Sex-Worker’s Take on Controversial Doc

Earlier this week, YouTuber Josh Pieters dropped a 47-minute documentary that followed the 23-year-old OnlyFans star Lily Phillips when she planned and completed her goal of having sex with 100 men in 24 hours as a stunt for her OnlyFans page.

Although she is certainly not the first woman to clear these numbers (in 2004 Lisa Sparks broke the world record by sleeping with 919 in one day), it’s nonetheless a grueling feat that took months of planning and a team of assistants to pull off. Any sex worker can tell you that just getting 100 men to upload their identification for screening is a job in itself.

Since announcing the project earlier this fall, Phillips has received online harassment and blowback from civilians and fellow OnlyFans artists alike, who have accused her of being everything from morally bankrupt to attention-seeking and insecure. The show itself, which follows her journey from naïve excitement about her fantasy project to the tearful exhaustion at its end, has sparked online discourse about the porn industry and its impact on young women’s lives.

As a long-time sex worker in various sectors of the industry, I know from experience that we tend to keep our cards close to our chests, afraid that sharing anything about our work lives that is not uniformly positive will be used against us by those who are eager to see our industry abolished – a standard that workers in other industries are not expected to meet. Her tears are, in this respect, political and controversial. But should they be?

One of the strengths of the documentary is the attention Pieters gives to the work that goes on behind the scenes of any sexual transaction, and the respect shown to Phillips as a successful businesswoman. We get a tour of her toy closet; we are told about her complex profit/loss spreadsheet; we follow her as she shops for the big day (note that her lingerie purchases are tax deductible); and we watch as her phone shows an overwhelming number of notifications from men applying to be a part of the experience. (The film is completely SFW, it should be noted, and goes so far as to blur images of sex toys and beep any words that indicate intercourse — the video of the act itself is only available behind a paywall on Phillips’ OnlyFans page.)

While she self-deprecatingly calls herself a bitch throughout the documentary, she also makes it clear that what she does is work. “I do (porn) because I enjoy it,” she says. “I’ve only ever felt empowered by the fact that I’m making money doing something that all guys are going to do anyway; all guys are going to sexualize me anyway.” While Pieters sweetly, and perhaps naively, replies, “Not all guys…”, Phillips remains steadfast in the refrain I’ve heard from many sex workers (and that I, too, at times has said): The sexual objectification of our bodies is something we can only cash in on if we are willing to live under the public scrutiny that the election engenders.

Certainly, Phillips is aware that living under stigma is the price she pays for the astronomical amount of money she makes (a number so high that both Phillips and Pieters are embarrassed to say it out loud) and the “empowerment “, she feels. “Everyone is praying for your downfall,” she says in a particularly candid moment. She speaks candidly about having her physical appearance and life choices picked apart by an audience of online trolls, saying, “No one likes what you do and everyone just thinks less of you.”

Despite this, Phillips still goes into the experience with sharp eyes. “I don’t think people realize how happy this makes me,” she says. Several times she hints that having sex with 100 men in a single day is her fantasy, though she doesn’t say exactly what the fantasy is: the actual sex, the challenge, the money, the attention? It seems plausible that it could be any or all of these things or something else entirely. After all, this is a stunt that fits into a broader context of both the history of pornography and the culture of online content creation. (Would MrBeast be worth half a billion dollars if he wasn’t constantly upping the ante?) Pulling off a stunt of this magnitude and bringing an audience along for the ride is certainly one way to stand out from the competition on OnlyFans.

On November 18, 2024, Phillips surpassed her goal of having sex with 100 men in one day (she reached 101), but admitted it was harder than she had anticipated. The documentary concludes with a post-coital interview of Phillips, a part of the video that has received plenty of negative attention on social media. In it, she comments through tears: “I don’t know if I recommend (having sex with 100 men in one day).” When Pieters asks her if she has had time to process the experience, she says: “Not yet, but I will not forget this day. Jesus.”

Pieters ends the film with an open statement: “Maybe what we witnessed that night was just someone overcome with emotion after completing such a monumental challenge. Or maybe we saw the true toll this career can take on a person.” As someone who has worked in the sex industry for 10 years and had other careers before that, I lean more towards the first reading. And yet it is this second possibility that so many people online (including in the comments on the YouTube video itself) latched onto, especially since she announced that she plans to break Sparks’ record next spring by having sex with 1,000 men in 24 hours. Prostitution and stigmatization of sex work is so widespread that it is easy to blame the sex industry for the possible harm this stunt caused her, but she is an adult working independently and can make her own decisions about how she uses her own body and to assume otherwise undermines her autonomy.

OnlyFans models are independent creators who mostly run their businesses according to their own dictates. This story made the news precisely because it is not industry standard – in particular, much has been made of the fact that she left STI testing up to the individuals (she says in the doc that she prioritized participants who provided medical documentation), and that she seemed surprised when Pieters told her that HIV could be transmitted via ejaculate in the mouth. And it’s true, she broke from typical industry precautions: she didn’t have any of the contestants perform STI tests through whatever the UK version of our PASS system is, she used condoms for vaginal sex but not oral sex, she didn’t run background checks like chaperones would when sleeping with civilians, she didn’t have the participants shower beforehand, and she used an Airbnb even though it might well get her banned from the service. If anything, this reveals her youth and inexperience, and what happens when content creators avoid the decades of trial and error that go into establishing standards for such heavily regulated industries.

The whole ordeal was put together in a somewhat haphazard way that seemed consistent with her age and experience. Despite having nine people on her team, things didn’t run smoothly: Phillips and her team were late, men dropped out at the last minute, and everything took longer than expected. Still, anyone who has run a large production (a conference, an event, a party, a once-bang) can tell you that there are always things you have to improvise at the last minute – especially when it’s the first time. Most of us who work in the sex industry learn to manage client expectations, our own emotions, logistics and money by doing the job. But that applies to most jobs.

Sex workers often talk about how one of the hardest things about the job is that we have to constantly perform happiness and satisfaction, so as not to be judged harshly for our choices. In my area of ​​the industry (full service, personal work) we only have two tropes: the down-and-out worker or the “happy whore.” Sex workers have no space to express ambivalence or complex feelings about their work. When anti-porn feminists and conservative Christians are both fighting to shut down our industry, we are loathe to be honest when we’re having a bad day at work, fearing that this information will be used as ammunition.

Perhaps the remarkable thing that Phillips did in this film was not to have sex with 100 men, but rather to break the fourth wall so that people outside the industry could see her vulnerability and her complex feelings about her birth. She allowed us to watch her learn on the job and work through her feelings about it while still asking people to recognize her humanity and agency at the same time. Perhaps by going to the extremes, she showed the world how difficult and nuanced this line of work really is. Maybe more of us should be so brutally honest about the complexity of our jobs.