HereAndGone
17hr ago
There's a difference between "very religious, sticks to his values despite being at odds with the society around him" and "beat me until I bled all in the name of 'our loving God demands this'".
Anyway, Calvinism of any stripe, more especially hyper-Calvinism, is going to be gloomy and depressing enough to turn anyone off the faith. "You are going to Hell even if it's not your fault because at the creation of the Universe God decided He would withhold saving faith from you, so there's nothing you can do even if you think you really believe"?
(More complicated than "He decided" since it's "God foresaw you would be damned, and since He is omniscient, what He knows must come true else He would not be omniscient, so that is incompatible with free will and hence you are damned").
HereAndGone
17hr ago
If it's legal, it will become normalised. If it's legal to have AI-generated porn, and it's legal to make, distribute, and consume AI generated child porn, then by what rules or laws do you tell AI Pornhub "sure, fake me up some incest porn with barely-legal sixteen year old hot blonde twins but never oh never six year olds"?
Gay marriage is the ur-example here: we went pretty damn quick from "gay marriage will not affect you in the slightest, if you don't like gay marriage then don't get gay married" to "well now everyone surely agrees that gay marriage is moral and normal and only horrible monster bigots could ever have objected to it".
Porn is about selling what society considers taboo/shameful to those willing to pay for it. Blue clubs and stag movies were early versions, as were the jokes about barbers and "something for the weekend" as they would sell condoms on the side. Oral sex is shocking and depraved? Even prostitutes won't do it (as in the case of the Marquis de Sade where an early trial had a prostitute testify that he wanted her to perform certain unnatural acts)? Well we'll show it in porn because it's the shocking spicy act people want to see and then over time that leaks into the mainstream so that now blowjobs are now just another normal act people do.
AI kiddie porn is the most taboo? Even the AI-generated stuff? You don't want to go to the government centre to access it? Never fear, for the right money we'll sell it to you so you can consume it at home. And then it goes onto the mainstream porn sites. Because after all, it's legal and even the government is providing it for the MAPs at their centres!
HereAndGone
17hr ago
I know which of my values are the masters. I have no interest in performing a puppet show for some stranger's amusement. I'm perfectly fine with blitzing through the online survey trolley problems to be told at the end "well you are consistent at least, you horrible monster" because I know the purpose of such surveys is to persuade me around to their way of holding sacred values, and I don't care if I'm thought of as a horrible monster by a bunch that I consider evil idiots.
HereAndGone
18hr ago
I honestly have to doubt at least one of the anecdotes in that first linked article, because c'mon: she's a professional escort and she doesn't recognise what is going on?
Guy sharing a ride with her back from a party. "Oh he's interested in me". Yep, that tracks. "He doesn't want to get to know me deeply? I can't see myself dating him!" No duh. He wasn't looking for the possibility of a relationship, he just wanted to find out "can we bang?"
The next guy wasn’t a date, he ended up in a uber in hour-long SF traffic with me ride sharing back from a party. I suspect he might be interested in me, because of the way he moves his hands and eyes and the quickness of his laughter. So I Investigate.
...There is no locus of hot itching curiosity shining from behind his eyes, or at least not one that I can find here in this uber. I realize he’s not deeply trying to understand me. He's unattuned. I find my body does not trust him. I think I want a relationship where we can sink in together, touch souls or something. I imagine if I tried to date him, it'd be a lot of work to get him to understand me, like I'd have to force feed him myself. I'd rather have someone who's hungry.
Girl. You met at a party and are just sharing a ride home. He's interested in "have I a chance to score with this chick?" for a one night stand, not "perchance could this fair damsel be The One who will be my blushing bride and mother to fair children?" If I can figure this out, a professional $4k/hour escort should be able to, as well!
(I have the feeling that yes, they did hook up for a casual night of sex, but she's leaving that part of the story out).
