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There is something deeply broken about our society. Egregious symptoms show that being the case.
One of those symptoms is Lily Phillips.
Lily Phillips is 23-years-old. She’s become quite prominent because she has a very lucrative OnlyFans account where she earns millions of dollars to take her clothes off and have sex.
Back in October, Lily Phillips did a stunt in which she had sex with 101 men in a day. She did a documentary about it titled, “I Slept with 100 Men in One Day.”
In the documentary, she says, “It’s not for the weak girls, if I’m honest. It was hard. I don’t know if I’d recommend it. I think if you’re a different type of girl, it’s very like… it’s kind of like being a prostitute in a sense of like, it’s just a different feeling. I don’t know how to explain it, like.”
“It’s not like just having sex with someone,” a man says to her.
“Yeah. Yeah. Just one in, one out. Like, it feels intense,” she replies.
“Like, more intense than you thought it might,” he suggests.
“Definitely,” she answers, then breaks down in tears.
She says, “I think by the 30th, when we’re getting on a bit, I’ve got a routine of how we’re going to do this and sometimes you disassociate and it’s not like normal sex at all.” She admitted not remembering much of this. She said, “In my head right now I can think of five, six, 10 guys 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 I did 100.”
The New York Post reported:
Phillips shared that it’s not just the physical intimacy of having sex with so many men that made her feel “so bad” but also disappointing them by not being able [to] talk with them, or even being interested in doing so.
She said that conversing with them was also “hard” and recounted how one man complained that they only chatted for about two minutes when she had said beforehand that they would talk for about five minutes.
Then, she breaks down in tears.
But none of this is apparently stopping her from taking on a new challenge now because the money is too good. She has claimed she wants to take on a new challenge in January. She posted on social media: “1,000 men in 24 hours. Male talent casting call. 18+ only. Location TBC.”
“I dreamed it up with my assistant. I can’t wait … It’s very exciting. It will be a world record. A real challenge!” she enthused.
“The current world record is held by Lisa Sparks, an adult film star who bedded 919 men in one day at a sex industry event in Poland back in 2004,” the Post noted.
The question here: Why is this wrong in our modern society? What’s the big problem for a lot of folks, particularly on the secular Left? That’s a relevant question. After all, she’s engaging in consensual activity. Why is this wrong? Why is this bad?
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We live in a society in which consent is considered the highest and perhaps only value.
That’s because we’ve largely bought into the liberal framework for how society ought to run.
According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, there are six moral matrices for how we measure morality. The first is care versus harm. The second is liberty versus oppression. The third is fairness versus cheating. The fourth is loyalty versus betrayal. The fifth is authority versus subversion, and the sixth is sanctity versus degradation.
For example, care versus harm would include feeling compassion for a suffering human being. That’s one value system. Liberty versus oppression would include seeing an unjust rule being promulgated that oppresses someone versus that person being free to make their own choices.
Fairness or cheating would be if somebody cheats, it’s unfair because somebody has cheated. Loyalty versus betrayal would be if someone betrays a group. Authority versus subversion is if somebody disrespects legitimate authority, and sanctity versus degradation is if, for example, somebody does something disgusting.
Leftists and conservatives think of the world in very different ways from one another.
Leftists are interested in only three of these six matrices: care versus harm (compassion); liberty versus oppression (individual rights and individualism); and finally, fairness versus cheating (the final outcome of a system as fair or rights as fairly distributed).
Conservatives, people on the Right, care about all six of those matrices, including notions like loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, and most importantly, sanctity versus degradation.
Thus, what does the Left do about somebody like Lily Phillips? Theoretically, the argument could be made that she’s harming herself, that this violates the sort of care/harm principle. That’s why what she’s doing is wrong.
But that runs directly against the liberty foundations of liberalism, because after all, she’s the one who has volunteered her consent to it. How can you tell her? Can you be paternalistic enough to suggest she has harmed herself under the rubric of leftism? And also, is it unfair that she did this if she did accept the arrangement? In fact, she sought the arrangement; she’s being paid by the tonnage for this arrangement.
For conservatives, the answer is actually quite easy. Phillips and women like her are engaging in self-harm. Liberty is not libertinism; it is bound by rules. Fairness is not implicated because she has no right to engage in this sort of conduct on a moral level. She has no moral right. She does have a legal right, but that is not the same thing as having a moral right to engage in this.
She’s being disloyal not only to any boyfriend she might have, but to the standards of her society and to humanity at large. You’re being disloyal to humanity when you violate yourself this way. She is undermining the authority of basic morality.
But most of all, and most importantly, what she is doing is disgusting.
Now, I know that word has fallen out of usage. “Disgust.” “Disgusting.” The idea in modern left-wing parlance is that if you talk about something being disgusting, it means that you’re being judgmental.
In his book “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt wrote about asking college students if it would be immoral to have sex with a frozen chicken. Liberals will initially say maybe, and then they’ll think about it and say, “No, it doesn’t violate my principles of consent. It doesn’t violate the care/harm matrix. It’s a violation of liberty to say that it is disgusting, problematic, or wrong.”
Conservatives would react, “Yes, that’s gross. It’s wrong. You’re degrading yourself.”
Disgust is useful and has kept human beings alive for eons. Originally, it evolved as a way of naturally driving people away from things that are quite bad for them. The reason human beings have a reaction of disgust when they see a snake is because snakes can kill people.
