The reaction was instant, furious and fascinated. Phillips was condemned as “vile” on social media and called a “slut”. Some argued she was a victim of the sex industry, while she called herself a proud feminist and claimed her work was empowering. Others seemed to want to save her: Russell Brand, in his “man of God” mode, interviewed her and offered her “protection”. (Last week Brand was charged with rape and sexual assault, which he denies.)

• ‘I was under Andrew Tate’s spell. Then he beat me’

Unsurprisingly, the 1,000-man gangbang has still not happened. But in October she went through what she called a “training” event, in which she had sex with 101 men in one day. A film-maker called Josh Pieters followed her in the lead-up and aftermath. His documentary (titled I Slept with 100 Men in One Day) has been viewed more than ten million times and has over 30,000 comments on YouTube.

Phillips with Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight

BBC

Everyone has an opinion about Phillips. Including me, which is why on Tuesday evening I was in the BBC Newsnight studio for a discussion about her. The host, Victoria Derbyshire, had interviewed Phillips, 23, and I’d been invited to talk about it alongside Reed Amber, a porn director and performer. In this mini referendum on the sex industry, I was the “against” and Amber was the “for”.

There’s inevitably something a bit weird about going on the BBC to have a live conversation about sex. I saw the interview for the first time during the broadcast, and watching Derbyshire gently press Phillips on the difference between the 101-man event and her previous feats of endurance intercourse was surreal: “I’d done 37 guys a month before, and that was just bliss,” Phillips said.

The 101-man event, though, was definitely not blissful. In the Pieters documentary we see Phillips collapse in tears at the end of the session. “It wasn’t exactly what I planned or thought it would be. I really underprepared for it,” Phillips told Derbyshire. Some of the men, she said, had been disrespectful — specifically, some had pushed against the time limit she had set for each participant.

• Why a ‘feminist’ on OnlyFans plans to have sex with 1,000 men in a day

You might fairly ask whether there’s any way to prepare for what Phillips put herself through, both physically and emotionally (or any way to command respect from the kind of men attracted to a gangbang). But months after the fact, she had rationalised her first reaction away. “I really don’t need the sympathy or the heartache or people being worried about me. It really is my choice and I’m not being abused.”

This is part of what makes Phillips such a lightning rod for arguments about the sex industry: she’s the first porn star to become a household name in the user-generated-content age. It’s not possible to simply talk about her as a victim of exploitation, however much it seems obvious that she’s putting herself through ordeals that are causing her harm. There is no studio or ominous pimp. The person exploiting Phillips is Phillips.

As a Gen Z, she has grown up in a world where extreme porn is pervasive and normalised. She told Derbyshire that she first saw pornography when she was 11. Derbyshire was visibly shocked, although this isn’t that unusual: according to the NSPCC, the average age at which children are first exposed to porn is 13, meaning Phillips was on the young end of the “normal” range.

The question, of course, is how this objectively harrowing state of affairs came to be “normal” at all. Perhaps surprisingly, Phillips is not an all-out apologist for pornography. She even conceded that her early experience with porn may have shaped her present life choices. “I don’t know a life without pornography, so maybe,” she said when Derbyshire asked whether this explained her decision to get into the sex industry.

Most unexpectedly, Phillips accepted that there was “100 per cent” a link between the explosion of pornography and the rise of the misogynist “manosphere”, as represented by Andrew Tate. For Phillips, the “red pill men” are the “opposite extreme” of her own work. (It’s worth noting, though, that Tate is also a sex industry entrepreneur who managed a stable of camgirls in Romania. Tate has now been charged with human trafficking and sex with a minor, which he denies.)

Everything around Phillips — OnlyFans, “red pill”, “content creation”, YouTube — makes her feel like a new and alien phenomenon, born out of the technology of today. But the discussion I had on Tuesday night was really old-fashioned, bread-and-butter feminism. Can an act as intimate and vulnerable as “sex” really be considered work, or is it inevitably exploitative?

Obviously, as an old-fashioned, bread-and-butter feminist, I believe the latter. Phillips might not want my sympathy, but she has it. Yes, these are her choices, but they’re choices made within an industry that extracts a good profit from her willingness to take excruciating risks with her body and her psyche. And if she chose not to, she’d be just another OnlyFans girl competing for attention.

But I’m also grateful to Phillips for her candour. When I texted my 18-year-old daughter to say I was doing Newsnight, she too had thoughts about Phillips. After seeing Phillips “break character” when she cried in the YouTube documentary, my daughter and her friends are less convinced that sex work can be “liberating” in the way its proponents claim. If Phillips is getting that message out, she might be a feminist hero after all.