I am just begging for the 1% of women whose temperament is compatible with sex work to stop telling the other 99% that sex work is a good idea. (Yes, Aella, this comment is about you.)
Aella was asked once if she would encourage her daughter to go into her line of work and she said it would depend on her temperament. I think Aella does concede her temperament is unusual for women and that her line of work wouldn't be suitable for many women. But she still wants it all to be normalised and accepted anyway :/
I don't know why it's so hard to say "some things should be taboo because it's not good for the public to emulate, even if they are not inherently wrong, and my lifestyle falls on the wrong side of that divide". It's kind of wanting to eat your cake and have it too. If you want to flout society's norms, at least be content doing it alone. I've flouted some norms. I try not to recruit people to it because most people do not have the temperament for it, and would just waste time and money.
“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.”
When I watched the documentary, this is also one of the parts that most stood out to me — her seeming distress at perhaps not having shown this parade of degenerates a good enough time. I agree that concern (and the big emotions it appeared to cause) can only come from someone with a character that is low in agency, high in agreeableness, and very neurotic.
When I think about Lily being used by 100 men in one day I shudder because historically the only scenario in which this would occur is wartime rape. Lily has no idea the kind of trauma she is subjecting herself to. She is literally calling upon the ghosts of all of her female ancestors who were gang-raped in war.
This seems more like a story of the attention economy than the sexual revolution per se. She reminds me of Mr. Beast, the YouTuber who’s made a fortune with videos like “I spent 7 Days in Solitary Confinement” and “I spent 7 Days Buried Alive”. In the internet age, publicity entrepreneurs can make a lot of money by putting their body through extreme acts (sexual or otherwise) and filming it for clickbait voyeurism. Are Lily Phillips and Mr. Beast passive doormats willing to debase themselves for attention, or canny, unabashed self-promoters who flout social norms for profit and fame? I don’t know them so I’m not sure, but I suspect there’s a lot more of the latter in them than this article suggests.
It’s also worth noting that these stunts are engineered to provoke precisely this debate. Is concocting a bold exhibitionist spectacle where you put yourself through something extremely unpleasant for money deeply agentic, or deeply un-agentic? The honest answer is *both*, and the tension inherent in that answer is the source of its power. It scrambles our intuitions and makes us think. Would this video have gone anywhere near as viral if some horrible bloke had bullied her into it? Of course not. Then it would be a simple story of victimization. We wouldn’t have any ambiguity to chew on. Think pieces like this one are part of the plan, and add fuel to the very fire of publicity they seek to critique. The truth is, like all of us, Lily Phillips is both actor and acted upon, like a figure from Greek tragedy. We have agency but it’s limited, conditional, and ambiguous. And we are drawn to dramatic and intense explorations of that ambiguity.
This is a really weak comparison. Mr Beast is highly agentic, a genuine philanthropist, and one with a unique model where his business and his philanthropy are the same thing. The world is a lot better for having him in it. His videos do not appeal to me, but that is an aesthetic preference rather than a moral judgement.
Lily Philips, by contrast, is a sad victim. While clearly not evil - without agency you can only be morally neutral - the world is probably a little bit worse for having her in it. She is miserable, and she's in an industry which damages society.
Even if we grant all that, it doesn’t undermine the basis of the comparison, which is that both are competing in an attention economy that rewards them for putting themselves through unpleasant physical ordeals with clicks.
Of course I feel sad for her but far more jarring is the reality that so many men applied and some actually followed through with it. The more interesting documentary would be about them. Expose them. Why don't we ask the men if they had considered how this might affect their future mate selection, family plans, etc. For the 1000 men experiment she should be selecting only men that are willing to be part of the documentary with their face and a basic interview.
Yes, I think it would be illuminating to find out what sort of man is willing to stand in line with 99 others, waiting for his 5 minute time slot with a young lady who clearly has some major emotional issues, in a room that smelled so bad the cameraman was retching.
We really need to start shaming this sort of pathetic behavior again.
