The story of Lily Phillips is one that has recently dominated headlines and ignited fierce debate online. For those unfamiliar, Phillips is a 23-year-old OnlyFans content creator who had sex with 100 men in a single day as part of a self-imposed ‘challenge.’
If that isn’t staggering enough, she’s now announced plans to “break the world record” by sleeping with 1,000 men in a day, in February 2025. This shock has been compounded by never-before-seen footage from the day, courtesy of a brand new documentary by YouTuber Josh Pieters titled: ‘I Slept With 100 Men in One Day.’ The film has sparked reactions ranging from voyeuristic fascination to outright disgust. I, however, have watched the documentary and feel differently.
At the heart of this story lies a woman who describes herself as empowered. She claims to have no regrets about her career choice, which she began in university after realising that she “was being a slut anyway… so [she] may as well make some money.” It’s a statement that’s as defiant as it is revealing. She proudly reclaims words like “slut”, going as far as to make her X bio “cum slut”, presenting herself as the unbothered, unshakeable embodiment of modern sex positivity. However, throughout the documentary her self-deprecation is constant, even playful at times — at one point she struggles to make tea and says, “I’m just good for one thing, me,” a comment that’s clearly meant to be lighthearted but sits uncomfortably for the viewer.
As the documentary progresses, cracks begin to show.
When asked about how her parents feel about her work, she’s quick to claim they’re supportive. But her admission that she’s “a little embarrassed” to tell them about the 100-man challenge makes me believe she’s struggling with an internal conflict. She says she’s not worried about being “disowned or hated”, but she’s afraid they’ll “think less of [her].” It’s a curious statement from someone who repeatedly insists she’s unbothered by judgment. In fact, contradictions like this are everywhere in Phillips’ story. She’s adamant that she doesn’t care what people think but is also candid about people “picking at [her] every day” that’s left her questioning her career path (and by the way, seconds earlier she confidently claims she never questions her career path). Her career is about control and autonomy — or so she says — but the reality of sleeping with 100 strangers in one day left her visibly shaken and emotional.
In the hours after the challenge, we see her at her most vulnerable. Standing in a post-event daze, she’s asked how she’s feeling. Her answer is disjointed, uncharacteristically unsure. She’s drained, describing the experience as something she “wouldn’t recommend” and “intense,” a word she struggles to elaborate on before her voice breaks, and she’s forced to excuse herself from filming. When she returns, she’s still crying. There’s no disarming joke this time. No self-deprecating quip to mask it.
This is where the discourse around Lily Phillips gets complicated. If we’re to believe her own words, she’s fine. She’s thriving. Her friends and family support her, she’s financially successful, and she’s living her fantasy. But it’s not difficult to spot the incongruities between her words and her actions. A self-proclaimed feminist, she argues that her work is empowering because she’s profiting from male desire. “Guys are always gonna sexualise me, so I may as well try and profit off it,” she says. It’s a sentiment echoed by many in the sex-positive feminist camp, who champion the idea that autonomy over one’s own body is the ultimate form of empowerment. It’s a sentiment that I have subscribed to for most of my feminist journey but one that wavered in synchronicity with Lily’s post-event break-down. Because this issue is far more nuanced than that, and what’s often missed in this conversation is that autonomy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Autonomy is only meaningful if it’s free from coercion, internal or external.
Which brings us to the question: is this empowerment or is this self-harm?
The concept of dissociation, which Phillips experienced during the event, is often seen as a hallmark of trauma. Dissociation happens when the mind disconnects from the body as a way to endure overwhelming stress or discomfort. By her own admission, Phillips “only remembers around 10” of the men, and she felt herself becoming “robotic” at man number 13. It’s not a leap to suggest this might be a trauma response. The feminist sex work debate often centres on choice, but if you’re dissociating while making that choice, is it really a choice at all?
I’d like to make it clear that this is an assumption on my part, but as someone who has experienced a fair share of disassociated trauma responses, I connected with Lily’s reaction. Pieters wasn’t sure whether Lily was simply exhausted or genuinely traumatised. I believe it may be the latter. Having spoken to sex workers before about their experience, this is a common process and has been described to me as a protective shield – meaning the choice not to process the decisions they are making means they do not have to face the weight of what they have done, or more suitably, what others have done to them. Because, for Lily it is much easier to call herself a “cum slut”, make a joke about sex to her cab driver and convince herself that this is her fantasy than to face the fact that perhaps she doesn’t like this and perhaps she has gone too far to change paths.
