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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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The claim as I understand it:

You have social media models, women who are making a living squarely in the "model" category of posting pictures of themselves in skimpy clothes or bikinis or whatever, but are not selling nudes or selling actual sex, don't have an Onlyfans, aren't advertising availability as a sugar-baby, etc. Super-rich guys from Dubai (or presumably elsewhere, but Dubai is the usual claim) DM them soliciting straightforward prostitution, offering to fly them to the guy's location in a private jet, pay them an absurd sum for a considerable amount of degeneracy, maybe let them have a mini-vacation afterward, and then fly them home, and the women find this offer acceptable. To the super-rich Dubai guys, this is essentially ordering takeout as the money involved is insignificant. For the women, the money is very significant, and it turns out that they do indeed have a price. It is claimed that this happens often enough that it is A Thing, an element of the social media ecosystem of which common knowledge more or less exists. It's sort of the difference between people looking for work and people willing to be headhunted.

The quoted phrase is the above, framed maximally-uncharitably.

This is not at all unbelievable to me, though it mounts, frames, and hangs the idea that the modern era is as corrupt and depraved as any that has come before it, just in different ways. I wonder how common it is.

Anecdotally I know at least one extremely (to me at least) physically attractive girl (a dancer) who has had similar offers (though not from Arabs, or not to my knowledge) but has refused them (so far.) Once her currency as a burlesque "star" begins to go down as her age goes up, I wonder how it will all play out. She's a lovely person, actually, in her way. At one point in my life I would have been quite taken with her. I suspect large swaths of girls in Japan at least would be reluctant to be flown to wherever simply because of the language barrier. Very wealthy men in Japan aren't as desperate for sex as someone in a more sexually repressed culture such as those in the mid-East, but I suppose they could be training their kept-women up to Tokyo.

Tangentially related, but have you or anyone else heard the term "misyar marriage"? I hit the trending button and possibly because I am in Asia I was bombarded by a lot of tweets in Arabic. Because why not I had them translated by my phone, and they were mostly masked women advertising themselves for these arrangements.