Essay #11: Lily and the White Rose

Do you see this woman?

A ghost is haunting the Internet: the ghost of Lily Phillips. Millions of people last week saw this poor wreck of a girl, in a clip from YouTuber Josh Pieters’s interviews with her, crumpling into sobs after sleeping with 100 men in one day.

This alone is harrowing to watch; Pieters’s full 50-minute documentary is almost unbearable. Pieters himself becomes visibly troubled over the course of it, his game mood darkening into one of foreboding: “Perhaps the reality of the situation was beginning to dawn on her,” he says almost hopefully as he narrates the leadup to the day. “It certainly was for me.”

The unusual thing about this nightmare spectacle is that so many people who watched it realized what was happening and described it honestly. There were of course some dogmatists who clung to the fantasy that nothing was wrong except “that she didn’t do it for the right reasons (ie. her own fun and pleasure).” But Lily insisted, repeatedly, that in fact this was for her fun and pleasure—and still, bystanders of all varieties could see that this wasn’t just a lifestyle choice, that it was something entirely more sinister and dreadful.

“This isn’t empowerment. This is self harm,” said one YouTube commenter. “My heart hurts for her,” said another, “She said so many problematic things.” Casual observers, more used to speaking the language of trauma than that of exorcism, started speculating about malign spiritual entities. No one described the situation more clearly, or more fearsomely, than the anonymous viewer who wrote, “So weird, it's like watching someone commit suicide but they are still alive.”

That’s exactly what it’s like. It doesn’t matter if you believe in the soul or not before watching this video: when it’s over, you do. You’ve just seen one getting battered and clawed at. The results are plainly visible in the woman’s vacant features, her wilting posture. It’s spiritual violence, physically manifest.

The other thing no one could quite deny was that Lily has lost control. Did she have a hand in bringing things to this point? Sure, obviously. So did every man who took advantage of her. So did her parents, who watched limply as their daughter submerged herself in an ocean of lost souls at university, as the riptide carried her further from shore. They had trained themselves not to disapprove, not to question what their children called liberation. They’re not blameless. Neither is she.

At another level, of course, Lily’s parents are products of the same movements that produced the university she attended. The architects of the sexual revolution sneered and chanted and litigated until it was shameful for women to admit that sex—even sex they agreed to, even sex that felt good—could hurt them. Washington Post columnist Christine Emba once interviewed a girl whose partner choked her in the act, and who “wasn’t sure if she could say anything, or even if it could actually be considered a valid problem.”

Emba was tracing the outlines of the same social values that shaped Lily Phillips, the decades of cultural unmaking that left her with no reason why she shouldn’t sell the image of her body, and then her body, to men online. “Guys are always gonna sexualize me so I might as well try and profit off that a bit,” she told Pieters. She made her choices, like all of us do, within the boundaries of what she believed possible. She had been permitted to consider everything except the reasons why she shouldn’t go on OnlyFans.

And OnlyFans is a corrupting force unto itself. This is now obvious. Social critic Louise Perry has been pointing out for some time that all cultures have a logic of their own, and that most people’s choices are guided by that logic. Our wills are free, but not limitlessly so: “the normal way to behave is to do what other people do.... And that’s fine,” unless the norm is hideously destructive and, relative to most of human history, abnormal. The dynamics that created OnlyFans have in turn created a situation in which market competitors for male attention feel obligated to indulge ever-more sensational fantasies, which then feed the demand for wilder stunts.

Heartbreakingly, Lily is both conscious of this process and unable to stop it from consuming her. In the documentary, she describes feeling “robotic” and acknowledges that she is “part of the problem.” She has also announced her intention to repeat the performance, at ten times the scale, in February. Writing for her Substack, reactionary feminist Mary Harrington points out that “even if she did ‘consent’ to this event, in a sense, she also experienced a sense of compulsion, arising through the relation between herself as an OnlyFans performer, and the aggregate wishes of her fans.”

Harrington says what not everyone can bear to, which is that this kind of compulsion—woven over generations into the atmosphere until it can constrict the soul of a 23-year-old to the point of asphyxiation—bears the hallmarks of what would once have been called demonic possession. Another OnlyFans performer, Alex Le Tissier, said much the same thing to Pieters: “It’s like you’re signing a deal with the devil.”

