Choosing to dissociate?

The pornography industry and boundary violation

Lily Phillips is a 23 year old English content creator on OnlyFans, who became headline news in December 2024, when a ‘documentary’ was released on YouTube, about what it euphemistically described as her “sleeping with” 100 men in a single day.

OnlyFans claims to be ‘the safest social media platform in the world’. When it started, in 2016, it aimed to be a platform for musicians and influencers, but its founders soon discovered that there was much more money to be made from pornography (OF takes a 20% cut from what its content providers earn). Its CEO, Kelly Blair, claims to be a ‘feminist’ and a ‘safety nerd’. She avoids using what she calls ‘the P word’, and she suggests that the platform empowers women by enabling them to create and profit from their own content, free from studio exploitation. But most content providers find it hard to make a living from OnlyFans. They soon discover that, competing with over 4 million other content providers, it is only extreme content that earns big financial rewards. The more extreme the content, the greater the financial reward. Competition between content providers encourages high earners to offer ever more extreme content to hold onto their ‘fan’ base. It is this business model that propelled Lily Phillips into her ‘100 men challenge’.

100 men

The YouTube documentary, I slept with 100 men in one day, is, for much of its length, thinly disguised promotion of Lily Phillips’s OnlyFans site. She smiles and giggles a lot, repeating, many times, how much this is her fantasy, how she “really enjoys” it, and how much she is looking forward to “getting run through by a hundred guys.”

Josh Pieters, the presenter, admires Lily’s parents for being supportive of her unconventional career. He thinks this is because they “must be very forward thinking and open minded, which is great.” He is mildly concerned that Lily has given insufficient thought to protecting herself from STIs and to avoiding risks to her personal safety. He doesn’t question, though, the wisdom of her ‘challenge’, to be ‘run through’ by 100 men in a day. And he doesn’t see anything problematic in men applying to be part of the 100, so long as they are tested for STIs and none of them are convicted criminals.

Pieters asks Phillips if she would refer to herself as a feminist. Her answer is a typically ‘liberal feminist’ one, and it echoes the mantra of the OnlyFans CEO - “Yeh. Doesn’t feminist mean you just want equal rights for boys and girls? I do what I want, and I do it because I enjoy it.” She goes on, though, to acknowledge that in reality neither the labour market nor personal relationships are equal - “I think there are obviously some women that maybe go into it because they have to, or need the money, or they’re coached into it by men. But my personal experience is I’ve only ever felt empowered by the fact that I’m making money off something that I think guys will do anyway. Guys are always going to sexualise me so I may as well try and profit off of it.”

On the day, Phillips’ experience of being ‘run through’ by 100 men turns out, predictably, to be far from empowering. She emerges from the ordeal tearful. “It’s not for the weak girls if I’m honest,” she explains. “It was hard.” She describes feeling “robotic” after the first 30 men, and that “sometimes you’d just dissociate”. She is upset, too, at having been guilt tripped by men who felt she hadn’t given them enough time. Her tears take Pieters by surprise. “I certainly didn’t expect to see Lily so upset at the end of it all”, he says. “To see her so visibly upset at the end of it all was really sad.”

“In the short run, dissociation is a very effective defence, walling off what cannot be accommodated. I think of dissociation as the cryonics of trauma, designed to put parts of the trauma into deep freeze until a ‘cure’ can be discovered.”

(Linda T Sanford, Strong at the Broken Places, 1990)

Dissociation, as a way of coping with unbearable trauma, is familiar to anyone who has been abused. It is, almost certainly, what enabled Phillips to endure what she was being put through. The men, in contrast, seem to have dissociated from any capacity for empathy they might have possessed. None of them were deterred from violating the boundaries of a woman who had distanced her mind from her body. Instead, we learn that some men who had been unable to perform had asked if they could have another go, and that some had complained of being deprived of the full five minutes they felt entitled to.

The 100 men remain shadowy figures throughout the documentary. We see their disembodied legs as they are waiting to perform, and we learn that, before they are called, some of them are entertained by a magician and others are using the opportunity to network. Pieters interviews three of the men, whose faces and voices are heavily disguised. He doesn’t question their participation in the challenge, asking only how they got there (one of them had flown in from Switzerland), and whether they were bothered about how many men had gone before them. He doesn’t explain why he protects their anonymity.

