LILY PHILLIPS & THE PATRIARCHY
What Kind of Patriarch Would let his Daughter Fuck 100 Guys in a Day?
Dear Nevermorons,
I’ve been meaning to write something about the Lily Phillips story for a minute now.
If you haven’t heard of Lily Phillips, she’s the OnlyFans star who got famous for fucking 100 men in a single day.
My biggest question when I heard about Lily Phillips was whether she mentally ill or not. We all know that there are women with extremely high sex drives, but there are also women who are promiscuous because they have severe emotional problems. What type of nymphomaniac was Lily Phillips?
I watched the documentary, and I’d say that she belongs in the former category. Surprisingly, it really doesn’t seem that Lily Phillips is all that crazy. She doesn’t seem like a narcissist. She doesn’t seem like a drug addict. She claims to have a good relationship with her family. It doesn’t seem like she’s being manipulated by anyone. It seems like she knew full well what she was doing, and that she wanted to be doing it.
So, should we be celebrating Lily Phillips as a trailblazer in the history of the women’s liberation movement?
It must be mentioned that she has apparently made something like $2,000,000 through her OnlyFans account. As of the current moment, there’s no particular reason to feel sorry for her. Maybe she’ll regret her decisions in the future, but let’s not forget she made two million dollars from one publicity stunt. If we’re thinking about this just from a business perspective, she played her cards like a champ.
But it is surely troubling to think of where this trend could be leading.
When I was growing up, we all wanted to be great artists. Maybe a rockstar, maybe an author or a painter or actor. But that’s not what teenagers these days aspire to.
In the age of social media, kids want to be influencers, which to my mind has very little to do with art, unless you consider advertising to be an art.
To me, an influencer is someone who has turned themselves into an ad, then sold that ad. I find it fitting that we refer to such people as “content creators”, not artists.
I don’t want to be too cynical - there are content creators who are doing very cool and creative things on social media. But at the end of the day, the medium is the message. I don’t know what an artist could do to transcend the mediated, alienating nature of platforms like TikTok or OnlyFans, which are designed to hack people’s brains to keeps them glued to their phones.
But maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Maybe the next Nina Simone or Amy Winehouse is about to blow up on TikTok. But I doubt it.
I also have to wonder where this is all leading. Will Lily Phillips inspire a wave of copycats? Will OnlyFans “influencers” start trying to outdo each other to do something even more shocking and extreme?
If that does happen, I imagine that it will start a race to the bottom, and the rewards will diminish until they are vanishingly small.
But I digress. My main point is writing this is to point out that Lily Phillips is proof that we don’t actually live in a Patriarchy.
Think about it - can you imagine being Lily Phillip’s dad? Do you think that he’s thrilled that his daughter is world-famous for getting gang-banged by a hundred guys?
But what can he do about it? She’s old enough to do what she wants, and he doesn’t have the power to stop her.
Do you see my point? Feminists act as if we live in a Patriarchy, but Lily Phillips is proof that we don’t.
If someone out there disagrees, let me ask you this - what does the word “Patriarchy” mean to you? Because Patriarchy is most certainly a real thing in many, many cultures. And it means “Rule of the Father”.
If you want to understand what patriarchy is, I suggest watching the following documentary, which follows a girl in Nepal as she prepares for an arranged marriage with an older man that her parents have chosen for her.
That’s patriarchy.
Ladies, do you really feel like you’re living under the iron fist of your father?
Did your father tell you who to marry? Does he force you to cook him food and wash his laundry? Does he punish you if you disobey him? Does he have any real authority over you at all?
If you’re a white women from a NATO country, I’m guessing that the answer to all of these questions is no. That means that you’re not living under a patriarchy, in the anthropological sense of that term.
Anyway, I hope that wasn’t too long of an intro, because the main event today is a piece by a brilliant social theorist named Tara Van Dijk.
I recently discovered her worke thanks to Jennifer Bilek, who has been heavily promoting it on Notes.
It seems that Tara has been generating a lot of buzz since publishing a devastating critique of feminism’s on Savage Minds.