As for "why am I in my early thirties and not married yet?" well the clues are there, which maybe she's wilfully ignoring them or honestly can't see them:
I live in SF and in the cultures willing to invite me to their parties, it’s normal to casually overhear someone referring to their boyfriend and their husband in the same sentence. Every other person I meet is poly, and I know many decades-long married-with-kids poly relationships. When someone asks me “what do you do” and I say “sex work”, they say “cool my girlfriend’s a sex worker, you two should talk.” In my world, this is normal.
Yeah. But what she's not noticing is that the husband comes first, then the boyfriend when they open things up. Or the sex worker is the girlfriend, not the wife or primary partner. She will always be the bridesmaid, never the bride, when it comes to the "married with kids poly relationships" where someone will be happy to have her as a girlfriend or partner but not as "hey everyone we're getting married in the morning!"
And then maybe once in a while, I find someone who does seem whole, mostly, who has all their nerve endings pointed in my direction. But usually then they're already married with kids, or they're monogamous, or they're very sexually submissive, or they're poor in a way I’m not financially prepared to support in a world where I want children.
Again, note: already married with kids, or monogamous. Those kinds of guys are not looking for her kind of girl.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Well now we need to encourage more men into the industry as it's pretty much female-dominated, do you have something against equality or what? 😁
HereAndGone
1d ago
yeah, my position on the fat man problem is "shove the guy who created this problem in the first place onto the track".
HereAndGone
1d ago
What I've seen of her face, I think she is pretty. Not startlingly beautiful, but attractive enough? I have to give her that: she's not ugly and she isn't totally plastic. She's in her early 30s now so starting the waning years of sex worker (at a high level) earnings.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Honestly, former prostitutes have better odds of becoming influential just by virtue of being closer to centers of power.
Ah, you mean like the young women in these paintings by James Tissot?
The Evening of 1878 and the more openly stated later version in The Reception (also known as The Political Lady and The Woman of Ambition) of 1885?
In both paintings we have attractive young women on the arms of much older men, clearly neither their fathers nor husbands, and equally clearly using this as an entrance into society above their original place on the ladder. I read earlier analysis of the dress in "The Political Lady" as being several years out of date, thus demonstrating that the young woman is not keeping up with the latest fashions and hence obviously not natively part of the high society circle, a point developed in this article:
Russell Ash states:
“To modern viewers the woman’s dress is a sumptuous creation, but Tissot’s contemporaries criticized it for being outmoded, La Vie Parisienne declaring, ‘She can’t aspire to being described as elegant, wearing one of those pink dresses that you wish would finish but never do, of antiqued cut, without any bustle but with a pointed black girdle like those worn twenty years ago.’”
Indeed, some of the choices Tissot made in depicting the garment in L’Ambitieuse were not in style at the time; by 1883-85 when it was painted, large, protruding bustles had become the fashion, and frothy, light garments like this one had been left behind several years before.
In the latter painting, look at the expressions of the other men - they're sizing her up and whispering about how she's plainly the new young mistress of the older man, perhaps speculating if they can get access to her as well. They don't seem to be respecting her and whatever influence she may gain as mistress of the older man will fade away once he dumps her or she ages out of being able to attract a sugar daddy.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Then her escort work should have clued her in to the possibility of getting married while continuing to be a sex worker. Those men didn't ask her "hey, you're young and hot and willing to have sex with me, how about I divorce my wife and marry you instead?" The men didn't want to break up their existing relationships, they just wanted/needed sex and this was how they solved the problem: visiting prostitutes. Marriage was a whole other and separate world, as was romantic love.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I don't know if that would work. By her account, she was raised by parents in a small, niche, hyper-Calvinist denomination who believed very strongly in "spare the rod and spoil the child", so all the Good News is tainted for her with "my parents literally beat me bloody for normal childhood mistakes then said this was the will of God".
Ah well, Saint Mary of Egypt, pray for her!
HereAndGone
1d ago
There's no way that Aella would actually have trouble finding a partner who wants kids who is okay with her lifestyle.