Her story has reignited feminist arguments over porn and sex work — debates that have been raging since the 1980s. On one side, you have sex-positive feminists who argue that sex work, like any other job, is work. And if a woman consents to it, that’s all that should matter. But on the other side are feminists who contend that consent in an oppressive system isn’t true consent. This camp argues that pornography and sex work are tools of patriarchal control that degrade and objectify women, no matter how “empowered” they claim to feel.
As feminist academic Gail Dines wrote, “If a woman’s “choice” is to survive in a world of men’s making, then it’s not really a choice at all.” Phillips’ story seems to exist at the crux of this ideological battle. She’s part of the ‘I’m doing this because I love it’ group, but her tears at the end of the challenge tell us that it is much more complicated than that.
What is really interesting about her emotional reaction is her explanation for it. Instead of reflecting on the physical or emotional impact it had on her, she breaks down over the fear that she might not have given the men a “good time”. It suggests that male validation is not just a side effect of her work but a driving force behind it. Naturally, porn is built on the concept of viewer satisfaction — that’s the entire business model — but the fact that this thought is what reduced her to tears is incredibly revealing. It proves that there is a deeply ingrained male-centric view of sex, where her self-worth appears bound to her ability to please men. She has quite literally been conditioned (as have many women) to prioritise male pleasure over her own well-being. Her tears, in this context, feel less like a reflection on her own experience and more like a reckoning with something she knows is much larger but is yet to process. It is something I think many viewers are acknowledging based on the fact that a large faction of the public is calling to ban OnlyFans after watching the documentary.
Another perspective I feel is dismissed is the role of the men who participated in the challenge. While Lily’s choices are being dissected online, there’s been far less attention on the men who willingly signed up to be part of it. These men are not passive participants but active exploiters of a system that commodifies women’s bodies. It’s striking how societal outrage is often disproportionately aimed at the women in these scenarios, rather than at the men whose participation makes the spectacle possible. To me, that’s a glaring double standard that deserves far more scrutiny.
Many would argue that it is her choice, and so consensual and thus not the fault of these men, but I disagree. Anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have argued that even when women “consent” to participate in porn or sex work, it’s not always a free choice in the true sense. They believe that women are shaped by a society that places pressure on them to meet male desires and that the existence of an industry built around women’s sexual availability reinforces those pressures. By this logic, the men involved in Lily’s challenge aren’t neutral participants—they’re active players in a system that depends on women’s commodification. Even Lily herself acknowledges this in the documentary, expressing concern that what she is doing isn’t “real sex” and could create expectations for other women to perform the same way for men in their everyday lives. Her own words literally tell us the uncomfortable reality that her actions may influence how we objectify women, and that even she is aware of this potential consequence.
During the documentary, Pieters speaks to another OnlyFans creator, Alex Le Tissier, who shared concerns about Lily’s mental and physical health. She also raised a point about how OnlyFans, being so crowded with performers, puts pressure on people to stand out. This pressure can push creators to do more extreme things, like Lily’s 100-man challenge and her planned 1000-man event. The drive to ‘go viral’ and make money in such a competitive space often leads performers to keep pushing their limits, sometimes in ways that harm their well-being. This is another huge point that we have to take into consideration when discussing this.
This doesn’t mean Lily is entirely a victim. Shortly after this, she admits that she is willing to bend her morals for money. Which is something that I think should be criticised.
I’m not saying that I am anti-sex-work, but I certainly am reconsidering how I view the porn industry and I do think there is a lot of nuance we must unpack before we come to a solution. There is a thick line between idealism and reality and sometimes we must work within the system that oppresses us to survive. And the reality is a ban on sex work right now would ruin the lives of millions of women.
While Phillips’ story is unique in its extremity, the pressures she faces are not. There’s a telling moment where she talks about Sundays being hard because all her friends have boyfriends, and she’s left wondering if she’s chosen the wrong path. This is a woman who’s constantly told by online commenters that she’s “unmarriageable” — a particularly insidious form of misogyny rooted in the idea that women’s worth is tied to being “wifey material.” Some X users are particularly harsh, with one going as far as to say “It’s women like Lily Phillips who are the reason I’m ashamed to be a woman.”
These public reactions are brutal, but they’re also telling. I don’t think they are really about Lily. They’re about a collective fear — that in a world where everything is commodified, even human intimacy, none of us are safe from exploitation.
If Lily Phillips’ story teaches us anything, it’s that feminism’s relationship with sex work is far from settled. Her experience demands empathy, not derision. It’s easy to point and laugh from behind a screen, but it’s harder to sit with the discomfort that her story creates after watching the documentary.
Because whether you see her as a feminist, a victim of patriarchy, or something in between, one thing is undeniable: This is not the story of a woman who is entirely at peace.
