For years, progressive activists have insisted that “sex work is work.” Simply googling the phrase now produces an AI-generated answer that affirms it: “Yes, sex work is work.” When I first heard this several years ago, I thought of Body Without Soul, Wiktor Grodecki’s 1996 documentary that follows a crew of impoverished young rent boys through the social and economic wreckage of post-socialist Prague. In one scene, Grodecki asks the boys, most of them underaged, how much it would take to buy their souls.
“You can’t sell it,” says one.
“I sell my soul together with the body,” says another.
The smallest says simply, “Two thousand crowns.”
A rosy-cheeked teenage Czech hustler, smoking a cigarette in bed, tells the camera, “The soul wants money. The body has to sell itself.”
Now, 28 years later, another documentary, I Slept with 100 Men in One Day, interrogates sex work again to a devastating conclusion. It has an artistic subtlety that eludes its clickbait title and a message similar to Grodecki’s—that selling the body means leaving it, if you want to survive.
“People call me anything—porn star, escort, OnlyFans girl—I don’t really care,” says Lily Phillips, 23, in a chipper, middle-class English accent. For the next 47 minutes, British YouTuber Josh Pieters follows the efforts of Lily and her staff to organize and ultimately execute Lily’s plan to have sex with 100 dudes in a single day.