00:02:47.320So you were right. Lily Phillips is a 23-year-old white British sex worker. She is an OnlyFans creator, and she's a porn star. So if you log on to Pornhub, you will find her in porn videos. If you log on to OnlyFans, you will find her there for anyone who needs kind of like a quick deep dive on OnlyFans.1.00
00:03:04.000It's basically like Substack, but for sex work.
00:03:07.360There are, of course, different types of influencers.
00:14:35.340Certainly, it's funny to watch it back now in the context of this conversation.
00:14:39.900Because when you talk about challenging assumptions, I think a lot of the time we talk about sex work as something somebody does because they are desperate.
00:14:52.240Somebody who is already pursuing a college degree and basically just says, oh, I like doing this and I can make a lot of money doing this and so I just want to do it.
00:15:03.860that very counter-cultural to the popular narrative about sex work.
00:15:11.140I noticed that she said, not proud, but okay with it.
00:15:16.640But I was like, it is interesting, though, to describe that choice
00:15:19.840or your relationship with sex as something you are proud of.0.90
00:15:24.240That also feels very unusual for the way that women typically talk about sex.0.99
00:15:31.640I mean, you brought that up right off the bat.1.00
00:15:33.260First and foremost, Lily Phillips is a middle-class white girl who did not have to do sex work. So that's where we're starting. And she says a few things in this early interview that she will say again and again in this documentary that she has said in previous interviews that she has said following this documentary.
00:15:49.420I like doing this. I have always liked doing this. She says, I have supportive family and friends.
00:15:56.660She says her parents know about this. And she acknowledges it's awkward sometimes. At one point,
00:16:02.480she says that her dad's friends have watched it, and that's kind of weird for her to deal with.
00:16:07.020But we also see that she talks to her mom on the phone every single day. We see these kind of
00:16:11.620aspects of her life that she is presenting to us that appear to be, if anything, consistent.
00:16:38.240We are about to find out how dumb she is.1.00
00:16:39.860I think that's also how the documentary is kind of set up.0.97
00:16:42.020So at this point, Peter's kind of spent some time explaining and showcasing what exactly Phillips does. I think he does this very well. He shows that, yes, she does do porn. Sometimes that's just having sex and having it be videotaped. But sometimes people will send in requests. They will pay hundreds of dollars for her to do specific videos for them. I went on to Lily Phillips' OnlyFans. Katie, have you ever been on OnlyFans?
00:18:14.600I also tried to find a few other OnlyFans creators.
00:18:17.300And what I found is that the numbers range quite a bit.
00:18:20.400And an OnlyFans creator, it's completely up to them what they offer.
00:18:24.140So Phillips doesn't give all of her numbers, but she does reveal that she charges several
00:18:28.460hundred dollars at a minimum for private videos.
00:18:31.300I think that number probably goes way up.
00:18:33.520She said that in her first month on OnlyFans, I think which was several years ago,
00:18:37.520she made $13,000. In recent interviews, she said that she made over 2 million pounds last year on
00:18:43.580OnlyFans alone. So she's making very good money. She has nine payrolled employees, I think most of
00:18:50.420which are part-time. But this is like not some young woman who's trying to make rent. This is0.99
00:18:54.940a capital B business. And it's important that we acknowledge that because I think that when you
00:19:00.960talk about sex work, the implication is always about the financial coercion. And that just does
00:19:05.840not exist here. We can have a conversation about the incentive to make a lot of money and how
00:19:10.380people will bend their morals to make a lot of money across every industry, but we are not having
00:19:15.940a conversation about a woman trying to find warmth and housing. That's just not what we're dealing0.97
00:19:20.600with right here. This is also a far cry from the average OnlyFans content creator. I think the
00:19:25.320average creator makes a few hundred bucks a month. The average sex worker makes no money and is1.00
00:19:30.020trafficked. So these are kind of the scales that we're working with. The reason I bring this up
00:19:34.800is because when I was doing a lot of reading about like how you engage with the politics of
00:19:38.820sex work, the idea of consent is the most complicated conversation. And there are feminists1.00
00:19:45.120who will say there is no consent in selling your body under patriarchy. There are feminists who1.00
00:19:50.320will say there is abso-fucking-lutely consent in terms of having sex under patriarchy. But1.00
00:19:55.140some of the questions that you can ask yourself is, is the sex worker working with an agency?
00:20:00.120Do they have to split their profits? Are they working underneath a john or a pimp? Do they need to afford housing and food? Or is their money going into savings? All these different levels that kind of give us an idea of just how strong their consent can be.0.94
00:20:13.900If you are a Black woman living in a rural town who has two children and doesn't have access to certain jobs and faces racial discrimination, the idea of you having consent into selling your body is very different than the idea of someone like Lily Phillips consenting to it.
00:20:30.360So as far as we can view this, she is as consensual as it gets.
00:20:35.080She's at the top of the consent pyramid.1.00
00:22:29.680They're kind of talking about how she's planning.
00:22:31.500And there are moments where Phillips appears to be fully in control,
00:22:35.500and there are moments when she is not.
00:22:37.000So, for example, they're largely trying to get people who already pay to be supporters of her platform. So that's where they're, like, sourcing these men from. And Phillips says they're going to have people send a picture of their license and an STD test. Peters points out they can fudge that. Phillips is just kind of like, well, I'm not worried about it. I'm going to have a condom.
00:22:56.520He asks if she's going to let them come in her mouth.0.99
00:23:31.740Something that he doesn't acknowledge that is really important that I've heard a lot of sex workers talk about is that when women are having sex, but in particular when you have a gangbang situation of a lot of men having sex with a woman, you always have, like, someone around who's basically monitoring the woman, making sure that what she wants is happening.
00:23:49.640She has multiple employees who are at the apartment when it happens, and I just bring that up because that was totally not discussed, and it was something that I wouldn't have really thought about until I was listening to a lot of these podcasts with sex workers.0.90
00:24:01.900So that is one thing that she does well. She is never alone. She always has people around her. She is in control. It's one man at a time.
00:24:09.020And as we approach the day of the event, we also get more context of the type of shit that Phillips does, and it is very much portrayed in a deeply kinky way.0.99
00:39:10.940But we sell it to many thousands of people, and people's financial situations are so different
00:39:16.460that no matter what we do to make this thing as foolproof and amazing and elaborate as
00:39:23.380possible. It's never going to satisfy everybody. People are always going to have questions or
00:39:28.740complaints or, hey, it's not working for this one thing I want it to do. And the way that I feel
00:39:34.260when I go through and do the customer chats every week from the questions that our support staff
00:39:40.380can't answer because they're too in-depth, I badly want people to like this product. I feel
00:39:46.140indebted to the people who purchase it and use it because they spent their money on it.