The documentary had over 7 million views on YouTube (and presumably more on Pieters’ Patreon account, where he profits directly from Philips’ suffering - his subscribers pay to view an ‘uncensored’ version). Clips from the YouTube version went viral. Reactions on social media were predictable. Some said it’s her choice, so what’s the problem. Others expressed concern for her wellbeing. Few challenged the men who turned up to participate in the challenge, and hardly any criticised OnlyFans and its business model that incentivises content providers to produce more and more extreme content.

Soon after the release of the YouTube video, Phillips denied that the ordeal had been too much for her. Instead, she claimed, her tears were the result of exhaustion, not regret. And, she insisted, she would soon be embarking on a new, tougher challenge.

1,000 men?

In the days after news of the 100 men challenge hit the headlines, Lily Phillips announced that it was a dry run for her next ‘challenge’, to beat a world record and endure penetration by 1,000 men within a day. This, she suggested, would “create unique content”, and cement her “name on the books.” She seemed totally blasé about the damage this would do to her body and her sanity, likening it to running a marathon. Will OnlyFans, keen to protect its supposed ‘ethical’ reputation, put a stop to it? Unlikely. Will Phillips’ OnlyFans subscribers suggest that 1,000 men would be too much, and that she should bow out? Just as unlikely. Will she be unable to find 1,000 men willing to abuse her? If only.

Phillips’ 1,000 men challenge is scheduled for sometime this month or next month. If she allows it to go ahead she would be embarking on an act of extreme self-harm. I hope that she can find the courage to call it off. It would not be easy for her, though. On the evidence of her earlier challenge, she would feel guilty about letting her subscribers down. It would unleash a torrent of vile online abuse, and it could jeopardise her future earning potential on OnlyFans.

Her life is worth more, much more, than that.

51 men

Release of the YouTube documentary in London took place as the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 of his fellow rapists was drawing to a close in Avignon. Pelicot had drugged his wife, Gisèle, and invited at least 80 different men to rape her while she was unconscious, at a rate averaging one a month (only 50 of those who appeared in his video records of the rapes could be positively identified). She was left with apparently inexplicable STDs, a bruised cervix, disorientation, frequent lapses of memory, and fears that she was going insane.

There are obvious differences between the abuse experienced by Gisèle Pelicot and that experienced by Lily Phillips. But there are some common features, particularly the large numbers of men keen to take turns in abusing a woman who was out of it - men who were recruited online, who knew what they would be called on to do, and who showed no concern for the woman’s wellbeing.

The Avignon trial will, rightly, be remembered mainly for the courage of Gisèle Pelicot, who waived her right to anonymity, insisting that “shame must change sides.” She wanted everyone in the courtroom to see the filmed evidence of what the men had done to her, “so that society can see what was happening”. She was keen to raise awareness of ‘chemical submission’ (coercive administration of sedatives), to encourage any woman, waking up in the morning and not understanding what had happened the night before, to look for evidence and demand justice. She shared her perception that the men who had raped her were not strange monsters, but ordinary men, products of a patriarchal culture that trivialises rape. ”It’s time that the macho, patriarchal society that trivialises rape changes,” she said. “It’s time we changed the way we look at rape.” Her overwhelming aim was to enhance “our capacity collectively to find a better future where women and men alike can live together with mutual respect.”

Unlike Pieter’s YouTube documentary, which didn’t challenge men’s belief that they are entitled to violate women’s bodies, the Pelicot court proceedings exposed that belief in all its callousness. Dominique Pelicot wanted to build up his collection of videos showing men raping his wife, and he recruited like minded men in an internet chatroom, using the pseudonym ‘à son insu’ (without her knowledge), The men who responded to his invitation all lived within 35km of the Pelicot family home, but were connected only by a shared interest in acting out a pornographic fantasy of raping an unsuspecting woman. Most were married, some were fathers, and they worked in a wide range of occupations.

36 of the 50 men on trial claimed that what they had committed was not rape, because the husband had authorised it. “It is the husband’s responsibility to ensure consent,” one explained. Others claimed that they believed, contrary to what Dominique had told them, that Gisèle was pretending to be asleep, and that this was the sort of ‘sex game’ she enjoyed.