Conceptualizing agency as a personality trait on the same kind of a bell curve as any other trait, is so obviously true in retrospect but I'd never thought of it that way until just now. If the thesis here is true (as I think it probably is) the question becomes, do we prioritize protecting the mass of people who would benefit from having their opportunities to make bad choices more limited, by having a nanny state? Or, do we prioritize freedom, letting people excel or self-destruct as they so decide without having an intrusive nanny state looming over them?
I think a middle ground can be found in between those two extremes, which would usually be served by something like culture and guardrails, and a subtle kind of social pressure and guidance that comes from family and community. Something which this woman clearly didn't have - It isn't mentioned in this piece but I have read that her parents are apparently proud of her chosen profession. A catastrophic failure of the adults enforcing protective boundaries for their daughter. Deeply distressing.
I agree that a middle ground is probably what we need, and that the means of enforcement does not need to come from the state... I think my mind just went to the state immediately because it is hard to imagine it coming from anywhere else in the modern world. Family bonds are broken, communities are ever-changing and no longer tight knit, religious authority no longer has any credibility in the culture, etc.
I actually think a more socially conservative culture might *further incentivize* this type of stunt. She’s going for shock value, and the stricter the taboos, the greater the shock.
I saw your comment below on this angle and I can see what you mean here (although I think that if this is the game she's trying to play here, I'm not sure she can play it as successfully as she aspires, and that's because I don't think she - and many other people - can really treat sex in the same way they can treat other extreme acts). But your overall point is taken; it's why I deliberately haven't watched any of the documentary itself and I wasn't too sure I wanted to comment on the coverage of any of this. I feel a bit icky about contributing to the spectacle but alas, here I am, now participating in the spectacle, although I was trying to limit my comments more to the agency question.
My comment was more general, in response to the general question the post above had on how we deal with the agentic personality question overall. For women with low agentic control who find it easier to go along with the prevailing sexual norms, but then feel terrible about it (something I have seen in friends), *some* kind of social scaffolding could be useful for them without a nanny state. I don't even necessarily mean only in a negative way, enforced solely by taboos. But also in a way that emphasises love and respect and doesn't make them feel weird for wanting, or demanding it, an emphasis on trusting their intuitions and not having sex that makes them feel used after, etc. I am genuinely continuously struck at how many of my friends who were raised with very liberal norms didn't seem to have this reinforcement at any point in their lives from family or friends.
For a woman who has already passed the taboo of selling sex, yes social conservatism is certainly unlikely to prevent this kind of spectacle for shock value, yes. However I'm agnostic on which direction the shock value - stronger taboo link goes. In a socially conservative culture, taboos are stricter but this means you don't need to go to as extreme lengths for the shock value. For example, when I've been in very strict religious places, even a flash of an ankle or a glimpse of hair becomes highly erotic, because it's taboo. This means you can achieve high shock value with much lower degrees of sexual novelty, well before you get to this. But in a culture that is already completely oversaturated with sex, pornography and in which most sexual taboos are already broken, you need ever more and more extreme content to push the taboo out further.
Alternatively, the other potential avenue is to somehow help younger women feel more assertive and just refuse to go along with sex if it's not what they want, and demand the things they do actually want.
This is again something I'm really struck by often - I grew up in a much stricter, religious culture with strong sex roles and a very defined role for women, and yet for some reason I have ended up with a much stronger ability to say what I want from a relationship and negotiate. I've never felt pressured to just go along with something I didn't want - and a man would've been seen as deeply dishonorable to even suggest meeting alone so early on, for example. So, I was genuinely very shocked to learn that many of my friends who were raised in a much more feminist, liberal culture who use the language of empowerment, strength etc, have *never* developed this ability. So many people told them it's OK and empowered to have whatever sex they want, but apparently no one ever told them it's equally OK to say no to sex on a first date, or to demand love, respect and monogamy if that's *actually* what they want, or that there is nothing wrong with them for wanting those things. For some women on MMM, they say that the *first time* they heard this message is from Louise's book, which is something that I find astonishing and a total failure of our time.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You actually anticipated my follow up comment about how this piece (and, of course, this conversation) are contributing to the power of the very spectacle we're trying to pick apart.
