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If she doesn't enjoy it, she should stop. But I don't see any fundamental problem with such virtuosic feats of sex. It's a bit weird in the same sense that hot dog eating contests are weird, but if the people involved were happy about it I wouldn't see any problem.
She might be able to find a fairly normal husband if she wants to, sure, and again I don't see any problem with it as long as both people are happy. A pussy doesn't develop magical destructive powers just because 100 dicks were inside of it in one day.
Also, I don't see why a trigger warning would be necessary. We regularly discuss things like wars, genocide, rape, and capital punishment on this site, so sex is pretty far down on the list of what should really trigger anyone who enjoys this place.
The fundamental problem is "should we let people do things that will likely fuck them up even if they think it won't, should we discourage them or should we preempt their attempts". Raskolnikov thought he was an overman who was above the petty morality of the masses. The he chopped down a couple of people and this fucked him up.
Sure, this Lily Philips was the only victim of her stunt and traditional liberalism strongly insists people should not be stopped if that's the outcome. But one may argue that we can minimize total harm by discouraging others from repeating her mistake, even if constantly bringing up Lily Philips as a negative example hurts her more than collectively agreeing to memory hole this incident.
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Is this your only criteria? It isn't. Because if it were, you would have no problem with people becoming addicted to drugs and other substances.
Furthermore, let's get into temporal preferences and shifts in self-perspective over time. Maybe this woman can convince herself that she's "happy" with it for some amount of time. I'd argue, given the clip shared, that that amount of time was, at most, the time between the end of this sexual act and when that clip was filmed. Regret may have been forestalled, and it then arrives on camera.
(Interesting aside: this has a bizarre connection to false/not-false rape allegations. Two people are "happy about it" in the moment. The next day, one of them wakes up feeling less "happy about it" and files the allegation. A complex and high stakes legal process then ensues wherein both parties try to somehow prove how they felt about what at which times).
People are often flawed at judging what is good for them and what makes them truly happy. To combat this, we try to develop systems of normative thinking to assist. Some people call this morals, ethics, virtues etc.
Show me the moral/ethical/virtue system that says "Sex with 100 strangers in an hour" is permissible. Aside from moral relativism, out and out hedonism, or nihilism, it doesn't exist.
To the extent that it's a moral system in addition to a political one, it's called liberalism.
Why would liberals have to allow this? Locke, for example, absolutely thought the government could punish sexual immorality. I'm not familiar enough with his work to know whether there's any inconsistencies there, but it seems like, as a matter of fact, most liberal societies thought banning that sort of thing was fine.
They wouldn't have to. In another comment I wrote:
It's perfectly consistent of Locke to think "what some other person believes about the ontological character of the communion wafer does not affect you personally, so let them do as they please; but the normalisation of sodomy, adultery and promiscuity absolutely do have distributed negative effects on society, and so should be forbidden and socially stigmatised". Whereas a more modern liberal generally takes the attitude of "people are entitled to their own opinions" and "what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is none of the government's business, and by extension none of society's business".
I don't have a good answer as to which interpretation of liberalism is better or more conducive to human flourishing. "As long as you aren't infringing on anyone else's rights" permits a lot of degrees of freedom to permit certain things and forbid others.
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You know what, fair. Thank you.
I'll pivot and, then, say that liberalism is a fantastic moral and political system for speedrunning towards the destruction of human integrity and the destruction of individual dignity. If such a path leads to such desolation, of what use is the path?
Liberalism has been around a few centuries and hasn't led to desolation yet. I'd rather not get off the path or take doommongering too seriously.
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Wouldn't the counter-argument be that, prior to the invention of liberalism, Europe was constantly tearing itself apart in holy wars? I doubt many of the people whose lives were constantly being disrupted as a result felt terribly dignified about the whole matter.
I'm not saying that "I'd rather be dead than compromise my integrity and dignity" is an incoherent or obviously ridiculous statement - there really are certain principles I hold which I would rather die than violate, or certain experiences which I find the idea of going through so humiliating that I would rather die than experience them. But I would like to be reassured that whatever you're proposing as an alternative to liberalism wouldn't immediately lead to hundreds of years of civil war and the immediate cessation of all meaningful human progress and economic development.
Other than the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), what other "holy wars" do you have in mind, such that "Europe was constantly tearing itself apart"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
So, the smaller post-Reformation conflicts leading up to the Thirty Years War?
What about the many, many centuries before the Reformation? Europe wasn't exactly "tearing itself apart in holy wars" then, now was it? It still looks to me like Europe has spent a minority of the last couple millennia in "holy wars" — certainly not enough time to deserve the term "constantly."
Well, obviously there were no holy wars (in the sense of intra-Christian wars) prior to the Reformation. Why would you start a holy war with someone who believes in the same creed you do? It's tautological.
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judeo-roman wars, islamic conquests and ongoing jihad, ridda wars, shia-sunni wars, crusades in the levant, fourth crusade against constantinople, albigensian crusade, northern crusades, hussite wars.
Before the catholic-protestant wars, the best one for folamh3’s argument is the islam-christianity war, as a constant, religiously motivated conflict which never really ended and kept eastern europe and the mediterranean bloody for a thousand years.
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So out and out hedonism it is.
Ironically I do think that there are systems of ethics that have a coherent claim to not just allow this behavior but make it virtuous. But nobody actually cares about weird sex positive pagans anymore.
I don't think liberalism is interchangeable with hedonism. My one-sentence gloss of hedonism is "do whatever you find pleasurable", which quickly spirals into libertine degeneracy. My one-sentence gloss of liberalism is "do whatever you want as long you aren't infringing on anyone else's rights", which quickly spirals into endless debates about distributed effects and externalities and "but how does this affect you personally" and so on. But to a first approximation, I fail to see how this adult woman having sex with a hundred consenting adult men directly infringes on anyone else's rights.
Bounded or not by pragmatic guidelines, the ultimate goal is indeed to realize whim and desire with no examination as to whether that is proper.
What OP surely means by a "moral system" is such an examination. Ethics of any kind.
If the answer to "what is to be done" is "realize desire", then it is hedonism.
Indeed the only reason for the limitation you point to is that in violating someone's rights you are preventing them from realizing their desire also. What are we then to believe if not that this is just hedonism, if of a pragmatic nature.
It does not, but that's the contention: that there is more to ethics than consent.
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I am a pretty moral person. I have a strong moral code. I am generally nice to others. I try to help people. I think that things like murder and rape are fundamentally wrong in an absolute way. And I have absolutely no problem with someone having sex with 100 strangers in an hour. The idea that there would be a moral issue about it strikes me as somewhat absurd.
As for drugs, I would prefer that people not get addicted to them, but there is no moral dimension about it for me.
A self-referential argument from authority is a hell of way to make a point.
What, then, does have a "moral dimension" for you? Are you saying that many things in life are not only inherently ammoral, but immune to morality?
Well, I already said that I think murder and rape are fundamentally wrong in an absolutely way, so certainly those have a moral dimension for me. But promiscuity doesn't.
Also, I'm not trying to argue from authority, I'm just pointing out that I'm not a moral relativist or a nihilist, and I may or may not be a hedonist depending on how you define hedonism, yet I don't see any moral issue with promiscuity.
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I'm not trying to speak for 100Proof by replying, just my opinion here.
Allowing oneself to weigh 600 pounds undoubtedly hurts one. Having sex with 100 people in a day does not undoubtedly hurt one.
That's debatable. But your comment makes me wonder if there were any sort of screening of these men for STIs, beyond simply "Hey do you have any?" I somehow doubt it.
Why doubt that? Requiring a ticket to ride is pretty standard procedure.
For whom? I feel like a girl advertising for sex wanting only a photo of your face and you holding up an email address (or whatever it was) is not particularly cautious. I could be wrong, of course.
