OnlyFans and Sexual Sociopathy

It's not self-empowerment. It's gang-rape sanctioned by state, culture, and (most startlingly) the women enduring it.

You’ve heard by now of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans duo who are pushing the limits of sexual endurance. Phillips originally shot to fame after she had sex with 100 men in a day. Blue bested this by sleeping with over 1,000 men in 12 hours. In the wake of these acts, which (of course) went massively viral, the discourse forked in the most obvious and expected way: condemnation by the right and a (tenuous) defense of sexual self-empowerment by the left.

Tim Urban attempted to split the different by arguing that this these are nothing more than neutral acts of physical endurance, like an Ironman competition. None of these takes, however, identify the real phenomenon we’re witnessing, which is the shift of sexuality out of the realm of either morality or self-actualization and into that of sociopathy.

For millennia, humanity has confronted the same questions about the ownership of sexual decision making. The question of whether sex is a neutral physical act, a tribal ritual, a spiritual coming-together, or a transactional currency is present in every society. And each has negotiated its own terms for what sex is, at essence, how it should be navigated culturally, and what its social consequences may be under varying circumstances.

In the the Jewish tradition, which holds sexual morality in its most uncompromising light, we find in the biblical encounter of Tamar, the ancestress of the Messiah, prostituting herself to her father-in-law, Judah, not just a valid but morally necessary act. The Christian tradition has at its very core the sublimation of sex in the Immaculate Conception. Hindu sects speak voluminously about sexual ethics, and Buddhism addresses it within the framework of craving and clinging. The sexual revolution of the 1960s celebrated free sexual expression as a human right. Other traditions abjure sex as inherently lust-bound.

What’s different today is that the emerging sexual narrative embodied by OnlyFans super-influencers like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips is divorced from any context — cultural, political, moral, social, economic or otherwise. Even within the narrowest reading of the term “social” (i.e. as it’s appended to “media”) we don’t have a true value-laden context for the phenomenon we’re witnessing, but a format. And while these women are being accused by some of prostitution, that’s also not entirely accurate since prostitution is almost by definition born out of economic necessity.

Even putting aside their lavish earnings, OnlyFans women who live in wealthy countries where education and opportunity are accessible relative to global and historical norms have not been pressed into sexual servitude, the way that millions of women around the world, and throughout time, have been.

Nor is this truly about choice. In literature and art there’s a long tradition that celebrates sexual freedom, even decadence, and that is loaded with social and cultural meaning. In the journals of Anaïs Nin, her erstwhile sexual and romantic partner, Henry Miller, and in the semi-autobiographical novels of Jean Genet; in the lascivious gaze of Klimt figures and the raucous celebration of sex of Toulouse-Lautrec; in Shakespearean bawdy, the derangement of the Marquis de Sade, the films of Almodovar, the pornographic interludes of Caligula, the sinister suburban sexuality of Blue Velvet; in the lyrics of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Britney Spears to The Weekend, we find sex, raw, sometimes unadorned, but never without some form of meaning, even in cases where the meaning is to explicitly and pointedly strip away previous layers of meaning.

The OnlyFans sexual dynamics that have been taken to their logical extremes by Bonnie Blue and Lilly Phillips are something entirely different. The most glancingly plausible value which these women, in a thin attempt at self-justification, have invoked — that of self-ownership of sexual decision-making — rings hollow for the simple reason that sexual politics now lie squarely in the realm of the individual, as they have for at least two decades. There is no need or basis to make a point about sexual self-empowerment when that very point is made endlessly, across every aspect of contemporary human activity, in virtually every Western cultural setting.

What’s stranded this conversation is the search for meaning or any context at all. Instead, what we’re seeing today is a form of sociopathy cast onto the realm of sex. Sociopathy is generally characterized by a complete lack of concern for the wellbeing of others. People who display antisocial personality disorder (as it’s now called) display a reckless disregard for social and cultural norms. They act impulsively, unchecked by the restraining force of conscience, or even by amour de propre, an Enlightenment conception of the (generally unhealthy) instinct to see ourselves through the eyes of other that has been explored by philosophers like Rousseau and Kant. Sociopaths do harm wantonly, their violence is un-contained and unreflected upon.

In the context of OnlyFans, the question, then, is what exactly is the harm that’s being done —and to whom. Moral traditions implicitly argue that deviation from a society’s sexual norms results in some form of abstracted harm, whether that’s to the metaphysical wellbeing of the society, its social cohesion, or its standing among rival groups. The truly exceptional aspect of the OnlyFans extreme sex phenomenon is that it obviates all of these claims. From the outset, the enterprise of having sex with 1,000 men in a day is neither a rejection nor a reputation of traditional sexual morality. For women engaging in this trend, that morality is non-existent.

The harm that exists in this act is, rather, done by these women to themselves. This is difficult to express in concrete terms because these acts are based in individual choice, they occur in controlled environments, and, as mentioned above, they take place outside of any moral framework. This is what makes this issue so slippery. Unlike anorexia, bulimia or self-cutting, which either lead to, or are themselves, acts of physical harm, there is little risk of permanent injury in these acts. If the harm isn’t physical, and it isn’t moral, what is it?

