Show Notes
In this conversation… Let’s get spicy, y’all! Today, we’re talking about the politics of consensual sex work, through the lens of a recent, extremely viral documentary that covered sex worker and OnlyFans influencer Lily Phillips’s 100-men-in-a-day sex stunt. If you haven’t watched the documentary yet, we’ve embedded it in this post for your easy viewing pleasure. And yes, this documentary is safe for work; the curse words are censored and there’s no actual nudity. The same cannot be said for the podcast episode. You’ve been warned! A note: this conversation was recorded prior to the are-they-or-aren’t-they viral drama of Phillips and fellow influencer-sex-worker Bonnie Blue both claiming they are pregnant within hours of one another, but for apparently different reasons (?), so we didn’t cover that. But please sound off in the comments if you’d like to discuss! References in This Episode The video of Ben Shapiro insisting quite seriously that women who fuck around will always eventually find out “Lily Phillips, OnlyFans and the big lie that sex work is good for you,” a rollicking ride of a think piece by Tanya Gold which dares to ask the question on everyone’s mind these days: What if women are not, in fact, sentient? “Shame on the men exploiting Lily Phillips,” a left-wing take by feminist Julie Bindel that will show you just how bipartisan the hatred for sex work truly is “Men in the Lily Phillips’ Experiment Are the Real Victims,” an essay by Liz Plank that is honestly the most normal review we covered lol “The Dirty Secrets of Pompeii,” a kind of touristy verbal romp through the fuckfests of Pompeii “Sex Work Through the Ages,” a very accessible deep dive on sex work that features our gurl Valeria Messalina sucking and fucking her way through life “The 7 Most Common Fantasies — and How Many People Have Ever Had Them,” a survey/data study on sexual fantasies by social psychologist Jeff Lehmiller of the Kinsey Institute, which—plot twist—actually took women’s fantasies into consideration “What Kinds of Porn do Men and Women Watch Most Often?,” another survey by Lehmiller on the relative kinkiness across genders “A Heated Debate: Theoretical Perspectives of Sexual Exploitation and Sex Work,” a nice li’l academic paper on this topic that can serve as a puritanical palate cleanser amid all this raunchiness “Sex Worker-Led Provision of Services in New Zealand: Optimising Health and Safety in a Decriminalised Context,” which explains what they are doing right in the LAND DOWN UNDAH “The Real Impact of the Swedish Model on Sex Workers,” a report by Global Network of Sex Work Projects, a nonprofit that advocates for the health and human rights of sex workers, that is just generally helpful “The Audacity of Tolerance: A Critical Analysis of Legalized Prostitution in Amsterdam’s Red Light District,” a report by Humanity in Action, an international nonprofit organization that educates and connects young leaders on issues related to human and minority rights, about why sex workers hate *special rules* “Dominance Feminism: Placing Sexualized Power at the Center,” a kind of dry academic paper about dominance feminism (honestly just read the abstract and you’ll get the gist lol) “The Kingdom in the Closet,” a great overview of the profound contradictions taking place within OuR tReAsUREd eCoNomIC pArTnER, Saudi Arabia!, written by Nadya Labi for The Atlantic And of course, a link to the GREATEST PODCAST (BESIDES THIS ONE) OF ALL TIME. Highly recommend the gang bang episode, the Saudi Arabia episode, the sex workers in New South Wales episode, though honestly, all of them are—wait for it—bangers Bonus Reading “4 Sex Workers Answer On How Much They Actually Earn,” an amazing Financial Diet rundown that shows just how much a sex worker’s life/finances/schedule/offerings can vary “[What the Lily Phillips] Doc Gets Right About Sex Work,” by Jessie Sage for Rolling Stone—this is notably the only mainstream take on Lily Phillips that dared t
More from Diabolical Lies
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com
A quick heads-up: Around 1:34:00, we discuss postpartum psychosis, depression, filicide, and the Lindsay Clancy trial (no graphic descriptions). If that’s not something you’re up for today, take care and skip ahead to 1:40:00. It only felt fitting to wrap up our pre-maternity leave regularly scheduled programming with a conversation that brings our very first episode full circle. Skeptics of the tradwife shtick have long observed that tradwife influencers aren’t actually exposed to the risks of the conservative, traditional lifestyle they’re aestheticizing, because they—presumably—have access to their own money and, with it, some degree of autonomy and optionality. This summer, the years-long discourse has finally landed where it started, with the accusation—you actually have a job—being wielded effectively as a defense—yeah, this is a job, why is everyone calling me a tradwife? The result is a discursive ouroboros. Many fellow Discourse Vultures have perceived Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman’s disavowal of the tradwife label in recent interviews whilst wearing top-to-bottom denim as proof that this brand of motherhood is no longer in vogue, and that the reality of Smith and Neeleman’s family dynamics (50/50 partnerships, being a CEO) serve as evidence of that shift. The personal is political, as they say, but how effectively does personal experience really serve as a political defense? Can it nullify the ideological associations of powerful aesthetics, when those aesthetics are already central to American culture? This episode is a close read of three eerily similar themes that appeared across both recent interviews with some ~lite feminist theory~ layered atop them. THEORY Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich (1977), the original source from which the “mothering as experience” and “motherhood as institution” framework was pulled “A review of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution” by Alice Braun (2019) “Institution of Motherhood” from Encyclopedia of Motherhood, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Andrea (2010) “Mothering and Motherhood: Experience, Ideology, and Agency” by Min Jao from Comparative Literature Studies (2019) “Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood” by Dorothy E. Roberts from Journal of Gender & Law (1992) “Filicide in the United States” by Phillip J. Resnick from the National Library of Medicine (2016) Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America by Rachel Louise Moran (2024) “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” by Audre Lorde (1984) CLOSE-READ INTERVIEWS “Nara Smith: Stop Calling Me a Tradwife” from Call Her Daddy (2026) “Ballerina Farm is Happy with Her Choices” by Stephanie McNeal from Vulture (2026) OTHER REFERENCED PRESS HITS “Tycoon or Tradwife? The Woman Behind Ballerina Farm Makes Her Own Path.” by Julia Moskin for the New York Times (2024) Alyssa Grenfell, the ex-Mormon YouTuber referenced “The Un-Trad Rise of Nara Aziza Smith” by Bianca Betancourt for Harper’s Bazaar (2024) “How Lucky Blue and Nara Aziza Smith Made Viral Internet Fame From Scratch” by Carrie Battan for GQ (2024) “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)” by Megan Agnew for The Times (2024) “Ballerina Farm opens its door to visitors” from ABC News (2026) “The ‘trad wives’ leaving high-control Christian nationalist communities” from CNN (2026)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.diabolicalliespod.com
The Democratic Party was facing an identity crisis when Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025. Just two months later, Democratic media Thinkboiz Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published Abundance. Their theory of the case: We could “solve our problems with supply,” and that to do so, we needed to pursue “a liberalism that builds,” an idea that meant aspiring to “more than redistribution […], more than parceling out the present.” The text of Abundance focuses almost exclusively on examples of government proceduralism and self-defeating obstruction, while at times quoting books like Fully Automated Luxury Communism and even Karl Marx. There’s just one difference between the productive capacity imagined in Fully Automated Luxury Communism and Abundance: only one of these books sees this vision as compatible with capitalism. Over the months that followed its publication, an “intra-left” fight emerged between the “populist left” (represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and the DSA) and the “abundance left.” For a while, it looked like Abundance would set the vision for the future of the party. What happened? Diabolical Lies investigates. All citations and references can be found at diabolicalliespod.com.