Lily Phillips “I Slept With 100 Men in a Day” Documentary: Review

Today I had to remind myself that I personally met two women who tried to break the world record for the number of men served in a gangbang. As Anton Chigurh says No country for old men“If the rule you followed made you do this, what use did the rule have?”

But seriously. It was 25 years ago next month when I traveled to Las Vegas and met with David Foster Wallace and photographer Nathaniel Welch Hustlers Magazine staff writer Evan Wright covers the 1998 Adult Video News Awards. There I met one Jasmine St. Clair, who was making a gang-bang movie in which she would take on three hundred men (except there were thirty were men and the footage was shot on a loop). Damn, I don’t blame her. In his essay about the event, Wallace wrote that Jasmine was “made up so incredibly heavily that she looked like a crow.” Jasmin didn’t like that, and Evan didn’t like it either after he started dating Jasmin a few years later. (I bet you didn’t see that coming.)

Just a year later, at the Sundance Film Festival, I met Annabel Chong, a much more reserved woman who, despite studying gender studies at USC, thought it would be a good idea to take on 300 men at once. These efforts were documented in the documentary Sex: The Story of Annabel Chong (now out of print). I was there premiere That’s when the magazine came along and Annabel (real name Grace) came to our photoshoot and did silly poses with a store-bought chicken. At a party later that week I met the director of the documentary and he said, “So you met Grace?” and I said yes, and he said, “So did you fuck her?” and I said no, I did no, that’s not really my line. I have never forgotten this exchange. You could almost say it haunts me.

There’s one thing about pornography: the deeper you go into its extremes, the sadder the whole thing becomes. That’s my very simplistic subjective view and I’m sure there are plenty of academics and anti-kink shamers who might have specific objections to the statement, but from my perspective as an old man, that’s just how it is. By the same token, while porn’s sadness is a real thing, practically an axiom, it’s also kind of a trite thing.

Which leads us to a new YouTube documentary titled Lily Phillips: I slept with 100 men in one dayabout an OnlyFans sex starlet who accomplishes the titular feat. I have to say that the use of the phrase “slept with” throws me off – I understand the slang, but you don’t power nap with the boys, girls.

Porn is very different from the times of Jasmin and Grace, when the material was consumed primarily on expensive video cassettes. It’s now more or less free, produced largely by amateurs, and largely ubiquitous if you know where to look. Raincoat brigades no longer exist. It seems like an oxymoron to mention production values ​​in porn, but the visual quality of most OnlyFans material makes one think of it wistfully Staging by Henri Pachard and Carter Stevens. (I know, but trust me.)

The Lily Phillips marathon, on the other hand, is more or less a phone-camera-only affair. Lily herself is a reasonably attractive “normal” young woman. Really more ordinary than usual. As she explains her story and her motivations, she reveals herself to be, well, banal. She repeats the standard line, “I don’t mind being called a slut,” and then the standard line, “But I consider myself a feminist.” Oh darling, have I heard that before. From the show world dominatrix who hanged herself around 1986 to the college girlfriend turned stripper who disappeared off the face of the earth in 1996. The field is not just sad. It’s dangerous. Or maybe not so much anymore because it’s so ubiquitous. (This is perhaps the most convenient place to remember that two of my fellow Musketeers who were on porn expeditions at the time, Ms. Wallace and Wright, committed suicide. David in 2008, Evan in July of that year.)

There’s a scene where host Joshua Pieters accompanies Lily to a lingerie store but is standing outside and a nice little old lady asks what’s going on and he tells her everything and she says, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I remember in 1980 I was working as a production assistant on an “adult film” and I was setting up a lighting rig on a corner near Washington Square and someone asked what kind of movie we were making and I said “a porno” and the person practically spat, “That’s disgusting.” Times have changed!

The film doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of the filming – in fact, the documentary filmmaker is so tame that shots of Phillips in a black bra and panties are blurred. This could be an act of mercy. To say that the actress isn’t having fun is a bit of an understatement. One gets two strong clues: that of Phillips’ essential ordinariness and that she is a symptom of late capitalism. Although she says she is not a businesswoman, money is the root of her motivation, not sensation. And the sensation for this number of men actually turns out to be unpleasant. “I definitely saw some cum today,” she states before she actually starts to cry. Understatement of the year: “I don’t know if I would recommend it.” Announcing her next project to compete with a thousand men sounds like a recipe for suicide. Find a new rule, Lily.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases on RogerEbert.com, the New York Times and, as befits someone of his advanced age, AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly jokingly, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World is Yours: The Story of Scarfacepublished by Hanover Square Press and available now at a bookstore near you.