Lily Phillips has become a general Rorschach test for contemporary sexual culture. Radical feminists, misogynists, Christian conservatives, sex workers, and the rest have been able to parse whatever message they wanted from what appears to be a genuinely vulnerable moment. In some ways, our consumption of this clip is even more objectifying than the consumption of her naked, prostrate body. Though the topic may be wrapped in various political doilies, at the heart of it is something more uncomfortable to admit: our collective fascination with scandal. I imagine that, out of the entire day, her tears are the act that on camera she most regrets. They are now proliferated. Interpreted. They are now discussed between conservative mothers and their online daughters in posh London department stores. Her tears are now a business hazard too: how can Lily convincingly go on to market this as the ultimate fantasy, when one has seen her lament that she “felt like a prostitute”, red spreading from her eyes to her cheeks like mould seeking wet? Seen her struggle to articulate both the psychic and physical cost of what, cynically, could be chalked up to viral marketing?   

When I was a university feminist, a common turn of phrase was “sex is like swimming, rape is like drowning”. The phrase, alongside concepts like “rape culture” and “slutwalks”, seems a vestige of 2016 feminism — a model that has faded alongside Hillary Clinton’s pink pussy hats and mandatory consent classes on the bucolic American campus. The simile is useful perhaps in showing (men, specifically) that rape feels qualitatively different to consensual sex: that the act ceases to be merely a bad version of the act when “no” is uttered. 

But many women are swimming with sharks. Or maybe not even sharks: maybe a fish that has unknowingly behaved as a shark. A shark that has seen another shark and tried to mate. Sometimes rape might not feel like drowning. Sometimes consensual sex can feel like you’re frantically attempting to stay afloat against an unexpected riptide. I always remember the Stevie Smith poem when this little feminist canard is invoked: “Nobody heard him, the dead man / But still he lay moaning / I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning.”. Terrible sex is very different for women than it is for men. It’s easy, and even normal, to realise that suddenly you are in an undertow and far from shore.

People online — particularly in radical feminists circles — were quick to state confidently that Lily Phillips had been raped. And indeed, her behaviour on the video is not dissimilar to a rape victim. But it’s important to differentiate this trauma from that of rape itself. Consenting to your own degradation is a specific form of psychic damage. How can we even know she felt raped? Being used, feeling robotic, and dissociating are not intrinsically part of the psychological profile of the rape victim. 

There is no space held for the immense violation one can feel in the aftermath of consensual sex

Lily’s pain is something different. Modern conditions call for modern vocabulary and such a vocabulary doesn’t exist. There is no space held for the immense violation one can feel in the aftermath of consensual sex. The pain is augmented by one’s enthusiastic participation in their own debasement. It affirms the anxiety rape victims always carry: that it was somehow really their fault. As it stands, “rape” is the only framework we have in which we can rationalise the reverberating wound one has after such an experience, while ignoring a key aspect of the wound itself. These women should be treated with compassion: they are not overreacting to an experience but rather underestimating its weight. And this underestimation is not unusual in a culture that is blasé around sex but prudish around eroticism. The lack of such a vocabulary disservices rape victims as well, in which their survivorship or victimhood or however the experience is conceptualised is part of an experience that exists on a patriarchal continuum with the volume turned up as high as possible. These experiences rhyme but don’t repeat. 

But rape is more than a feeling. Rape is a crime. In the way it’s currently discussed, rape as a legal term does not clearly align with its cultural parlance: partly because of low conviction rates and continuing rape myths, but also partly because we associate rape with personal interpretation. The propagation of this framework often puts women in a double bind not only in the cultural sphere but in the legal: in a trial-by-jury, a victim must be mentally unwell enough to show they were impacted by the assault, but well enough to be consistent in their retelling of events. In putting such an importance on a woman’s reaction to an experience, we shift the blame from where I imagine feminists would prefer it lie: with men.