I agree that in a very socially conservative society where this sort of video would be censored or otherwise severely punished, you would see less of it. Likewise, in a fully liberated society in which all manner of sexual expression was normalized and accepted, there would be less shock value, less interest, and less of a market for it. The virality, and the power, comes from exploding the tension inherent in partial, conditional liberation, and partial, conditional agency.
I also think that on a more sexually restricted society there will be less men taking up her offer so she will be limited on how much self-harm she can exercise. Barring going to a seedy dark alley in the wrong part of town to find the worse men with nothing to lose or with highly sociopathic personalities willing to participate, which most women, even the less agentic ones, wouldn't do.
Yes, it's really tricky to navigate the participation in the spectacle. It's very difficult to just ignore such a thing for obvious reasons, but then by talking about it we do give it the public reaction that is partly what drives the shock value.
I'm not sure about the latter part of your comment - it is always going to be human nature to seek and break the next taboo, especially sexual taboos and novelty. So, even in a fully sexually liberated society, if such a thing could even exist, I can't imagine that this drive wouldn't exist. Perhaps this exact video would barely raise eyebrows, but then people would need to go for something even more extreme to get the same reaction so maybe you'd have an even more extreme spectacle. I don't really want to speculate on what that could be!
The only thing I feel like I disagree with in this analysis is the idea that having a ‘masculine kind of sexuality’ would necessarily protect her from these feelings of distress that she seems to exhibit.
Although I know for a fact that there are plenty of men (I’m mostly referring to gay men now) who would gladly go through with something like this, and in fact do so every weekend, without a doubt in their mind, I don’t think this is because they have a ‘masculine kind of sexuality’ but because they are deeply troubled and disturbed on some level.
Speaking personally, I have a very ‘masculine kind of sexuality’, however have been tortured by it numerous times. Engaging is risky sexual behaviour has produced feelings of anxiety, anticipation, shame, regret and distress despite the fact that I’ve been driven to do it by a high sex drive. I am thankfully more in control of myself these days, before the haters start to try and tear me down.
So in that regard I think you paint men with too broad a brush. I would expect that even if the majority of men might fantasise about the idea of having sex with 100 women in one crazed, orgiastic free-for-all, the reality is that only a few of those men would be able to do so without experiencing some kind of emotional side-effect skewed toward the negative. It is not masculine sexuality that insulates one from those feelings, perhaps it is just masculine sexuality that causes the fantasy to arise.
I was thinking a similar thing, which is that even if women with a “masculine sexuality” *can* do these things, it doesn’t mean it’s good for her. I tend to think these things aren’t really good for anyone, including men. Maybe some people are better at hiding the scars, but they become apparent sooner or later.
And I think most men aren’t that agentic either, if we’re being real. Like the men who signed up to do this. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys have brains so addled by porn and feel such low agency in their ability to date women that that’s why they signed up.
You can absolutely see that these guys are nervous, not particularly agentic guys. The agentic guys are out there either married or having lots of normal casual sex. I don’t think highly agentic men would feel the need to go and sleep with an onlyfans girl for a few minutes, it doesn’t really seem to fit the personality type.
That’s a good observation on your end. And I agree, these things aren’t usually good for anyone.
Men are also encouraged to suppress any feelings that might make them look "like a woman" so it might be that a lot of men would feel this way but they don't even know it themselves because they don't explore themselves in that way. Of course, these feelings have to go somewhere alcohol, drugs, video games or suicide. Let men feel their feels is my motto.
Same. I wish I had never read about it: I am disturbed. And I believe this is the only truly human response, and that the lack of such responses from everyone involved is the problem.
As my Grandmother used to say..."don't waste the pretty"....
Doing the hard work of developing a relationship, having children and making a life that will insulate and inoculate you against the ravages of age and death is daunting... I guess this is Lily's answer to my Grandma... I doubt the money will be enough...
