If anything highlights the disintegration of values, I’d propose it’s the recent case of British OnlyFans creator Lily Philips sleeping with (or claiming to have slept with) about a hundred men in less than a day. Back in October, adult content maker Philips had sex with 101 men in 14 hours, an event she said helped fulfil her biggest sexual fantasy and, of course, to increase her subscriber base.
I consider myself generally liberal but I gotta draw the line somewhere and this case simply screams We’re Well and Truly Screwed. We can quibble and argue about cultural values all we like but how does a society allow (let alone enable and encourage) a young woman to do something like what Philips did?
Surely this isn’t “feminist liberation” or “female empowerment”? Quite the opposite in fact, no? Is anybody who genuinely cares about Philips actually applauding something like this? How can any parent or family member (and aren’t we all family members in a sense?) look at something like this and not have our hearts broken?
Note that this isn’t like, say, young women being forced to sell their bodies in the city to make a living, That would be tragic enough but, framed as such cases are by the sad fact of economic ‘necessity’, we can sorta ‘understand’ that such women are doing what they gotta do to survive.
But this isn’t what Philips is doing. For whilst it’s tragically true that sometimes people have to sleep with strangers failing which their families may starve, nobody has to sleep with a hundred strangers within half a day for a sheer publicity stunt or ‘sexual exploration’ or from some desire to be the ‘best’ in the adult industry.
To wax British, that’s just absolute bollocks.
That a young lady would be driven by such ‘motivations’ would only reveal the insidiousness of this capitalist system of sexual exploitation and commercialization. From the platforms which hosted the ‘event’, to those hundred men themselves and the hundreds more who ‘applied’ to join, to the marketing and incentivization machines rendering this episode profitable, to Philips’ “friends” who egged her on, to the very values (not least those of Philips) which make even one person say such a sex ‘marathon’ is at all permissible or fine — surely not only conservatives with ‘traditional values’ should be concerned?
And now I’m tired of sounding like some hellfire preacher. So I’ll conclude with a few questions maybe we should think seriously about.
How do we protect ourselves and our children from such an insanely “sex-ploitative” system without blanket-banning any short video which reveals even a glimmer of skin? How can we maintain strong liberal values without descending into carnal madness?
And, of course, what does healthy sexuality mean in an age of OnlyFans?