Aella's gangbang for instance required std screening. It's just kind of one of the first things you'd think of when considering logistics for this sort of thing.
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I have no problem with people becoming addicted to drugs and other substances. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I have no problem with it because it's none of my business how they choose to live their lives.
I think this response is beautiful. This was the standard response of the laissez-faire economist and the social liberal pre-2024. It has dominated western politics and was basically the default position of anyone who drank water, breathed air, and wanted to not be fucked with. Leave well enough alone, what I do is my business. You don't have a right to tell me what to do, and I don't have a right to tell anyone what to do.
I also think that this response is very dated. Partly as a result of the way the internet systematically crushed the vast majority of social barriers to information, partly because of the wilful detonation of social structures and institutions (What if people are excluded? Well, then everyone needs to be excluded! Wait, why'd they let that in? Screw this, I'm outta here!).
There is a fantasy of man as an island that has never gone away.
It is still possible, for some, to a limited extent. For the rest of us, who don't hunt, kill and butcher our own meat, make our own clothing, craft our own domiciles and generate our own electrical power, we have to engage with society in some way. But that breaks the fantasy. We wish to think of ourselves as alone, fully in control of our own destinies, that society loses more from us not participating in it than we lose by not participating in society.
I think we're past that. Isolated as we are, we are all easy pickings for those who've managed to coordinate meanness. I think that's also why people have such poor reactions to this poor creature who has sold her body to a crowd for attention. They are concerned with great ideas, like the collapse of pair bonding, stable male-female relationships, and what this signals for both sides of the fence, as well as the governments that rule them. Maybe some of them are concerned for her mental well-being, who knows. It's a tug of war between those who see society as something to be preserved, shaped in a way that benefits them, or at least in a way that doesn't make their lives actively worse, and those who couldn't give a hundred fucks about society.
We do not care for the crackhead. What he does with crack is his business. But we do not live near him either.
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Please meet Daniel Penny, another person who didn't care how others choose to live their lives until he really, really cared.
I mean this is such a naive response. Of course no one should care how another person lives their own private life. But we live in a society. We interact with one another. If your horribly addicted to drugs, you might choose to "involve" yourself in my life in a drastic way.
Perhaps you'll say, "oh, sure, you can beat the crap out of an addict if they accost you" - but the median position in society is that we shouldn't let people become addicted (to at least the illegal substances) so that we can avoid the far more costly "beat up the zombies" method of social regulation.
Blind/naive libertarianism is just such a poor way of even approach the world. Complex system interact with one another. Unintended consequences are real. People's quality of life extends beyond the walls of their apartments.
A person becoming addicted to drugs to the point that he starts to be violent to people or overuse the healthcare system is a social problem because, well, he starts to be violent to people or overuse the healthcare system. A person choosing to have sex with 100 men in one day in a safe manner causes no harm to others that I can think of. I guess you can put forward complicated theories that boil down to some kind of magically contagious social rot, but I neither find having sex with 100 people in a day to be rotten nor am I convinced that its contagious nature is much of a problem.
It causes harm to the self. That's the whole point. This was a bad decision by the lady in question and it was a bad decision that should be easy to avoid.
Again, utilitarianism and/or libertarianism congratulate themselves by saying "we have a hard line up against harming others" conveniently leaving out that all "others" are "selves" depending on reference point. While I definitely don't think the power of the State should be employed to inhibit people from doing things that may or may not be harmful to themselves, I do believe that a useful moral system must necessarily state that there are some actions and motivations that are harmful to the self (and do not offset this with noble and/or virtuous self-sacrifice ) and ought to be avoided for moral reasons ... not just in service of a self-preservation instinct.
It causes harm to the self if you're the kind of person who is harmed by having sex with 100 people in a day, in which case you shouldn't do it. If you're the kind of person who isn't harmed by it, your argument doesn't apply.