I wasn't aware of "Lily Phillips" until I saw Mary Harrington's and your piece today. While this situation is saddening, I'm also struck by how things have changed because of technology.
If you read David Foster Wallace's "Big Red Son," strange is it sounds, the porn industry of 1998 seems far more humane than it is today:
"From the acceptance speech of Ms. Jeanna Fine, upon winning AVN’s 1998 Best Supporting Actress Award for her role in Rob Black’s Miscreants: “Jesus, which one is this for, Miscreants? Jesus, that’s another one where I read the script and said ‘Oh shit, I am going to go to hell. [Laughter, cheers.] But that’s okay, ’cause all my friends’ll be there too!”
[Huge wave of laughter, cheers, applause.]"
And it was slowly becoming explicitly commodified. As one of the porn crew-men says, “In a way, it’s kind of a drag. Now everybody’s watching it. We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen."
So we end up with Lily Phillips, alone, tracking her earnings on a spreadsheet. Maximally efficient, completely miserable. The "gangbang" is, sadly, not new. But the mechanism of OnlyFans is, and it's disturbing.
There are only inadequate words to express how absolutely heartbreaking and devastating this is. Where is this girl's mother? Father? How is no one stopping her self harm? Are her parents or friends who dare push against this horror accused of not being liberal/enlightened enough? This is the same self harm of an ROGD girl (whose non affirming parents are vilified for speaking out against medicalization) wanting testosterone and a double mastectomy, but mirror-imaged. And yet some still wonder why so many girls want to be boys (to escape this porn driven sexuality) and non AGP boys want to be girls (to identify out of being seen as the drivers of porn driven sexuality).
This is very good, very thought-provoking, and a fascinating use of my arguments (which draw on lawyer Joseph Raz). Raz argues that one reason we obey the law without thinking (“the authority of law”) is so we don’t have to reach down and think through the underlying substrate of morality and ethics every time we decide, say, to walk to the post box knowing we don’t have enough stamps to post our letter.
I have more contempt for the porn industry and the men who railed Lily Phillips than I do for the villains in A Serbian Film. At least that movie was fictional.
Some of this I agree with, but I really part ways with you, I think, on the topic of agency. You seem to be arguing that men have more of it than women.
The money OF took in from users last year was astronomical. More than several major sports leagues in then US combined. Those users are mostly male, surely. Is that “agentic”? I don’t think it is.
I’d also suggest that men are overwhelmingly the targets of sports gambling, crypto bubbles, and WSB style disguised as investing. People have their whole lives ruined by this stuff. (The US decision to legalize sports betting is a legitimate catastrophe for (young) men.)
I see these things as quite similar to the Onlyfans problem: under modernism, things that used to be taboo or at least restricted are suddenly easy to access and promoted on TV, in magazines, totally normalized. Without external guardrails and moral guidance, vast numbers will struggle.
I just do not agree that this is about NPCs or that women have less agency than men.
I think both can be true at the same time. Similar to your points, I am reminded of the drug legalization cause. Similar to gambling, many people can use drugs recreationally for fun while others are quickly addicted and lose everything. My opinion (not based on research) is that people who are more conscientious and better emotionally adjusted are simply better able to resist addiction. Or to use Louise's term they are more highly agenic.
Regarding men and women, I have come around to Louise's point of view that on average women act with less agency particularly in sexual situations. Personally I have witnessed numerous women tell me of sexual encounters where they did not want to have sex, but 'went along with it' and never said "stop it" and then felt they have been forced to after the fact. Personally I do not understand it and never had any problem saying "no" but it is clear that this is a common pattern.
I am just begging for the 1% of women whose temperament is compatible with sex work to stop telling the other 99% that sex work is a good idea. (Yes, Aella, this comment is about you.)
