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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   1410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."

I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:

Five years ago, it was rare for escorts to charge more than $1K per hour. Now, a handful of women charge much, much more: $3k, $5k an hour. $23k a day. $30k a weekend. Inside the shifting economics of intimacy in Silicon Valley...

I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.

I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.

Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.

Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.

Anyone consistently taking home 30k over a weekend should feel ZERO need to advertise that fact, trebly so if they're in a dubiously legal occupation. They should not want to invite competition, especially from potentially more attractive ladies.

Likewise, such a person would probably not want the attention this could bring to her clients, both for competitive reasons and for their own confidentiality. Its more accepted to do this kind of disclosure either anonymously or as a post-retirement memoir, no?

Conclusion: maybe ONE guy paid her 30k, ONCE, and maybe for some particularly lurid scenario or there were some other expenses involved or whatever. She's using that to set her price negotiations with any future Johns aggressively in her favor.

I'm skeptical of taking MUCH from this about the larger escort scene in SF, although I'm willing to believe, given the gender ratios (to say nothing of sexualities) I've heard predominate out there that any cishet guy with decent Testosterone and hundreds of thousands/millions of tech dollars in his pocket would try to find an outlet.

This article is likely an ad. Not even heavily disguised I'd say.

If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?

There's a valid read on this from the AI/Economic Anxiety perspective though, yes. Tech bros are an ascendant class purely on the backs of very new wealth and the appearance that they'll 'own' the future (maybe not literally) on current trajectories, so their status

And so the two broad sectors of Western economies that are 'thriving' are anything that directly caters to wealthy boomers (or not-so-wealthy, given how much the government spends on them too), or anything that is closely related to AI development. (Finance is doing fine too, but that's not so interesting).

The up-and-coming generation would not be wrong to notice they can trade in significant amounts of dignity and personal autonomy to siphon some of the wealth those particular beneficiaries without having to actually break through into such classes. But 10-15 years of doing so just for a shot at getting enough financial independence to never have to degrade yourself again is kind of bleak to contemplate from this side of it.

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I could be wrong, but I imagine that the average blue-collar worker probably thinks of ultra-high-price escorts as being kinda cool, weird, and glamorous rather than resenting them. It's the same with athletes and entertainers. The average blue-collar worker would direct a bit of occasional grouchy complaining towards them for being supposedly overpaid, but would have no genuine hate in his heart toward them. He can see how they directly provide obvious value to people through various kinds of entertainment. And when it comes to prostitutes, there is the added factor that they are doing a job that the blue-collar worker imagines to be very unpleasant. His resentment toward prostitutes would be largely limited to the subset of prostitutes who do morally dubious things like chase NBA players with the key intent of getting pregnant by them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the blue-collar worker actually felt more animosity toward well-paid white-collar workers whom he imagines (largely accurately) sit on chairs all day long doing arcane corporate bullshit that has unclear tangible value.

That said, the blue-collar worker might well feel resentful of the ultra-high-price escort if her clients are people he feels animosity toward for being supposedly wimpy: highly paid tech workers instead of finance bros, for example.

To be fair, this is largely me going off of vibes I feel like I've picked up in real life and online, not based on any actual data. So I could be totally wrong.

pseudo-intellectual

What's pseudo about it? She's genuinely an intellectual. In fact she bested Meghan Murphy in their debate over porn and sex work on Benjamin Boyce's podcast a few years ago. I remain more on Team Murphy, but she lost that battle.

Anyway, maybe it's just me being jaded and experienced, but I don't see the value in spending so much on these women. They're still just meat sacs after all, they don't warrant such money being spent on them. There's no way they are so differentiated from some other attractive, smart woman that they should command these prices. Do they come with some state-of-the-art virtual reality experience that enhances the encounter, Strange Days-style?

I'd like to see a profile on the guys paying for these women. That would be more illuminating. If they're twenty-something rich, nerdy Asian guys, that would track. If not, I'd have to revisit my murky thesis. These men might too be enchanted by the aesthetic of it all, just like some of the women who will see the article and especially the photo that comes with it. "I'm with this high-end escort like I'm in some Mission Impossible movie or something. It's a cool story I'm in. The people looking at me from across the hotel bar don't know she's an escort, anyway. They may think she's with me organically, and that we're a power couple out here slaying."

