The myth of female agency

Why I feel sorry for Lily Phillips

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

The two most common objections to my first book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, were both concerned with female agency.

The first was a classic feminist argument: “who are you to tell women that they can’t choose their choices? If women want to do sex work, sleep around etc., then why should anyone try and stop them?”

The second argument was similar, but from an anti-feminist stance: “women’s choices led to the sexual revolution, and now you have the gall to blame men for female unhappiness. Why can’t women accept the consequences of their own decisions for once?”

Both of these sets of critics start from the same assumption: that women – including some very young women – were the agents of the sexual revolution, having made a clear-eyed decision to liberate themselves, for better or for worse.

As I argued in the book, I don’t believe that women were the agents of the sexual revolution. Norms and laws changed rapidly because of the material changes brought about by new technology, particularly the Pill. If feminist campaigners made any difference, it was by hurrying the process along a bit (sorry, I don’t believe in ‘the great woman theory of history’). The result is a contemporary sexual culture that best serves the interests of a subset of high status men. But those men didn’t design the culture. There was never any conspiracy. This is just what happens when you take innate differences between the sexes and add dechristianisation, the internet, and the Pill. A perfect storm, I guess. Or an imperfect one.

I realise that this analysis doesn’t leave much space for agency, female or otherwise. Which is annoying for people who want to cast women as the main characters in this history, either as heroes or as villains. I understand why so many feminists are desperate to represent women as highly agentic – they’re trying to challenge the very sticky cross-cultural belief that women are childlike in a way that men aren’t. I’m not sure why so many anti-feminists are determined to do the same thing. Perhaps it’s because they’re so hyper-focused on women as the gatekeepers of sex that they assume women possess a similar gatekeeping power across all other domains.

But the truth is that very few people are highly agentic. I suspect that this is one of those personality traits that can be roughly represented as a bell curve, with just a few people at the far-right tail who are really capable of thinking independently, exhibiting self-control, actively changing their environment in pursuit of a higher goal, and generally exerting power over their own lives. Most people aren’t like that – this is what the insult ‘NPC’ is alluding to – and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The normal way to behave is to do what other people do, aspire to what other people aspire to, and take a passive “it is what it is” attitude towards the culture at large. And that’s fine. After all, a society full of Type A nonconformists would be nightmarish. A bit of conformism is good, actually, as long as people are conforming to a functional model.

But what if the model isn’t functional? That’s the predicament that the 23-year-old OnlyFans star Lily Phillips finds herself in. A new documentary, I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, follows Phillips in the weeks leading up to an event in which she… well… “sleeps” isn’t really the right term. Phillips is, in her own words, “ran through by 100 guys” – random men recruited from her OnlyFans subscribers, invited to an AirBnB in London, and offered five minutes each. The event lasted fourteen hours. At the end, the cameraman entered the sex room and was so appalled by the smell that he audibly retched.

A clip of Phillips breaking down in tears after the 101st man has been making the rounds online and a popular opinion on Twitter is that she’s an evil whore. She chose this, the haters say, and she’ll keep choosing it – Phillips is planning to do the same thing in February, but this time with 1000 men. Her critics think she just loves money and attention. Her fans think she’s a businesswoman taking on an ambitious challenge. I think she’s sprinting for a cliff edge.

I haven’t written about the porn industry in a long time. There’s a lot of disturbing content in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and I haven’t wanted to revisit the subject in the years since I wrote it. I Slept With 100 Men in One Day is a very good documentary – far more psychologically complex than I’d expected – but it’s also a horrible thing to watch. I felt a growing sense of dread as we approached the big day, as did presenter Joshua Pieters. “I feel nervous for you” he tells a jittery Phillips as she prepares herself for the first man, but she’s adamant that she wants to do this. “People forget that it’s also my fantasy and this is something I want to do” she says repeatedly. “I totally totally love my job.”