Here is my question, for myself as much as for anyone else: what would it take for us to say that the whole situation is not just like a deal with the devil, but actually is a deal with the devil? Do we want visual evidence, documentary footage? But we have it. There on camera is a woman who not only seems but looks and sounds like she has been ground down within—like she is at once the collaborator and the prisoner of a force vastly older, more cunning, and more powerful than her, bent on her demise. One of her hundred anonymous partners was shaking so violently afterward that he could barely lift an energy drink to his lips, as if his own lust had manhandled him and then cast him aside like a rag doll.

In 2024 we are all extremely comfortable talking about “systems” of injustice and oppression, disembodied mechanisms and algorithms with the power to influence and entrap us. What distinguishes these forces from those that older authors called “powers of the air?” Less and less, it would seem. The medievals probably attributed consciousness and intention to these powers in a way we do not. Are we more justified than they were? Can we conceive of any evidence besides that of faith that would decide the question? If cowled figures with eyes of red materialized behind Lily Phillips to ensnare her in a net of shadows, would it be any more or less conclusive than the video we already have?

The artists of periods earlier than ours were more at ease depicting spiritual entities with humanoid bodies, red-skinned and wielding pitchforks. From the standpoint of our materialist assumptions, the imps that skitter along the margins of medieval manuscripts look like products of an age that actually saw different things than we do, like faithful representations of eyewitness experience. But only a simpleton would insist that whatever our ancestors painted, they actually saw. Will archaeologists in the 22nd century think Tolkien had been to Mordor because he painted pictures of it? The monks of the middle ages were just as capable as we are of representing immaterial realities in visual terms.

In fact, when I review the accounts of demonic possession in the New Testament, I’m struck by how little physical description there is of the demons themselves. It’s conspicuous by its absence. In the prophets and in Revelation you get depictions of beasts and chariots, wheels of eyes and swords of fire. But that seems to me like quite a different, more impressionistic mode of imagery than what you get in the Gospels, which is realistic human behavior explained by demonic activity.

“Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.” There’s a demon in there, no question, and the patterns of its behavior are as recognizable in the man as in the herd of pigs to which they flee at Jesus’ command. But you’ll look in vain through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for any mention of a demon’s skin color, or how tall it is. Even Satan is totally without features, though he has a voice and a nature. How sure are we that ancient writers believed in demons because they had different evidence than we do? What if they were looking at the same human events we are, but seeing them differently?

In light of this question, Lily Phillips brings to my mind another sufferer in tears. Once, at dinner with Simon the Pharisee, Jesus met a woman “who had lived a sinful life.” She spent the evening weeping at his feet, wiping them with her hair. When Simon objected, Jesus asked: “do you see this woman?”

I don’t think he was asking if Simon could perceive her physical presence. I think he was asking if the man could find it in himself to take the full weight of her presence for what it meant, whether he could see behind her physical gesture of abjection the years of spiritual self-destruction and helplessness, the blood-tinged thicket of sin both chosen and unchosen, the years of dishonesty and neglect and social failure that had snarled around her like some grim torture device. The kind of unholy snare that has Lily Phillips in its grip. Can you see it? Can you see her?

It might be worth considering that the next thing Jesus did was forgive the woman’s sins. People will tell me this is because she repented and asked for mercy. Not in the text, she didn’t. At least, not in so many words. It was enough that she knew the extremity of her need and trusted him to meet it. “Your faith has saved you,” he told her, “go in peace.” Not even “sin no more.” Perhaps she didn’t need to be told. She had seen enough of demons to steer well clear in the future. Was that a kind of repentance?

It was certainly a kind of faith. And faith, we are often told, is a kind of sight. It is also a kind of language. What we believe possible, we can conceive; what we can conceive, we can describe; what we can describe, we can notice. There’s a reason why Christmas is preceded by Advent, a season of prayer and meditation: it’s a way of preparing to see the incarnation when it comes, to read the material world as an image of the spiritual one. To cast out demons, you need eyes to see them. To be saved, you need faith.

In the ruin of Lily Phillips’s bedroom, in the aftermath, somebody had left a single white rose—a symbol of the Virgin Mary, mother of mercies and refuge of broken women. Was she in that room, the White Rose reaching out to the bruised Lily? Was her son? Everyone involved in the awful affair sinned grievously; everyone was implicated and no one was innocent. That’s the demon-haunted world we’re living in, no different here and now than it was two millennia ago in Jerusalem. And that is the world in which, at every moment and every coordinate point, God incarnate offers mercy. Can we see him?