Some readers will have seen the story swirling around the internet in the last week or so about the young woman named Lilly Phillips who had sex with a hundred men in one go. I normally wouldn’t bother to comment on such a story. After all, we live in the world where such debaucheries are an everyday affair. However, this story has taken an interesting twist, one that is actually worth commenting on. It’s worth commenting on from my personal point of view because it is unusually and clearly amenable to archetypal analysis.
The crucial fact in this case is that what has prompted the flurry of public discussion is not the original sex act. That apparently happened back in October. As far as I can tell, it got little to no attention. What did get attention was an interview with Phillips that was released on YouTube about a week ago. The part of the interview that was most poignant was when Phillips broke down crying.
It was the sight of a young woman in distress which triggered commentators to claim that it was actually men who were responsible for the situation. There was even apparently an op-ed in a newspaper claiming that the men involved should be jailed over the matter. This led to a flurry of counter-comment claiming that this was all typical of modern feminism, where women get to have the freedom to do what they like but get to blame men when it all goes wrong.
These might sound like mutually contradictory takes. But there is a quite precise logic at play here, one that was beautifully explicated by Eric Berne in his well-known book The Games People Play.
Berne’s work has been a big influence on my own archetypal model, but he follows more in the Freudian paradigm, which was primarily concerned with the child-parent relationship. Berne is concerned with what he calls transactional analysis. He identifies three roles that people can play in a transaction: the Child, the Adult, and the Parent.
The Child represents our basic drives, desires, and dreams. The Parent represents authority in the broadest sense i.e. things that should be done because they are morally right. The Adult represents the workaday world of getting things done. It is concerned with outcomes and how to get to them most efficiently.
Berne’s key insight is that the transactions we go through in real life are structured around these roles. Where it gets particularly interesting, however, is when we switch between roles. We might begin our interaction as two Adults who are taking care of some business. Things can get awkward fast when one participant transitions to the Child role.
This happens fairly often in most places of work, where the expectation is that we are Adults, but where somebody suddenly slips into the Child role. Ricky Gervais built his entire TV series The Office on the premise of having a boss, who should be playing the role of Adult, or at least Parent, but instead is a Child.
Berne was concerned with interactions between individuals. However, we can easily abstract his model to public discourse in general. There are repeated patterns, or games, that public discourse falls into just as we fall into patterns with the people we interact with on a regular basis. The Lilly Phillips story fits exactly such a pattern, one that is very common in the modern West.
Using the Bernian analysis, the big question is this: Which role is Phillips playing? Is she a Child, an Adult, or a Parent?
Like many young women these days, Phillips makes money from the OnlyFans website. OnlyFans is a business venture that generates about $5 billion per year in revenue. Since this is all business, we could place Phillips in the role of Adult. She is a tech-savvy young woman making use of an opportunity to make money.
But, of course, there is more and more competition on OnlyFans these days, and so we can also guess that the sex-act was a way for Phillips to win the battle for attention. Remember that the Adult archetype is concerned with getting results. Since Phillips achieved her goal of winning attention, which will presumably translate into money, we can still claim that she is playing the Adult, and doing it smartly.
If Phillips was originally playing the role of Adult, it was the release of the YouTube interview a week ago that changed her role. The interview showed her human side, which really means it showed her in the role of Child. More importantly, because it showed her breaking down crying, she was a Child in need of protection.
Like clockwork, this triggered the Parent response from a number of commentators. What is the role of the Parent: to protect the Child. Who did Phillips need to be protected from? Well, it must be the other party to the sex act, the men.
It was this targeting of men which duly brought another set of commentators out of the woodwork to point out that Phillips’ needed to take responsibility for her actions. These commentators were denying the validity of casting Phillips into the role of Child. For them, she was and should be an Adult.
Suddenly, the story had changed and we see the moves in a game that everybody knows because it takes place in practically every family at one time or another. This is the game where the Child plays the Parents off against each other. The most common form of this is to run to Mother to avoid discipline from Father. That is what we see in the story of Phillips as it unfolded this week. Those who want to portray her as the Child are playing the role of Mother. Those who want her to take responsibility for her actions are playing the role of Father.
As if to emphasise this new reading, there was a new twist in the story just a few days ago when Phillips announced that she was going to do it all again, this time with even more men. At this point, we are definitely in exactly the kind of game that Berne analysed. Ostensibly, the roles in the game are Protective Mother, Tyrannical Father and Innocent Child. Innocent Child runs to Protective Mother who blames Tyrannical Father.
In actual fact, however, the real roles of the game are Devouring Mother, Impotent Father and Naughty Child. One of the primary properties of the Devouring Mother is that she engages in enabling behaviour. Enabling allows the Child to harm themselves so that the Mother can offer “protection” and “care”. It keeps the Child dependent on the Mother. Implied in this game is that Father is either absent or impotent.
Once the Child has learned how to play the game, the steps become clear: Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father. This game is very common in the public discourse of the modern West, and has become even more prevalent in recent decades.
Ultimately, it is the Child who suffers most from this game, and that is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome in the story of Phillips. However, we can also extrapolate from this individual case to the broader pattern of modern society.
Absent Father is really the Adult. He’s too busy keeping industrial capitalism running to have time left over for family. Since industrial capitalism runs on money, that’s his only concern. Sites like OnlyFans make money, and that’s enough for him.
Meanwhile, Devouring Mother likes money too, so she won’t stop the game from being played, especially because it lets her indulge in her main addiction: performative compassion.
With Absent Father and Devouring Mother as parents, is it any wonder that the collective Child of the modern West is in trouble?
Hi Simon,
Oh my goodness, what a hornets nest of a hot mess. I’d not heard of any of this unfolding story, and if I may, as my grandfather once dryly quipped about my parents dramas: The facts do not reflect well upon those involved.