Aella was asked once if she would encourage her daughter to go into her line of work and she said it would depend on her temperament. I think Aella does concede her temperament is unusual for women and that her line of work wouldn't be suitable for many women. But she still wants it all to be normalised and accepted anyway :/
I don't know why it's so hard to say "some things should be taboo because it's not good for the public to emulate, even if they are not inherently wrong, and my lifestyle falls on the wrong side of that divide". It's kind of wanting to eat your cake and have it too. If you want to flout society's norms, at least be content doing it alone. I've flouted some norms. I try not to recruit people to it because most people do not have the temperament for it, and would just waste time and money.
You mean drag queen story time is bad?
Society needs to recognize and treat them as they are: mentally unwell and socially damaging.
“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.”
When I watched the documentary, this is also one of the parts that most stood out to me — her seeming distress at perhaps not having shown this parade of degenerates a good enough time. I agree that concern (and the big emotions it appeared to cause) can only come from someone with a character that is low in agency, high in agreeableness, and very neurotic.
When I think about Lily being used by 100 men in one day I shudder because historically the only scenario in which this would occur is wartime rape. Lily has no idea the kind of trauma she is subjecting herself to. She is literally calling upon the ghosts of all of her female ancestors who were gang-raped in war.
This seems more like a story of the attention economy than the sexual revolution per se. She reminds me of Mr. Beast, the YouTuber who’s made a fortune with videos like “I spent 7 Days in Solitary Confinement” and “I spent 7 Days Buried Alive”. In the internet age, publicity entrepreneurs can make a lot of money by putting their body through extreme acts (sexual or otherwise) and filming it for clickbait voyeurism. Are Lily Phillips and Mr. Beast passive doormats willing to debase themselves for attention, or canny, unabashed self-promoters who flout social norms for profit and fame? I don’t know them so I’m not sure, but I suspect there’s a lot more of the latter in them than this article suggests.
It’s also worth noting that these stunts are engineered to provoke precisely this debate. Is concocting a bold exhibitionist spectacle where you put yourself through something extremely unpleasant for money deeply agentic, or deeply un-agentic? The honest answer is *both*, and the tension inherent in that answer is the source of its power. It scrambles our intuitions and makes us think. Would this video have gone anywhere near as viral if some horrible bloke had bullied her into it? Of course not. Then it would be a simple story of victimization. We wouldn’t have any ambiguity to chew on. Think pieces like this one are part of the plan, and add fuel to the very fire of publicity they seek to critique. The truth is, like all of us, Lily Phillips is both actor and acted upon, like a figure from Greek tragedy. We have agency but it’s limited, conditional, and ambiguous. And we are drawn to dramatic and intense explorations of that ambiguity.
This is a really weak comparison. Mr Beast is highly agentic, a genuine philanthropist, and one with a unique model where his business and his philanthropy are the same thing. The world is a lot better for having him in it. His videos do not appeal to me, but that is an aesthetic preference rather than a moral judgement.
Lily Philips, by contrast, is a sad victim. While clearly not evil - without agency you can only be morally neutral - the world is probably a little bit worse for having her in it. She is miserable, and she's in an industry which damages society.
Even if we grant all that, it doesn’t undermine the basis of the comparison, which is that both are competing in an attention economy that rewards them for putting themselves through unpleasant physical ordeals with clicks.
Of course I feel sad for her but far more jarring is the reality that so many men applied and some actually followed through with it. The more interesting documentary would be about them. Expose them. Why don't we ask the men if they had considered how this might affect their future mate selection, family plans, etc. For the 1000 men experiment she should be selecting only men that are willing to be part of the documentary with their face and a basic interview.
Yes, I think it would be illuminating to find out what sort of man is willing to stand in line with 99 others, waiting for his 5 minute time slot with a young lady who clearly has some major emotional issues, in a room that smelled so bad the cameraman was retching.
We really need to start shaming this sort of pathetic behavior again.
Maybe they are being paid behind the scenes. This is a performance, after all. We can’t take it at face value.
Conceptualizing agency as a personality trait on the same kind of a bell curve as any other trait, is so obviously true in retrospect but I'd never thought of it that way until just now. If the thesis here is true (as I think it probably is) the question becomes, do we prioritize protecting the mass of people who would benefit from having their opportunities to make bad choices more limited, by having a nanny state? Or, do we prioritize freedom, letting people excel or self-destruct as they so decide without having an intrusive nanny state looming over them?
