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It is not feminist to turn degradation into a business model. Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans performer who made headlines for allowing 101 men to have sex with her in a single day, claims empowerment. So does OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair, who insists that her billion-dollar porn empire is built on feminist ideals. But a recent Reuters investigation has torn that lie apart, exposing a cesspool of criminal exploitation—where abuse, coercion, and trafficking are monetised under the guise of “choice.”
The findings are horrifying: sexual slavery, child abuse material, and revenge porn proliferate on the platform. With 55 million pieces of content uploaded in a single month, the idea that these crimes can be eradicated is laughable. Meanwhile, Blair, the CEO of the $1.3 billion porn empire, she is oddly squeamish about the word “porn,” calling it “pejorative.”
OnlyFans is not new. It was founded in 2016 by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely and later sold to shadowy investor Leonid Radvinsky. Since then, it has paid over $20 billion to its creators, while keeping a pimp’s commission of 20% from every transaction. The pandemic saw a surge in desperate young women turning to the platform, with creator numbers jumping from 348,000 in 2019 to over 1.6 million in 2020. Today, competition is brutal. The site doesn’t promote content, leaving women to debase themselves for visibility—flooding social media with explicit content to drive subscribers. The lucky 0.1% rake in over £80,000 a month, but the average creator takes home a measly $140.
Reuters’s report should have been a death blow. Women deceived, drugged, terrorised, and enslaved to create content. Criminals imprisoning women in suburban houses, branding them with degrading words like “dog” and “toy.”And yet, despite this, OnlyFans continues to brand itself as a progressive alternative to traditional pornography. Blair talks about “freedom” and “choice” while ignoring the grotesque coercion beneath the surface.
But the most insidious part of OnlyFans isn’t the criminal exploitation. It’s the way it normalises a world where selling sexual performances is routine. It’s the way it turns women into commodities and packages their degradation as empowerment. Phillips, in a documentary about her 101-man stunt, shrugged: “Guys are always going to sexualise me, so I may as well try to make a profit off it.” This wild chase for cash doesn’t seem to end. In her most vile act yet, Lily filmed herself exiting a hotel room with male bodily fluids on her face, then confidently walked through the streets of London, openly displaying her stained appearance. This is the mindset of a generation raised on porn—children of an industry that taught them sex is a transaction, something done to them rather than with them, where the only consolation is financial.
OnlyFans is not just the next iteration of pornography; it’s the logical endpoint of a culture that tells women their worth is in their ability to arouse men. It is a marketplace where the victims of the porn industry’s earlier abuses are now trapped in a cycle of selling a digital facsimile of the sexuality that was stolen from them.
And it’s getting worse. In the age of PornHub and OnlyFans, stories of young women “breaking records” by having sex with hundreds or even thousands of men in a day have become grotesquely normal. Bonnie Blue, a 25-year-old OnlyFans star, claims to have shattered the “world record” for group sex, sleeping with 1,057 men in a day—beating Lisa Sparks’s 919-man stunt in 2004. Phillips had hoped to outdo Sparks with her 101-man session, but now she’s eyeing 1,000 men in 24 hours.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t sex. This is industrialised degradation. This is male consumption taken to its brutal extreme. The descriptions are nauseating—two to five minutes per man, groups of five, individuals granted 30 to 45 seconds each. Once you strip pleasure from sex, once it becomes pure commodification, what’s left? Only the spectacle of misogyny itself.
Even other sex workers are horrified. OnlyFans creator Kassidie Kosa called Phillips’s antics a form of self-harm, warning that pushing these limits isn’t sustainable or healthy. But the industry rewards extremity, and as the stakes get higher, women are driven to go further. The result? A dystopia where female self-destruction is just another form of content.
This is what “feminism” has become under capitalism. Not liberation, but a race to the bottom, where the most abused woman wins. As Andrea Dworkin wrote in Pornography (1981): “The object is allowed to desire if she desires to be an object: to be formed; especially to be used.” In 2019’s Females, Andrea Long Chu took this further: “To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.”
This is the world OnlyFans has built—a world where the feminist project is dead, where women are not liberated but further entrapped, where selling your body is the last refuge for those failed by an indifferent system. And the most tragic part? Many of them believe it’s empowerment.
Image: Let’s Talk About Porn by Charles Deluvio, 2018 // Unsplash Content License
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