many causes his movie succeeds so nicely. He isn’t kinky, and says so. He comes throughout as a good boy. He makes no try within the documentary to exude a sophisticated, understanding, cool-with-all-this angle, a lot much less the sweaty-pawed enthusiasm of the laddish period of gonzo journalism. As an alternative, Pieters seems to be the one individual on-screen who cares about Phillips’s happiness, moderately than fulfilling their very own fantasy or enabling her profession. With out ever saying something that demeans Phillips, he declines to hide his perception that what she’s doing is a nasty concept. (She appears informal in regards to the STI testing and invitations the lads to convey their pals, unvetted, on the final minute.) Each fiber of my being wished her to surrender pandering to clammy masturbators and have a correct relationship with somebody as respectable and candy as Pieters. Look! Isn’t it good to have a dialog with a person as a substitute of charging him cash to see your vagina?
But nonetheless free Pieters and his viewers may really feel to specific their concern, the OnlyFans economic system has a momentum of its personal. Some attention-grabbing stunts, regardless of how extensively criticized, additionally reveal an urge for food for extra. Neither the backlash to the movie nor her personal said misgivings have deterred Phillips from persevering with in porn. She now maintains she desires to do one thing much more excessive, by having intercourse with 1,000 males in a single day.
Excessive intercourse stunts should not new, though the follow has till lately fallen into abeyance. Fellow survivors of the Nineteen Nineties may keep in mind the documentary Intercourse: The Annabel Chong Story, the place a gender-studies pupil had intercourse 251 instances in a day. At this distance, my mind has helpfully scrubbed most particulars, apart from the visible of an extended line of males ready for his or her flip, and Chong’s grievance that she saved being scratched by their fingernails.
The following 12 months, the grownup actor Jasmin St. Claire claimed to have managed 300, though the journalist Evan Wright, who attended the filming, put the quantity at barely 100. Wright in contrast the occasion to fight, in having “the sense of being in a gaggle of individuals intentionally and methodically engaged in acts of madness.” St. Claire ended up needing to ice her genitals midway via, and she or he was summoned onto Jerry Springer’s present afterward so the viewers might specific its disgust. “That’s the place America actually is a fantastic nation—it permits nasty pigs to be on nationwide TV in the course of the day,” she stated.
In 1999, the porn star Houston breezed previous the competitors, having intercourse 620 instances in an occasion confusingly named the Houston 500. (Afterward, she had her labia trimmed, and promised to public sale off the remnants.) “It’s not about intercourse,” Houston stated on the time. “It’s only a freak present, principally.” Throughout the web, you will discover the rumor that the file is at present held by Lisa Sparks—greater than 900 instances, in 2004—however Sparks herself has written that it was about 150, and that “I used to be so bored throughout the occasion that I order[ed] McDonald’s (hey a fats lady has to eat!!).”
From this, you may collect that these intercourse stunts are not often horny. For the ladies, the occasions are, at minimal, a grueling double shift down the hump-mines. However the calls for of high-volume intercourse additionally tax the lads, a lot of whom are tormented by efficiency anxiousness when the large second arrives. Phillips’s occasion had a excessive dropout price within the days beforehand, which shocked her however not me. The porn trade, within the days earlier than Viagra, was stuffed with wannabe male stars who talked an enormous sport after which discovered the brilliant lights and onlookers to be an actual turnoff. Fantasy is one factor; actuality is one other.
One observer of the Houston 500 divided the male members into three teams: “the skilled, the hopeless, and the hopeful.” After Phillips’s occasion, one of many few males who agreed to be interviewed by Pieters stated that he had no regrets: He had been a fan of Phillips from her earliest days on the location, and flew in from Switzerland to have intercourse along with her. However one other man was shaking. If his identification was revealed, he stated, his father would “kick me out immediately.” One more man gave Phillips a rose earlier than their assignation; it was nonetheless there on the mattress, in its wrapper, amid the handfuls of condoms strewn round afterward.