I highly suggest reading the whole thing, but here’s a teaser:
The Patriarchy is feminism’s fundamental fantasy. Without it, feminism is unmasked as a form of neoliberal governmentality, managing speech, identity, and interpersonal conduct on behalf of the changing requirements of the market and the state…
To survive, it must continually stage itself as a heroic resistance against an increasingly spectral Patriarchy, a figure it both desires and disavows. Feminism’s own enjoyment comes from endlessly rediscovering or inventing traces of patriarchy everywhere…
Without patriarchy to fight, blame, and endlessly complain about, feminism loses its reason to exist.
What you are about to read is another piece by Tara which continues in the same vein. It is called The Porn Industry and Sperm Banks.
Thank you to Tara for allowing us to repost her cutting-edge work.
Enjoy!
Crow Qu’appelle
P.S. It just so happens that Tara did a podcast episode about Lily Phillips! Check it out!
The Porn Industry and Sperm Banks
What Strange Patriarchy Is This?
by Tara Van Dijk, originally posted on Morbid Symptom
You know you’re in the grips of ideology when clear evidence against it is interpreted as clear proof of it.
- Slavoj Žižek
How feminism treats porn and the fertility industry today is a prime example of this. The narrative is that the rise of bachelor men lost in porn, the explosion of sperm banks, and the booming fertility industry—all of it—is just more proof of patriarchy’s enduring power. But the contradictions are glaring, for anyone not enthralled by the Patriarchy Fantasy.
Patriarchy was about binding men to women—securing sex, reproduction, and social order through marriage and family. It required male investment in women as wives and mothers, creating this pair-bond as the foundation of society. Men gained power through women—by securing heirs, social status, and legacy. Porn is about getting off. That’s it. No bonds. No investment. No future. Just pixels, orgasm, and exit.
Porn doesn’t reinforce male power—it rewards male solitude and alienation. It thrives on bachelorhood, parasocial fantasies, AI girlfriends, cam girls—anything but marriage, family, or reproductive responsibility.
Patriarchy relied on the symbolic Father—the figure of Law, restraint, order. Porn is pure superegoic enjoyment. No law, no limit, no Father—just endless demands to enjoy. The Father said No. Porn says Enjoy!
If this is patriarchy, why are more men opting out of the marriage market entirely? Why is the dominant female complaint today not about being trapped or controlled, but about the lack of husband or father material?
Sperm banks don’t scream “patriarchy”! They flag male exit from reproduction.
This sector of the fertility industry exists because of less men willing—or needed—to play the paternal role. The sperm is alienated, commodified, and sold on the market.
Patriarchy—whatever its faults—was reproductive. Porn is anti-reproductive. Patriarchy was fundamentally about managing reproduction—raising families, controlling paternity, securing legacy. Porn is sterile. It routes sexual desire away from real women, away from pregnancy, away from forming families.
Patriarchal power was concrete: control over specific women in specific households. It was local, personal, material—this man marries this woman and produces these children. Porn is abstract. Men consume women they’ll never meet—streamed from anywhere, owned by no one but the market. Libido is globalized, flattened, commodified. No control. No paternity. No legacy. Just endless consumption.
Thesis: What the porn and fertility industries reveal isn’t the persistence of patriarchy. It’s the death of it. This isn’t a story of reconstituted male power. It’s the collapse of the entire sexual contract.
If you look at trends in dating / intimacy among younger people, Lily is an anomaly not a reflection of current habits. I purposely avoided her story in the news cycle because I think it’s one of those one-off events that generates the worst kind of discourse. That’s not to say that young people *dont also* want to be influencers, but I can see them vying for it in more wholesome ways Mr. Beast-style (I don’t think he’s “wholesome” at all, just that his content isn’t violent, sexualized, etc. it’s just exploitative ;))
Why did Lily Phillips need $2M? Because we live under a system in which your right to live with a roof over your head is controlled by the Rothschilds banking dynasty. Had Lily grown up in the Goddess societies of the entire BCE, she would have been part of a matrilineal and matrifocal culture. Perhaps she would have done the same but it's unlikely to have started a trend, if you're surrounded by other women who own the land, the buildings, the livestock and the food production. They would likely say, "Okay, now get back to work. There are dishes to be washed."