I don’t believe her. I know that will outrage the female-agency-enjoyers of both varieties. Feminists and anti-feminists alike insist that Phillips is mistress of her own destiny. Maybe she’s a sinner, or maybe she’s empowered. Either way, she’s using her body to make (a lot of) money and she’s telling us again and again that this is what she wants.

She’s also telling us that she hates herself. “Just good for one thing, me” she says when she fails in her efforts to make Pieters a nice cup of tea. “Guys are going to sexualise me anyway so I might as well profit from it” she explains to him. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, and fears she never will. She doesn’t really have any friends, either. She admits that she often feels lonely. “Everyone thinks less of you” she says at one point, visibly upset. “But I’ve never really cared what people think” she lies. “I don’t mind being called a slut” – another lie. I can guarantee that Phillips is reading the horrible things that people are saying about her online this week because she says she goes looking for these comments. She knows that thousands of strangers think she’s an evil whore. It’s all part of the self harm.

In the tearful clip that has been widely circulated, Phillips wonders if she might have found it easier if she were “a different type of girl.” I think she means a girl who was actually agentic. Who really did have a masculine kind of sexuality, and sought out this kind of sex with genuine excitement. In a world of eight billion people, such women surely do exist. But I don’t think that Lily Phillips is one of them.

In another time and place, none of this would have happened to her. Phillips is driven by two very modern forces: the OnlyFans business model, which financially rewards this kind of shocking stunt, and the ideology of liberal feminism, which she has absorbed without a moment’s thought.

But then young women, in general, are extraordinarily memetic. Women are more likely to mimic the expressions and body language of their conversation partners, more likely to mimic other people’s opinions in public settings, and more likely to use popular slang. In other words, they are more sensitive to the subtle social cues of the people around them, and more eager to imitate cues they interpret as high status.

Both male and female conformism peaks in adolescence and then declines with age. Again, conformism isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and can be very useful in the right context. But runaway conformism can lead to disturbing phenomena, including outbreaks of mass hysteria. As medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew writes:

[T]he literature does not lie. Throughout history, groups of people in cohesive social units have suddenly fallen ill or exhibited strange behaviors, from headaches and fainting spells to twitching, shaking, and trance states. But whether it’s an outbreak of spirit possession at a shoe factory in Malaysia, a collapsing marching band at a school gala in England, or a twitching epidemic in a Louisiana high school, the pattern is invariably the same. Most, and often all of those affected, are females. In fact, of the 2,000+ cases in my files that date back to 1566, this pattern holds true over 99 percent of the time.

Of course there are plenty of women who are highly agentic and not at all susceptible to these social forces. My impression is that these agentic women are particularly likely to get to the top of professional hierarchies – including within media – and they often find it difficult to empathise with those who are much more conformist. Highly agentic people form what Helen Dale describes as a “self-control aristocracy… [composed of] people who can make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf.” They chafe against paternalistic restrictions on their behaviour because they personally have no need for them.

The self-control aristocracy looks with utter confusion at Lily Phillips’ behaviour. Not just the “ran through by 100 guys” bit, but at all of her other displays of self-abnegation. Like when she cries at the thought that the 101 men who had sex with her might not have had a good time:

I’d have to stop them early and say ‘I’m so sorry, you have to go’… there was this awkward interaction of you feeling pressure to have to make them cum, even if you hadn’t spent enough time with them, and feeling like you hadn’t given them a good time… I felt bad because some people had travelled so far.

Who the hell worries about whether some skanky loser has had a good time while using you as a masturbatory aid? A very neurotic, very agreeable 23-year-old woman who is very low in agency, that’s who. There are loads of them about. And the sexual revolution has hurt them terribly. A society that did not permit OnlyFans to exist would be a much better society for women like Lily Phillips who will never be members of the self-control aristocracy.

“She took it like a champ” said Phillips’ assistant at the end of the event, while her boss was in the shower scrubbing herself. Phillips will probably take the 1000 men “like a champ”, too.