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Would you say it's immoral for someone to intentionally burn themselves so they could get a cool scar? What about smashing their own (non shared) things in a fit of rage?
Do they correctly dispose of the smashed bits afterwards? Did they do the smashing when I don't have to see or hear them and they aren't inconveniencing anyone?
Is the scar in a visible part of the body? Will it be deleterious to their health now or in the future?
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What if they took a drug that caused 100% of users to violently assault the next person they see? What about 50% or 10%?
Because other people using drugs does actually affect you in most cases. Whether it's something relatively small like having to step around hobo puke on the sidewalk, or something more direct like a junkie biting your face off because they're high on bath salts.
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Does it seem to you that her lack of enjoyment surprised her?
Does her apparent lack of enjoyment surprise you?
It surprises me that people put so much weight on her lack of enjoyment. If you asked me ahead of time if even the most sex positive person would enjoy a continuous eight hour marathon sex session, I'd say of course not, based on how physically demanding it would be if nothing else. It's also not unusual for people who are physically exhausted to become emotional.
Lots of people also have unrealistic fantasies that they derive more pleasure from the thought of than the practice. Presumably people are actually enjoying the sense of thrill when contemplating something taboo. It's also typical for people to be unaware of their own psychology in this way.
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If you watch the documentary she's pretty clear her lack of enjoyment at the end is because she feels bad that some of the guys didn't have a good time, not any regret about the act itself.
I haven't watched it yet, but this sounds like weapons-grade copium.
Put yourself in her position for a second. Actually, forget about putting yourself in her position, imagine doing the same thing as a man. If you have to have sex with a hundred women, it becomes nothing but a feat of physical endurance no matter how hot they are, and no matter whether or not you thought it was a sexy fantasy beforehand. I'll have a hard time believing you'll have any concern for anyone past participant #5, let alone for them having a good time. If you break down crying and cite your concern for others as the reason, the chances of me believing you are zero.
EDIT: I have now watched the documentary, and can confirm that it was total weapons-grade copium.
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Well, that's why I said "if she doesn't enjoy it". Surely some people do. Aella for example.
That doesn't really answer either of the questions. Sure, I can imagine that some people genuinely would enjoy it, for some definitions of "enjoy".
The Rationalists had a phrase I admired, "I notice I am confused". They realized confusion was useful, and an opportunity to seek deeper understanding. For those who hold that sex is harmless entertainment, this seems like it ought to be confusing. Why did she expect to enjoy doing this, and why didn't she enjoy it?
And this is the thing, really. Back in the 90s, the sexual revolution was unassailable, because those of us arguing against it were killjoy puritan tyrants who just wanted to spoil everyone's fun. So we were pushed out of the way, and it was declared that anything went. And that's well and good, but it turns out that there do indeed appear to be consequences, and those consequences do indeed appear to be woeful in at least some cases, and the side that won the fight has no room for either the consequences or their woefulness in its model. The license they argued for is observably making people wretched, and the only move available to them appears to be to play dumb.
@Primaprimaprima - I never had time for replies to the art discussion, but IIRC your position was that art cuts, takes away from you, is incisive, yes? Was this art, in your view? Do you think her choices have made her life better?
There's nothing intrinsic to the content or the surrounding circumstances that prevents it from being art.
I don't really have a strict criteria for separating art from non-art. It's not a problem that I consider to be very important. Probably some criteria of intentionality would be useful (so one can distinguish between say, a random urinal at your office and Duchamp's Fountain) and I don't know if the requisite intentionality was present in Philips's case. Neither the content of her act itself nor her reaction to it afterwards really help or hurt the case for it being art.
Depends on how much and what kind of attention she's getting. In the short term, I wouldn't be surprised if it was better, because the news coverage will drive traffic to her OF.