I think a middle ground can be found in between those two extremes, which would usually be served by something like culture and guardrails, and a subtle kind of social pressure and guidance that comes from family and community. Something which this woman clearly didn't have - It isn't mentioned in this piece but I have read that her parents are apparently proud of her chosen profession. A catastrophic failure of the adults enforcing protective boundaries for their daughter. Deeply distressing.
I agree that a middle ground is probably what we need, and that the means of enforcement does not need to come from the state... I think my mind just went to the state immediately because it is hard to imagine it coming from anywhere else in the modern world. Family bonds are broken, communities are ever-changing and no longer tight knit, religious authority no longer has any credibility in the culture, etc.
I actually think a more socially conservative culture might *further incentivize* this type of stunt. She’s going for shock value, and the stricter the taboos, the greater the shock.
I saw your comment below on this angle and I can see what you mean here (although I think that if this is the game she's trying to play here, I'm not sure she can play it as successfully as she aspires, and that's because I don't think she - and many other people - can really treat sex in the same way they can treat other extreme acts). But your overall point is taken; it's why I deliberately haven't watched any of the documentary itself and I wasn't too sure I wanted to comment on the coverage of any of this. I feel a bit icky about contributing to the spectacle but alas, here I am, now participating in the spectacle, although I was trying to limit my comments more to the agency question.
My comment was more general, in response to the general question the post above had on how we deal with the agentic personality question overall. For women with low agentic control who find it easier to go along with the prevailing sexual norms, but then feel terrible about it (something I have seen in friends), *some* kind of social scaffolding could be useful for them without a nanny state. I don't even necessarily mean only in a negative way, enforced solely by taboos. But also in a way that emphasises love and respect and doesn't make them feel weird for wanting, or demanding it, an emphasis on trusting their intuitions and not having sex that makes them feel used after, etc. I am genuinely continuously struck at how many of my friends who were raised with very liberal norms didn't seem to have this reinforcement at any point in their lives from family or friends.
For a woman who has already passed the taboo of selling sex, yes social conservatism is certainly unlikely to prevent this kind of spectacle for shock value, yes. However I'm agnostic on which direction the shock value - stronger taboo link goes. In a socially conservative culture, taboos are stricter but this means you don't need to go to as extreme lengths for the shock value. For example, when I've been in very strict religious places, even a flash of an ankle or a glimpse of hair becomes highly erotic, because it's taboo. This means you can achieve high shock value with much lower degrees of sexual novelty, well before you get to this. But in a culture that is already completely oversaturated with sex, pornography and in which most sexual taboos are already broken, you need ever more and more extreme content to push the taboo out further.
Alternatively, the other potential avenue is to somehow help younger women feel more assertive and just refuse to go along with sex if it's not what they want, and demand the things they do actually want.
This is again something I'm really struck by often - I grew up in a much stricter, religious culture with strong sex roles and a very defined role for women, and yet for some reason I have ended up with a much stronger ability to say what I want from a relationship and negotiate. I've never felt pressured to just go along with something I didn't want - and a man would've been seen as deeply dishonorable to even suggest meeting alone so early on, for example. So, I was genuinely very shocked to learn that many of my friends who were raised in a much more feminist, liberal culture who use the language of empowerment, strength etc, have *never* developed this ability. So many people told them it's OK and empowered to have whatever sex they want, but apparently no one ever told them it's equally OK to say no to sex on a first date, or to demand love, respect and monogamy if that's *actually* what they want, or that there is nothing wrong with them for wanting those things. For some women on MMM, they say that the *first time* they heard this message is from Louise's book, which is something that I find astonishing and a total failure of our time.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You actually anticipated my follow up comment about how this piece (and, of course, this conversation) are contributing to the power of the very spectacle we're trying to pick apart.
