THE backlash to the women who have turned sex into a competitive sport has inspired a controversial play premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe.
A one-woman show, it is written and performed by former model Issy Knowles in response to the vilification of the women who are selling videos of themselves having sex with up to 1000 men in a short space of time.
Body Count explores the phenomenon and why it creates so much fury.
“I am fascinated by the amount of emotion extreme sex acts seem to garner from everybody,” Knowles told the Sunday National.
“They make people so angry but I feel these kinds of events deserve a bit more critical analysis and a bit more compassion.”
Knowles pointed out that while there are just a handful of women, such as Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, who have been posting these videos on the OnlyFans website, there are thousands of men queuing up to have sex with the women and many thousands, if not millions, paying to view the end result.
“It is men who have created this market but it is of course the women who are vilified,” said Knowles.
She is no stranger to the Fringe, having written and performed in her one-woman hit Model Behaviour in 2018 which was later developed into a TV pilot and picked up by Downton Abbey producer Carnival Films. The script topped the Brit List in 2022 and Knowles’s debut feature, a horror called Hungry Mouth, is in development with Meduza, who produced the Robert Eggers horror The Witch.
In the meantime, she is thrilled to be returning to the Fringe with the new show which will be staged at the Pleasance.
“I’ve been dying to take a play back to the Fringe but I’ve discovered that in order for me to write a one-woman show, I have to be seething with rage about something,” said Knowles.
“That’s the only thing that can get me back on stage because it is incredibly intimidating to be on stage on your own for an hour. So I just had to land on something that made me angry enough.”
Despite her anger, she still hesitated about pitching the idea.
“I’m not a sex worker and I struggled with the ethics of whether it was even my place to talk about this and I am still thinking it is going to piss off the right and the left,” Knowles said.
“However, I am proud of what I’ve ended up with and I think it is going to be a really funny, challenging show. I just want to make people think a bit deeper about stuff like this and look past what is being thrown in our faces by a patriarchal society in a very right-wing world.”
The finished show is not the one she set out to write, as she became more interested in society’s response to the phenomenon during the research and writing.
“There is all this panic around OnlyFans and sex work but OnlyFans for sex workers has been a really good invention because it cuts out pimps or managers,” said Knowles. “It’s been positive for the sex-working community but there is a moral panic around it.
“Men are always asking how we can stop women creating an OnlyFans page when the question is why so many women feel it is the only way to garner a lot of financial wealth in their lifetime.”
She said that instead of asking how we can stop women selling on to the website, we should be looking at society and picking up on the fact that there is still a glass ceiling, there is still a gender pay gap.
“It is still a patriarchal society that limits women’s growth and potential,” said Knowles.
“Also what is it about sex that as a society we feel so strongly that women don’t know their own sexual limits and we feel the need to control the sex women have and the amount they have?”
As well as the extreme sex acts phenomenon, the finished play puts a spotlight on the rise of the right-wing and incel culture.
And having been single for the past couple of years after a four-year relationship, Knowles said she personally had felt the effects of people like Andrew Tate becoming more popular and misogyny becoming more normalised.
“Misogyny is on the rise and we have evidence in real time with reproductive rights being stripped away and trans rights being eroded,” she said.
“In the conversations I am having with men, I can see how comfortable many have become in their misogyny. Obviously it is not all men but I have never had so many men come over to me and
ask me what my body count is straight away. As if it is any indication of what kind of person I am. It just feels like misogyny is on the rise and it is not a great time to be a woman.”
Knowles said the recent OnlyFans events highlight the lack of connection in society and the trend to objectify women to the point that men can queue up for one-sided pleasure and not think much about it.
But while she believes it is not a great time to be a woman, Knowles also feels it is not a great time to be a man.
“Underneath all of this is this desire to connect,” she said. “Men don’t have the same community that women create and I think the success of these OnlyFans events is a sign of that.
“In writing the play, I wanted to get into the heads of both sides. I really wanted to humanise and understand more deeply the women who are in there and the men who are queuing up to take part.
“I wanted to find something in this that is actually a bit hopeful, as bizarre as that sounds, and if people want to find out where it ends up, they will have to come and see.”
Body Count premieres at the Pleasance Courtyard and runs from July 30 to August 25