I'd be surprised if more than a dozen escorts in the Bay Area actually make more than $1M/year from escorting. It might even be substantially less. Their customers comprise a market that, though not exactly thin, is at least ragged enough and demanding enough that escorts can't simply line up a constant stream of guys to occupy all their working hours. And, if you treat $1M/year as an earnings cap for the very top performers in your career (that will last, very optimistically, a decade), in the Bay Area that isn't really shocking or impressive.

It's not even the best strategy if you're a woman looking to trade her looks and charm for money. Just marry a well-off guy, of which there are plenty. Or be like Lucy Guo: join a company early as the token pretty-ish woman, get fired, and walk away with billions.

I think this is the exact opposite story that should be disseminated widely in a culture. We want stories of women foregoing money, status, and attention for the sake of a marital pairbond and having children, because that’s what you want high iq Bayarean women doing. This story is unlikely to nudge a reader toward escortdom, but it will nudge them toward valuing money and status even more. Or it will make some think, “if she’s taking advantage of her body for so much money, then it’s definitely okay if I do it on a smaller scale with my boss / manager / investor”. But it’s impossible to get a pro-motherhood + pro-love bio in a newspaper.

If you want that, I think you're in luck. I think that the majority of high IQ Bayarean women are either pursuing or at some point will be pursuing a pair bond, usually marital, that includes children. And I doubt that any amount of news stories would have a significant impact on the changing what fraction of them decides to turn to prostitution instead.

I don’t have an IQ breakdown, but they have the highest rate of delaying birth until their 40s, per LA Times

https://archive.is/LUoTe

When it comes to delaying motherhood to pursue careers and other life aspirations, Bay Area women are leading the nation. This region is home to the greatest share of women having children at 40 and older — a trend that experts chalk up to a combination of economic opportunity, progressive social norms and access to reproductive technology.

Dr. Mary Hinckley, IVF medical director at the Reproductive Science Center of the Bay Area, said she was not surprised to see the region leading the trend of older pregnancies since many women there prioritize careers and other life experiences ahead of starting a family. The Bay Area embraces modern forms of family structures that may or may not include children and, in general, largely does not foster a culture where women feel traditional societal pressures to start a family young, she said. Around half of her patients at the fertility clinic are at least 38 years old.

This is suboptimal for a variety of reasons. If we’re throwing a portion of our smartest and healthiest women there, we want them to have the lowest age of birth and the highest number of kids, to maximize health and intelligence of future generations.

Stories like this do have an effect, not any one story isolated, but the kind of women that are boosted in popularity and status among women through our cultural stories (news, social media).

It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.

So close. You are questioning if the escorts who earn big bucks really are worth their money, but don't stop to think if the same might be true for the tech bros who are paying the escorts.

If hiring expensive escorts is conspicuous consumption, then so is hiring expensive tech bros. Plenty of companies decide that paying their CEOs with stock options to the tune of 100M$ is worth the money -- likely for status reasons, some species of white elephants, then so is the CEO paying top tier escorts for a weekend. After all, what use is a astronomical salary if you do not spend it? Many guys end up spending a decent fraction of their paycheck on romance. Paying your ex-wife half of what you own -- or paying child support, for that matter -- generally ends up being more expensive than paying an escort, I think.

A lot of the goods of conspicuous consumption run into totally diminishing returns, where every doubling of the price gets you less value. Going from a 15k$ car to a 30k$ car will be a whole different experience. Going from a car worth one million to one worth two is probably not even going to be noticeable. Likewise, there is a difference between a four dollar wine and a two dollar wine, but if you spend 200k$ rather than 100k$ on a bottle you are most likely just enjoying the price tag. Likewise, I would likely not to be able to tell the difference between an evening with a 10k$ escort and a 100k$ escort (note to self: think about putting that experiment on gofundme). Both will be hot, cultivated and great at sex, I imagine. The differences will probably be completely beyond me, like "but the more expensive one is more focused on the philosophy of utilitarianism, while the cheaper escort is more into continental philosophy, which is less in demand by rich johns right now".

