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 yr 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 current YouTube documentary “I Slept With 100 Males in One Day” went viral just lately, I might solely think about how the owner of the luxury London residence the place Lily Phillips carried out her stunt would possibly react.
“After the day was completed, Lily, beneath her personal identify, left a assessment on the Airbnb itemizing, saying, 10 out of 10, would one hundred pc advocate,” the documentary’s host, Josh Pieters, advised me. Phillips was, nevertheless, much less passionate about her feat of endurance intercourse. The explanation the movie has turn out to be so talked-about is that one brief clip—considered 200 million instances on X—reveals 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 appears 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 business have been dismissed as prudes—I used to be stunned 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 extra space to be open about its excesses. Instantly, I considered Billie Eilish, then 19, telling Howard Stern just a few years in the past that watching porn as a baby had “destroyed” her mind.
And certain 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 “is just not very brilliant and can quickly not be very properly.” Among the best-rated feedback on YouTube, with 36,000 upvotes, referred to 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 word 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 woman subsequent door, quite than cartoonishly inflated grownup performer. She’s an OnlyFans star who sells $9.99-a-month subscriptions to her express content material, and makes hundreds of {dollars} extra by recording bespoke movies for her followers, and taking their telephone calls. Her recruitment methodology for the “100 Males” stunt—providing to sleep with any man who stuffed out an software and took an STI check—brings the claustrophobic, intimate nature of web fame to its logical conclusion.
Pieters stated he owed it to his viewers to indicate them his real response to her work. “I grew up within the era of porn being out there to us as youngsters on the web,” he advised me. “It could take so much to shock me or upset me, however I believe 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 scent.
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 popularity 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 grew to become well-known by way of political pranks similar to 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 target 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 working behind, and couldn’t give him the complete 5 minutes—5 minutes!—he had been provided. “I suppose once you’ve promised one thing to individuals who assist you, it’s kinda arduous 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 properly. 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, realizing, cool-with-all-this perspective, a lot much less the sweaty-pawed enthusiasm of the laddish period of gonzo journalism. As a substitute, Pieters seems to be the one individual on-screen who cares about Phillips’s happiness, quite 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 thought. (She appears informal in regards to the STI testing and invitations the boys to deliver 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 first rate and candy as Pieters. Look! Isn’t it good to have a dialog with a person as an alternative of charging him cash to see your vagina?
But nevertheless free Pieters and his viewers would possibly 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 acknowledged misgivings have deterred Phillips from persevering with in porn. She now maintains she needs to do one thing much more excessive, by having intercourse with 1,000 males in a single day.
Excessive intercourse stunts aren’t new, though the apply has till just lately fallen into abeyance. Fellow survivors of the Nineteen Nineties would possibly 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 criticism that she saved being scratched by their fingernails.
The subsequent yr, 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 by way of, and she or he was summoned onto Jerry Springer’s present afterward so the viewers might categorical its disgust. “That’s the place America actually is an exquisite 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, mainly.” Throughout the web, yow 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 in the course of the occasion that I order[ed] McDonald’s (hey a fats woman has to eat!!).”
From this, you would possibly collect that these intercourse stunts are hardly ever 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 boys, a lot of whom are affected by efficiency anxiousness when the massive second arrives. Phillips’s occasion had a excessive dropout fee within the days beforehand, which stunned her however not me. The porn business, within the days earlier than Viagra, was stuffed with wannabe male stars who talked an enormous recreation 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 together with her. However one other man was shaking. If his identification was revealed, he stated, his father would “kick me out right away.” 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 girls within the on-line intercourse business, success requires self-promotion and a specific amount of self-abasement. Performers get consideration at the price of changing 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 most likely 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 similar to “Do Fashionable Ladies 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 girls in low-cut tops, whereas concurrently charging their viewers $20 to have a single message learn out on air, No matter has you coated.
These boards provide sexualized rage bait—the traditional format sees a blithe, pleased intercourse employee speak about 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 girls to go on No matter and be humiliated, after all. It’s a dwelling. 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 true loser?
The distinction between “100 Males” and the pre-internet intercourse stunts is that many performers within the Nineteen Nineties hoped they may use their fame to interrupt into the mainstream leisure world. Houston, for instance, wished to star in a sitcom. Now there isn’t 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 may’t do,” Pieters advised 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 similar to Phillips to advertise their companies outdoors the OnlyFans paywall. (One main distinction is that in contrast to Paul, Phillips most likely received’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 would possibly like. “I Slept With 100 Males in One Day” would possibly superficially be involved with intercourse, but it surely’s additionally an perception into the tip level of liberalism, as manifested by way of the web. On-line porn is just not going away, and America makes solely the barest try and maintain 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 illnesses, supported by common individuals who have been advised by influencers that milk pasteurization is “woke.” We’ve turn out to be deeply uneasy with the idea of authorities saving us from ourselves.
There’s a motive 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 concern,” Pieters advised me. So how, in a extra liberal, much less non secular world, “do we all know the place the traces are, and the place to go and the place to cease?”