I agree that in a very socially conservative society where this sort of video would be censored or otherwise severely punished, you would see less of it. Likewise, in a fully liberated society in which all manner of sexual expression was normalized and accepted, there would be less shock value, less interest, and less of a market for it. The virality, and the power, comes from exploding the tension inherent in partial, conditional liberation, and partial, conditional agency.
I also think that on a more sexually restricted society there will be less men taking up her offer so she will be limited on how much self-harm she can exercise. Barring going to a seedy dark alley in the wrong part of town to find the worse men with nothing to lose or with highly sociopathic personalities willing to participate, which most women, even the less agentic ones, wouldn't do.
Thank you.
Yes, it's really tricky to navigate the participation in the spectacle. It's very difficult to just ignore such a thing for obvious reasons, but then by talking about it we do give it the public reaction that is partly what drives the shock value.
I'm not sure about the latter part of your comment - it is always going to be human nature to seek and break the next taboo, especially sexual taboos and novelty. So, even in a fully sexually liberated society, if such a thing could even exist, I can't imagine that this drive wouldn't exist. Perhaps this exact video would barely raise eyebrows, but then people would need to go for something even more extreme to get the same reaction so maybe you'd have an even more extreme spectacle. I don't really want to speculate on what that could be!
Wow. Perfectly said ❤️
The only thing I feel like I disagree with in this analysis is the idea that having a ‘masculine kind of sexuality’ would necessarily protect her from these feelings of distress that she seems to exhibit.
Although I know for a fact that there are plenty of men (I’m mostly referring to gay men now) who would gladly go through with something like this, and in fact do so every weekend, without a doubt in their mind, I don’t think this is because they have a ‘masculine kind of sexuality’ but because they are deeply troubled and disturbed on some level.
Speaking personally, I have a very ‘masculine kind of sexuality’, however have been tortured by it numerous times. Engaging is risky sexual behaviour has produced feelings of anxiety, anticipation, shame, regret and distress despite the fact that I’ve been driven to do it by a high sex drive. I am thankfully more in control of myself these days, before the haters start to try and tear me down.
So in that regard I think you paint men with too broad a brush. I would expect that even if the majority of men might fantasise about the idea of having sex with 100 women in one crazed, orgiastic free-for-all, the reality is that only a few of those men would be able to do so without experiencing some kind of emotional side-effect skewed toward the negative. It is not masculine sexuality that insulates one from those feelings, perhaps it is just masculine sexuality that causes the fantasy to arise.
I was thinking a similar thing, which is that even if women with a “masculine sexuality” *can* do these things, it doesn’t mean it’s good for her. I tend to think these things aren’t really good for anyone, including men. Maybe some people are better at hiding the scars, but they become apparent sooner or later.
And I think most men aren’t that agentic either, if we’re being real. Like the men who signed up to do this. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys have brains so addled by porn and feel such low agency in their ability to date women that that’s why they signed up.
You can absolutely see that these guys are nervous, not particularly agentic guys. The agentic guys are out there either married or having lots of normal casual sex. I don’t think highly agentic men would feel the need to go and sleep with an onlyfans girl for a few minutes, it doesn’t really seem to fit the personality type.
That’s a good observation on your end. And I agree, these things aren’t usually good for anyone.
Men are also encouraged to suppress any feelings that might make them look "like a woman" so it might be that a lot of men would feel this way but they don't even know it themselves because they don't explore themselves in that way. Of course, these feelings have to go somewhere alcohol, drugs, video games or suicide. Let men feel their feels is my motto.
Thinking about this makes me so viscerally upset. It’s so dehumanizing and disturbing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Same. I wish I had never read about it: I am disturbed. And I believe this is the only truly human response, and that the lack of such responses from everyone involved is the problem.
As my Grandmother used to say..."don't waste the pretty"....
Doing the hard work of developing a relationship, having children and making a life that will insulate and inoculate you against the ravages of age and death is daunting... I guess this is Lily's answer to my Grandma... I doubt the money will be enough...