00:39:50.660They want it to work for them. And so I feel like I owe them something. And I do think that you can kind of tease apart here the way that she's talking about each interaction and like wanting to make sure the person has a good time and while they've come all this way. These are her fans. She's describing it in a way that's procedural. It's almost bureaucratic. It's like very sterile.
00:40:14.100She's trying to get these people through, but also make them feel special and also make sure they're having a good time. I can't help but think about the fact that if you take the sex out of it for a second, she is just kind of describing the natural challenge of being a service provider and feeling indebted to or like you owe the customer or the person on the other end of that interaction or that transaction something specific.
00:40:41.000And I think that really jumped out at me that I think people are like making it definitely about the sex. And I'm like, I don't even know that this is about sex. Like the sex almost feels kind of secondary to me and the way that she's describing her emotions here.
00:40:54.180Well, I'm glad that you said that because I was going to compare you to Lily Phillips. No. But I'm really glad that you said that because showing my hand a little bit, the whole outline for today's episode came after I watched this documentary. I think it was the third time.
00:41:10.380And that week, which was, I think, like a week and a half ago, I had had, just randomly, multiple conversations with women who hate their jobs to the point of being, like, clinically depressed about them.0.59
00:41:22.980And I was watching Phillips talk about this, and I was just like, damn, if I haven't seen a lot of women talking about their jobs with the same way, except feeling that way every single day.0.91
00:41:33.780And then I got to the question that you're talking about, which is, oh, but it's sex, right?
00:41:38.600And so you get to this thing, which is, it's kind of in the same way that we have, like, American exceptionalism, which is this idea that nothing ever applies to America.
00:41:45.900Like, if you say, well, Australia got rid of guns, someone will always go, but that doesn't work for America.
00:41:51.440American exceptionalism goes hand in hand with the American dream, the idea that there are things that work and things that don't apply to America in a way that don't exist anywhere else.
00:42:01.380And it's just an effective way of siloing a country.
00:42:07.180We have this kind of exceptionalism to it, where if you try to compare it to any other industry, someone will innately say, which we're about to get into, but it's not the same.
00:42:27.460This is an aside, but I don't know if you saw.
00:42:29.400I saw this amazing tweet that was like, the really cool thing about severance is that it dares to ask the question, what is it like to work at Deloitte?
00:42:37.180So putting that aside for a second, this moment with her is the moment that launched a thousand
00:42:43.820ships, right? This is the moment that everyone is about to latch onto. I want to note a few
00:42:48.080things. Number one, Peters is interviewing her immediately after this event. If you watch any
00:42:54.420documentary from any seasoned documentarian, you do not do this, or at least you do not do this
00:43:00.120once. And so before I say anything else, Katie, I want you to read a quote that Lily Phillips gave
00:43:05.900to Grazia, a UK magazine. She gave this two months after the documentary. And this is her
00:43:11.940talking about that moment. I felt extremely bad. Some people traveled across the pond and I felt
00:43:20.040they're not getting what they signed up for. She tells me reflecting that capturing her raw response
00:43:24.260to this on camera was perhaps a mistake. I wish now I had set a boundary and given myself an hour
00:43:29.540or two to recover before I started answering questions. Yeah. So I find it really interesting
00:43:35.360that when she is talking about that moment,
00:43:37.480her regret is not having a bigger boundary
00:44:03.760ugh, I don't want to go to work today.
00:44:05.020I don't want to go to the brothel. You can't because you're a sex worker. And sex work is1.00
00:44:09.380inherently disgusting and degrading and unacceptable. And so you have to be a1.00
00:44:13.220spokesperson for sex work at all times. Otherwise, you are basically letting your industry down
00:44:20.160because there is so much stigma around it. So I thought that was fascinating.
00:44:24.440Well, it's like what you said about what do you not need evidence to believe.
00:44:29.160Right. I do, again, find it interesting that her regret beyond the boundary—yes, she has the regret around not setting a firmer boundary with the documentarian. That is fascinating. But again, even two months later, these are her customers, these are her fans, and she wanted them to enjoy the experience.
00:44:50.120And so to the extent she regrets it, she's like, I felt guilt and I felt badly because I felt like they weren't getting what they wanted out of it. And when you have, as I'm sure we all do, these ideas and biases about sex work, it's very easy to interpret her answer in that moment to Josh as proof of regret of the sex work itself. But that's really not what she's expressing.
00:45:17.840Yeah. So just to talk about a few of the assumptions that I realized I was making when I first watched the documentary. First and foremost, the most important one, she is an unreliable narrator. That is the immediate assumption that I had, which is you can't trust her. You can't trust what she's saying. She says she likes sex work, but women just say that when they don't realize what they're actually doing.
00:45:39.200Or, well, she says that she's upset because she didn't provide the service that she wanted, or she feels guilty for some unhappy customers, but that's just a smokescreen. We all know what she's really upset about. There's this assumption again and again that I made that people make in every single one of these reviews that both Lily Phillips and the men who signed up to have sex with her do not understand the implications of what they're doing.0.85
00:46:03.860And I find this really interesting because if you were to look at it from any other angle, she's an incredibly reliable narrator. Like, she says the same thing in interviews again and again and again and again. Like, she's a dream witness for any sort of legal case. She is so consistent. I like what I do. I love my family.
00:46:21.160The biggest challenge to my job is the stigma. I feel bad that people traveled here and I didn't give all of them a great experience. Like, these are again and again and again in every interview before the documentary, during the documentary, after. She says the same thing. And there is just this very consistent belief that she is just not telling the truth.
00:46:43.880Peters ends the documentary very shortly after that clip that we just listened to,
00:46:48.740and he kind of narrativizes it in this way.
00:46:51.040He says, I don't know what to believe,
00:46:53.500but either we are seeing someone who's overwhelmed at the end of a long workday,
00:48:58.020I mean, it was, yeah, all right, dude.
00:49:00.580That's about what I expected him to say.
00:49:03.000But I do think that, to your point about Phillips getting away with it, she has money, she has internet fame, she has fans, she has friends, she has a supportive family, right? She's happy, she's confident.0.83
00:49:17.000She has all of the earthly things that supposedly women who engage in sex work or, frankly, if we're going just a little bit broader, women who engage in promiscuous behavior are not supposed to have.1.00
00:49:31.820We as a society want to punish women who behave in this way.0.93
00:49:35.500So a woman who is behaving in that way and yet gets all of the earthly spoils that she could imagine, well, what do you do then? You have to go to a different realm to exact that punishment. You say, oh, she doesn't have a soul. She might have all the things on earth that you could want, but she doesn't have a soul.1.00
00:49:55.440I mean, not to get too into it, but like this is literally what the men who wrote the Bible were thinking.
