“It’s Not For The Weak Girls” - From Annabel Chong to Lily Phillips

You’d have to have been living under a toadstool this past week to miss the media coverage of Lily Phillips, a 23 year old, English Only Fans content creator. ‘I Slept with 100 Men in One Day’, a documentary made by YouTube film-maker Josh Pieters, catalogues Lily’s 101-men-in-1-day sexploit, which took place back in October of this year. Pieters’ documentary uploaded to YouTube on 8th December. The public and media reaction, ranging from shock to disgust to blaming feminism to blaming men to disapproval to pity to sadness and back again, hasn’t stopped since.

On completion of the stunt, Phillips told film-maker Josh Pieters: “Sometimes you just dissociate…it’s not like normal sex at all…In my head, I can think of five, six guys, ten guys that I remember. And that’s it. It’s just weird, isn’t it? If I didn’t have the videos I wouldn’t have known that I’d done a hundred”. Disturbingly, Phillips didn’t seem aware of how HIV can be transmitted and, when informed of the facts by Pieters, admitted to having never really thought about it. As someone who grew up in the 1980s bombarded with doom-mongering about AIDS, I found her lack of awareness concerning. But HIV is so 1980s I suppose. Arguably, as with anyone who engages in dissociation, there is a level of cognitive dissonance at work with Phillips. Pieters told news.com.au, 13th December, that he wanted the documentary to capture every side of Phillip’s journey during her X-rated mission: “It was vital that we showed as many sides to this complex scenario as possible” he explained. “Throughout my filming with her, she had stressed how this was her fantasy and how excited she was for this day. Though, despite her saying (this) to me, I could not shake the feeling that this was not going to be as easy and happy as she wanted it to be.”

Like a true content creator, Phillips has moved swiftly on to the next project, recruiting for a 1000-man event which is scheduled to take place in February 2025, and is training by having large quantities of sex, gradually increasing the number of sexual partners. She’s gone online to request the women of Britain to send their husbands and boyfriends along to keep up the numbers. “I’ve done 101 and I’m doing 300 in a few weeks. It's like a boxing match,” she told The Reality Check podcast recently. The current world record is held by porn star Lisa Sparks who bedded 919 men in one day at a sex industry event in Poland in 2004.

It’s all so tiresome because this has all been done before. In January 1995, a 22 year old Singaporean Grace Quek, under the pseudonym Annabel Chong, starred in an adult film, ‘World’s Biggest Gang Bang’. Over the course of 10 hours she had sex with men a total of 251 times (some lucky chaps got to go more than once). It set a world record for the time and became one of the best selling adult films of the 1990s. It’s very much of that era; notably one of the two producers was Ron Jeremy, a legend in adult entertainment. Jeremy’s fall would come over two decades later, when the Me Too movement finally reached the porn industry. He has since faced multiple charges of rape, sodomy and sexual assault. Jeremy was gentleman number 251 in the gang bang. The story of the ‘World’s Biggest Gang Bang’ was picked up by international media but, crucially, also by the newly burgeoning internet. Esquire magazine gave Annabel Chong the 1995 ‘Dubious Achievement Award’ (‘Talk About A Sore Winner’ the headline read).

Unlike Lily Phillips in 2024, Quek had no social media through which to explain her actions and motivations. She quickly discovered what we now know so well - that what is said in media interviews is cut and edited down to controversial soundbites. Annabel Chong was referred to as ‘Singapore’s most notorious citizen’ in the mid to late 1990s. She made many high profile media appearances including The Jerry Springer Show (May 1995), UK television’s Channel 4 debauchery-fest The Word and she debated at the Cambridge Student Union. I actually remember watching her infamous appearance on The Jerry Springer Show in 1995. Like many in Britain in the mid 90s, I was initially intrigued by these American import shows with their ‘frank and open’ discussions of behaviours and relationship dilemmas. Where I grew up in Belfast, people would never have spoken of such things openly let alone on a television show. That would have meant getting emotional, anathema to us. I’ve linked the Springer episode with Chong as it’s an exquisite time capsule for anyone that wasn’t around in those halcyon days. The past really is a foreign country…