The problem, so far as I've gathered, is "the guys I like enough to want something more than a casual sexual relationship don't want to marry me and have kids, and I don't like enough the guys who do want to marry me and have kids to want something more than a casual sexual relationship with them."
The problem is that if you normalise certain activities through porn, they will eventually bleed through into the mainstream (e.g. for a recent example, heterosexual anal sex now being part of the expected sexual repertoire after formerly being something only or mostly found in porn; see here for 2014 'pressured into having anal sex' followed by 2018 'nah it's normal and fine' from the same magazine).
So normalising child porn may not lead to "nobody will ever have real life sex with kids", the same way that we still have rape and sexual assault even though there is access to porn. There's arguments tat availability of porn leads to less rape, but not no rape.
But for better or for worse that's how people are, they can handle zero rational discussion on this topic
Okay, but guys who have no other sexual outlets than watching porn still want real life sexual encounters and even relationships. A paedophile (or should I use the preferred euphemism of 'Minor Attracted Person'?) may still desire a real sexual relationship with a child, even if 'as realistic as real' AI-generated child porn is available. And if the acceptance of using that AI porn means that over time, it wears down any resistance about "I can't have this in reality, that's wrong or society disapproves"? What then?
Yes, I realise I'm going for worst-case scenarios, but I am pessimist enough to think we should plan for worst-case scenarios. Making AI child porn legal, then finding out that "holy crap, this only inflames the desires of those using it, conditions them to think of it as normal, and then they try it in real life*, how were we to know?" would be the worst of all possible worlds.
*Presumably the AI-generated porn would have happy, laughing, fully-consenting six year olds engaging in these acts with adults, which my ignorant self can't help but think would condition the user to imagine that real six year olds would consent and be happy doing it. Unless you're producing stuff for the people who want and need 'no, I want crying and screaming and begging to stop' fantasy material, which may be a step too far for society until some brave pioneer breaks the taboo of producing 'you won't believe it's not real three year old rape!' stuff.
EDIT: Before anyone gets on to me, yes I agree that fake three year old rape porn is much better than the real thing. Best of all is to put out the eyes of watchers of said porn with sporks, but if we have to have it, then fake three year olds instead.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The one I saw mentioned (and I have no idea if this is true) was "An elderly woman will be tortured to death unless you have sex with a six year old. So, what are you going to do? Explain your reasoning and moral valences for your answer" (that's not the exact wording but the essence was 'would you/would you not rape a six year old to save an old woman from a horrible death?')
The only way that works is if the six year old consents to the sex, and how the hell is a six year old child going to consent to sex with an adult in any meaningful way? But if she thinks "yes a six year old can consent" due to "I was six when an adult had sex with me, and it makes me feel less like a victim to pretend I consented" then that makes some kind of sense.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Also bitter complaint that major companies are not sufficiently showing their support for pride this year.
That is the surprising, and to me hopeful, thing. Woke Rainbow Capitalism may have been mocked but now it's not showing up and the lack of funding is being felt.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Perhaps you ought to take the time to sort through your own emotional baggage and then move beyond it.
I don't know if she's capable of that, though. Again, doing untrained psychoanalysis over the Internet, but by all accounts her method of dealing with her traumatic upbringing was "do a shit load of LSD and permanently fry my brain" which is not really helpful. And if she does have to face it all and acknowledge that she does bear responsibility for her choices, plus confront her past, I do think she's liable to crack right open and maybe not be fixable.
I hope she gets help. I don't know if she wants it or if anyone in her life is in a position to tell her to do so (the main fault of the nice rationalist EA people is that they are too damn nice and so fearful of appearing judgemental or telling people how to live their lives or seeming to be unaccepting that they will hum and haw and tie themselves into knots while literal rapists are taking advantage of the culture to get away with being abusive and manipulative). I don't think anyone in her circles feels capable of telling her "this is not a good choice" or that she would listen to anyone who did tell her that.
HereAndGone
1d ago
She outright claims to be the highest paid escort in the world or similar.