I wasn't aware of "Lily Phillips" until I saw Mary Harrington's and your piece today. While this situation is saddening, I'm also struck by how things have changed because of technology.
If you read David Foster Wallace's "Big Red Son," strange is it sounds, the porn industry of 1998 seems far more humane than it is today:
"From the acceptance speech of Ms. Jeanna Fine, upon winning AVN’s 1998 Best Supporting Actress Award for her role in Rob Black’s Miscreants: “Jesus, which one is this for, Miscreants? Jesus, that’s another one where I read the script and said ‘Oh shit, I am going to go to hell. [Laughter, cheers.] But that’s okay, ’cause all my friends’ll be there too!”
[Huge wave of laughter, cheers, applause.]"
And it was slowly becoming explicitly commodified. As one of the porn crew-men says, “In a way, it’s kind of a drag. Now everybody’s watching it. We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen."
So we end up with Lily Phillips, alone, tracking her earnings on a spreadsheet. Maximally efficient, completely miserable. The "gangbang" is, sadly, not new. But the mechanism of OnlyFans is, and it's disturbing.
There are only inadequate words to express how absolutely heartbreaking and devastating this is. Where is this girl's mother? Father? How is no one stopping her self harm? Are her parents or friends who dare push against this horror accused of not being liberal/enlightened enough? This is the same self harm of an ROGD girl (whose non affirming parents are vilified for speaking out against medicalization) wanting testosterone and a double mastectomy, but mirror-imaged. And yet some still wonder why so many girls want to be boys (to escape this porn driven sexuality) and non AGP boys want to be girls (to identify out of being seen as the drivers of porn driven sexuality).
I thought her mother is her [financial] manager and on her team? Perhaps I miss heard it on the documentary
I don’t think I can watch it.
Yeah it is quite repugnant, I had to fast forward a few times
This is very good, very thought-provoking, and a fascinating use of my arguments (which draw on lawyer Joseph Raz). Raz argues that one reason we obey the law without thinking (“the authority of law”) is so we don’t have to reach down and think through the underlying substrate of morality and ethics every time we decide, say, to walk to the post box knowing we don’t have enough stamps to post our letter.
I recall when I saw Aeila for the first time on triggernometry. She IMMEDIATELY struck me as demonically possessed…
Or has it occurred to you that I have plenty of experience dealing with autistic people yet still had the aforementioned impression of her?
I have more contempt for the porn industry and the men who railed Lily Phillips than I do for the villains in A Serbian Film. At least that movie was fictional.
Some of this I agree with, but I really part ways with you, I think, on the topic of agency. You seem to be arguing that men have more of it than women.
The money OF took in from users last year was astronomical. More than several major sports leagues in then US combined. Those users are mostly male, surely. Is that “agentic”? I don’t think it is.
I’d also suggest that men are overwhelmingly the targets of sports gambling, crypto bubbles, and WSB style disguised as investing. People have their whole lives ruined by this stuff. (The US decision to legalize sports betting is a legitimate catastrophe for (young) men.)
I see these things as quite similar to the Onlyfans problem: under modernism, things that used to be taboo or at least restricted are suddenly easy to access and promoted on TV, in magazines, totally normalized. Without external guardrails and moral guidance, vast numbers will struggle.
I just do not agree that this is about NPCs or that women have less agency than men.
I think both can be true at the same time. Similar to your points, I am reminded of the drug legalization cause. Similar to gambling, many people can use drugs recreationally for fun while others are quickly addicted and lose everything. My opinion (not based on research) is that people who are more conscientious and better emotionally adjusted are simply better able to resist addiction. Or to use Louise's term they are more highly agenic.
Regarding men and women, I have come around to Louise's point of view that on average women act with less agency particularly in sexual situations. Personally I have witnessed numerous women tell me of sexual encounters where they did not want to have sex, but 'went along with it' and never said "stop it" and then felt they have been forced to after the fact. Personally I do not understand it and never had any problem saying "no" but it is clear that this is a common pattern.
That short clip of her was heartbreaking to me.