00:50:00.180Peter sitting there like, yeah, and then Mary Magdalene.1.00
00:50:04.400All right, so let's go through a few of the assumptions that Ben Shapiro is making. For those who are just listening, I think it's perfect that he had this little fucking laptop visible that said facts don't care about your feelings. Here are some of the assumptions he makes that he does not provide any evidence for.1.00
00:50:16.760Number one, what Lily Phillips did is inherently shameful, okay?
00:50:20.980Obviously, if you're not, like, as devout as he is, you're probably not going to agree that her soul is stained.
00:50:25.560But I do think a large number of liberal people would agree to some extent with the ideological assumption that what you are doing is shameful and degrading and it is hard to come back from.
00:50:35.080That, like, once you do that, it changes your relationship to sex.
00:50:41.040Another assumption that he makes is that Lily Phillips clearly regrets her decision.
00:50:45.300He makes this assumption in spite of a lot of evidence to the contrary, right? Shortly after this documentary, she said she was going to have sex with a thousand men. In every interview, she has said she doesn't regret doing this, but he makes this assumption, right? She made herself into a sex robot. He says that's why she was upset, right? Because she has degraded herself. Again, going completely against what she said about why she was upset.
00:51:07.540And then number three is that what he's saying about sex work is that she did a reversion to the animal. And what makes us human is our desire to rise above animal instincts. I saw this take a lot in the comments section for all the articles that I was reading in like other right-winger videos about this that I watched.
00:51:28.080This is an argument that a lot of people make, that it's like, she's just resorting to animal
00:51:33.500instincts. And the whole thing about what makes us human is our ability to rise above these instincts.
00:51:38.480Isn't that the complete opposite of what they say? If you ask all of these fucking0.99
00:51:42.880right-wing biological essentialist determinists what they say is that, well, women are biologically0.99
00:51:49.440inclined to partner up and be monogamous because it's in their best interest to have a partner who
00:51:55.740will care for their young, but it's men who want to go out and spread their seed. How do they
00:52:00.340reconcile what they say most of the time to defend or prop up the supposed differences in gender
00:52:09.660with her behavior of wanting to have sex with 100 people in the same day?
00:52:15.880Just really funny how this world of conservatives, I guess I would say, or like people who are
00:52:20.200espousing conservative values without realizing it, when they do and do not want to associate0.98
00:52:24.760humans with the animal kingdom like all of these people are like the same people who circle jerk
00:52:29.200to jordan peterson's grand unifying theory of humans being crustaceans and even the idea that
00:52:34.540that is animal is just so interesting and i actually while i was doing research for this
00:52:39.280outline i saw a video where do you know who mia khalifa is yeah so mia khalifa is a woman who was0.96
00:52:45.560you know very famous for the porn that she did who no longer does porn work she is like a human0.57
00:52:50.480rights activist she's lebanese she's been very outspoken about palestine and she designs jewelry
00:52:54.560now. And so she was interviewed in a recent video, and someone said, what do you do? And she said,
00:52:58.440I'm a jewelry designer. And all these right-wingers lost their minds, being like, oh, are you a
00:53:02.820jewelry designer or are you a fucking porn star? And someone said, and I've been thinking about it1.00
00:53:07.080while doing this outline, isn't it so interesting that if a woman chooses to have sex in exchange
00:53:12.960for money, she will never be anything else? But if men are convicted of rape, that is a bullet
00:53:17.280point on their resume. That doesn't prevent you from becoming fucking president. But if you have1.00
00:53:22.000sex and someone sees it, you can never be anything else. So now let's move on to a criticism made by
00:53:28.680UK commentator Tanya Gold. I would describe her as a sort of reactionary feminist, but what I
00:53:33.900found interesting about this piece, there was an article in The Atlantic, there was another article
00:53:38.260and everyone kept referencing as like the feminist argument about Lily Phillips. And so I'm going to
00:53:42.440be curious to hear your thoughts on it, Katie. All right. Wait, this is purported to be the
00:53:48.560feminist argument about it? People have linked this analysis as coming from a feminist.
00:53:55.840Okay. In January, Lily Phillips says she will sleep with a thousand men in 24 hours for her1.00
00:54:02.880OnlyFans site. I have seen the flyer. To apply, you must send in a headshot and hold your photo
00:54:07.860ID close to your face. This reads like a parody of the physical contortions Lily herself makes
00:54:13.020for her cameras. Wait, holding an ID close to your face is a physical contortion? All right,
00:54:18.440that's a bit of a stretch. She has just slept with 100 men in 24 hours, and what was close to
00:54:23.400her face is unrepeatable. It made her cry. Did it? Did it? Perhaps the tears were for the camera.
00:54:30.000Lily had a documentary made about the day. Because grief is as marketable as sex, I don't know. I
00:54:35.660suspect she doesn't either. It's a parody of something else, too. What happened to Giselle
00:54:40.900Pelico, who was drugged? Oh my god, this is a heinous parallel to draw. Giselle Pelico,
00:54:47.480who was drugged, apparently raped by 51 men at the behest of her husband, and by insisting the
00:54:52.420trial take place in public, has become a modern feminist heroine in France and across the world.
00:54:57.260Pelico is 72, and she perfectly understands what happened to her. Phillips is 23, and I don't think
00:55:02.980she understands at all. It's a truism that by the time women understand what sex really is,1.00
00:55:07.540men no longer want it from them. What the fuck is happening in this paragraph?0.99
01:02:42.120I think it's interesting. I can't remember the exact phrase, but there was something in there
01:02:45.380about like, and why would a man want to have sex with a woman after she's had sex with so many
01:02:50.120others? It kind of slips in this purity. Exactly. This purity myth idea, this body count hyper
01:02:57.940fixation, this idea that men don't want to sleep with women who have slept with other men.
01:03:02.800And it's interesting because typically that assumes that the woman herself is now dirty.
01:03:07.860Right. But who's doing the dirtying in the situation? If you logically follow the implication, it's that sexual contact with men sullies you, that the men are the dirty thing, the sullying agent. And so I find that really interesting.1.00
01:03:23.300And all of these little Easter eggs in here of the disgust response, another notable one to me is when they break the fourth wall in the documentary, and they include the cameraman, like, gagging at the smell.
01:03:37.220Not only did they keep that in, but it's kind of imperceptible.
01:03:41.300Like, I didn't notice it until they called attention to it.
01:08:09.200The story of Lily is similar to that of other women I have spoken to on OnlyFans.0.97
01:08:13.420The middle-class young women who appear on there tend to be those that have not previously been involved in prostitution.
