Don’t blame the sexual revolution for Lily Phillips’s gross stunt

I’m partial to a bit of hippy-bashing. Maybe it’s because I’m an Eighties kid that I have a tendency to roll my eyes at tales of Sixties rebellion. There are some Boomers who would have you believe theirs was the first generation to mutiny against its elders and frolic naked in fields. But there’s one thing I won’t blame hippies for – Lily Phillips’s gross fuckathon in which she bedded 101 men in a single day for the titillation of the onanists who follow her on OnlyFans. Blaming that exhibitionist horror on the sexual revolution of the Sixties is scapegoating masquerading as sociology.

Phillips is a 23-year-old ‘OnlyFans model’. This is a euphemism for people who film themselves having sex for the entertainment of paying subscribers. In October, she pursued the ‘sexploit’ – as one newspaper coyly called it – of screwing more than a hundred men in 24 hours. Someone made a documentary about this cursed event and it aired on YouTube last week. In one scene, a teary-eyed Ms Phillips, fresh from her foolhardy stunt, said: ‘I don’t know if I’d recommend it.’ This vision of a clearly distressed young woman unleashed a tsunami of thinkpieces.

It wasn’t long before the culprit in this unholy debauchery was uncovered – it was the sexual revolution wot done it! These are the ‘wages of the sexual revolution’, said a writer for National Review. Apparently, the sorrows of this ‘home-brew pornographic social-media influencer’ – her name’s Lily, dude – speak to ‘our fallen world’ in the post-Sixties era. Rachel Johnson said Phillips’s teary breakdown is proof that ‘women are victims of the sexual revolution’. Society has a responsibility to ‘look Lily Phillips right in her red eyes’ and tell her she’s the ‘literal endpoint of the sexual revolution’, thundered one writer. Or, I don’t know, we could leave her alone?

The sexual revolution is getting it in the neck a lot right now. There’s Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. There’s the new cult of prim ‘post-feminist’ women and peculiarly angry ‘post-liberal’ men who basically trace the decline and fall of the West back to all that braless dancing at Woodstock. There are those armies of sun-starved blokes on the internet who say they can’t find a good woman because the sexual revolution turned them all into sluts with sky-high ‘body counts’, when the real reason they can’t find a good woman is because they tweet stupid shit like that.

It all feels too pat, doesn’t it? There are the obvious points. The sexual revolution was 60 years ago. If a woman screwing a hundred men for paying voyeurists is the ‘wages of the sexual revolution’, then these are the most late-paid wages in history. Also, the hippies, for all their faults, had sex. In my view, the most lowlife constituency in the Lily Phillips debacle is the unseen constituency of masturbators, the thousands of cock-tuggers at home whose appetite for cold, detached depictions of sex is what drives this sordid trade. Surely the problem here is not people having sex but people not having it? Less the sexual revolution than the weird sexual counter-revolution of our fearful, wanking times?

Many are trying to explain the Lily Phillips thing in 20th-century terminology, and it just doesn’t work. Feminists say she’s being ‘exploited’ by men. I think most men will agree that the 101 men who queued to have sex with a 23-year-old woman as part of an online experiment are reprobates. But that’s no excuse for stripping Phillips of her agency, for denying her authorship of this sordid event. It’s a strange feminism that so glaringly infantilises women, that judges women less morally capable than men at weighing up the wrongness of an exhibitionist sex stunt. My view is that everyone involved – the woman who put out a call for men and the men who gleefully replied – have behaved terribly.

Meanwhile, some right-wingers are countering the feminists by saying Phillips is just a ‘slut’. Such tub-thumping moralism also avoids grappling with what’s new here. I don’t recall any of the adventurous women I’ve known – we don’t call them sluts anymore, lads – sleeping with scores of men in one day for the ‘likes’ of legions of faceless tossers. Come on, this is not promiscuity. It’s something far darker. It speaks, in my view, not to an oversexed era but to an undersexed one. To an era in which a deep dread of sex, and more importantly of intimacy, has created the perfect conditions for the growth and thriving of a predatory industry of performed sex.

Here’s my penny’s worth: Lily Phillips is a product less of sexual liberation than of sexual fear. Her stunt speaks not to the devil-may-care bonking of the sexual revolution, but to the frigid fears of the post-AIDS era. Consider the fact that while Ms Phillips is certainly having a lot of sex, many other youngsters are not. Survey after survey finds that teens and twentysomethings are having less sex than their parents’ generation did. It is not an accident that this desert of sex among the young coexists with rampant fornicating by OnlyFans folk. In fact, the former fuels the latter. It is the millenarian turn against sex, not the sexual revolution, that underpins today’s culture of onanism. Fearful of losing themselves in the arms of another, too many youths bash one off to a stranger.

To blame the sexual revolution for the undoubted problems of the 21st century – voyeurism, onanism, atomisation, loneliness, porn – is to read history backwards. It leaps over all the intervening decades to point a finger at high hippies who would be as horrified by the Lily Phillips stunt as we are. Most unforgivably, it neglects to examine the decades-long culture of fear through which whole generations have been educated to fear intimate connection. To see sex as a source of disease or of exploitation or of heartbreak. Have you thought about having a wank instead? Betty Dodson, America’s famed celebrator of self-love / self-abuse, spoke to our fretful moment when she said wanking provides an orgasm without ‘the pain and the hurt and the suffering’ of closeness with another human being.

This is the irony of the handwringing over Lily Phillips: a lot of it is coming from the very people whose problematisation of sex and intimacy paved the way for today’s rise of the wankers. We find ourselves caught between two depressing prospects: the ‘sex-negative’ outlook of the feministic establishment and the ‘sex-positive’ activism of woke millennials. The former teaches us to tread carefully whenever the sexes connect. After all, men are violent and women are vulnerable. The latter is even worse. Its idea of sex positivity is something like polyamory, where pudgy, pale queer-studies graduates draw up rotas for fucking. Sexy it ain’t. And they celebrate prostitution as ‘sex work’ because their friend Ophelia from the Home Counties had a hoot sleeping with men for money for three months while studying at Oxford. They care nothing for the fact that most prostitutes do it out of sheer desperation and have their economic insecurity ruthlessly preyed upon by pimps.

There is no easy way out of this postmodern sex quagmire. A good starting point, though, would be to challenge the cloud of dread that attends sex and intimacy these days, and trust the young to negotiate such encounters for themselves. Many, of course, still do. Far from both the transactional exhibitionism of OnlyFans and the sex dread of bourgeois post-feminism, there are many good, working people who experiment when young and settle down as they age. Who enjoy casual sex and later devote themselves to a higher thing. These are the hidden, unsung victors of the sexual revolution.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy