don't cross the gender picket line!

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! Apologies if you follow me on Bluesky, as you may know this already, but I feel the need to talk about what happened to me last night. It has in many ways ruined my day, but has also made me laugh whenever I've remembered it.

So I went to bed, as one does, and eventually fell asleep, as one should, then I woke up at 4am filled with purpose. I opened my eyes and left my bed immediately, because I worried I'd fall back asleep otherwise. You see, I had a night movie review to work on! I'd been commissioned to watch the same movie at three different times of day - with one of them being nighttime, naturally - and so had to go watch that movie and take some notes, see if it hit differently than it did in the daytime.

I walked downstairs and eventually stopped dead, and thought: hang on, what? What am I doing? And that was the point at which I realised that the "night movie review" commission was not real, and in fact just a dream. I did manage to fall asleep again after a while, but remain quite tired today. Brains! What are they like!

Anyway, separately - my pal Hazel runs a pub now, and she's started a newsletter chronicling the life of a pub landlady, and it's hugely entertaining and also revealing, and I've been enjoying it a lot. You can read it here, if you like.

A column

Over the course of a few weeks, towards the end of last year, three people came to me with a similar purpose. Unlike the wise men, they didn't have any offerings, but instead wanted to ask me something. One was a former flame; another was my brother; a third was a member of the House of Lords.

"What", they asked, one by one, unaware that others had come before them, "did you make of that documentary about the woman who slept with a hundred men in one day?". The first question made me feel vaguely offended, perhaps because it'd been asked by someone I was once involved with. We've remained good friends, but surely everyone ought to have their limits.

The second, put to me by my own sibling, made my eyebrow raise even further. We're from a happily liberal family, and aren't scared of discussing what others wouldn't, but really? This? By the time the third question came, I decided to make my peace with it.

Sometimes there will be something in the world which will make people think of you, and you just can't decide what it's going to be. You just have to be pleased that people were thinking of you at all. Am I thrilled by this particular sequence of events? Not necessarily. Did it pique my interest enough that I will now write about it? Regrettably: yes.

As it turns out, writers really aren't much more complex than slot machines. Shove enough compelling and confusing facts into them and words will eventually have to come out. It should be noted that I resisted the urge for nearly a month, but I was always going to crack eventually, and here we are.

So, Lily Phillips. She's 23 years old. She's an OnlyFans model. She's earnt, according to an interview she once did, "millions" from it. Last year, she set out to sleep with a hundred men in a day, on camera. Someone made a documentary about it. One scene from it went viral. In it, she has just finished her challenge, and she breaks down in tears.

"Sometimes you just dissociate", she tells the documentary maker. "It's not like normal sex at all". Afterwards, she confesses that she only remembers around ten of the men she slept with. "If I didn't have the videos I wouldn't have known that I'd done a hundred". It's assumed that the extreme shagging is mostly to blame for her physical and emotional state but, mostly, she says she's disappointed that she couldn't give every single man who slept with her a perfect experience.

The clip did the rounds on social media, again and again, because no-one could quite agree on what it showed. To some, it was clear proof that sex work is inherently exploitative, and that we've created a perverse, broken world in which women are incentivised to harm themselves for money and attention.

To others, the scene was an unfair one to highlight. Yes, Phillips was shaking and crying, but that didn't necessarily mean that what she'd done was harmful. People run marathons and after the finish line they tremble and collapse, and some of them can't even speak properly for a while. You wouldn't look at them and say "well, no-one in their right mind would ever do this willingly, so they must have been coerced".

Who, my three wise friends asked me, has it right? Though previously unaware that someone had died and made me king of ethical rulings on weird online sex stuff, I tried my best to answer, but couldn't quite get there. On a purely legal basis, I'm in favour of decriminalising sex work, as I believe it is the world in which people would be safest. On this specific issue, however, I just didn't know where I stood.

As my three discussions made clear, Phillips wasn't obviously being used like a puppet by some malevolent, manipulative forces. She was having that sex willingly. She clearly struggles with low self-esteem, but so do many women out there. She didn't strike any of us as the sharpest tool in the box, but that isn't a crime either. That she has earnt hundreds of thousands of pounds from her videos also came up repeatedly: whatever she's doing, she's doing it successfully.

Where does that leave us, though? Clearly the documentary hit a nerve, and some conclusions ought to be drawn from it. Online sex work has become entirely ubiquitous, but its rise was so swift that we're yet to stop and think about what we make of it. We may as well give it a shot now. I don't pretend I can address the entire issue in the space of one newsletter, but did have an epiphany earlier this week which I think may have been relevant.

I'd spent weeks uneasily leaving the Phillips story on the backburner, because I instinctively found the whole thing quite unbearably icky, while struggling to side with cynical puritans and assorted woman-haters. Again and again, my inner Pete Seeger would ask: which side are you on?

Then it hit me: I'm not the person who should be made to answer this. Phillips is, because she's a scab. That was my lightbulb moment, and the note I sent myself so I wouldn't forget. There's a gender picket line, which in an ideal world wouldn't be there at all, but it isn't, so the picket line stands, and she crossed it, and we can judge her for that.