01:08:19.140Many of the others from disadvantaged and impoverished backgrounds gravitated to the
01:08:23.220site during COVID when the brothels were closed. Make no mistake, whatever OnlyFans intention,
01:08:28.800the site is prostitution behind a screen, but pimps and predators are never far away.0.98
01:08:33.520When women like Lily talk about being driven by a sexual desire,
01:08:36.820this is all part of the fantasy constructed for men. Hmm, okay. No woman has a fantasy to end up0.95
01:08:43.620with the type of injuries that will occur from such extreme activities as having sex with multiple
01:08:48.200men. Katie, you've had sex with multiple men. What do you think about that? I will plead the fifth.0.97
01:08:58.260You'll be so happy to know I was going to start out this podcast with an intro that just
01:09:02.120asked you as many invasive questions as possible as a way of met a fourth wall breaking how
01:09:07.540uncomfortable we are about sex. And then I was like, she's sick. And so I cut that part out.0.99
01:09:12.300The flu saved me. The flu saved you. So what do you think?
01:09:15.660Oh, man. Okay. Immediately, the things that jumped out at me most, saying that the people
01:09:21.220on OnlyFans are going to profit. Yes, the OnlyFans platform will get a cut, but the chief beneficiary
01:09:26.840of the profit will be Phillips. Let's be clear. It's very noteworthy to me that we are excluding
01:09:32.480her from the benefit pool. And then when women like Lily talk about being driven by a sexual1.00
01:09:37.960desire, this is all part of the fantasy constructed for men. Okay. So I feel like what's happening0.92
01:09:42.700here is because even someone who is as devout a practitioner or like believer in women's rights
01:09:51.380as you can be, the idea that a woman could have sexual desire or appetite does not exist as a
01:10:00.860possibility. It only exists insofar as kind of this, I feel like what's implied is this pick
01:10:06.820me thing of, oh, this is all just part of the male fantasy that's being constructed here.
01:10:12.700She does not have any actual sexual desire of her own. This is basically manufactured
01:10:17.680for the cameras. There's that coupled with the removal of her agency or her control
01:10:26.560in the business element of what's happening. It's kind of like on the right and in the right
01:10:35.380leaning analyses. The women might be in control, but it's in kind of like a villainous, manipulative,1.00
01:10:45.080soulless, depraved way. They know not what they do type assessment, a lot of biblical language.1.00
01:10:53.880But on the left, it feels like this assessment is really leaning into this idea that, well,
01:11:01.100she's not really an agentic participant in this they're acknowledging the profit and the
01:11:07.720exploitation but they're kind of like sidestepping her role yeah in creating and controlling the
01:11:16.580situation at hand so that you can like acknowledge the fact that those elements are there without
01:11:23.480implying agency on her part it's weird in order to talk about it they almost have to
01:11:30.840make her, like, a passive bystander in what's happening.
01:11:35.220Yeah, I see what you mean. A lot of these arguments are very circular in, like, a snake
01:11:39.080eating its own tail kind of way where, well, she can't have consent, so there's no point
01:11:43.800talking about her consent. Or, well, women cannot fantasize about having sex with this0.96
01:11:49.720many men, and so if they claim to be fantasizing they're having sex with this many men, that
01:11:53.360is just another symptom of the problem that we were talking about. And this is an argument
01:11:57.120that is frequently made by feminists, so that's what we're about to talk about. But, like,1.00
01:12:00.080it is really interesting how the left and the right converge here into this argument and there
01:12:05.720are just different arguments about why like I think Republicans would say oh well the world
01:12:10.300has lost its way and women are the garden of Eden and we have always been tempted you have to rise1.00
01:12:15.100above and then people on the left would go patriarchy patriarchy is keeping them from doing0.69
01:12:19.060this but both arguments rest upon this assumption that she knows not what she says do not believe
01:12:25.180her. Do not believe her when she says she wants to do this, even if she doesn't love it. Maybe
01:12:30.880she just fucking wants to make $2 million a year. I know a lot of people who do a lot of fucking1.00
01:12:35.240degrading shit to make that much money, but it is not the same. And again, we're about to kind0.99
01:12:40.840of hop into that, but a few assumptions that she is making that we haven't touched on. Number one
01:12:46.200is that what Lily Phillips went through was dissociation, that that is a sign of extreme
01:12:51.520trauma. There's a lot of, like, really interesting armchair expert shit going on. I saw that in the0.97
01:12:56.500comments. I see that again on the left and the right, this idea that it's like, that is proof.
01:13:01.640There's the proof. Don't listen to all the moments when this woman is sober, having slept well,0.94
01:13:07.200sitting on a couch, talking about her life. No, no, no, no. Believe her after she just finished1.00
01:13:11.260that fucking marathon and hasn't had a bite to eat and is exhausted and tired and overwhelmed.1.00
01:13:15.960That's her truest self. It's when she's dissociating. And it's framed that way in the0.99
01:13:20.080documentary. It's this moment of truth, right? Did we see the true toll of this? And it is just
01:13:26.260further encouraging you to not believe anything that this woman says. Another assumption, her0.99
01:13:32.560sexual desire is not real. It is not organic. It is not hers. And then number three is that, again,
01:13:38.480it is always an extreme activity to have sex with multiple men. And then another review I want us
01:13:43.320to look over really quickly is one that Liz Plank did for her substack, Airplane Mode. I love Liz
01:13:49.480Plank. She's a pop culture feminist. She does really funny videos online that are so smart1.00
01:13:53.800and edgy. And she did an article that before starting research for this episode, I completely
01:13:59.260agreed with. And now I would say I probably have a different take on. But the article title is
01:14:04.420Men in the Lily Phillips Experiment Are the Real Victims. Now, the majority of this post is
01:14:08.800obviously about how men are covered or not covered in this documentary and how we should spend more
01:14:14.920time interrogating the desires and the behaviors of men, which I largely agree with. But then there
01:14:20.800was this one paragraph that I felt kind of differently about after doing research for
01:14:25.720this episode. So Katie, I'm going to have you read it for us. To be clear, I'm not saying the concept
01:14:30.340of anyone, regardless of gender, having sex with 100 people in one day isn't unsettling. The
01:14:36.300documentarian audibly gags upon entering the room, filled with condoms, tissues, and other remnants
01:14:41.720of the day's activities. Phillips herself admits to dissociating through much of it and recounts
01:14:46.720how semen accidentally ended up in her eye, despite her asking for it to go elsewhere.
