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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?
She had another survey that looked at success of escorts by age and found younger more successful, which was apparently not particularly controversial.
But ageism isn't something that ever really caught on with current progressives. I still recall a prominent Babe.net (of Aziz Ansari bad date fame) defender trashing some critic by calling her old, without much pushback.
Your surprise at the reaction to this is why "radical centrism" is actually a thing now. Previously bland, no-shit-sherlock observational territory is becoming verboten.
Oh, I don't know. I definitely see a lot more complaints about ageism in dating over time and a lot more complaining about age gaps.
Naturally, all the complaints are about men preferring younger women, allegedly cause they're easier to abuse.
Right now it's sort of a FDS/Deuxmoi (aka internet rabbit hole) thing but I remember when we used to laugh at "Tumblrinas" and say shit like "I identify as an attack helicopter" and,well, we are where we are now. I can see it building.
No one seems to doubt that men like youthful women, though. If you point out that women in their late teens and early twenties are considered most beautiful as a cross cultural universal, wokes don’t generally try to dispute it. They’ll argue that fat is beautiful and dark skin is beautiful and western beauty standards are artificial about those things until they’re blue in the face, but generally not the same argument about men’s preference for youth.
Because that one can easily be mapped to "(white) men bad"
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The interpretation of why has changed.
There does seem to be a push amongst some to act as if it is a moral failing of men and mainly a desire on the part of abusers to abuse younger and more vulnerable women. I think you're very much mistaken if you don't think the same sort of delusion that leads people to argue that fatness is stigmatized merely due to arbitrary social norms doesn't lead to them also whining about youth being favored by men. It's out there, it hasn't metastasized yet.
I don't know what percentage of this is bitter, extremely online 30 year old women just whining and competing as they can intrasexually*, or people who've actually worked themselves into a shoot and legitimately believe this.
Given that some people are apparently now convinced that men and women are interchangeable, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter category is much larger than expected.
* Thanks to feminism you can't just attack the young women, but you can attack the men dating them and try to stigmatize the relationship by calling it "predatory" - that way you don't have to compete with more attractive younger women. This path actually allows one to pretend you're doing this to help the younger woman and not to cope with uncomfortable realities of the dating market.
Was the stereotype of much older men taking advantage of the naivety of younger women/girls ever not a thing? I mean, obviously the woke hyperventilate about it, but they hyperventilate about everything. It’s one of the big justifications trotted out for patriarchy- that these men are secretly losers and are targeting young women too naive to see their character for what it is.
Where wokeness and feminism change things is that they can’t use it to justify patriarchal control of those young women anymore, so they redouble on attacking the man, and also can’t endorse more traditional ways that you often had large age gap relationships(because traditional forms of courtship depended on patriarchy). Hence, total condemnation of large age gap relationships because the proper, pro-social way to do them necessarily impedes the autonomy of young women pretty substantially. A full grown man carrying on directly with a very young woman/girl has never been seen positively, for largely the same reasons the wokes don’t like it. Girls/very young women are, to put it bluntly, morons about relationships and generally not competent to pick their own partners, and hence are pretty easy to take advantage of by nefarious actors. Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, wokes sometimes have a tendency to call things ‘abuse’ or ‘harassment’ that are neither of those things. Yes, they talk in a shrill manner about it, but they do that about everything. But ancient and medieval law codes criminalized seduction for a reason. This is just progressives reinventing the wheel and calling it something different, again. The difference is this time, you can’t just talk to her father and have everything be nice and socially approved of. And there’s very legible reasons progressives would insist on that difference. And all of that is pretty compatible with acknowledging that women are most attractive to men from 16-23 and not in their 30’s. And for the most part, wokes and progressives don’t dispute that. They may jabberwok about power imbalances and predatory behavior, but they don’t seem to think they can change Leonardo DiCaprio only dating women under 25.
This is now being applied to cases like this where a 25 y/o almost-certain independent millionaire dating a 40-something y/o millionaire is being harangued enough that she's complaining about it on her page. Or the Al Pacino case where what seems like a 28 y/o gold digger is trying to ride an old man to a position in his will.
Obviously nobody thinks that the predatory male behavior towards immature girls should be tolerated and every society is distrustful of male intentions. This is why we have statutory laws and I'm not even inherently against rules that do things like protect college students from professors, though I do worry about infantlization.
However it seems clear to me that a lot of people are trying to stretch the taboo past that. Part of it may just be the general infantilization of the youth (where college is another state of adolescence).
But I think the reason for that is their own sexual imperatives. And this is revealed in the cases they pick: Florence Pugh is one of the most promising stars in the world, with wealth and status. She honestly was more high status at the time than her partner. If the industry had to pick one... There is no justification for being angry on her behalf. I used to even see women side-eye George Clooney for usually dating ~35 y/os. It never got as big as Leo, since he mainly "tastefully" dated 30+ but it was a thing. Again: once someone is 30 there's no justification for worrying about their consent.
Put it to you this way: this dynamic is actually very similar to black women complaining about "their" men (since black women and older women show preference for black and older men respectively and don't want to compete with perceived more attractive options) being taken. They also come up with their own motivated reasoning for why it's bad.
Do you think black women are actually doing this for the safety of white women? I'm trying to be more optimistic about human nature but...
They're deliberately trying to pathologize it.
This to me is like the "I don't think they're trying to cancel JK Rowling". They're not trying to because they're - rightly - fatalist about it; Leo and Rowling are just too insulated and most people don't care about Leo's dating. They'll do what they can on the margins though - aka whining online endlessly.
But, as I said, I no longer take it for granted that these sorts will stay in their niche.
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