In an ideal world, women should be able to act in whatever way they want, as long as they don't harm anyone. In an ideal world, I would have no problem with her sleeping with a hundred men to earn some money, because there are many other men out there who want to watch her doing that. It's not something that would ever appeal to me personally, but that's fine. I can't pretend I understand the passions and impulses of trade negotiators, but I don't believe they should be shunned by society either. Well, not most of them anyway.

Obviously the trouble here is that the world is currently a rotten place to live in, especially if you're a woman. There are many people out there who wish us ill, and resent our very existence. As a result, they will try to find any excuse to belittle us, curtail our rights, and push us back into the little boxes we spent centuries in.

The only way to survive this is to act as a class, because that is what we are. Union leaders often say that an injury to one is an injury to all but, in the context of a class war, the opposite is just as true. If one of us strays, all of us will have to deal with the consequences. Phillips may have got some financial compensation for her shagging marathon, which may have made the online reaction worth it, but the rest of us haven't even seen a dime. The actions are singular but the punishment is collective.

This may be the stage at which you point that yes, well done, I've managed to reinvent the concept of feminism. I wouldn't entirely disagree, but would still argue that some basic principles clearly need to be stated again, especially at the moment.

We know that a war is being waged on women, by forces too numerous to count, but we're yet to begin acting as one or, at the very least, seeing ourselves as a definable unit. The attacks may not be coordinated, and the goals may not always be the same but that doesn't really matter. What does is that we're currently getting it from all sides, all the time, and that should make us think about how to react.

We talked about identity politics for years and years but somehow never quite got to the real point of it. Beginning sentences with "as a…" was seen as inherently narcissistic, and the product of an overly individualistic society, but the opposite should have been true. If I say I am speaking, acting and living as a woman, it means that I am introducing myself as a foot soldier for an army I am knowingly fighting for.

Crucially, it also ought to mean that I am willingly putting the well-being of my platoon ahead of my own. Take, for example, heels and make-up. A woman wearing both to the office every day may fare better than a female colleague who doesn't, because she will seem more put-together and more attractive, and men remain, in many industries, the ones holding most of the power.

There is a direct conflict here, because it is normal and natural to want to do everything you can to have a successful life. Still, putting an unnatural level of work into one's appearance while at work means putting the women who don't at a disadvantage. If every woman followed the lead of men, and walked around in flat shoes and with fresh faces, expectations would alter over time. Because they don't, the women who choose not to conform to patriarchal standards of beauty will end up getting penalised.

I realise it is quite a contentious argument to make, as it essentially means calling a whole host of women traitors to their gender, which is unlikely to be well-received. What may sweeten the pill is the admission that, in tough situations, we're all only ever doing the best we can.

I may not wear high heels and make-up every single day of my life, but I rarely post pictures of myself online without at least a bit of mascara on. I don't film myself having sex with men for money, but I did drastically change both my lifestyle and my diet a few years ago, because I knew that being thinner would make my life easier. Every woman will end up betraying the cause in one way or another: there is no point believing otherwise.

It would also be futile to try and truly act like all women everywhere are part of the same faction, because that's not how the world works at all. There are too many of us, and our experiences are too different from one another.

What we can do, however, is use this class-based frame as a lens through which to look at our own actions, who they may benefit, and who may be harmed by them. No man is an island and no woman ever truly stands alone. We can also choose to look at the world around us through that same lens.

One critique of "choice feminism", whatever that ended up meaning, was that choices are not made in a vacuum. Applauding a woman for wearing a corset and stilettos "because it makes her feel good" seems hollow, because these things just happen to be what the patriarchy told her she would enjoy. It denotes a lack of curiosity which verges on motivated reasoning.

Another relevant point should have been that the world is unfair and so your choice, as a member of a marginalised group, may negatively impact others like you. Call it trickle down misogyny. Of course, it is an infuriating state of affairs. I hate and resent the fact that I cannot ever just be myself, and must only ever be a public representative for the group popularly known as "women", but it is what it is, at least for the time being.

Lily Phillips' stunt made me uncomfortable and resentful not because I judged her actions, per se, but because I could tell that she would eventually become a stick our people would be beaten with. The one thing we have to do is to hold the line as best as we can, and she let us down.

It doesn't mean that I really hold it against her; she doesn't seem especially bright, and there clearly is something within her which means that she requires constant male attention and approval. That can't be a fun way to live. What I can do instead is try to articulate just why what she did bothered me so much.

There are millions of men out there lying in wait, ready to grab any weapons they can and use them against us. If you give them an inch - no pun intended - they will gleefully take it and run with it. If anything, the internet has also made this dynamic more immediate and sharper than ever: online, we're all ambassadors for whatever in-groups we're a part of. Stumble, and we all fall.

That is, I think, what I make of that documentary. It reminded me of a core tenet of feminism, which is that we, as women, are engaged in a class war, and can only win it by acting as such. None of us will ever be perfect, and there will always be scabs and dissenters but, as much as we can, we just need to hold the fucking line.