01:14:52.340Yeah, so again, I think you can see how I would feel very similarly to this. I think that this
01:14:58.020is a very modern take. This is much more mild and sex positive than the other reviews that we have
01:15:02.880read. But I found it interesting that Liz still felt the urge or the inclination to clarify like,
01:15:09.240well, I'm still not okay with this. Because I think that I would have had that exact urge
01:15:13.480before I did all the research for this episode. This feeling to be like, well, I'm not saying
01:15:17.400this is okay, because I think that there is such an instinct that what happened is wrong,
01:15:21.640that someone is to blame. But obviously, like, I have been kind of deconstructing that throughout
01:15:26.120this conversation. And I would be really curious to know if Liz changed her perspective, if she
01:15:31.680cared as much about the smell. Like, who cares if things smell weird? Sex smells. The idea that
01:15:37.980a weird smell is necessarily bad is not something that I think I agree with, but I think is very0.99
01:15:43.040common, especially with women, to convince ourselves that our bodies are unnatural,0.94
01:15:48.400that any bodily smells are things that we should hide. The idea of semen accidentally ending up
01:15:54.100in her eye against her consent as evidence for this not going how she wanted. We have this0.93
01:16:01.040fixation on the end of the documentary without acknowledging, number one, that she has since
01:16:06.620clarified how she felt in that moment. And without talking about like what we mean when we say
01:16:11.500dissociation, like there are just like all these things that again, you don't need evidence to
01:16:15.240believe. No one is backing this stuff up with studies, with asking questions about other sex
01:16:19.780workers. And I should note that in that interview that we played a clip of with that other sex0.59
01:16:25.680worker who was very like dairy about sex, like it was awful. I slipped into it. I'm always doing
01:16:30.740worse stuff. She talks about the smell and she says, I bet it's going to smell. And I only noticed
01:16:35.500that on like the third watch where I was like, wow, that's another perfect Easter egg that we0.68
01:16:40.020are like prepping these people to be revolted by the smell of sex. And so after I was reading all
01:16:45.920these reviews, I kind of wanted to spend some time just understanding like the history of sex work.
01:16:50.940So what I noticed in doing research for this conversation is that both pornography and the
01:16:57.920concept of sex work have been given like the old 1950s treatment. Like when everyone's talking
01:17:02.420about it. It's like, society has run amok. Like, look at the way we're doing pornography.
01:17:07.700Pornography is dehumanizing. One person in an article referenced this totally random Billie1.00
01:17:13.360Eilish interview in which she says porn ruined her brain as a child. There are all these associations
01:17:18.900that we're making about porn and sex work being recent events that are now impacting humans in
01:17:25.980ways that are unnatural. Isn't there some, like, Republican dad that has the, like, it's like
01:17:31.560life lock but for porn where it's like you and your son have each other's passwords or whatever
01:17:37.080where like it like alerts the your like dad if you like watch porn when people are talking about
01:17:42.680lily phillips i hunted down as many articles as i could and the one thing i could not find in any0.94
01:17:49.020fucking article was an acknowledgement that sex work and pornography have been a part of human0.92
01:17:54.940society for as far back as historical records go. There has been this framing of sex work and0.99
01:18:01.880pornography as recent developments. There are paintings of fuckfests on the walls of Pompeii.0.99
01:18:09.580There are paleolithic paintings of genitals, many of which were of the vulva, which suggests0.97
01:18:17.760that tribes of people from thousands of years ago had a better working understanding of female
01:18:22.920sexual anatomy than our congressional representatives currently do. There is a long
01:18:27.880history of sex work, which is like, duh, when you think about it. But it's like the oldest job.
01:18:33.620It's often referenced as the oldest profession. And there is like a whole argument over whether
01:18:37.700it is or not. But the fact that that is an argument to begin with shows how old it is.
01:18:42.260And in terms of sex work, it has always been kind of filled with contradictions. I was reading about
01:18:48.440how some of our earliest records of brothels are from thousands of years BC. And there were like
01:18:53.780hierarchical class structures. There were certain women who were authorized to have sex inside of1.00
01:18:58.280religious temples. Others were forced to sell sex to regular people on the streets. It was naughty0.95
01:19:03.440and complicated from the start. And what your race was, what class you were born into, all of0.99
01:19:08.820these things impacted how much you could sell your body for. Whether you worked for a brothel or
01:19:13.820whether you just sold money on the streets. Like, there has been this kind of from the start. And
01:19:18.500the fact that we don't acknowledge that is really interesting to me. One thing that was notably
01:19:23.080different is that the earliest examples of sex work, so for example, during the period of the0.97
01:19:28.180Romans and the Greeks, the big difference here is just how little of a shit they gave about what0.99
01:19:32.720type of genitals you had. People did not have labels. Men had sex with teenage boys, didn't0.99
01:19:38.900call themselves gay. They certainly didn't call themselves pedophiles. These were just like people0.99
01:19:43.300who enjoyed pleasure, and that was about as far as these conversations went. And just like in
01:19:50.180modern day, there were people who were trafficked into sex slavery and were literally sex slaves,
01:19:55.140no consent whatsoever. And then there were people who had more agency in the situation.
01:19:59.200There are a lot of parallels in the fact that we started, and the idea that even that porn is new,
01:20:04.360it's not new, it's just found its latest iteration on the web, which is what we could say for almost
01:20:09.840every single industry that humans have. And I'm going to share some links for this because we
01:20:14.280could spend five fucking hours talking about the history of sex work. But like what you need to0.87
01:20:17.460know, the TLDR is number one, sex work has always been around. It is a fundamentally human act.
01:20:22.720Number two, a big line in the sand in which sex work and just like the concept of sex became more
01:20:28.300complicated and stigmatized is when monotheism rose to power. Christianity, Islam, our notions
01:20:34.200of sex changed. Oh, interesting. I was also going to say, like, it's interesting to me,0.99
01:20:39.940something that this is calling back now when you say sex work is this ancient thing, but we are now
01:20:46.320just almost watching it be refracted through the mediums of modern life. It's almost like we're
01:20:54.620reacting to the technologization of sex. Like, remember the first sex robot? They made her a
01:21:00.420sex robot. And it reflects our anxieties about sex and about technology. But it almost in that way
01:21:07.540kind of feels similar to me to like the moral panics about like when the TV was invented and
01:21:13.860everyone was like, oh my God, everyone's watching too much TV. It's going to rot their brains.
01:21:17.820It's like that same sort of frenzied. It's this new thing, but it's not new.
01:21:24.260Yeah, 100%. There has always been moral panic around the latest technological innovation.
01:21:28.400There are so many moral panics around porn that we could probably spend a whole conversation talking about them. Just one I want to hit on that is really important to me is that I did a lot of research into trying to figure out if it's true that porn is in fact like rotting our brains and making us anti-sex in real life. And I don't know, the jury's out. I did not find a lot of convincing evidence.
01:21:50.680It feels like it's a pretty indisputed topic, and it feels like all of the evidence about how porn impacts our brain feels very similar to me to all of the evidence we have about how the internet in general impacts our brain, around how social media impacts our brain, and I'm not interested in doing like a Jonathan Haidt Anxious Generation takedown on porn.
01:22:09.780So that's another conversation for another day. But there is, of course, the moral panic ongoing that the types of porn that we view online impact what we think is normal or okay to do in real life.
01:22:22.080So you might think, Katie, that yes, sex work is eternal. Yes, pornographic images are human, but a gangbang? I mean, that must be the definition of modernity, right? Like, that is a direct result of our scrambled, fucked up little heads. It's the end result of what happens online. This is what happens when people learn about sex through porn, through Pornhub, and this is how we get all fucked up.
