On OnlyFans performer Lily Phillips' 100 men in one day and Bonnie Blue's 1057. How quickly we forget about Annabel Chong!

Credit where credit's due.

Lily Phillips

This week I write to you from the Broken Head caravan park on the outskirts of Byron Bay. I’m staying in a cabin, but I’m quite fascinated by the campers and caravans circling us. Once upon a time, caravans had names like Sunseeker. Now it’s RhinoMax Defender (being pulled by a Raptor). Quantum. Matrix. Patriot. Predator. Only one of those is a lie.

I’m moved to write about a story that you may have seen on social media or in tabloids – that of British OnlyFans performer Lily Phillips being fucked by 100 men in one day.

Whoa! Sorry for the ‘being fucked’ bit, when we were only one moment ago talking about campervans… but I’ve found it odd that most stories about Lily refer to her as ‘sleeping with’ 100 men. Weeks later, Bonnie Blue outdid her with a reported 1057 men, as detailed in this Vice story.

What’s even more odd is that no one – that I’ve seen – has mentioned Annabel Chong.

Annabel, real name Grace Quek, is a porn star who took on 251 men in 1996 for a porno called The World’s Biggest Gang Bang. Just as Lily’s feat was recorded for a YouTube documentary, in 1999 we had the doco Sex: The Annabel Chong Story.

I sat down in a Soho café with Annabel/Grace in 1999 after seeing the documentary at The Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. At the time I was a sub-editor for American porn magazines, working in an office out of London’s Soho. I didn’t mind working there. It sparked my morbid imagination about what I could or could not endure – perhaps in the same way that we read newspaper reports about grizzly incidents – and the writing was simple enough to be conducted while extremely hungover; essentially, taking something out of one hole and inserting it into another. But while the pages we commissioned were relatively tasteful shoots of some of porn’s most incredible-looking women, like Jenna Jameson and Janine Lindemulder, we were smack-bang in the late-90s era of porn stars executing record-breaking feats.

Side note: some of the following is taken from my 2021 book, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, published by Black Inc. Also available on audiobook!

In that café, probably over a very 90s focaccia, Annabel explained to me that she was exploring the idea of the female as stud. As a former gender studies student at the University of Southern California, she was interested in the mythology around the Roman empress Messalina, who – popular and probably politically malicious rumour had it – enthusiastically bedded half of Rome.

But it felt to me as though Annabel was retrofitting her film with this motivation. In other interviews, she had mused that her 251-man feat was more like team sport, and team sports were part of the fabric of American society. Her gang bang was thus about communal bonding, spectacle and statistics, not about sex.

That actually made more sense to me. From a young age, Americans are encouraged to pursue athletic achievements, to break records, to win. Why would American porn stars and directors escape that kind of conditioning? And if the gang bang is the sport, then the star at the centre of it – be they a straight woman, a gay man, trans or otherwise – is the athlete.

Speaking to the Turner Entertainment Report, Annabel said of the gang bang, ‘It’s like running a marathon … the pain is part of the high, part of the adrenaline rush.’

This is echoed nearly two decades later by Lily Phillips, who told the Reality Check podcast that ‘it’s like a boxing match. I think I’ll get sore towards the end, but I think I’ve got the right determination just to be able to push on’.

I’m not sure about Lily’s true count, but Annabel eventually admitted that her cock count had been exaggerated. There had only been seventy men, but she was penetrated 251 times. Maybe. Similarly, the next movie in the World’s Biggest Gang Bang series, starring Jasmin St Claire, was advertised as featuring 300 men, but actually there were only thirty milling around. In her memoir, What the Hell Was I Thinking?!!, Jasmin dubbed it ‘among the biggest cons ever pulled off in the porn business’.

On the day of Jasmin’s gang bang, Annabel Chong was invited on set to metaphorically pass on the baton. Journalist Evan Wright, for LA Weekly, reported: ‘I experienced a sense of numbness on Jasmin’s set – as I would on many others – that I can only compare to accounts I have read of combat. It was the sense of being in a group of people deliberately and methodically engaged in acts of insanity.’

Soon, such scenes would be commonplace. As porn stud Tyler Knight wrote in his 2016 memoir, Burn My Shadow (I’ve read a LOT of porn star memoirs as you might have deduced):

‘Directors for other bukkake movies and gang bang scenes rove up and down the line handing out business cards. One director poaches talent for a gang bang scene with an overdue pregnant woman. His scenes resemble a school of swarming piranhas stripping a cow to its bones. The scene will shoot close enough to Northridge Hospital in case the woman goes into labour.’

Director Mike Quasar worked for the production company on Jasmin’s film, as well as on the third in the series, The Houston 620, named after the star, Houston. Predictably, he told me that the advertised 620 guys were actually 180. Still. Not too shabby.

‘It was one of the most absurd things I’ve ever been involved with my entire life,’ he said, down the phone from his home in Woodland Hills. It’s a neighbourhood that borders the porn metropolis of San Fernando Valley. He’d had a long day on set and I could hear the ice cubes rattling in his tequila. ‘People often ask if porn has got too extreme. You know, porn was actually much more extreme back in the late 1990s, early 2000s.’

I offered Mike my theory – that porn performers feel the same kind of pride in their abilities that an athlete might. Most people wouldn’t, but also couldn’t, pull off the pretzling and dilating that these women and gay men put their bodies through weekly. He agreed.

‘I literally had this conversation two hours ago with Joanna Angel, when we were shooting today,’ Mike said. ‘She was talking about when she goes to work for Kink [a BDSM production company], and she looks at it like it’s going to the gym: “How much more can I take? Can I do this?” It’s all about what she can tolerate. So it’s not even a sexual thing, it’s literally like an endurance test.’

Like Lily Phillips has tearfully said in the new YouTube documentary, ‘It’s not for the weak girls, if I’m honest – it was hard. I don’t know if I’d recommend it.’

Lily has announced that her new goal for January 2025 is to have sex with 1000 men in one day.

But who’s counting?

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