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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?
The Motte is in fact the first rat-adjacent space in which I have noticed how much seething hatred she seems to inspire in certain quarters. It seems... hard to determine why it's so extreme, but at the same time totally unsurprising that it is there? After all, she has consciously and openly built her social status by entering a community of nerds starved for female attention and selectively dangling hers before them, making a show of being simultaneously promiscuous and picky to come across as the stereotypical "slut who will sleep with everyone but you" to almost everyone simultaneously, with echoes of the circle crusher trope as well. On top of that, her audience includes a large number on the alt-right~trad larper spectrum (see this very forum), whose role compels them to reach for the KJV vocabulary when facing people in her line of work, as well as redpillers who seem to take particular offense at the "rational camgirling" of her oeuvre that is essentially gender-flipped redpill advice (under the men extract sex = women extract resources homomorphism), and few people enjoy having the UNO reverse card pulled on them.
For the record, though, I've actually always enjoyed her posts, and would be sad if there are no more. I always kind of assumed she knew what she was doing and was just okay with the rock-bottom agreeableness lifestyle, so did anything actually change (The ranks of the white knight guard thinned too much? The haters became more numerous or determined than before?) or should I read this as her having somehow managed to remain in denial about the reaction until now?
The endless "Though experiment: what if a scenario where pedo stuff is not actually harmful, or is at least the least harmful option?" assuredly plays a large part.
I don't think I noticed that, somehow. What sort of "pedo stuff" are we talking about, on the spectrum from toddler rape to the American "that bikini pic? She was 17 years and 364 days old, you monster"?
Possibly relevant link: AI Child Porn Will Probably Save Real Children
She's probably right but damn if that isn't the most autistic thing ever. It is not new that people will treat anything short of maximal condemnation of child porn as being pro-child abuse. I don't think that it should be that way, because it's better for said abused children if we can rationally discuss ways to better disincentivize what's happening to them. But for better or for worse that's how people are, they can handle zero rational discussion on this topic and I would say she should've known that.
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.
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.
I don't think you have to normalize it if you make it legal. There's no need to put "literal toddlers" next to "teens", "mature" and "shemales" up on PornHub.
Just like in some countries addicts can get injected with heroin at government-run clinics, the same approach can be used there: pedophiles can visit government-run clinics, where a soundproof room with a PC securely connected to a government-run AI CSAM server is theirs for X minutes a week.
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!
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