Public vice calls for public opposition

Increasingly, my online experience is flooded with the promotion of vice. When I take a brain break from academic work to watch basketball highlights, they are punctuated by ads for gambling. And recently, social media has been filled with conversations related to OnlyFans—or sanitized virtual prostitution.

In contemporary Western societies, we have lost the nerve to say “no” to public vice, to countenance the use of any form of hard or soft power to promote public virtue. The conceptual acids of expressivist liberalism have eaten away at these tools. The only forces we can oppose are those that restrict choice. And this choice-and-pleasure maximization benefits the bottom line for many. Since the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for expanded gambling in 2018, the industry has blossomed exponentially. Just in the last year, Americans bet more than $121 billion on sports. And gross revenue for OnlyFans has grown from $5.8 million in 2018 to $7.9 billion in 2024. The alliance of Dionysius and Mammon faces little opposition today.

Even in recent history, these types of activities endured much more social shame and legal limits. Such forces pushed these industries into more private spaces. Now, with expanding legal permission, they increasingly pop up in public.

We have been demoralized from pushing back against immorality. If chosen activities do not inflict immediate and obvious harm, and if they are making money, then what is the big deal?

Such was the consensus in a recent online discourse when many realized how much some of the top “content creators” make with OnlyFans. A clip from an interview with 20-year-old Sophie Rain, in which she revealed that she earned more than $43 million in 2023, went viral. Many compared this to what high-grossing professional athletes make and concluded there is little difference.

However, just the other day, another OnlyFans story dominated social media, and this time a different side was shown. Lily Phillips is another “content creator” who aggressively promoted her project of sexual intercourse with 100 men in under 24 hours. Those who do not consume such content might have ignored this story. But a YouTuber named Josh Pieters produced a short documentary and has shared clips on social media of him interviewing Phillips after the affair, which have gone viral. In the immediate aftermath, we find her (fully clothed) with puffy eyes and on the verge of a breakdown. She can barely speak and struggles to find the categories to explain what has just occurred. All parties consented. On one side there was pleasure, on the other there was profit. So, what is the problem?

This tragedy, I suggest, is illuminating. It is a symbolic reductio ad absurdum exposing the limits of such a consent-centered, choice-maximizing morality. Such a framework lacks the categories to account for the deep darkness involved in such acts, the damage they bring upon oneself and society, and the multifarious forms of failure involved. Even though I take issue with the reductive “harm”-framing in contemporary ethics, it is not obvious that no harm was inflicted here. Multiple figures failed in various ways that did damage. We need more categories to assess these failures.

Quite obviously, the men who paid for and participated in this project failed. Just because she consented does not make them innocent. They should see the damage they have done to Phillips. They should be ashamed of themselves. Same for her mother, who is supposedly her “manager.” Pimping out your daughter is a monumental failure of parenting. The legal system that grants a wide berth to this industry failed. And Phillips failed herself and society as well. You can observe the damage she has done to her soul in her blank expression, teary eyes, and confused speech in the aftermath. It appears that she is struggling to find moral categories for what she has done to herself and the ways this also negatively affects others.

This whole industry does damage to society, especially when it faces little to no public opposition. Through legal permission and market forces, we are taught that such choices are not only licit but equally valid to other options and quite possibly good (especially if everyone enjoys themselves and/or makes money). But they aren’t. And we should be able to confidently say so and discourage such vice through various private and public mechanisms.

None of the figures involved are definitively lost. Jesus informed us that many prostitutes enter the kingdom ahead of the smug and self-righteous (Matthew 21:31). But He did not say that society should endorse prostitution. We can and should seek lost sinners while at the same time promoting virtue and discouraging destructive vice.