The Issue With Having Sex With 100 Men In a Day Isn’t the Sex Work, It’s the Content Mill

Earlier this month, English OnlyFans creator Lily Phillips filmed a stunt heard ‘round the internet: She had sex with 100 men in one day, for her OnlyFans channel. Clips from a companion documentary about the event, hosted by YouTube prankster-turned-amateur-documentarian Josh Pieters, quickly went viral. They show a tearful Phillips in the immediate aftermath, leading to predictable online moralizing about sex work with headlines like “What Does Sleeping With 100 Men In One Day Do To the Soul?” and comments on the Pieters’s video like, “This is the best anti-porn film I've ever seen.” I also watched the documentary and agree that there’s something deeply wrong here. While I don’t think sex work is inherently bad for the soul, I’m beginning to think that being a “content creator” is.

For once, these viral clips don’t seem to be taken out of context; if anything, the full documentary is even more difficult to process. At the end, Phillips looks tired and drained, and describes “dissociating” throughout her marathon sex day, with commenters quick to diagnose this as a trauma response. But in a piece for Rolling Stone, sex worker and writer Jessie Sage reminds us that “sex workers have no space to express ambivalence or complex feelings about their work. … We are loath to be honest when we have a bad day on the job, fearing that this information will be used as ammunition.” Which is to say: You can have complex feelings about any work without the conclusion being that that specific work is immoral. 

However, I think this specific stunt breaks norms in the porn and film industries in ways that are destructive. Phillips’s stated goal was to have sex with 100 men in a day, one man at a time for five minutes apiece, and no guarantees of finishing. Though this sounds like a straightforward premise, it’s an incredibly challenging film production, something Phillips and her team seem totally unaware of. It’s their lack of knowledge, skill, preparation, and professionalism that lead to disaster.

On the day of the shoot, Phillips's entire crew is over an hour late; male participants and the documentary crew show up on location an hour before anyone from her team does. The scheduling is a mess, the day runs hours overtime, men are being thrown into the room last minute to make up for cancellations. Anyone who has ever been on a non-union film set (myself included) can’t help but cringe. The chaos, the tension, the nasty cold pizza for lunch are all too familiar. From a production standpoint, the day was a shitshow. 

And from a human standpoint, it was unsafe. This is sex work; the stakes are higher than an improv team’s comedy web series. At one point in the documentary, Phillips seems surprised to learn that HIV can be transmitted via oral sex. Men who provided STI tests were “prioritized” but testing wasn’t required. There were no background checks run on the men. Security guards seem to have been stationed outside the rented Airbnb but not inside to protect Phillips from these untested, unfiltered strangers. 

The cavalier way in which STIs were treated is a break from porn industry standards where most studios require bi-weekly STI testing. But, as Sage writes, these mistakes reveal Phillips’s “youth and inexperience” (she’s 23) “and what happens when content creators eschew the decades of trial and error that go into establishing standards for such heavily regulated industries.”

Phillips shortly before the stunt. Credit: Josh Pieters.

And that’s the problem, in my diagnosis: Not sex work but “content creation.” Anyone with a ring light and a dream can now become a one-person film/porn/photography/design studio. The professional and legal regulations and norms that have evolved in recent past decades have been eroded by the onslaught of content, which has become a catch-all term for basically anything on your phone or computer or gaming console. You can see it in Phillips’s own offerings: Her bread and butter is sexy videos, but she also sells custom messages, DMs, and discussed in the documentary mailing a bottle of spit to a fan. Yes, content truly can be anything.

And content creators are expected to do it all. Just scan any remotely creative, entry-level job posting on LinkedIn. It’s a given that all younger creatives are one-stop shops—wordsmiths, Photoshop pros, amateur composers, key grips, editors, and podcasters all in one endlessly eager, underpaid body. Imagine a world in which doctors are expected to practice all forms of medicine, lawyers all forms of law. Need heart surgery? Call your gyno. Accused of murder? Here’s the guy who wrote my mom’s will. I bet a dermatologist could deliver a baby in a pinch but no one wants that. But that’s exactly the expectation for “content creators.” And that flattening of a dozen crafts and mediums into one catchall bucket has consequences. 

We see these consequences in the documentary. No one is trained in the basics of what they do for money: how to build a shoot schedule, how to screen for STIs (or even why you should screen for STIs), how to handle talent. Whether or not they realize it, Phillips and her team put lots of people in danger with their lack of experience. This isn’t to say that traditional porn—or even regular film studios—consistently, adequately protect the well-being of their employees. But at least a regulated, somewhat centralized industry (with unionized labor) provides a way to observe and to learn a craft. At the very least, film studios are something solid to sue if it all goes sideways.

And though it’s tempting to think of this decentralization as empowering (we all work from home! For ourselves!), the reality is unbelievably grueling. The vast majority of “creators” don’t work on their own time, they work all the time. They don’t work from home, their home is now their work. And when the already precarious nature of sex work meets the boundary-less demands of content creation, someone is bound to get hurt. The only questions are who and when?

There’s one part of the documentary where Pieters interviews a young man (blurred face, distorted voice) who has just had sex with Phillips. His hands are shaking so badly he can barely hold onto his drink. When asked how he feels after having sex on camera, he tells Pieters that he’s nervous; he will certainly be kicked out of his home if his dad finds out. As far as I can tell, the only preparation these men had for their OnlyFans participation is signing a waiver. They weren’t prepped by an actual producer, weren’t told about the haphazard STI testing requirement. They showed Phillips’s team their IDs, but there were no background checks; I guess they were all of legal, consenting age, but I’m not sure, and I doubt anyone on that set was either. In the documentary, Phillips and Pieters demure from saying the actual amount of money she earns (presumably because it’s so large and they are too British to talk about anything as crass as a large amount of money). In any case, I doubt these guys are getting a cut. 

But this is the content economy. You don’t need to know what you’re doing as long as you’re utterly committed to pleasing the insatiable, amorphous audience. Create more, give more access, take on another role, commodify whatever you can (your body, your kids, your marriage, your home, yourself) and cash in. But beware: As some of Phillips’s partners seem to have learned after the fact, there’s an incredibly thin line between consuming and being consumed.

Sex work isn’t the problem, not in this case and not in any case where consenting, informed adults are participating. (That’s not to say that consent and information are always perfectly balanced and clear in sex work, of course.) Plus, when you’re 23, have never really worked another job, and the world is throwing embarrassing amounts of money at you, you might do just about anything, including things that don’t feel right, or that you might regret almost immediately. I know I did, and the stakes for me were a whole lot lower. So yes, I believe Phillips when she reassures the viewer that she’s happy, loves her career, and that being “ran through” fulfills a sexual fantasy for her. And I also think she’s a victim of the content economy. 

Since the documentary dropped earlier this month, Phillips has announced she’s upping the ante. Next year, she plans to break the current world record and have sex with 1,000 men in a single day. For better, but likely for worse, the content mill churns on.