01:22:46.140There were cave paintings, weren't there? You're going to tell me about a cave painting?1.00
01:22:49.620I'm not finished with my little rant. And so you're seeing more and more little extreme sex acts and you need to watch them in order to like awaken and arouse. You're deadened. I phoned adult. Pleasure receptors. Wrong. The gangbang is eternal. And we're going to learn about that right now. Katie, will you please read this wonderful paragraph from a subsec I found that talks about a woman in the Roman ages? And I have since verified this from other articles, but I love the way that they wrote this in narrative form.0.77
01:23:16.820Valeria Messalina, killer name. Valeria Messalina was one of the most badass women of all time.1.00
01:23:24.460Messalina, I cannot believe her name was Messalina, was the third wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius.1.00
01:23:31.620She was born into a wealthy and influential family. Her great-grandfather was the consul
01:23:36.340Lucius Claudius Marcellus, and her grandmother was the daughter of Marcus Licinius Crassus,
01:23:42.100one of Rome's richest men. She was powerful, sophisticated, and uninhibited. Her sexual
01:23:48.660appetites rivaled the most debaucherous emperors from Nero to Caligula. In a way, she made these0.93
01:23:54.680two look like schoolboys. Messalina went down in history as the woman who partied hard. She had0.85
01:24:00.640lavish feasts where naked participants would smash grapes under their feet, get drunk on wine,1.00
01:25:00.540So, Katie, first and foremost, yeah, if anyone wants to, like, keep a little thing in their head, remember this after you listen to this episode, monotheism is what made us hate sex. That's, like, very, very important here. And just to put this another way, the gangbang is older and more central to human history than the Bible is, just, like, historically speaking, if we want to be factually accurate.
01:25:23.800If I had to wager, if we had to give, like, liberals and conservatives alike, like, a little drop of Veritaserum and ask them what really bothered them about Lily Phillips, I would guess that it's the gangbang. It's a hundred men. It's not the fact that she's selling sex for money. It's not the fact that she's showing her tits in public. It's a hundred men.
01:25:41.780And the theory that is posited again and again from, like, the articles and the commentators is that this obsession with this version of sex is something that comes from, like, a generation that has been ruined by porn, right?
01:25:54.960And if you were to look into it, you would find out that, like, the stunt to have sex with 100 men has been done a number of times in the past 20 or 30 years.
01:26:02.600Basically, as recently as we've had porn videos, women have been doing this, so it's not new what Phillips is doing.1.00
01:26:08.600but again the more important argument is that lily phillips could never want this the feminist0.93
01:26:13.900argument is that quote when women like lily talk about being driven by a sexual desire
01:26:18.200this is all part of the fantasy constructed for men no woman has a fantasy to end up with the
01:26:23.840type of injuries that will occur from such extreme injuries and then i was thinking like well josh
01:26:30.060peters talked to a sex worker who backed that up right she said that sounds crazy but then i was
01:26:35.340like, that's pretty interesting that he took on another sex worker who does another type of sex
01:26:40.060and kind of just blurred them as like, well, they're all the same, right? They're all sex0.98
01:26:43.580workers online without recognition that like, well, different type of sex workers like doing
01:26:48.480different things. Some only give arousal massages. Some are willing to do anal. Like the idea that
01:26:53.960that woman was a representative was kind of interesting to me. I started to think about
01:26:57.840this. And I was like, did anyone ask a single woman what they think about gangbangs? And the
01:27:05.900answer is no. So today, this podcast is doing the very brave work of actually taking five seconds
01:27:10.840to wonder if some women are, in fact, just dirty little freaks who want to fuck around and find1.00
01:27:15.240out. So, exhibit A. 2019 survey from a man named Jeff Lehmiller, an American social psychologist1.00
01:27:23.140at the Kinsey Institute, famously focused on the study of human sexuality. So Lay Miller surveyed
01:27:28.8404,000 adults from all 50 states between the ages of 18 and 87. I should note that I was reading his
01:27:34.520survey and he wrote at the bottom that he was like, this isn't a wholly representative U.S.
01:27:38.220sample because these people are participants on social media. And I was like, we love an honest
01:27:42.080king. But it seems like a pretty well-done survey. So he took these 4,000 people and he was like,
01:27:47.660tell me what gets you hot. What are you into? Katie, can you take a guess at what percentage
01:27:51.820of men in this survey fantasized about multi-partner sex, aka threesomes or an orgy?0.66
01:27:57.360Oh, I'm going to guess low, like 20 percent?0.52
01:47:15.840Here's the thing that I think you're going to find really interesting.0.94
01:47:18.180There was one little part during this Gang Bang episode where one woman made the argument that women are actually completely biologically set up to have sex with men.
01:47:26.820in rapid succession. Why? Because of how frequently women can orgasm. A woman can keep going all day0.93
01:47:32.560long if she wants. Some women can have eight orgasms in a row.1.00
01:47:56.820That's fascinating. Yeah, it's funny how women's biological quirks are always used to1.00
01:48:04.920hem them in in conventional wisdom and never to expand their horizons.1.00
01:48:11.140It's very true. And then the last thing I want to talk about in terms of sex work is that
01:48:15.840we also make assumptions about the person purchasing sex. There is this assumption
01:48:20.060of exploitation. If you are buying sex from a person, you are exploiting them. And I think
01:48:25.000that when you imagine it, you imagine, like, a relatively nasty white dude with a violence0.99
01:48:30.920fetish. I feel like that's the visualization that people see. Yeah, like Tucker Carlson.0.98
01:48:34.620Yeah, like a guy who doesn't care about women. If you listen to this podcast, if you listen to
01:48:41.440the testimonies of sex workers, that is not the case. A lot of sex workers require advance
01:48:47.260appointments, which means that they have conversations with people before they come.0.86
01:48:50.300They find out why they're coming. Before they come.