You’d have liked him, he was a genuine Elder and made quite the impression upon me. Helped me see a bigger world.
I’d be interested in your perspective, but I once heard someone suggest that: we have the morals and ethics that we can afford. I do wonder if this economic dimension also relates to the social transactional games that people play? It may. Dunno. What do you reckon about that?
Cheers
Chris
This is a sad story well diagnosed. But it’s not the child who gets hurt the most, everyone suffers badly from this dynamic. Mums, Dads and children need to grow up.
Chris – I can see how that might be valid, but doesn’t seem applicable in this case. Berne’s broader point was that games are played partly to avoid boredom, which seems to be the main function of the internet now. But things also have a habit of going viral on the net. Gives new meaning to the concept of STDs 😛
Jinasiri – no arguments here.
It’s also disgraceful that we consider it legitimate to put on the Adult hat where all sense of honour, love, beauty, reciprocity and spirit are traded for monetary returns. I reckon the better moniker for that kind of behaviour is “the Machine”.
It is actually a strange concept if you think about it. Very much specific to the modern West and the schism between capitalism, science and the rest of society. Both capitalism and science separated the question of what “works” from the question of what we should do (morality). I can’t think of another society in history where the Parent and Adult were two separate roles. I think they would have been the same.
We made our bed and now we and a hundred others must sleep in it – another resounding efficiency victory for scientific materialism 🙌
It is strange how people get excited about “hey, we’re doing this experiment.” I always think that’s a fancy way of saying “we have no idea what’s gonna happen here”. I suppose it is “exciting”.
> Gives new meaning to the concept of STDs
ROTFLMAO. Sexually Transmitted Distraction has got to be the best definition of porn I’ve ever seen. I rather hope _that_ goes viral.
@Chris
> we have the morals and ethics that we can afford
You have a good point there in that western society is well into overshoot on what we can afford – the efforts to regulate a perfect society have largely halted the productive economy. As a result weird tangents like this unfortunate scenario become one of the few ways for individuals to make any headway – I expect the games are dysfunctional in a similar degree to the insanity of the jobs available. I would apply the same reasoning to Bullshit Jobs™ as well.
Daniel – I will do my best to try and slip that into some conversations (pardon the pun) 😛
Daniel and Chris,
“we have the morals and ethics that we can afford”
Smarter than competing is the disproportional strategic response. Better than engaging monsters on their own terms and turf is ripping the very ground out from beneath them the moment they cross the threshold of one’s own domain.
This silly girl is getting her handsome sheckles by shining as a star of stupidity and amorality in an economy devoted to it. By out-Bullshitting the Bullshit Machine she enslaved herself and that swollen wallet will do nothing for her empty and pock-marked heart.
The economy as we have it is essentially mining the riches of virtue, generosity and love built up by the ancestors, converting culture, civility, competence and care to cash. The most valuable resource is not oil nor gold but Goodness. It is by Goodness that material resources can be used and managed meaningfully and sustainably.
We are end the end of the rope. It is amorality that we cannot afford. The disproportional response to the Bullshit is to live a life of ethics, generosity and love for the happines, meaning and dignity that those qualities themselves engender and putting money back into its proper place as one of many mere means, and a paltry one at that.
To me, the whole story sounds like a malfunctioning id/ego/superego, where the ego forced the id to do something crazy with the wholehearted approval of the malfunctioning superego, and now the id is licking its wounds. I mean, the superego says “go sleep with as many people as possible because that’s what strong women [adults] do,” right? And the ego executed the order, and now the id is crying on camera.
Irena – yes, but the superego also says – “I’ll protect you if you get hurt” (because I want you to be a victim so I have an excuse to protect you).
@Simon
But the superego didn’t do a particularly good job of protecting the id! Quite the opposite, one could reasonably argue. That’s why I said it all malfunctioned.
Irena – we need a little more of Berne’s theory to explain this. Every Game has a psychological payoff for the players involved. The payoff is its own reward independent of any other real world effects. People can become so addicted to the payoff that they will hurt or even kill themselves by playing the Game.
The payoff for the Devouring Mother is performative compassion. She allows the Child to get hurt in order to get that payoff.
The payoff for the Child is the feeling of care from the Mother. The Child learns that she must hurt herself to get that payoff.
Both the Child and the Mother get the additional payoff of moral righteousness from blaming the Father.
@Simon
I get your point about the game payoff. Still. This doesn’t really look the work of the Mother (Devouring or otherwise) or of the Father (Tyrannical or otherwise). It sounds more like the superego got taken over by an aging butch lesbian great-aunt, exceptionally active (ahem) in her heyday but now suffering from a host of age-related ailments, who is now trying to socially reproduce herself. (Okay, okay, so the great-niece is not lesbian, butch or otherwise, but that was supposed to be a minor detail.) I think that Auntie Dearest fully expected this to work out beautifully and is now scratching her head and struggling to understand what went wrong. It was just one big misunderstanding is what I’m saying. 😛
Well, whether the collective Child of the West is being raised by a Devouring Mother or a lesbian aunt, I think we can agree the situation is not ideal 🙂
Hi Simon. Interesting take on a sad activity. There is another one (!!!) who has a supportive mother who assists in recruiting the young men. I couldn’t understand how this could be, but now looking at it through the devouring mother lens it makes sense (money, public profile etc). Article link if you are interested – https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13959739/Bonnie-Blue-mother-breaks-silence-students-queue-sex-porn-star.html
Sandra
Sandra – geez. Yes, that fits the Devouring Mother pattern to a tee. I doubt it will be too long before OnlyFans simply becomes a live porn site. This is a classic arms race scenario.