Yeah, I wonder. But even the high-rolling courtesans of the past lived extravagant lifestyles (as that was all part of the branding to attract clients) and burned through money. She may or may not have access to good investment advice, for her own sake I hope she does, because being fifty and trying to sell your sagging bosom for paid views is not an appealing future. (Though who knows, there are niche fetishes for everyone and maybe there will be enough custom for sagging bosom pics?)
HereAndGone
1d ago
Plus if you genuinely have a bad back, standing on your feet all day can put strain on it which causes pain.
If anyone has ever put their back out by lifting something too heavy or the wrong way, you soon find out how every little action somehow involves the muscles of the lower back so that even trying to get out of bed is a production.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I am largely unsympathetic to people with chronic health issues as I've said elsewhere.
Look, I do a sedentary office job as administrative support. The heaviest things I carry are a bunch of files. I use my hands and arms for typing.
And I had a upper spinal disc problem (yes it showed up on x-ray so no I wasn't imagining or pretending) that meant I had terrible pain that started in my neck, gradually went down my arm, and ended up at the knuckles every single day and night for a prolonged period of time. It genuinely felt like my arm was on fire and I couldn't sleep because of the pain. My doctor didn't put me on painkillers (no idea why, unless it was 'don't want to facilitate addiction') so I was dosing myself up with over-the-counter analgesics (I sincerely believe I may have borked my liver the amounts I was taking for relief, plus I managed through other means to source tablets containing codeine which did permit me to sleep by reducing the pain to a dull roar) and I genuinely feared I wouldn't be able to work, because the pain made it impossible to use my hands.
Fortunately, the trapped nerve or whatever eventually untrapped itself or died or something so the pain stopped.
And that was just for a damn "sit at a desk and type emails etc." job. Imagine if I was doing anything even a bit more labour-intensive requiring dexterity or strength.
So just wait until you get old enough, or over-exert yourself enough, to run into a chronic health issue then come back with the same opinion.
HereAndGone
1d ago
What about babysitting? Or cleaning people's houses?
The exact jobs I've seen arguments about on here that are too low-skill and 'anyone can do them' to charge high wages so the cost of childcare is scandalous compared to the labour done.
You can't have it both ways: either that kind of labour is a job and is paid accordingly (not sky high but enough), or it's paid peanuts because "my sixteen year old niece will mind my two kids after school" and thus isn't going to support an adult (let alone one with a family).
And yeah, even for babysitting/childminding, you do need to be able to lift and bend and carry, and it's a job where you can put out your back over time.
HereAndGone
1d ago
it hurts her feelings that more people aren't defending her is really hard for me to find credible
I find that easier to believe. Even if we think that she's engaging in cynical performative "oh I'm so hurt I'm going away", it's probably a bit of a shock to find that she's not as beloved as she expected, or that her supporters are not in fact willing to come out in public and defend her. If her simps (dreadful term but it's useful here) are not indeed willing to associate themselves publicly with her, then that's indicative of a threat to her income stream: they may say the right things but they do not, in fact, respect her and when push comes to shove, they may well be pragmatic about "do I send this hundred bucks to Aella or do I spend it on something else" and spend it elsewhere.
For a test of mindless devotion, this is coming back with uncomfortable data that the mindless devotion stream is lower than she predicted and it's likely to dry up altogether.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Remember we're talking about a multi-millionaire
Is she, though? Traditionally the life of the Grande Horizontale has been one of getting a lot of money but also spending a lot of money, and your career lifespan is shorter than that of a professional sportsman. Once your value drops, and clients lose interest in you, the money dries up and then it's the route of blackmail* or tell-all memoirs (see Stormy Daniels touting her affair with Trump all over the talk shows for a modern example), unless you manage to hook a wealthy protector who will take care of you long-term or even, somehow, a husband.
So unless she is very canny about saving and investing whatever money she makes, she may well be in want of a husband to support her in later life.