Now, that does not mean all disgust historically is proper. Sometimes human beings are disgusted by behaviors or traits that are perfectly legitimate or have arisen through no fault of the person by whom they are disgusted. So, for example, many primitive cultures found people with mental disabilities to be disgusting. In ancient Sparta, if you had a disabled baby, you left it out on a cliff somewhere.
But disgust as a general human emotion is a response to the violation of the sacred.
So what exactly is “the sacred”?
The sacred is the thing that we as a species place beyond question. That’s what sacred means. Sacred means to declare something holy.
To be holy means to be separate from the secular. It is something that is not to be questioned. It is something that has such high value that to question it would undermine the entire society. To throw away the sacred is to throw out that which is most important in building a society.
There are some things we find so sacred that we will not violate them.
An entire community cannot come together to share the same values unless they agree on a concept of the sacred and the profane; things that are so high in value that they are not worth arguing about — and to argue about them should generate a feeling of disgust.
It is community, says Robert Nisbet, that gives to the sacred its most vital expressions everywhere: birth, marriage, death, and other moments of the human drama.
These are all of such high value that they become sacred.
In the case of Lily Phillips, what is sacred here?
The individual human soul.
You do not own your own soul. It does not belong to you. You have duties attached to the stewardship of your soul.
Your innate humanity is made in the image of God. You as a human being are sacred. You are the sacred property of the Divine.
After all, whatever disgusting substances this woman has anointed herself with can be washed off, but her soul can’t be washed off without repenting of what she has done to herself.
And she knows that. Why is she breaking down? Why is she upset? It’s not just because of the physical exertion. It’s because she made herself into a sex robot. She made herself into something profane. She engaged in profane behavior, and she should be disgusted with herself. She should be ashamed of herself.
A society should be able to look at that behavior and declare it wrong. It is not just a mere matter of moral apathy because a society that greenlights, celebrates, or pays people millions of dollars for this sort of behavior gets more of it.
It reduces the humanity of all of us to the level of the animal. It removes the sacred completely. Then, all that remains is the profane.
No community, no workable society, can be built solely on the profane. Human beings have a natural understanding of the sacred. We have a natural understanding, a desire to worship, a desire to understand there are things that are of eternal value.
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This is why, by the way, when it comes to sex, the concept of consent is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Of course consent is necessary to sex, but it is not the only marker of whether sex itself is a good thing or a bad thing in regard to how people engage in it.
It’s because we’ve lost the concept of the sacred and the profane.
In the #MeToo movement, there is a phenomenon that has arisen many times where women will consent to sex with someone they should not have. They will treat themselves badly; then, they’ll wake up the next morning and decide they didn’t like it.
And they don’t have the language to even express what it is they don’t like because they already gave consent. Un-giving consent is not possible. So then they go to the language of consent again. In some cases, they’ll go so far as to say they were raped when they weren’t actually raped or the evidence shows they weren’t raped.
But they’re not wrong to feel bad about themselves.
They’re not wrong to feel bad about the decision-making. Regret is a realization of having taken something sacred and having made it profane.
The relationship between two people who love one another in a committed bond is sacred. That’s what makes sex sacred rather than profane.
If sex is treated in a profane way, a lot of the time, it will feel profane. You might wake up in the morning and feel degraded because you degraded yourself.
Then, people look for an excuse for why they feel the way they do, but they don’t even have the language to explain why they feel the way they do. This is particularly true of young women who are engaging in activities they later regret. They don’t even understand why they regret.
The answer is that we are all, men and women, capable of sullying ourselves, of disgusting ourselves. And that is a worthwhile tendency in human beings to recognize: that sometimes when we look at the behavior of somebody like a Lily Phillips, we should be upset. We should be upset that as a society we have decided an OnlyFans kind of society is fine, decent, and good.
It is not. It is not fine, decent, or good. Pornography ought to disgust us because it is disgusting. It should disgust us because it turns something that should be about commitment and love into something that is simply about rutting. Sex is meaningful — not because it is a matter of consent, but because it is a matter that has meaning attached to it and has throughout human history.
Pretending that people don’t have emotions connected to sex is one of the most ridiculous aspects of the modern feminist movement and the modern secular Left. Even Phillips acknowledges that. She says, “I didn’t even get to talk to the guys.”
That’s the most pathetic expression of the problem, but she’s not wrong. It turns out that very often, both women and men actually want to know the person with whom they are having sex because it means something beyond pure consent.
A society that boils its morality down to consent alone is a society that doesn’t even have the language to express why it’s corrupting itself. It’s why we as a society have such trouble declaring pornography is morally bad or OnlyFans is a blight.
Young men are being destroyed by OnlyFans. Young women are certainly being destroyed by OnlyFans.
And this should not be a matter of moral apathy in our society. I’m not talking about regulation or legislation. Perhaps that’s appropriate, but that’s not even the question. The question is: Do we even have the moral language anymore to look at human behavior that ought to disgust us and say it’s acceptable to be disgusted by that behavior?
It’s ok to look at what violates the nature of being made in the sacred image of God and say, “That’s bad, and I have an innate sense of being provoked by it into disgust.”
It’s ok. We were made that way, and that is a good thing.
A society that loses any concept of the sacred and trades the sacred for the profane is a society that is not long for this world. Because in the end, if we can’t place certain principles above and beyond debate and in the realm of the sacred, then we’re not going to have a society for very long.
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