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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?
To drive the point home, these women affect being really anal about methodology – despite being, like you note, often unable to parse the trivial study design. I wouldn't scoff at that merely because of their occupation, escorts aren't street workers and may well be above average in intelligence (though Aella is of course still an outlier) – it's more of a conflict of interest, Upton Sinclair moment, and as is common, it's misguided territorial instinct – they won't get more clients nor higher incomes by making the conclusion of the study or Aella personally lower-status on Twitter.
Crucially, they have strong guild/cabal ethics with their talk about «community» and how she's «new», and a weird idea of the purpose of ethical research guidelines. Or... maybe their idea is the correct one in the current climate?
I've collected their responses (not up to date) because it was just such a perfect example of motivated reasoning and middlebrow dismissal, it reminded me of mainstream skepticism directed at politically incorrect findings we discuss here more frequently, namely HBD. See also: artists and AI, audiophiles and double blind testing, {your own example}.
I don't include links because my goal isn't to bash their looks (by the way, it's not like she got dogpiled by conventionally overweight hookers).
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This was my favorite comment. It implies that either
BMI does not correctly measure obesity, in which case it wouldn't be stigmatizing toward fat people because it isn't correctly identifying them
BMI stigmatizes fat people, which means it correctly identifies them, but having a high BMI somehow brings some additional stigma that merely being fat doesn't
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