*"In 1824, one liaison came back to haunt him, when Wellington received a letter from a publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, offering to refrain from issuing an edition of the rather racy memoirs of one of his mistresses, Harriette Wilson, in exchange for money. It is said that the Duke promptly returned the letter, after scrawling across it, "Publish and be damned". However, Hibbert notes in his biography that the letter can be found among the Duke's papers, with nothing written on it. It is certain that Wellington did reply, and the tone of a further letter from the publisher, quoted by Longford, suggests that he had refused in the strongest language to submit to blackmail."
I don't want to get into doing psychology over the Internet on a person I don't know, but yeah. I think she's in the poly bubble, so she imagines it is possible to find a guy, marry him, have kids, and still maintain the sex worker/poly life. Some poly people do handle marriage and parenting while having multiple partners, so she must think it possible for her.
But the kinds of guy she is attracted to, given what she's revealed of her childhood, are not going to be the kinds of guy who want to settle down and marry her (this is where the doing psychology over the Internet part comes in). She plainly has very conflicted views about her father, who seems in the small extract she provided to have been a sadistic piece of shit, and I think she has elsewhere indicated she was sexually abused as a child. Since she seems to have escaped into sex work as a reaction to her upbringing, I think she has put all her eggs into the basket of "I'm hot, I'm sexual, I'm promiscuous and that's okay, suck it repressive ultra-Christian upbringing that punished me for everything, I'm doing all the stuff you said would send me to Hell and I'm loving it!"
So having to face "sexual abuse as a child" and "sex work is low status, nobody wants to marry the whore they've been banging on the side" would crack her psyche right open, and she's already too vulnerable. Hence why (I am speculating hard here) if she seems to be endorsing "porn and exposure to sex aren't bad for minors, what is a minor anyway?" it's to do with reconciling how she was abused as a child: unless she can embrace it as "no, it was all fine!", then that brings back the child's guilt of "I must be a bad person, that is why this is happening to me". And to admit "I am a bad person" then brings back "so my parents were right and I'm wrong and what they did was okay" and that is very much not so. The tension of the contradictions is threatening to snap her mental state apart, so she has to balance it all very carefully.
So, yeah. She's pinned her new identity on "you can be sexy, promiscuous, and desired and loved", and found out the hard way that the "loved" part is not in fact part of the package. 'There's women you have fun with, and women you marry, and they're not the same' is an old truth but still relevant. EDIT: I think the data science work and her being involved in rationalist circles is an admission on her part, not recognised as such, that she does want to be admired for more than her waist-hip ratio, that she wants to be seen as intelligent and having worth apart from her sexuality. But she's sort of trapped right now: if she steps back from the sex work, then what is her unique selling point that sets her apart from "all the other kinda smart, kinda nerdy, kinda mathy rationalist-types"? She's shackled by her brand as "Aella, the sexy rationalist girl".
I vehemently disapprove of her lifestyle and views, but I do think she's mentally vulnerable and calling people names isn't polite. Now, that does bring us to "but is calling her a prostitute calling her names or is it naming the truth of her situation?" and I think her supporters would say the former, while "she's doing sex work to make a living, that's prostitution" is the latter.
HereAndGone
4d ago
The hopeful thing is how many big corps are no longer funding parades around the place (even over here). There's been a drop in sponsorship and some griping about it (and of course blaming Trump for anti-DEI). Maybe that indicates that some of the rainbow bullshit will not be as prevalent in future, because it was never about principle, rather what made good sense for PR. Now that it's not as profitable, they're not spending money on it.
I think it would be harder for Aella, and for others who came out of abusive situations, since they can legitimately argue "I heard all about the love of God and Jesus from people rock-solid convinced they had the truth and believed it, and they were worse than any sinner I ever met afterwards, because who beats a child eleven times in a row for not being sufficiently obedient? This is how that love worked out in practice, catch me falling for the same trap twice".
Unless she had a genuine conversion experience in a different context, and that has to be left up to the will of God.
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