Consent in its current popular usage requires us to be able to anticipate exactly how a certain act might make us feel. If the act doesn’t make us feel the way we anticipated, we may no longer be consenting. This puts the onus on women to be able to articulate exactly what they want and how: a tall order in an age in which women’s sexuality is still nascent in its first-person expression, and an age in which women still remain eager to please male partners, and internet pornography normalises dangerous acts. Moreover, this condition takes away a lot of what is exciting and intimate about sex: that one works in an exploratory way with a partner. That there is something being endeavoured together. That you both can conjure new sensations — bad, good, or even weird — into being.  

The experience was likely not only novel for Lily. It would be too for the men. They likely were getting kicks from an element of self-debasement, albeit theirs more temporary. Is there anything more degrading than waiting in a line, attempting small talk, to be the unremembered 73th suitor she’d given five minutes to? They were likely unsure if they were going to like it. Likely sure that she would not. But the collaboration that happens with a trusted partner when sex gets weird or uncomfortable or even debasing is absent. Everyone is left to reflect what occurred anonymously.

Critical theorist Katherine Angels writes in “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again” that “the fantasy of total autonomy, and of total self-knowledge, is not only a fantasy; it’s a nightmare.”. How was Lily supposed to know how 100 men would make her feel — that it’d be meaningfully different from the 35 she’d proclaimed to have tackled before? Of course it would be different than she’d expected. And she’s sharing this experience not only with 100 men, but with the internet as well, as we watch her tears and decide whether or not she deserves our sympathy. In some corner of the internet, she will be perpetually crying telling the interviewer that it was more overwhelming than she thought. And in another clip, two hours earlier, she will be being perpetually penetrated with a smile glazed over her face. I might be accused of clutching pearls, but they are merely shown before swine.

In diminishing Lily’s agency and chalking her up as a victim, we also diminish the agency of the men involved. In one viral tweet, a woman said she saw no meaningful distinction between the 100 men who had sex with Lily and the 80 rapists who were recruited by Gisele Pelicot’s husband in the infamous and ongoing French trial, to rape her while she was asleep and drugged over the course of 30 years. It’s irresponsible to equate these two, no matter how horrid the men who signed up for Lily’s scheme may be. Pelicot was asleep. Like Lily, she was recorded. But she was left to construe decades of abuse from someone she felt she trusted from video snippets and photographs and comments on a forum called “Against Her Will”. And like Phillips, we have seen her recorded in the aftermath, in her brave testimony at trial, which she insisted on being made public to remove her shame and place it squarely on to the men. Angrily, she told the court “they must take responsibility for their actions. They raped. Rape is rape.”

Seeing all men on a spectrum of predator takes agency away from those who commit rape. Rapists are not a tumorous outgrowth of the patriarchy. A popular “gotcha” dragged out by men’s rights activists in response to “rape culture” as a concept is that the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network stated that “rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime”. But this was not RAINN railing against rape culture’s critiques of a society that sexualises reluctance — and perhaps sexualising reluctance is the only refuge available when, “liberated” from traditional gender roles, the dynamic of seducer and seduced is hush-hush, old hat, and in flux. Seeing all perpetrators as existing on a spectrum turns a blind eye to the awkward, hard fact of talking about rape: that these crimes are not circumstantial situations slept-walked into by men simply responding to some social conditioning. No matter how much sex is tied up socially in fantasies of power and domination.

We should be able to articulate these grey areas outside the blunt framework of rape accusation

I feel bad, ultimately, for Lily. I imagine the building dread she might’ve got in her stomach when she found herself in a trap of degradation organised by herself and no one else, feeling unable at a certain point too deep to back out. Regret, unlike trauma, means you carry something else beyond the noxious experience: your own complicity in it.

We should be able to articulate these grey areas outside the blunt framework of rape accusation, as well as place scorn on perpetrators as not simply victims of patriarchal condition. But until then, I imagine Phillip’s OnlyFans subscribers — with their screen brightness turned up by a single hand — who will find Lily in the uploaded video. I know how they will find her. Not drowning, but waving.