When Jerry Springer inevitably asked why she had chosen to have sex 251 times in 10 hours on camera, Annabel shot back, smiling “Why not?” Of course, the audience whooped and cheered in a way that was already predictable. However, when she continued with the contention that ‘World’s Biggest Gang Bang’ was a challenge to stereotypes of women as passive objects during sexual intercourse and a reclamation of female sexuality, the Springer crowd grew quieter and a bit nonplussed. “I do think that explanation still holds true…although I feel that I was somewhat naive about how my actions would be perceived, portrayed or interpreted by the media and the general public,” Quek reflected in 2020.

A film-maker, Gough Lewis, who had seen her on the Jerry Springer Show tracked her down by September and requested to make a documentary on her. Quek agreed, assuming the documentary would give her a platform. For the next two years, Lewis and a camera crew followed her from her performances in Las Vegas to the debating society at Cambridge, collecting 120 hours of footage. After editing the footage down to 86 minutes, Lewis and Quek presented the film at the Sundance Film Festival of 1999. ‘SEX: The Annabel Chong Story’ was the first of the festival’s 200 films to sell out and was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize; also competing at Sundance that year were ‘The Blair Witch Project’, Gregg Araki’s ‘Splendor’ and Tim Roth’s ‘The War Zone’ - prestigious company.

But things quickly turned sour when Quek said the film omitted too many details, including the fact that Lewis and Quek had been in a relationship for half of the production. The final scenes of the documentary rankled most with Quek. They showed her visiting her parents in Singapore to reveal her porn career to them, but also to promise them that one day she would make them proud. An onscreen caption then informed the viewer that Quek had, in fact, returned to the porn industry. “I did not return to the industry - the documentary maker made up that timeline!” Quek stated. The missing pieces of context in the film led to disappointing reviews. It was an “exhausting experience” as Quek described it and she lost friends from her old life in Singapore, who disapproved deeply of her lifestyle choices. This was a time and a world unlike that inhabited by Lily Phillips, in which sex work was not seen as an acceptable career option nor generally approved of by parents. “I stopped Googling myself…because there were all these Singaporean discussion boards...So vicious…I don’t even know this person. And they want me to die of AIDS?” Quek claimed that her parents suffered harassment and she was being stalked.

Quek learnt how to code in 2000 whilst working at a strip club. One of her private clients had introduced her to the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. According to Quek, during their tutorials she dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform and would deliberately make a mistake coding so that the client could spank her; then they’d do some more coding. “Looking back, that was my best hourly rate ever,” Quek told VICE in 2020. “I never got $800 an hour to write code ever again.” She enrolled on an intensive engineering course in 2001, which gave her the foundation to make the transition from sex worker to computer engineer. This would mean leaving her alter ego ‘Annabel Chong’ behind. Twenty five years on, Quek is now a senior front end developer for a major tech company in California - she is photographed at the heading of this article. Sitting behind a screen, Quek basks in anonymity. “Nobody needs to know who wrote that code. They just need to know that it works.” Interestingly, Quek has compared the sexism in the tech industry in the 2000s, when there were far fewer women involved, to what she’d experienced in the porn industry. Reflecting on making such a radical life change, Quek said: “I was like, ‘I really don’t need this in my life’. I’d rather be able to do something where people treasured me for my ability, for my brains, rather than the way I looked.”