In the long term, she may have to deal with reputational damage if she tries to go into something other than porn. But I don't view that as particularly just, so it feels weird to describe it as "her choices making her life worse". That feels akin to the woke mob canceling someone for wrongthink and then asking them "do you think your choice to engage in wrongthink made your life better or worse". The "consequences" of the original choice would have been perfectly manageable if not for the wilful external interference.
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As a parallel comment already stated, there is not actually anything confusing about instances of people not enjoying something that they claim is enjoyable. There are people who overeat, people who are fed up with doing daily quests in live-action games, people who drive for 8 hours to go to an amusement park and spend their whole time there bored, people who align their whole lives to enter a profession and then are miserable from the realities of it, and even people who go halfways across the world to visit a city and break down from disappointment; yet, nobody generally takes those things as evidence that food/games/amusement parks/professional commitment/international travel need to be made exceptional and/or taboo again.
This sounds like you are confused (about the lack of visible confusion from "those who hold that sex is harmless entertainment"). What do you think could be possible reasons for this lack?
Every time someone goes viral having a bad experience from sex, conservatives like clockwork parachute in to run victory laps wearing their best told-you-so face, as if the case for the sexual revolution rested on an argument that nobody can ever possibly not enjoy sex. Have you ever seen this persuade someone - not in the way where someone already agreeing pretends to be persuaded, or someone who is in the process of joining your tribe taking notes on the ideological package they are supposed to download, but someone who actually isn't with you and isn't about to be performing a very specific update to their worldview regarding whether the sexual revolution was a good thing?
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I mean, little kids think they'll enjoy eating 100 cakes, but there's quick diminishing returns for many pleasures. I would venture a guess that psychologically, having sex twice in a single day is pretty doable, and probably still enjoyable.
I don't think there's anything special about sex as a pleasure that makes doing it 100 times much more onerous by the end. It's just like trying to force yourself to drink 20 shots of vodka, or smoking 200 cigarettes in a day. Pleasures just don't scale that way.
I notice that your choice of examples have deleterious effects on the recipient of said "pleasure" that could range in severity up to including death.
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When I was much younger, having sex several times a day -- with the same woman -- was very enjoyable for both parties. However, I think even then, 100 times would have been physically painful.
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Am I mixing you up with someone else, because I thought you'd always been a liberal until... 2008ish?
I was raised a Conservative Christian. I ditched the Conservativism in 2002/2003, and the Christianity around 2004, and went atheist and deep blue on pretty much everything but guns; I actually left the country for Canada under Bush because I was deep into blue tribe conspiracy theories about 9/11 and stolen elections, among other things. I came back to the states in the Obama years, but stayed deep blue. When the Feminist blast-wave hit my position in ~2013 IIRC, I was initially very concerned and highly engaged and all gung-ho for Social Justice. It took a couple months of actually paying attention for that bubble to pop.
"SOCIAL JUSTICE NOW!"
"Social Justice is vitally important, but some misguided people are doing it wrong, they need to stop that!"
"They aren't stopping, they need to be stopped, guys this isn't the way"
"Wait, why are all the people around me cheering the bad people on and shouting at me, this is crazy, what the fuck is going on"
"Either I'm going crazy, or 90% of my social class has gone abruptly crazy, and I can't tell which"
"Nope, it's them. They're betraying True Liberalism, which we must fight for."
That played out over about three or so months, and I came across Slate Star Codex while trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. I started limping my way back to Christianity around then, but still identified as deep Blue for another couple years, thinking that Social Justice was just a temporary aberration which could be rolled back or corrected. I spent a long time arguing against the Zunger thesis and in favor of Scott's niceness, community and civilization, until eventually I realized that I was losing those arguments because Scott was wrong and Zunger was straightforwardly correct. That destroyed what was left of my allegiance to Blue Tribe, and I've been moving Red ever since.
Thanks, I had no idea about the Early Life part, and only remembered your post-bush moving-to-canada stories.
You've been writing for a long time, is there any chance you still have like 2005 era blog comments? It would be really interesting to see old-you's perspective on events I hardly remember.
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