01:48:52.600before they come. C-U-M, baby. A lot of women have repeat clients. A lot of people want to0.99
01:48:59.360lose their virginity and don't know how. They have men and women who come. They have sometimes
01:49:04.080couples who want to get better at intimacy. I've read numerous accounts of sex workers who work
01:49:08.960with clients who don't even want sex. They just want to be held. This brings us against the power
01:49:13.880of framing where it's like, yeah, you can have a conversation about sex in the digital age and you
01:49:18.440could make these sound arguments about how a sexual coming of age by watching porn is probably
01:49:23.900not going to give you a good education on how sex works. You could also make the argument that we
01:49:27.660are living through like an insane loneliness epidemic, and sex work is an essential tool
01:49:32.260for helping people deal with that. Another thing, this is just kind of an aside, but I listen to a
01:49:37.580few different sex workers who work with people who are just really ashamed of their bodies,
01:49:40.560and so they pay someone for sex to help them engage with these things. This is completely
01:49:45.820dismissed because no one gives a shit what sex workers have to say because they are inherently0.99
01:49:50.600unreliable narrators because they are choosing to sell themselves for sex right now we're going to0.98
01:49:56.420talk about how sex worker fits into labor practices this is the really fun part so when people talk
01:50:02.600about lily phillips they frequently end up kind of like nodding to the other end of the sex work
01:50:07.560spectrum like all the women who are trafficked and work for pimps and have sex against their consent
01:50:11.760Sex work is obviously everywhere. Sex workers are everywhere. And while this is largely reductive, I think that it's helpful to just, like, cut this in half between people who don't choose and people who choose.1.00
01:50:22.180For decades now, feminists have, like, been dealing with this dichotomy. How do you deal with sex work? Katie, do you have any guesses of, like, how feminists have generally tried to deal with this?1.00
01:50:31.540Oh, geez. How do you deal with sex work?1.00
01:50:37.200This, too, is what feminists have been doing for decades.1.00
01:50:41.760just like oh fuck next yeah let the record reflect that i'm staring blankly at the wall1.00
01:50:47.800i don't know making it about exploitation yeah do you remember that review earlier in this0.99
01:50:53.140conversation where she was saying like second wave feminists hate everyone but otherwise0.99
01:50:57.320feminists will say sex work is empowering so i wanted to look into that and this woman was
01:51:00.980kind of correct like the idea of the stereotype of the man-hating feminist did come about in kind0.89
01:51:06.880of the second half of the sexual revolution. There was this surge of these women called1.00
01:51:11.460dominance feminists who basically argued that sexualization and sexual coercion was like the1.00
01:51:17.760linchpinch of subordination. Like if you want to talk about patriarchy, if you want to talk about1.00
01:51:22.540why women aren't equal, it's because men sexualize them. Huh. Okay. And it's very controversial. And0.95
01:51:27.500the whole idea was you could never actually consent to your own oppression. Sex work is
01:51:32.420always oppression. There is no form of sex work that is really acceptable. Part of that oppression
01:51:37.560was economic, but it was also kind of spiritual in a way that feels right-wingy now. So, Katie,
01:51:42.080I'm going to ask you to read this quote from feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was like a pretty1.00
01:54:13.000If you ask sex workers, they fucking hate it.0.99
01:54:15.980They say that, yes, you have reduced the number of pimps, you have reduced trafficking victims, all these great things, but now the people who are still working as sex workers feel less safe. We have to go underground. We have to take our practice to shadier and shadier places because you have criminalized this. We have difficulty screening clients. We have difficulty negotiating because everyone is afraid of getting arrested.0.99
01:54:38.440So that's currently ongoing, is this idea of, yeah, you can criminalize it, and maybe you're doing like a dent in sex trafficking, but you're not stopping sex work.
01:54:50.000So the second of these approaches is called legalization.
01:54:53.760The Netherlands did this with Amsterdam, that's an example, where you legalize it and you create all of these special regulations for the practice.
01:55:00.940So the Red Light District is a great example.
01:55:03.200So, in this circumstance, prostitution, which is what they call it, is legalized and regulated.
01:55:22.800More recently, the Netherlands has tried to, like, address this by creating more laws.1.00
01:55:27.460You can't buy sex from someone if there's reason to suspect they are under coercion, quote unquote, which feels like a kind of useless law. They're looking into banning it for people under 21. And they've done surveys of sex workers and the sex workers fucking hate it. They aren't happy. They are more stressed out. They feel like they have to meet all these different rules and regulations from like the cleanliness of their location to what they're doing.
01:55:50.640they have to file with the state or with the country as official sex workers. They don't
01:55:56.320want to do that. They don't want to necessarily identify as that.
01:55:59.920So the legalization just added a regulatory regime that they don't appreciate.
01:56:06.240Right. So legalization is basically like if you want to take exceptionalism and turn it into
01:56:12.520a legal structure. It's like this can't be similar to any other structure, so we must
01:56:16.560create a new structure. If you were to ask sex workers what they want, or sex work organizations
01:56:22.080or human rights organizations, what they say by and large is, we don't want you to legalize this,
01:56:27.120we want you to decriminalize it. Which is to say, this isn't exceptional. Treat us with the same
01:56:32.280health and labor laws that you treat any other industry. We don't want special laws. Treat me
01:56:37.640like a nail salon. Treat me like anything. Don't give me all these other hoops to jump through.
01:56:41.500just decriminalize this so this has been done in new south wales which is in australia and it's
01:56:48.060been done in new zealand they love it they really enjoy it sex workers who are in new south wales
01:56:53.800and sex workers abroad agree that this is by far not perfect but it is by far the approach that
01:56:59.940they like the most the idea of treating this like any other labor practice don't require me to like
01:57:04.920register with some state don't require me to have all these different hygienic rules
01:57:09.060just let me do my job let me do my thing and don't worry about it which brings us to this1.00
01:57:15.120kind of conversation where I feel like this is where a lot of people worry that feminists are1.00
01:57:19.100going to be like sex work is liberating right like you and I talked about that when we were1.00
01:57:22.560talking about do we do this episode like are we going to talk about if sex work is liberating1.00
01:57:26.380and in that review with Tanya Gold she referenced that you have feminists saying sex work is
01:57:31.380empowering yeah I have not found many feminists who say that I really I think that like pretty0.85
01:57:36.780much everyone knows that this is nuanced and I will just say on the record sex work is not
01:57:41.880liberating not because it's sex work but because work is not liberating work is work work is by0.96
01:57:49.740definition oppressive most people work to survive like that is not just fucking sex work I just have0.92
01:57:57.340been thinking about how many people hate their work and who is allowed to receive empathy for0.93
01:58:04.280hating their job and who isn't. And then I was just like thinking about sex work and how it's
01:58:09.420so similar to agricultural work. That industry is so based off of an assumption of exploitation.
01:58:15.920But when people talk about like all the migrant workers we use to pick our fruits,
01:58:20.360no one says we can't pick fruit anymore. They say, oh, no, we should make sure that people
01:58:24.980get paid for their work. Everyone always wants to eat fruit. But with sex work, we never have
01:58:29.480that. It's never like, oh, well, no, sex work is always going to be around. We just have to make
01:58:32.940it a better practice, it's like, no, we have to eliminate it. And I'm just kind of like,
01:58:38.080how? Well, I think that the preeminent means of elimination right now is people think that
01:58:44.580stigmatizing it to eliminate it. Right. Or at least diminish it. But that doesn't work. That
01:58:52.700doesn't happen. But I do think if somebody is commenting something nasty on that Josh Peters
01:58:57.020documentary, in their head, they're like, well, she needs to be taught a lesson. She needs to
01:59:02.920be stigmatized, right? And to me, it kind of brings up this question of when you say,
01:59:08.600are we going to talk about is sex work empowering? Well, work isn't empowering. For most people,
01:59:14.120work is not something that empowers them. It's something that oppresses them. And that
01:59:17.260goes for regardless of whether you have sex for money. It makes me wonder, what does make work
01:59:22.800empowering? What would make something empowering? And I do think that it comes down to ownership.
