When Pieters asks her earlier whether she thinks of herself as a businesswoman, she brushes the idea away: “People would give me a bit of stick if I said I was a businesswoman.” But as he looks at her laptop, Pieters realizes that a businesswoman is exactly what she is, and he tells her so. More than that, she’s in a business that he understands very well, because (if you set aside the floor covered in condoms and the tax-deductible lingerie) it’s not so far from the one Pieters himself is in as a YouTuber.

His film, though, isn’t just an exercise in voyeurism. It wouldn’t be exactly correct to describe Pieters, aged 31, as non-judgmental. He grew up with online porn, and he considers himself liberal. Even so, he’s clearly alarmed by what Phillips puts herself through. He’s also compassionate: often the only person expressing any concern about Phillips’ wellbeing.

“As someone who’s been a content creator in the online world for 10 years, I’ve experienced some extreme measures taken to achieve online fame,” he tells me, mentioning the Logan Paul “suicide forest” video, in which the YouTuber Paul filmed the hanged body of a Japanese man. “And obviously I’ve taken some extremes of my own.” Actually, Pieters’ “extremes” were mischievous stunts rather than affronts on human decency: in 2020, a video went viral in which Pieters presented Right-wing agitator Katie Hopkins with a fake award in front of a screen with the words “Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy” (read the initials).

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“I think all online creators have a constant pressure on them to keep upping the stakes,” says Pieters. “Gone are the days of production companies or studios or the music industry dictating what creators and artists can and can’t do. We now live in a world where creators are able to choose exactly what they want to do and how far they want to push things, which can obviously be great in some respects, because it opens up so much creative freedom.”

Freedom, though, isn’t an unalloyed good. When a creator is trapped in the economic cycle of delivering what their followers want (“audience capture”), it might not even really be freedom. Pieters’ move into long-form documentaries is a way to escape being permanently typecast in the limited role of “social media practical joker”. “I’m 31 now. I had my time doing pranks and being childish on the internet,” he says.

Getting into Phillips’ story appealed to him because of his own reaction to it: “I thought I was pretty liberal with my views on online porn and adult content creators. But when I stumbled across this story, I was taken aback and shocked.” He also realized that, while lots of podcasters and streamers were keen to talk to or about Phillips, “there was no real conversation happening. It was all clickbait and ragebait.” His own background as a creator, he says, meant he was well-placed to go beyond the voyeurism and try to understand why she was undertaking such a horrifying stunt — and what the effect on her might be.

“There is obviously a point at which it becomes dangerous and some of those decisions might be ones that creators regret,” he says. “What we’re seeing on OnlyFans now, or even just in the adult content creation business in general, is almost this same innovation we saw on YouTube.” That means, in Phillips’ case, an escalation from selling nude pictures to selling hardcore clips to outrage-baiting acts such as the 100-man gangbang.

Her next project, she announced shortly before Pieters released his documentary last year, would be to take on 1,000 men in one day. That stunt was originally slated to take place this month. It is now unlikely to happen on schedule, if at all, with Phillips saying she plans to work up to it with a series of (relatively) smaller events: “What’s the point in just going straight to the thousand? Then you’re not going to profit if you do 300, then 500, then a 1,000. It just makes a little more sense.” There’s that businesswoman again.

Meanwhile, Phillips’ ex-friend and fellow porn star Bonnie Blue claims to have already completed the thousand — and in 12 hours rather than 24. In case anyone thought this wasn’t an explicit act of competition, Blue made a concern-trolling swipe at Phillips: “Seeing someone cry after content is not nice, and not everyone is cut out for these circumstances, so I really wish her all the best.” Content. Such a bland, denatured word for a woman left bruised, sore and raw from repeated penetration.

But content is everything, and everything is content. The arms race (cocks race?) between Phillips and Blue is simply the fulfillment of the remorseless imperatives of the attention economy: a content creator does, or claims to be doing, something so horrifying, it’s impossible for people not to react; that reaction becomes the topic for news stories and commentary (including this); this makes more people aware of the creator, driving more reaction and further coverage. Somewhere in that outrage, the creator can expect to pick up a decent number of new subscribers along with the haters.

From another perspective, though, what Phillips and Blue have done looks like a profound misunderstanding of how OnlyFans works. The porn star, freelance sex researcher and Substacker Aella broke down the business model in a recent post. As a successful camgirl, Aella signed up for OnlyFans early on, and wasn’t impressed. She was used to extracting large sums of money from a small number of men in chatrooms; the market rate for subscriptions on OnlyFans was too low to match her expectations.

