I happened on this documentary by accident. I hadn't heard of Lily Philips and her unorthodox (to put it mildly) little OnlyFans stunt. Apparently, the 23-year-old OF star ran a sort of project to have sex with 100 men in the course of a single day, which she then filmed and put out presumably on her OnlyFans channel.
The documentary itself was quite telling about this girl's mental welfare - both the guy filming it and the comment section seemed understandably concerned about her mental health and speculated as to the level of dissociation that would make you do that. And it is, indeed, quite a fascinating subject, not to mention a deeply tragic one. But what seems far more interesting to me is,
who's watching this kind of content?
Personally, I had serious doubts when the girl cheerfully asserted that this had always been a dream of hers. Really? Getting fucked by 100 guys on the clock? Rigid, tedious, impersonal? Who the fuck has such dreams? Worse, who dreams about seeing a young woman they (presumably) like to an extent go through that?
I can't imagine anything less enticing. It's something so ugly, so violent and debasing. And while I do understand there's people with extreme tastes out there, this isn't really marketed as such. It's not a fetish thing or a kink thing. It's just a sex thing, and it seems to rhyme with the increasingly impersonal and dissociated way we (as a society) view sex.
It's no longer an act of connection or enjoyment. I don't imagine it affords the viewer even the falsified pleasure of regular pornography. It's just a marathon. A stunt. A feat of endurance. How many men can one woman take before she breaks?
Only, who are these men looking to break women? And how long can we function if we're starting to look into such perverse ways of breaking each other apart?
There's something deeply frightening to that thought because it betrays a much deeper disconnect. Logically, if you're lonely and horny, you go on some porn website and masturbate to someone getting railed and appearing, at least, to enjoy it, yeah? We can all understand the logic behind couples, or even menage a something pornography as presumably the viewer imagines themselves in the midst of it. But this isn't really that. And unless there's a market for fantasizing you're sitting in a waiting room to fuck a stranger for five minutes right after another stranger, and before yet another, it signals something's gone wonky in our cultural understanding of sex.
The only way such a video could be arousing is if we've stripped all the human connection out of a sexual encounter. It's no longer the cumulation of desire and tension, but merely the ugly sum of its parts. How many pants, grunts, cocks, and so on.
We are dealing with a mating crisis in our Western world. Fewer and fewer young people are having sex, connection has become increasingly interchangeable and superficial, and we have started viewing our bodies as mere hulks of meat. Together, these issues combine to create this worrying depersonification on sex that affects not just women (who are more likely to become the victim of objectification and atrocious sexual violence), but also the future of our species.
And I don't even mean that on a fertility, birth rate level. It's not just fewer people are having sex, so less babies. It's also on the off-chance when we do have sex, we're doing it with a stranger and have built so many walls around ourselves, have been trained so well to present ourselves as meaningless meat-packages that the experience leaves us even more void and isolated.
Leave it for long enough, that leads to societal breakdown, because we're failing to connect meaningfully with one another. We've taken kinship and authenticity and replaced it with digital anonymity. We've taken the very real, very beautiful soul-to-soul connection that can happen during sex and turned it into a commodity. Your body needs to be fucked the same way the socks need washing and the trash needs taking out. It's a chore, but no longer a pleasure that runs deeper than that brief, still guilt-ridden climax.
We worry quite a lot about the future of our species when children aren't being made. And that's a deeply worrying fact. But what exactly does humanity look like when we no longer view one another as human beings in the first place?
