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If you've been on twitter in or around the tpot space the last few days, you may have seen Aella blowing up and deciding to go private. I won't recount the whole story, but it is in screenshots in the link earlier.
Suffice to say, apparently she searched her name and saw a ton of vitriolic attacks and discussions around her online presence. She claims that the worst part is the "overwhelming hate with nobody defending me. People are ashamed publicly to support me, they don't want to be called a simp or cringe."
Long story short she basically said that she is heartbroken, is "so sad the world is shaped this way," and decided to quit twitter and go locked for the foreseeable future.
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute. She is extremely successful, and has built up a huge presence on twitter as well as a cult following in rational spheres. She does data science work as well, and claims to be autistic. She is polyamorous and openly promotes and campaigns for that lifestyle, as well as doing drugs. Some of her stunts include things like tattooing her name on the body of men who have sex with her, having orgies while sharing details of who got to get in, etc.
A few darker claims are that she pushed her two younger sisters into sex work (one of them, by her own admission on twitter, was doing camgirl jobs before she turned 18.) She has also said some... problematic things that are edging around support for pedophilia, although she's canny enough not to come right out and say it.
Now as I'm sure many people here agree with, I don't exactly agree with aella's views or lifestyle. That being said I am still torn, the world is a cruel place. At the same time, aella has probably caused harm to a lot of others with her lifestyle and especially her approach to promoting it online.
This equivocation points to an actual underlying tension/confusion I have around liberal expression. On the one hang I think polyamory, sex work, and some of the.... encouragement aella has around minors watching point &c is quite bad, and should not be allowed to happen in the public square. I think a certain amount of shaming is absolutely good and necessary.
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves, in order to protect our children and especially young girls from (imo) degenerate and overall unhealthy lifestyles?
How should society treat a prostitute who encourages other women to become prostitutes? She's a predator. She is preying on the minds of other young women, as well as on the minds of young men.
There are countless stories from every culture in the history of the human species that portrays people like her as some form of demon that should be cast out of society at best. People aren't being as nice to her as she wants, and she wants to continue preying on them. Even this sob story about how she claims to be surprised that people don't like her is yet another attempt at hijacking the attention of people by violating sexual norms.
Yes she is a human being and I don't want her to suffer, but she should feel a nearly infinite amount of shame for the harm she has done to the people around her. I hope she figures this our and starts working to repair it.
No human being is irredeemable, and this includes her; part of that redemption is an acknowledgment that what she has been doing has been harming society. I truly hope she can figure this out, and once she does society will welcome her with open arms.
I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
That is not just how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
It's pretty close to how it goes.
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
No, it is not.
As I have experienced it, marriage is almost a perfect inversion of my thankfully-secondhand understanding of prostitution. My relationship to my wife is not commodified, it is not compartmentalized, it impacts every decision I make each day in a significant way. In the sense that engaging a Prostitute is a discrete choice, my marriage is much less of a choice and much more of a consequence, an effect rather than a cause, leaning far more on path-dependence in a way that would be incoherent if applied to prostitution. You are attempting to fit something into a discrete box whose main feature is its inability to be discretely boxed, and then you are claiming that since everything outside the discrete box isn't inside the box, it can be safely ignored.
A concrete example: if we define "haggling" as "negotiation to maximize one's own benefit at the expense of one's opposite", then haggling's role in prostitution is straightforward and practical. And yet, in a proper marriage, there is no way to productively haggle, because your opposite's interest is your own interest. Most married men will grok the maxim "happy wife, happy life"; I am not aware of an equivalent formulation for prostitutes.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin. It doesn't imply there's no such thing as love, it doesn't imply that there's nothing beyond commodification, etc. (There are many complexities here that would have to be addressed, but I probably don't hold the views that you think I do on these questions.)
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution. People seem to think that prostitutes are bad, in some particularly unique way. We're trying to figure out why they think that.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" is a claim that the exchange of resources for sex is the central feature of the relationship. It is true that marriage relationships involve both sex and the sharing (as distinct from exchanging!) of resources; they also involve a great many other acts and features: emotional intimacy, emotional support, the bearing and rearing of children, companionship, emotional and physical labor, cooperation, negotiation, and on and on; most forms of positive human interaction would either be included or approached by a complete list. What you are doing is to take two items from a very long list, and claim that these two items and their interrelation are central, and all else is peripheral. To say that this elides more than it reveals is a notable understatement.
Another concrete example: Parenting involves exercising total control over a human, while also providing for their physical needs. These two features are the essence of both slavery and imprisonment; therefore, parenting/slavery/imprisonment is basically just slavery/imprisonment/parenting.
One can play this particular game with any form of complex human interaction. Selectively ignoring and exaggerating the aspects and interrelations of any two forms of interaction allows one to claim that anything is like anything, but sophistry provides no actual insight, only the illusion of insight.
From a strict materialist perspective, it seems the chain of argument starts with noticing that these two modes of interaction appear to be mutually exclusive, and quite stubbornly so, and then note that one is very obviously more conducive to human flourishing than the other. It's really no different from materialist arguments against drug addiction, wireheading, or other forms of degenerate hedonism. If you yourself admit that prostitution is deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever relative to marriage and you recognize that prostitution and marriage appear to be mutually incompatible, then prostitution is worse in concrete terms, and in the abstract the situation is improved with less prostitution and more marriage, all the way up to no prostitution and all marriage. Why, from a strictly materialist perspective, should we encourage or even accept the worse state, rather than pushing people as hard as we can toward the better? Maybe that pushing grows counterproductive at some point, quite likely there's a level of coercion where the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but again, the same is true for all the other degenerate forms of hedonism, defection, and bad tradeoff behavior. We live in a society, as they say.
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