30-04-2025
Lily Phillips: Don't blame me for how men have sex
To promote her thousand-man gangbang, Lily Phillips posed naked with her legs behind her head in a photograph reminiscent of the one of Germaine Greer on the infamous cover of Suck magazine to champion female sexual empowerment. But while Greer is considered one of our greatest feminists, Phillips has met a rather different reception.
Should her name not already be familiar to you, Phillips is best known for sleeping with 101 men in 14 hours. In doing so the 23-year-old became the face of a new kind of pornography: shocking, not just because it is extreme, but because of how normal it's becoming.
This new wave of shock porn is partly enabled by OnlyFans, a website launched in Essex in 2016 that has caused a sex-industry revolution by enabling creators to make content on phones in their bedrooms which they sell direct to fans. It has taken porn out of the hands of powerful producers and opened the floodgates to amateur adult creators. Today the site has more than 305 million users, generated $6.6 billion in creator payouts in 2023, and has more than 4.1 million creators competing for clicks and money. At the tamer end, the pop star Lily Allen sells pictures of her feet; at the other, the English adult star Bonnie Blue has slept with 1,057 men in 24 hours.
Phillips's latest stunt (she ditched her own plan to have sex with 1,000 men after Blue did it) was a 50-man 'backdoor' challenge. I will leave you to guess the details.
In real life Phillips is sweet, friendly, girl-next-door pretty. In jeans, a white cardigan and gold necklace, she carries a Louis Vuitton Nano Speedy bag (rrp £1,420) in her French-manicured hand. She chats about the weather and jokes her diary is 'Tuesday cuck video, Wednesday gangbang'. Is she the face of a sexual revolution or the victim of a new kind of sexual exploitation?
Phillips says her best qualities are that she's ambitious and confident. Watching how relaxed and happy she looks posing for our photographer, I'm struck by how rare — and cheering — it is to see a young woman so unanxious about her appearance. 'I get a lot of girls my age who are supportive of what I do,' she says, and I believe her. When I canvas friends' views about Phillips's career I find a schism between disapproving fortysomethings and 20-year-old girls who tell me: 'I'm impressed by her if anything.'
I ask Phillips the highlight of sleeping with 101 men. 'Getting to meet that many guys that support me and are fans,' she trills, claiming it also fulfilled her sexual fantasy. Did she orgasm? 'No … but pleasure isn't all about orgasm.'
Is it true her 101-men stunt made her over £2 million? She's vague. 'I don't actually have a number …' Over £500,000? 'Yes.' Over £700,000? 'Yes.' Over a million? 'Yeah …' She is awkward. 'My parents always really taught me to talk about money is really vulgar, and it's just it's not very ladylike.' I note 'vulgar' and 'not ladylike' are how some critics might describe filming yourself shagging 101 people. Still, she thinks you can't go 'living your life through other people's opinions'.
Like all young women you meet these days, Phillips claims she is a feminist. She sees gender equality in 'being able to explore my sexual kinks and being sexually liberated'. And she insists that sleeping with 101 men was a feminist act. 'It was, 100 per cent,' she insists. 'Definitely, because it was under all my own rules, my decisions. I chose to put myself in that position. I was very, very in control. If it was a man in my position, he'd be talked about very differently.' And I wonder if she's right. Perhaps we should hail Phillips a modern Hugh Hefner, an icon of sexual liberation?
Phillips grew up in Derbyshire, in a 'picture-perfect family house'. Her parents' cleaning business earned enough to buy Range Rovers, Porsches, a few properties — 'we definitely had a privileged life'. At ten, she dreamt of running a wedding dress shop; at university she studied nutrition. 'That's when I actually found out what I really wanted to do.'
She started out as a content creator doing Instagram, TikTok, make-up videos, 'thirst traps'. 'I've always been really body confident,' she says, explaining how her interests dovetailed. She was already having 'a lot of casual sex … small gangbangs, three-ways … I just thought, why not also share this aspect of my life?'
She started out with bikini pictures, solo videos, girl-on-girl, transitioning to full porn casually. 'I had just got to that point where I felt so comfortable with sex and with my body that I thought, why not? I personally don't see sex as a scary, intimate thing to share. It was just something that I basically thought was like art that I wanted to share with people.'