Later, though, she realized what made OnlyFans work. During a camgirl session, the men viewing in the chatroom can see each other’s usernames and are competing for the camgirl’s attention: the more money they spend, the more attention she gives them, and the more incentivized they are to give even more money. On OnlyFans, though, the men are all invisible to each other. It also has tools for mass messaging, allowing creators to create the appearance of personal contact at minimal effort. Or as Aella puts it: “OnlyFans maintains the dynamic that made camming so successful — direct, live connection with a girl — but manages to make it feel individualized. Instead of having to pay a lot of money to rank against other men, you can pay a little money and enter a pussy paradise with not a single other man in sight.”

The nature of OnlyFans allows for contact at scale. More contact, in fact, than any one woman could reasonably supply. This, Aella explains, is where agencies step in: while a man believes that he’s chatting away with the hottie of his dreams, in reality, the messages are likely being crafted by a minimum-wage cubicle worker with a rudimentary crib sheet. For this service, the “creator” fronting the account might pay as much as 50% of her takings after OnlyFans takes its cut. In the most extreme cases, the woman is little more than a model fronting a character otherwise entirely confected by a manager.

The shocking thing to Aella was that there was barely any effort to make these chats read as the original output of the performer in question, and the men didn’t care. “It took a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that for most men, they don’t care about reality when it comes to their supposedly connective porn,” she writes. “They aren’t tracking you for signs of genuine enjoyment; to them, your personality is simply a vessel with which to certify that your breasts are genuine.”

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Phillips and Blue are effectively forcing their bodies to stand in for the endlessly replicable, digital versions of themselves that OnlyFans allows them to generate. The men who subscribe to them are fundamentally uninterested in their reality or otherwise. What they are paying for is the simulacra of intimacy, not intimacy itself: a digital representation of a woman on which to practice a faint imitation of desiring and being desired, rather than a whole person with whom they might have a relationship.

To put your real, bruisable, nerve-filled body in the place of the avatar is to make a terrible, existential error. The men who have sex with Philips are little different on that account from the vitriol throwers of the manosphere who obsess about how her “body count” diminishes her value and call her a whore. So when Blue snarks that Phillips isn’t “cut out for these circumstances”, perhaps what she means is that Phillips has, despite everything, a stubborn persistence in believing in her own personhood.

“It didn’t seem like anyone had actually taken a moment to speak to Lily as a human being,” says Pieters. “And what we found was, she’s an incredible human being. A really smart, business-minded person. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that what she was doing would have some sort of toll on her, and as much as she ‘loves being a slut’, in her words. I think the documentary showed that there is a real person in there, and some of the stuff does affect her.”

Of course Phillips would cry when speaking to Pieters after her century. She has spent a day being screwed by men who see her, not even as an object, but as the token that stands for the object; and then she finds herself speaking to someone who sees her as wholly human, capable of being harmed and deserving of being cared for. That disjunction is an extreme version of the tragedy that everybody lives when they move between their thin, online self and the full, fleshy existence of the body. If we mistake the one for the other, we will all break the way that Phillips breaks.

The first half of Mitchell’s narrative related how she had been brought up in America’s Nineties sexual purity movement, taking the pledge and practising abstinence before becoming a stay-at-home mother of three. Living “a modest and devout life” with her husband in the Midwest, she became a pastor in her local evangelical church. The second half of the piece effectively described a conversion experience, in which our heroine saw a bright light on the road to Damascus and realised that her deepest, most authentic self was an insatiable bisexual slut. Renouncing every aspect of her former self, she duly moved to California and turned on the webcam.

“Instead of preaching from a pulpit, I take off my clothes and get down and dirty on OnlyFans. Instead of denying my sexuality, I embraced my sluthood. I am now the happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest I have ever been! There is finally congruence. There is integration. There is alignment.” There is no mention of what her children think about their mum’s presence on social media, delightedly detailing the stretchiness of various orifices.

“So what?” you might ask. Or as one man complained when I posted, only slightly facetiously, that this was the worst thing I’d ever read: “What is it about other people being happy that upsets you?”. In any case, Mitchell’s story certainly wasn’t the worst thing I have ever seen on X. That was earlier this year, when I had the misfortune to click on a link featuring OnlyFans performer Lily Phillips, and learnt for the first time about the concept of a “cumwalk”. In case you don’t already know, this involves walking about a town centre with what looks like glitter all over your face, except it’s not.

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Phillips is the woman involved, quite literally, in a race to the bottom with fellow OnlyFans luminary Bonnie Blue about how many hundreds of men they can have sex with on film in one go. Confusingly, Blue and Phillips look almost identical and both have East Midlands accents. Initially this gives you a false sense of relief as you dismiss what you are seeing as a lunatic one off. But if it helps tell them apart, Phillips is the Derbyshire girl from the widely-circulated documentary last month, talking the director through her extensive collection of dildos and insertable traffic cones, before a team of assistants set up a marathon gangbang for the delectation of her subscribers. Blue, meanwhile, is the one from Nottingham who haunts various Freshers’ weeks, standing outside student union buildings with a felt-tipped placard saying “BONK ME FOR FREE LET ME FILM IT”.