Observing the media frenzy around Phillips - you couldn’t buy this level of publicity - I did wonder where she’ll be in twenty five years? Time comes for us all and there’s only so long that a woman can turn these type of tricks. There’s always someone younger and prettier in the rear view mirror. Perhaps she has a plan and aims to be out of the business when she’s made enough money? This week many publications have revelled in reporting the vast sums that Only Fans content creators allegedly earn. On 12th December, US Weekly Entertainment News reported that US Only Fans creator and self-proclaimed Christian Sophie Rain, made 43 million dollars last year and over 10 million this month so far. According to Rain, one of her subscribers (a gentleman called ‘Charles’) sent her nearly 5 million dollars between November 2023 and November 2024. “The Lord’s very forgiving,” the 20 year old Rain told People magazine on 11th December. “If this wasn’t meant for me, I wouldn’t be here right now.” These sums may be, as many claim, grossly exaggerated but it’s still fair to surmise that Rain and Phillips are making enough money to enjoy the finer things in life. Rain has faced a similar backlash to that Phillips is experiencing. “You can call me whatever you want,” she wrote above a post on Twitter/X calling her a prostitute, “I will be laughing my way to the bank”. She doesn’t strike me as a victim.

Of course, there is the danger that twenty five years from now, Phillips may claim that she didn’t give her consent, that she was groomed by someone (Only Fans? the men? social media?) and that the men raped her. Her body. Her choice. Or does that only apply to abortion? In a much publicised piece in The Spectator on 11th December, veteran feminist Julie Bindel apportioned the blame for Phillips’ stunt squarely with the men involved. Bindel’s piece of polemic received a great deal of pushback, not only from Spectator readers but from the wider media in general. It can basically be summarised as ‘Men are terrible and will hurt you because I’m Julie Bindel’. There does seem to be a fundamental contradiction between feminists, on the one hand, arguing that women are capable of making their own decisions and, on the other hand, saying they must be being exploited if they make a decision that feminists disapprove of.

Are we to assume, as Bindel does, that Phillips has no agency? That young women can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves and need to be protected from the consequences of their actions like children? Conversely, why is Phillips not the exploiter? The men who participated didn’t get paid whilst she and Only Fans are profiting. Phillips will make four times as much as Only Fans from her stunt - for every 100 pounds generated, she keeps 80 with 20 going to Only Fans, before tax. The monetisation of sex via Only Fans is what really sets Phillips apart from Quek, who often claimed to have made little money from the ‘World’s Biggest Gang Bang’. As is often the case, the producers and others profited but it did give her a ‘unique selling point’ in an industry in which it’s all too easy to burn out and fade away fast.

The British documentary maker Louis Theroux has made three films (all currently available on the BBC IPlayer) focusing on the often difficult lives of adult entertainers, especially as they grow less young. The first ‘Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends - Porn’, 1997; the second, ‘Twilight Of The Porn Stars’, 2012, in which he caught up with performers featured in the first film and examined how the internet was changing the business; the third, ‘Selling Sex’, 2020, which looked specifically at on-line content creators. A high profile performer, Kagney Linn Karter, who featured in Theroux’s 2012 film took her own life, aged 36, earlier this year. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13105075/kagney-linn-karter-suicide-dead-ohio-chris-brown.html?ito=native_share_article-top

It’s clearly a tough business. “Not for the weak girls” to quote Phillips. In a stand-out scene from ‘Twilight Of The Porn Stars’, remarkable for its honesty, Louis asks the female manager at porn production company LA Direct Models (Karter was on their books), if she’d want her daughter working in adult entertainment. The manager, Fran, replies blankly: “It’s not something I would want for my child. Because it fucks with their heads and I don’t want to be the mother of a whore.” When Louis asks Fran if she respects the performers and the toll sex work can take, Fran looks weary and replies: “I think working 64 hours a week in an office is hard work. I don’t think going to a set and fucking someone is as hard as what the rest of us do on a daily basis.”