One of the issues that lies at the heart of the feminist movement is the concept objectification. Feminist thought has for decades taught that across all aspects of human endeavor — from art to work to relationships to daily life — women are made into objects for the use of men. This is not a phenomenon unique to women, but women have been subject to it, as a constant, in ways that men have not. For feminists, objectification is key to the domination of women by men. It’s the cornerstone of their subordination.

Whether we agree with that point or not, there is an argument in the feminist literature on the topic that’s hard to deny: the claim that objectification lies at the very heart of pornography. As feminist Catherine MacKinnon wrote, “Admiration of natural physical beauty becomes objectification. Harmlessness becomes harm.” The reason for this is that objectification turns a person into a commodity. It strips them of the individual qualities that makes us human beings. It makes a person fungible, interchangeable, a set of body parts removed from a person’s aspirations, thoughts and experiences. It’s an absence of qualities, rather than a presence, a silhouette cast against a wall of desire. Because of this, those who have been commodified are made into something less than human, and, sometimes, as in the case of the mechanized genocide of the Holocaust, something non-human.

The strange thing about Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips (along with the entire genre of OnlyFans sex influencers) is that the one claimed justification for these activities, self-empowerment, lies in opposition to the actual effects of the extreme self-objectification at the heart of this endeavor. Here’s a description from one of the men who participated in the Bonnie Blue stunt: "There were around 30 or 40 guys around her at any one time all taking turns.” Another participant later said, "People were just going in and a group would surround her. Whoever got the opportunity would start joining in. She was in the middle and there were loads of guys around her doing whatever to her.”

This is not a description of self-empowerment but of gang rape sanctioned by state, culture and, finally, by the very woman subject to it.

One of the arguments that has cropped up online about Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips is that the entire onus has been placed on these women, and not the hundreds of men party to these acts. And this is indeed the case. Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips are subject to our scrutiny (even if we can’t put a finger on why) while the men who were essential their stunts go unremarked on. But that’s also not entirely true.

The objectification associated with transforming pornography into an activity engaged in by influencers takes place regardless of gender. Andrew Tate’s entire platform can be reduced to an obsessive hyper-objectification of women. Tate’s gargantuan misogyny, which has led him to go so far as to potentially implicate himself in alleged crimes, is driven by a need to objectify women that has taken on the proportions of an out-of-control fetish, something that has consumed his own humanity. This has made him into a kind of objectifying thing: an objectifier. He is not the all-too-human (if misguided) man on the other side of the OnlyFans camera seeking connection in a series of dwindling dopamine hits. He’s not the John. Instead, he’s the force behind the camera, the mechanism of objectification.

One of the most unnerving details from the reporting on Bonnie Blue’s sex stunt is that most of the men who participated wore balaclavas. These men, too, erased themselves in this act. Their humanity was objectified almost as much as that of the woman. I say “almost” because, unlike Bonnie Blue, they were able to preserve their anonymity. In doing so, they were able to cleave off a version of themselves that engaged in this act, putatively leaving their “real” selves untouched by it.

This cuts to the heart of why Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have, in a post-shock era, managed to shock us. In the realm of online pornography, there is a frame. The acts displayed are presented within a literal digital frame within the browser window. This telegraphs that the people involved are participating in a kind of physicalized fiction, a kind of performance.

For decades, we’ve been acculturated to this idea: porn stars (we’ve learned) have home lives and families; they win awards for their performances; and, as we’ve seen with the most famous example of the “traditional" porn star, Jenna Jameson, they sometimes have well-founded political beliefs. This frame served as a barrier against that final step of dehumanization. Whatever might take place in the frame, they are real people.

What Bonnie Blue, Lilly Phillips and the entire OnlyFans enterprise have done is dissolve that frame. The extreme acts, the realism of the women’s presentation of their personalities, the fact that Lily’s “financial manager” is her own mother, destroys any final barrier between the objectification they engage in and their self. It’s not only that they have made the startlingly unnatural leap of self-objectification in a given scenario or professional role. It is, rather, that they have turned their lives their youth, their promise — their selves — into sexual objects, mere things.

Students of history, as well as regular people with sufficient experience in life, know that, eventually, the world tramples things. Warhols are consumed by conflagrations in LA and, in one moment, artifacts worth millions become dust. Heirlooms get smashed by rambunctious children. Once new furniture molders. Jewelry cheapens. This is the fate of a thing, and only by a sentimental or moral attachment provided by a dedicated human — a parent to their grown child’s baby shoes, a devotee to a religious icon, a collector to a rare find — does the thing have any hope of surviving the entropy of life.

This is the risk we see latent in the actions of these young women. For now, they are flush with money and (maybe more to the point) attention. They are shiny objects who have managed to stay in our collective feed while everything else disappears within moments. But the feed will move on, and where will that leave them?

Twenty years ago, a talented on-the-rise actor named Chloë Sevigny performed a graphic sex act in a film. That act has stayed with her since then, a thing-like appendage that has been, unfairly, perhaps even unjustly, stitched onto her public persona and that she’s been forced to carry with her ever since.

That was just a few frames of film in an otherwise uninteresting movie. For women who have turned their lives into a sexual spectacle, the consequences are much more extreme. And what horrifies us most about the presentiment of the existential danger they face is that not only do they not seem to know it’s there, but that they truly don’t care.