Shown in the documentary weeping with exhaustion after fielding a 100-strong queue, afterwards an unbowed Phillips told the world she now had plans to hit the big 1K. Reportedly furious that her former friend had nicked her idea, Blue then rushed to climb sex-Everest first, eventually triumphantly announcing that she had just conquered 1007 men in 24 hours. Phillips has since declared she will be working up to the goal, a bit like doing the three peaks as a sponsored training run before Nepal. “What’s the point in just going straight to the thousand? Then you’re not going to profit off of it. If you do 300, then 500, then 1,000, it just makes a little more sense.”

Apart from that age old motive, Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire rivalry, what could explain what is happening here? Cancel culture brought us the concept of the “purity spiral”: as journalist Gavin Haynes told it, a process of “moral outbidding”, “when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation”. The result is a “moral feeding frenzy” as members vie with one another to demonstrate who is the purest. In contrast, the OnlyFans apparatus seems to be trapping some people in what you might call an impurity spiral. This time, though, the value without upper limit is anticipated male gooning — another modern concept, and apparently nothing whatsoever to do with being an Arsenal fan — and camgirls are outbidding each other with more and more extreme ways of producing it.

Obviously, there’s the money. A popular take is that these women are the ones in control of their sad sack subscribers, helplessly pinioned one-handed to the mouse button. Phillips is said to have made £2 million from OnlyFans. Blue is making £600,000 a month. Mitchell was making $100,000 a month in 2021 according to the New York Post, though some of that could be from her side hustle as an inspirational life coach (free gift: “7 tips to make a sh*t ton of money”, though weirdly she doesn’t mention her main income source).

The average OnlyFans income is pitiful, at around $150 a month, so you can see why there might be a cynical interest in capturing more attention. Still, Phillips, Blue and Mitchell seem sincere when they say they adore their work, the odd fit of exhausted crying aside. Watching the Phillips documentary and seeing her talk us through her massive collection of sex toys and props, I concluded that OnlyFans is a new kind of Panopticon. Thousands of naked camgirls are stuck in tiny rooms getting ever freakier, entranced by fantasies of themselves as desired by excitingly faceless men, irrespective of the grim reality of the drooling deadbeats actually watching online.

Though I could be wrong, Phillips seemed to me to be fascinated by how she thinks she appears to an imagined audience, carrying the erotic vision of it with her wherever she goes — and especially into stinking rented Airbnb bedrooms, crammed with expectant flesh-and-blood subscribers. They too were basically a kind of prop for the benefit of viewers elsewhere. “When I did 37 guys in a day, I genuinely can’t remember any of their faces” she tells the filmmaker. “If I don’t find someone attractive I struggle to look at them when I’m having sex with them.” “But you don’t struggle to have sex with them.” “No, no, no.”

Later, after making a bespoke “jerk off instruction” video for some bloke paying her to tell him to eat his own semen, she says “it’s kind of fun, you’re kind of like playing an acting role”. This would have felt like superfluous information, except that I felt it inadvertently got to the heart of the matter.

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Back on X, my own mental prison of choice, I have certainly seen people posting at each other as if they were really talking to someone else entirely: a person in their head they are very angry with, or someone they want to impress. I may have even done it myself. And why wouldn’t it be this way? You can’t see or hear fellow users and most of them have made-up names anyway. People talk about the phenomenon of “audience capture”, but in my experience it’s rarely your actual audience that ends up consuming you. On X, the psychic projection results in lots of aimless snark, ranting and humblebragging. Translated into the world of livestreamed porn content, you get unexpected creativity with traffic cones instead.

People tend to treat OnlyFans as relatively benign in relation to obviously sinister outfits like Pornhub, but when it comes to worrying where porn culture will all end, it seems like it might carry its own special risks. We are told the erotic plasticity of women is far greater than the relatively fixed desires of men; meaning cultural and social factors are more likely to affect what they find arousing. Women make most of the content on OnlyFans, seamlessly moulding bodies and libidos to badly typed-out fetishes in order to wring higher order self-objectifying pleasure out of the process. Women performers outbid other women performers in increasingly extreme behaviour, locked into exciting rivalries to feel the most desired, to become the most monetised. And all with nobody else in the room.

In the old days, whatever other physical and mental risks they ran, porn performers were safely separated in time and space from their audience. Their gymnastics were trapped on the videotape like flies in amber. Nowadays they cumwalk among us, even as new jerkoff instructions ping into their phone from lecherous men with credit cards, identities and faces thrillingly vague. Maybe it’s true that I just don’t like people being happy, but it all seems a bit unhealthy to me. In an impurity spiral, as in the original version, there is apparently no upper limit to the crazy.