For ladies within the on-line intercourse trade, success requires self-promotion and a specific amount of self-abasement. Performers get consideration at the price of turning into objects of pity and hatred. A lot of Phillips’s earlier self-promotion got here from podcasts optimized for insecure, combative males—ones that, as Pieters put it, are “hosted by the kind of individuals who in all probability have a poster of Andrew Tate on their wall.” The No matter podcast, which has 4 million subscribers on YouTube, is the obvious instance, with episode titles reminiscent of “Do Trendy Girls DESERVE Chivalry?” and “Choosy Journey Nurse DEMANDS 6ft3 Man Who Makes $100,000+ Per 12 months?!” In case your kink is watching two guys in hoodies berate eight enticing youthful ladies in low-cut tops, whereas concurrently charging their viewers $20 to have a single message learn out on air, No matter has you lined.
These boards supply sexualized rage bait—the traditional format sees a blithe, blissful intercourse employee discuss how a lot cash she is making, and the way a lot she loves her job, whereas being peppered with aggressive questions on her “physique rely” and whether or not feminism is a lie. If she storms out of the studio, cleavage bouncing, a lot the higher.
Nobody is forcing ladies to go on No matter and be humiliated, in fact. It’s a residing. Like Phillips’s intercourse stunt, these podcast appearances by OnlyFans stars are the product of a hustle tradition the place it’s thought of higher to monetize your objectification than endure it with out compensation. If a person has to pay $20 to ship you a message calling you a rancid slut who won’t ever discover love, who’s the actual loser?
The distinction between “100 Males” and the pre-internet intercourse stunts is that many performers within the Nineteen Nineties hoped they might use their fame to interrupt into the mainstream leisure world. Houston, for instance, wished to star in a sitcom. Now there is no such thing as a mainstream: Phillips is utilizing the publicity to drive extra direct subscriptions to her OnlyFans. “Gone are the times of film studios and music labels controlling what artists and actors can and might’t do,” Pieters informed me. Content material creators are “their very own manufacturing firm, and so they select what they get to place out.” The identical impulse towards virality—and controversy—that noticed Logan Paul file a video in a Japanese “suicide forest” is now driving creators reminiscent of Phillips to advertise their companies exterior the OnlyFans paywall. (One main distinction is that not like Paul, Phillips in all probability gained’t find yourself interviewing Donald Trump.) Extremity sells, and as TV producers and newspaper editors have yielded to social-media platforms, there are not any gatekeepers to curb its full indulgence.
If anybody is exploiting Lily Phillips, it’s Lily Phillips, which raises thornier questions than some feminists may like. “I Slept With 100 Males in One Day” may superficially be involved with intercourse, but it surely’s additionally an perception into the top level of liberalism, as manifested via the web. On-line porn just isn’t going away, and America makes solely the barest try and hold it hidden from minors. On-line playing is booming. Important gamers in Silicon Valley are all in on cryptocurrencies—a lot of that are transparently scammy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is making ready to go to warfare with the regulator that tries to guard Individuals from catching preventable ailments, supported by common individuals who have been informed by influencers that milk pasteurization is “woke.” We have now develop into deeply uneasy with the idea of authorities saving us from ourselves.
There’s a purpose we’ve began appending the phrase porn to glamorized variations of actual phenomena: meals porn, property porn. We all know that porn is a fictionalized model of intercourse, and understanding the generally grim mechanics of its manufacturing would spoil the fantasy. Stunts like “100 Males” make individuals indignant partly as a result of the lie turns into too apparent to disclaim—and partly as a result of neither a performer’s discontent nor the general public’s appears more likely to change something. “The whole lot Lily Phillips did on this stunt was completely authorized, but it’s inflicting such an enormous quantity of shock,” Pieters informed me. So how, in a extra liberal, much less spiritual world, “do we all know the place the traces are, and the place to go and the place to cease?”