01:59:31.440Yeah. I think that that is kind of like the antithesis of capitalism. Work under capitalism
01:59:37.260is typically wage labor, meaning someone else owns your time, someone else owns what you create.
01:59:45.420And in the U.S., you have to do it in order to have health care. That's a form of indentured
01:59:49.840servitude. A lot of people who are earning, like, minimum wage, you are literally indentured. You
01:59:54.880cannot leave your job. Think of all the people who come here on those immigrant visas that require1.00
01:59:59.280them to never leave their jobs. All the engineers in Silicon Valley, like, this goes up and down1.00
02:00:03.920across the economic spectrum that we are so beholden to our jobs in America.
02:00:09.160So what is the sex work equivalent of workers owning the means of production?1.00
02:00:13.000Is it what Lily Phillips is doing?1.00
02:00:16.800I mean, I think about the joke Emma Stone makes in it where she's like, we are off to sell our bodies and we own the means of our own production.
02:00:25.300Something that I was thinking a lot about in terms of, like, the question about the empowerment of sex work is that the argument that people make is that there is something, like, inherently invasive about sex, right?0.98
02:00:36.120Like, you have a man's penis inside of you if you're a straight woman, right?0.98
02:00:39.160Like, Lily Phillips is taking a pounding, literally.1.00
02:02:03.220is way more central to our humanity than most bullshit jobs under capitalism.0.98
02:02:09.360Sex work will be here long after open AI has solved for every engineer and every content1.00
02:02:15.760creator. And so the idea that we are viewing it as something exceptional when in fact it is like
02:02:20.740one of the most central parts of human society would be like where I would start to talk about
02:02:27.020it, which is like, yeah, sex slaves have existed for as long as human societies have. And that is
02:02:32.280awful but to discuss them as something exceptional or as something that can be eradicated I think is
02:02:37.280to have a false understanding of how central it is to this conversation and then the other thing
02:02:44.740I was going to say is I think being really conscious about framing trafficked sex slaves
02:02:49.660like women who are trafficked as like 13 year old girls from small towns have way more in common
02:02:55.440with the African children who are working the mines in Congo than they do with Lily Phillips
02:03:01.440Yeah. We talk all the time about class solidarity. Let's have some clarity about labor solidarity and, like, who we're talking about and why we are connecting them because Lily Phillips is not Giselle Pelico. And it is, like, offensive on a higher order to everyone involved, to Giselle and Lily both to connect them.
02:03:20.920So I did all this research, and I went back and I watched the documentary a final time.
02:03:24.900And the thing I kept thinking about is, what if Josh Peters is the unreliable narrator here?
02:03:30.200Lily was pretty clear about what she was doing the whole time.
02:04:18.920And then, spoiler alert, you find out that he's not as nice as you thought, but he's also not a villain. He's just a very prototypical guy who was exposed and engaged with sexual violence and didn't do anything about it. And I was like, dude, this fucking guy is Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman.
02:04:36.720Like, he is Mr. Nice Guy. We're all prone to believing him and defending him, and he stepped in with no knowledge of sex work, no knowledge of how pornography works, no knowledge that sex workers have been connected with the internet from the very jump, and just, like, interviewed another sex worker, thought that that was a good enough example of evidence, and then went on his way.0.99
02:04:57.200How much money has he made from this? Nine million views.
02:05:00.640I would assume probably at least tens of thousands of dollars.
02:05:05.040I was just going to say, if we're going to talk about exploitation, there is kind of an interesting exploitation linkage here with, no, you're kind of exploiting her, making a documentary about her and leaving all the comments on, aren't you?0.98
02:05:19.060Ooh, you're kind of fucking doing this.0.98
02:07:37.300And then I was thinking about prisons and how I said in an earlier episode how, like, male-on-male sexual violence is rampant in prisons.0.99
02:07:44.660But what if there's also a fucking shit ton of consensual sex?0.99
02:11:52.360Yeah, lesbian stepmom. There we go. Like, you're joking, but I'm also serious. It's like this1.00
02:11:56.840idea of what women wanting, being inherently sexist. You have to just constantly sit with0.99
02:12:03.000these contradictions. Women are subjected to sexual violence. Women fantasize about sexual1.00
02:12:08.940violence. Women enjoy things that also might be perceived as sexually violent, but are not to them.0.98
02:12:14.860Women can engage in things, in sexual events that are not extreme to them or sexually violent to them that you might perceive as sexually violent.
02:12:26.040I also historically have found that phrasing, I can't remember, Dworkin maybe?
02:12:33.560Basically that you cannot consent to your own oppression.
02:12:36.680That like, consent does not transform something disempowering into empowering.
02:12:40.520But I do think that the way that you approached that in this conversation, like, well, empowering is kind of the wrong question to be asking to begin with.
02:12:49.800We don't ask other work to be empowering, so why are we asking that here?
02:12:54.860That, I think, was the right approach.
02:12:58.440And I would also just add to the Andrew Dworkin thing, you're conflating a political theory, consent and oppression, with sexual desires.
02:13:07.380And sexual desires don't really fit into that framework. Yeah, that's a good point. The other part that I found extremely compelling that I think is going to be sitting with me for a while is this idea about what we don't need evidence to believe and how that is a useful frame for engaging with some of this material.
02:13:23.820Where are we not really citing sources? Where are we not really citing evidence? Where are we just kind of relying on conventional wisdom and our kind of like culturally acceptable beliefs and biases to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the argument? So widespread in coverage of sex work. That's going to stick with me for a while, too, I think.
02:13:42.680Yeah, people don't feel obligated to share resources or links or even to like be clear about what type of sex work they're talking about and why. And I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot because every single Lily Phillips video I watched, I watched a lot of right wing shit that was just like, frankly, so rude that I didn't want to engage with it and vile.0.96
02:13:59.980Every single video that followed me was about Blake Lively. And I was like, dude, if that is0.82
02:14:05.120not the ultimate moment that doesn't pass the sniff test for anyone who's wondering what's
02:14:09.560happening with Blake Lively, let that be your warning that this is not some feminist agenda1.00
02:14:15.060to take down Blake Lively. Every single video about Lily Phillips that was snarky and boring1.00
02:14:21.800and anti-intellectual was followed up with Blake Lively. So sit with that, whoever wants to,
02:14:27.460sit with that. Damn. Well done. You killed it. So that's it. That was amazing. Thanks.1.00