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.