When she told her parents, 'it definitely wasn't their first choice of a job — it was probably near to one of their last,' she admits, but insists, 'They've always expressed their love for me, and they'll always support me.' Should they have stopped her? 'With the stunts, they definitely said it's not something that they want me to do, but at the end of the day, I'm an adult.'
She would like a family one day, to fall in love. 'This definitely affects it, but I don't think it means that I'll never be able to meet someone. It just means that it has to be the right person.' Does she find the idea of saving sex for someone you love silly? 'That's fine for some other people but personally, not for me.'
Phillips first saw porn at the age of 11 at a friend's sleepover. I ask if it shaped the way she sees sex, and she says it 'normalised it'. 'It made me so much more comfortable with sex. I feel like before people didn't speak about it as much. Now I can have an open conversation with you, and it doesn't make me feel embarrassed because I think sex is very normal and it's not embarrassing.'
She says porn taught her about sex. I ask where she learnt about female pleasure? 'Girl-girl videos.'
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Initially, she disagrees with the suggestion that extreme porn encourages young people to do more extreme sex acts, although when I point out how choking has become normalised by pornography, she admits: 'Honestly, I've never thought about that. But you're so right because everyone used to think choking is really kinky and now in most scenes, a lot of people do it.' Maybe, she admits, young men are influenced by the porn they see. 'I understand that men are starting to think that having hardcore sex is very normal … choking, slapping or being very rough.' Yet, she insists, 'I don't think I should be blamed for the men wanting to have sex like this.'
She thinks the emphasis should be not on her, but 'schools and parents need to educate children on the types of porn young people are watching', explaining that 'this isn't necessarily very normal sex this very hardcore sex, and isn't what you should necessarily be doing on your first time. This is maybe if you feel very comfortable with each other and you've consented to it before, and it's something she's asked for.' She notes that OnlyFans makes users share their ID — 'all porn sites should do that'. Should her work come with a warning? 'Yeah, 100 per cent definitely. What I do is extreme.'
I point out that to some, the men in Phillips's gangbang are cut from the same cloth as the men who assaulted Gisèle Pelicot. Phillips finds the comparison 'extremely disrespectful'. The men, she says, 'knew that this was something I wanted and I asked for. That is extremely different to raping a woman.'
I tell her I've seen her compared to Andrew Tate for promoting misogyny. 'That's not at all what I stand for,' she says. What do you stand for? 'Being sexually liberated and, as a woman, doing what you want and having sex with as many people as you want without being kind of judged.'
Do you add to that objectification of women or perpetuate it? 'I just wanted to have sex and also film that and put it online,' she says with a shrug.
I'd like to see Phillips as a sex-positive symbol of young feminism, yet she seems so naive. When I ask where she sees herself at 50, she optimistically trills: 'I'd love to be a veteran, someone in the Hall of Fame of porn.' Has Phillips thought about the physical impact of porn on her body? 'If you're a gaffer outside, you've probably got rough hands,' she says, as if porn is the same as any job, although she admits, 'I haven't spoken to that many older women in the industry and heard their problems.'
In a short documentary about Phillips sleeping with 101 men, she was seen bursting into tears. Now she seems awkward about it. 'It was a very, like, emotionally draining day,' she says. 'Just very, very exhausting. If you have a hard day at work, you know, sometimes people can cry. And I'm just a very emotional person. I cry a lot, at everything.'
Still, she admits the experience made her feel 'what I imagine it's like to be a prostitute, to have sex with men who are very disrespectful and don't really follow boundaries or their time limit. That is kind of how I felt that day, that people weren't that respectful.' I think back to her insistence that she is always 'very, very in control' and start to doubt it.
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I wonder about the pressure she will face to go to even more extremes in an industry that has gamified sex, using the human body to generate ever more outrageous content. She has already been asked to cross her boundaries, to do 'pegging … toilet stuff'. 'I got offered 30 grand to do a scene with a goat.'
Speaking to her I am reminded of Annabel Chong, who became one of the first proponents of extreme porn in the Nineties when she had sex 251 times with 70 men in 10 hours for a film called World's Biggest Gang Bang. Phillips knows the name right away — 'She walked so I could run!' I point out that the talk show host Jerry Springer called Chong's actions the 'height of human degradation … Nothing more than what I would consider consensual violence, violence to the body as well as to the notion of what is a women, what is a human being.' Phillips shakes her head. 'If she has consented to it, and it's on her terms, and this is exactly what she wants to do 100 per cent, then I don't think it's anything like that.'