Phillips may well be questioning at times ‘is it worth it?’ Perhaps, for fleeting moments, she may regret it. But ‘I’ve come this far now, might as well carry on’ she possibly reasons to herself. Perhaps she buys herself something lovely and just forgets about it for the time being? - cognitive dissonance in action. Phillips also strikes me as a people pleaser, a deeply dangerous thing for someone in her line of work to be. In the first five minutes of the documentary, she makes a mess of making Pieters a cup of tea explaining: “I’m just good for one thing me, honestly.” In her on-line profiles, she has described herself as “an English c-word”. I’ve known people who have suffered sexual abuse as youngsters and, concerningly, Phillips does exhibit some of those traits: engaging in risky behaviours, the lack of boundaries, the extreme people pleasing. Some commentators have focused on her outburst of tears after the 100-man event, as featured in the photograph heading this article, citing it as proof that she’s being exploited or coerced in some way. The tears could’ve just been a release of stress and relief that the shenanigans were over. Who knows? She didn’t seem too distraught a few days later, when she moved on to promoting the next stunt - something a somewhat shocked Pieters remarks on in the documentary. Crucially, everyone around her is colluding with her behaviour. ‘Where are the parents?’ many have wondered this week. Well, her mother is her financial manager (or ‘Momager’ to use the dreadful Kardashian terminology) and, reportedly, her father’s friends are amongst her Only Fans subscribers (creepy). So everybody in her world is fine with it or so it would seem on the surface.

Quite unlike Quek’s strict, traditional Singaporean parents, who were horrified when they found out what their Raffles Girls School-educated daughter had been getting up to. Quek had been performing in adult films for some time, to supplement her income as a student at the University of Southern California when she made ‘Gang Bang’. The whole production of that film was professional (the participants were vetted and tested for HIV and STDs as per standard practise in the professional porn industry), condoms were used throughout and it was shot at a film set in Hollywood. In sharp contrast, Phillip’s production seemed chaotic, disorganised and shambolic at times. In Pieters’ film we see that Phillips had a gaggle of assistants but no ‘fluffers’ (professional porn shoots will have a ‘fluffer’ to ready the male performers for action, time is money after all). Phillips seemed to be doing it all herself - good grief, how exhausting - whilst her assistants made excited mobile phone calls to recruit men (participants were constantly dropping out) and giggled incessantly. Notably, they all made sure that none of their faces were shown on camera. Phillip’s chief assistant let slip to Pieters that placing some basic security at the front door had been an afterthought. Nobody even bothered to clean up the mess in the bedroom - much to the horror of Pieters when invited to survey the aftermath.

Poignantly, one of the men who came to have sex had brought Phillips a rose. If only Shakespeare was still around to write a stanza or two on that. It’s fair to surmise that the owner of the Air BnB rented for the stunt had no idea what was occurring (making such a film at a rental is forbidden under their terms and conditions, Phillips’ assistants repeatedly asked Pieters not to film the property). The whole thing reeked of rank amateurism compared to Quek’s film, which was done by industry veterans, the aforementioned Jeremy and director John T-Bone (made-up name I’m guessing), a character straight out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film ‘Boogie Nights’. Perhaps this is just what happens when amateurs larp as porn stars? Phillips’ team will have to up their game and do better next February if they’re going to get to 1000.

As a business model, content creators on Only Fans must continually offer more variety to keep relevant. Relevance brings in revenue. Without new content, the simps who buy subscriptions simply, pardon the pun, move on to new content creators. Once Phillips has done her 1000-man stunt next year, no doubt there’ll be something else. Quek’s own record was beaten the very next year by porn star and pro-wrestler Jasmin St. Claire, who starred in a 1996 sequel to ‘Gang Bang’ allegedly having sex with 300 men in a day. In her 2010 autobiography ‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ St. Claire admitted the whole thing was “among the biggest cons ever pulled off in the porn business” and only 10 men actually did anything. No matter, the ante was upped. To me, what Phillips is doing is an extreme form of self-harm. So was what Quek did back in 1995. I was glad to read that she’d moved on to a career in tech. Quek’s Damascene conversion came later and she had the brains necessary to switch from porn to tech. Reflecting on the end of her old life Quek concluded: “Being famous quickly wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t all that fun to begin with.”

Certainly, Phillips won’t go down in history like the Roman Empress Messalina (wife of Emperor Claudius) whose alleged sexual antics made it into Pliny the Elder’s ‘Natural History’, or Cleopatra or Catherine The Great of Russia. Promiscuity, alleged or real, for money or for fame, is pretty ordinary now and there isn’t even a Jerry Springer Show to go on anymore.