“Each of the accused entered a bedroom and saw a woman lying still on the bed. None bothered to check whether she was, as they would later claim, playing along … More than once the court heard, on the videos, Dominique issue a rebuke: ‘Shh: you’re going to wake her up.’ The men persevered, getting onto an unfamiliar bed and manoeuvring Gisèle into position, her limbs heavy and uncooperative from the sedation. She never said a word, nor moved an inch to make herself more comfortable. Experts testified that the amount of sedative Gisèle Pelicot was given meant that her state would have been more akin to a coma than traditional sleep … Each of these men chose to ignore the testimony of her motionless body. ‘When you saw the lifeless body,’ she challenged the defendants in court, ‘did it not occur to you that something seriously wrong was happening in that room?’”

(Sophie Smith, Sleeping Women, London Review of Books, 26 Dec 2024)

We know of only two men who were invited by Dominique to rape his wife but declined the invitation, and they didn’t see fit to inform the authorities, or Gisèle, about the crimes they knew were being committed. Among all the accounts that I came across, only one man expressed any shame, and that was for failing to maintain an erection. This he, felt, was letting Dominique down.

The trial only occurred because a woman had objected to being ‘upskirted’ by Dominique Pelicot while she was shopping at a supermarket. It was this offence that led to the police examining the contents of his smartphone, and discovering the meticulously catalogued video evidence of multiple rapes on his hard drive and memory sticks.

It’s pornography, stupid

All the men who participated in Lily Phillips’ ‘100 men challenge’, and all the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot, were avid consumers of pornography.

Objectification of women is a central feature of the male conditioning that institutionalises male dominance under patriarchy. “Becoming a man requires that the boy learn to be indifferent to the fate of women,” noted Andrea Dworkin:

“Indifference requires that the boy learn to experience women as objects … He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as a child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.”

(Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, 1981)

Pornography has long played a part in guiding the transition from boy to man. It is only in recent years, though, that technology and capitalism have combined to make pornography immediately available, anywhere, and at an ever younger age. Internet pornography affects females as well as males, and it teaches both that sexuality is about violation not connection.

“Pornography turns men into sexual offenders while blinding women to sexual abuse. It corrupts men and conditions women to accept sexual violence. Men and women can never respect each other as equals in an environment where men are aroused by choking and punching women.”

(Genevieve Gluck, X, 20 December 2024)

Pornography is a business whose profits are based on the violation of boundaries, particularly the boundaries of women and children. Its market is approaching saturation, so its potential to continue growing depends on its ability to differentiate its product, especially by developing more extreme forms of boundary violation. OnlyFans knew what they were doing when they cynically appointed a woman as CEO to normalise that process. They must be grateful, too, that they have conditioned the likes of Lily Phillips into not only telling us that she is choosing to create content from her being abused, for their profit, but that she actually believes it’s her choice. It makes the normalisation so much more convincing.

Not all men?

Men who feel awkward when confronted with evidence about their potential for sexual violence often respond by insisting that it’s ’not all men’. While it’s true that not all men directly mete out sexual violence, all men who consume pornography live off other mens’ sexual violence. Given the opportunity, many of them would copy in real life what they have absorbed from their screens. That Gisèle Pelicot’s ordeal was only discovered because her husband was observed upskirting a woman shopper should remind us that invasions of privacy are boundary violations. And that a man who commits a comparatively ‘minor’ violation of a woman’s boundary will all too often go on to commit a major one.

‘Not all men’ is a response that fits in neatly with the message that it is empowering for women to participate actively in their abuse. It’s a combination that does much to further the interests of the pornography industry. Men’s passive bystanding in the face of other men’s increasingly vicious abuse of women and girls is collusion, and it’s unforgivable.

Domestic abuse campaigner David Challen has written, about the rapists of Gisèle Pelicot, that “It is the everyday ordinariness of their violence that should jolt us into action.” His remarks could just as well have been made about the men who lined up to abuse Lily Phillips:

“Behind closed doors, behind the frontages of many ordinary-looking men’s faces, there are abusers, perpetrators of violent emotional, coercive, financial and physical acts against women. It’s time to stop pretending the prevalence of male violence is small and stop saying good men are not part of the problem. Well, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re watching on. And if I may ask, what good is there in that?”

(David Challen, 51 guilty verdicts, Substack 20 Dec 2024)