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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Aella recently made an online survey about escorting and posted a chart on Twitter. It shows monthly earnings binned by BMI and clearly depicts that escorts with lower BMI making more on average than escorts with higher BMI. I would not have thought anybody would be surprised by that. The comments under the post proved me wrong.

Christ almighty, I had no idea that there are so many statistically literate whores around just waiting to tell you your survey is bad. I also wasn't aware that escorts advertise their services so openly on social media.

The number of escorts, both slim and not so slim, calling her out with little to no argument is mind blowing. The arguments they do give basically amount to sample size too low, BMI isn't real or "your survey is bad, and you should feel bad". Some of them also appear to lack reading comprehension. They point out that a sample size of 30 doesn't tell you anything meaningful. The post, however, clearly states that the sample size is about 30 per bin (which Aella points out is kind of low), making it about 150 total. Some give the argument that they themselves have high BMI but earn way more than that, and therefore the survey result must be wrong. Averages are seemingly a foreign concept to some.

A lot of them don't give much of an argument at all but question her intentions. Why would anyone be posting such dangerous information targeting the doubly marginalized group that is fat escorts? Their point seems to be that such information serves no purpose for anyone and should be kept hidden, which is ridiculous, since any woman considering escorting must have an interest in how much she can expect to earn based on her body type.

Others claim Aella is trying her hardest to stir the pot for attention. That could have been a valid point, if what she posted had been the least bit controversial. If you went out and asked 100 random people, I can't imagine that more than a few would say they believe fat escorts on average make the same as normal weight escorts. I also can't imagine any of these offended women would have any sort of problem with a chart showing that taller men make more on average than shorter men.

A few are asking what Aella's credentials are or whether the survey has been reviewed by an ethics committee, as if you need any of that to do a random google forms survey on the internet. They appear to believe that ethics committees are to protect people who might find the result offensive and not the participants of the study.

I also can't help but find a bit of irony in prostitutes trying to discredit someone based on their credentials.

Anyways, the data from the survey is available on Aella's website. I had a quick look at the correlations. It seems to be mostly what you would expect, but one thing that I don't get is that condom use shows no correlation with contracting STDs, which makes me quite suspicious of the data. It isn't correlated with education level either, but somewhat correlated with doing the job out of desperation (0.19). I would assume it would be the other way around. What is even crazier is that condom use is slightly negatively correlated (-0.11) with having a romantic partner. That seems absolutely insane to me, but maybe they use protection when they are with their partners?

Not a single one of the replies is by statistically literate people. "Sample size" is an applause light, nothing more.

But I've been thinking about this recently, why did fat women become a protected class among the woke? After being recommended, this video about how some Norwegian students found a math question about calories in vs. calories out "offensive".

After all, most woke protected classes share either one of two traits. Historically did not have rights in the US or are hated by the ring wing in the US. Fat women don't satisfy either category. And yes, the "body positivity" egregore speaks for fat women only.

My theory is that it's a memetic mutation. It has all the markers of a true woke cause and can Cuckoo as a woke cause as a result. The fact is self-serving for its adherents might just be a coincidence. Or it could just be the woke female analogue of inceldom. Also probably incentous with the quirky mental illness memeplex. Just fucking madness. I'm not even gonna bother trying to make sense of all this.

It slides neatly into the memeplex of "men bad," since a (false) story can be told that it's primarily men who police women's bodies and create fatphobia.

For comparison, you'd expect incels' "heightism" to merit at least as much concern as fatphobia, but there's, unsurprisingly, little embrace of it as a cause among the woke.

I agree. The lack of concern for heightism should be enough to convince anyone that wokism is a hammer of the strong not a shield of the weak. Short men face extreme discrimination and there is nary a peep from the woke about the issue.

In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth. Worse, the hatred of short men today is actively cheered by most women.

There's a recent commercial where a woman is watching a football game during a wedding. When the minister says "are there any objections", she says (watching the game) "he's so clearly short". This is played for laughs. Imagine she had said "he's so clearly black" instead.

In modern society, short men are like the Cagots of the Middle Ages, who were hated and considered unclean for no other reason than an accident of their birth.

Surely this is an extremely hyperbolic comparison. Per Wikipedia, Cagots were legally "typically required to live in separate quarters", "not allowed to enter taverns or use public fountains", "buried in cemeteries separate from non-Cagots, with reports of riots occurring if bishops tried to have the bodies moved to non-Cagot cemeteries", "allowed to enter a church only by a special door", "compelled to wear a distinctive dress to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose", "prohibited from selling food or wine, touching food in the market, working with livestock, or entering mills", and so on, and so on, and so on.

On the other hand, short men in the modern day... have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?

have difficulties getting dates and are made fun of in pop culture?

I think if you add the parent comment to yours and divide by two you'd get the truth. So a little hyperbole for humor is par for the course here.

As a tall dude, the way short men are treated is beyond "difficulty getting dates". I know men whose SMV would quadruple with another 6" in height. Everything requiring effort and personal quality comes second to a chick standing on her tippy toes to kiss.

I understand it's correlated with dick size but the female height fetish has never been not fucked up.

Even if short men could literally not get a partner ever, this would not take them half the way to the situation of Cagots according to most people's value function (though I have certainly seen a tendency in incel communities to obsess about female acknowledgement/attention to the point that it displaces anything else, and they can truthfully say that they consider deficiency in it worse than the previously listed set of abuses; this seems to me to be pathological).

Moreover, I do not think it is in fact true, unless one is so short as to be disfigured; among all my acquaintances I can not point to a single single guy whose singleness appears to primarily be due to them being short, though there may be nontrivial indirect causality (along the lines of shortness contributing to lower SMV, which contributes to negative experiences, which contribute to personality flaws). I know of two long-term couples where despite the odds the guy is significantly shorter than the girl (and in neither of the two cases does he have any overwhelming compensatory advantages like being rich or famous). Being so short that there are no girls shorter than you at all, for a guy, at any rate would be very rare.

You could argue that the "short->unattractive personality->no dates" pipeline is just "short->no dates" with a technical extra step, but it's not like there aren't plenty of other initial causes that end in "unattractive personality->no dates" for men all the time. Among the people I knew, "got into the wrong kind of anime early on" depressed performance more than "is short"; and while you could argue that getting in the wrong kind of anime is fixable in a way being short isn't, in this case we are talking about either effect being mediated through personality (you can't unwatch Love Live! any more than you can gain height), which in either case is likely fixable, even if you need to get electroconvulsive therapy or something in the toughest cases.

I can tell that subconsciously I'm much more dismissive of men 5" shorter than me, than men around my own height.

Note, this does not apply to short men who are visibly jacked. Take the dwarf pill. Clangeddin be with you.

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