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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Extremely frivolous stuff, but there's a fun debate going down over on Aella's twitter about personal hygiene. In short, as a true empiricist, she measures lots of stuff about her daily routine (iirc, using an app called Daylio), and recently revealed her stats for 2023. What is causing a kerfuffle is not the number of days she had sex (63), took Adderall (126), or escorted (6), but the number of times she showered, namely 37 [sic].

Aella insists she doesn't smell (and says she's consulted with others to confirm this), but I think that's a very relative statement; some people seem to have a high baseline tolerance for stank of various kinds, to the point that even strong odours don't register to them as stank, while others like myself are very smell sensitive; at the risk of TMI, my wife was amused that I could tell when our kids in their diaper days had done a pee, because I could always smell it almost immediately even when she had no idea. Back in my online dating days, there were several dates I simply couldn't follow up on because the person I was with had bad personal hygiene. I'm not talking about a mild healthy body odour here, but when you're having sex doggy-style and get hit by bad ass-stench it's an instant boner kill. And I'll be honest, I've had a crush on Aella for ages; she's a very attractive nerdy woman, and as a sexually confident and charismatic female Rationalist, she is a very horny unicorn among horses. But I've got to say, learning that specific factoid about her life had a similar effect on my idle long-distance lust as an F150's tires do on a small rodent (not that she should care, of course - just putting it out there).

That said, I am a bit of ablutomaniac - I shower and/or bathe 2-3 times a day. I don't think it's a hygiene thing per se. I shower when I get up because it helps me feel awake and ready for the day; I often have a shower or bath in the late afternoon/early evening after a workout because it feels great to soak sore muscles; and I sometimes shower just before bed, because I find it really nice to get into a bed with clean, fresh-smelling sheets having just come out of the shower smelling clean and fresh myself. I also routinely use (carefully chosen, subtle) cologne on my body as well as both fabric conditioner and scent booster when washing my clothes.

Anyway, Aella's feed is pretty funny right now, to the point that she's holding polls about showering, and I was curious what folks here think about it. Obviously me and Aella are at different ends of the ablutic spectrum, but what's a healthy normal number of times to shower/bathe per day? How much of it is down to personal preference?

actual prostitute who literally sells her body as a commodity apparently has no respect for it or and is whoring this out on the internet.

Wow this is really compelling stuff. A girl in the internet talking about her bobs and vagene? Sounds like she isn’t like the other grills!

This is objectionably low-effort. Don't post like this please.

I disagree that this is any more low effort than the rest of the replies here, it’s just said more succinctly.

Here’s a longer version which takes more “effort”.

Why is Aella popular among rationalist spaces? Well one reason could be that rationalist spaces trend towards under sexualized men, and likely often polyamorous men, who tend to be be both undersexualized and bitter towards women. Aella offers them the fantasy of an attractive woman who could potentially have sex with them, or at least provides the fantasy that there are other women like her who could potentially have sex with them.

Not only this, but she also provides sapiosexual fantasy if an “above average intelligence” woman who will talk with them deeply about deep, interesting, complex topics. Sex is traditionally not something talked about in the open, and she is willing to proverbially kill this sacred cow, something that is incredibly alluring to a sapiosexual, because it gives odd the impression of deeper understanding or thoughtfulness.

Of course this, like her other prostitution, it fake.

A prostitute doesn’t love you, and the feelings you get from one are are a shallow simulacrum of love.

Similarly the things Aella is saying or talking about are shallow (because being thoughtful isn’t the point), because the point is to titillate nerds, not to actually increase any level of understanding.

It’s porn for sapiosexuals, it’s porn for everybody else, and for a few unlucky men, it’s the willingness to be an actual prostitute.

It’s sad, and also incredibly annoying because like another poster said, this stuff gets posted in the ratsphere all the time. It’s snuck in as “discussion”, but it’s just a prostitute advertising her body and mind as available for sale.

I hope this considered “higher effort”. I suppose asking me to take something with meaning and expand it into something with has the appearance of meaning is pretty appropriate for a thread about Aella

and she is willing to proverbially kill this sacred cow, something that is incredibly alluring to a sapiosexual

I’ve never been able to take the term sapiosexual entirely seriously, because in the Malay language, sapi means cow. Nominative Etymological determinism strikes again?