I suppose this cements “the grass is always greener…” as the world’s oldest fallacy.

Measuring one’s life against the most lurid possible comparison is a proud tradition. The difference between your reaction and a kid wanting to be a big rock star is that you don’t actually like the prospect of being in that position. Probably. I’m not gonna judge.

as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand

Note that these are VERY different options. Unlike prostitution, you could almost certainly work your way into any one of them depending on your risk tolerance. But, like, why should you? Is the expected value of any of those options actually higher? Does it outweigh the added risk?

Point is, that tweet is engagement bait. I can’t endorse forming economic opinions based on a platform that hates you rewards style over substance. Twitter delenda est.

My point is I am tempted do something low trust that makes me a lot of money instead of work a normal job. Trade off for myself at the expense of the commons. I’m not comparing these jobs to prostitution necessarily. Only in that they’re all antisocial to some degree.

I guess I’m not convinced of the throughline between all four options, there.

“Leeching off the government” is the only one which involves claiming benefits that were intended for someone else. Some NGOs fall in this category. Everything else sounds like a central example of a job: someone paying you for your labor. If you’re honest and they’re satisfied with your work, how are you defecting?

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

This sentiment is the spirit of our age. And it is a powerful one. Powerful enough to be dangerous.

One looks around themselves only to see ruins. The ruins of institutions, morality, competence, dignity. Lorded over by intrigue and profiteering.

But the despair of ruins, as all things, contains its own contradiction. A hope stirs in men so beset. A miraculous hope. Hope to escape from a mortifying impotence.

And for whom hope? For men with simple ideas and strong resolve.

Yes, the spirit of our age is the spirit of the dictator. The budding flower of the strongman is always nascent in the garden of the brothel.

O, destined Cromwell, may your retribution be no orgy of blood, for all whores who know they own the day also know that tomorrow belongs to you.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I imagine this sort of life would become markedly less cute in your old age compared to being a wageslave and taking the contribution match for a couple of decades.

It's a mistake to take fee lists like that at face value. This is a market where, due to its questionable legality, it's pretty hard to do price discovery. Clients aren't revealing how much they actually pay, and service providers have an incentive to signal that they are in-demand and high-value, because that's how they attract high-end clients. The whole thing is opaque and vibes-based.

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

I have known one of the women this article is describing. (I don't know if she's actually named in the article, I couldn't get past the paywall at my office. But she's aella's set, so the exact sort being described.)

You do not want the lives of these women. In one sense it's sexy to be a porn star or an escort, especially today when people pay you lots of money, you go to parties all over the world, the food is nice and the views are beautiful, etc. But it's not really worth it. As someone who's been blessed to travel a lot after enough of it the locations all blur together and the food is overrated anyways. (Nobody cooks as well as my mother, or my aunts for that matter. My father grilled a better steak than any I've ever had out.) What you're left with at the end of the day is yourself. Wherever you blow, there you are.

The woman I'm thinking of had a lot of problems. She had unnecessary plastic surgery and nose jobs to make herself more beautiful, when she was quite beautiful already. She fucked men for favors and started fights and then found herself without friends. She felt powerful being taken out by powerful and wealthy men who strung her along with fantasies of marriage or introductions that never came. And she didn't need the money because she came from money already. The people who knew her best talked of overwhelming loneliness. Whoever you know, there they are.

If you met her you would think she was beautiful and smart and funny and kind. Maybe this is cope, maybe it's straightforwardly good to be beautiful and wear beautiful clothes and eat beautiful things. Maybe I didn't really know her in any meaningful sense and it's rude to even profile her in the third person. I think she had a lot of fun having sex. I think she did a lot of nice things for a friend one time at some social expense to her own reputation.

I think she hated me because I was gay. I think she was the type of woman who loves exercising power over men, and there was nothing she could exercise over me. I think I saw a glimpse of something that made me feel profoundly sad. I think she would say that she doesn't think about me at all.

I think it all ended rather badly for everyone involved.

I've known lots of other successful and interesting people and I would say generally that the ones who are happiest are extremely productive or extremely devoted to their families.

Thinking some more, I've known some guys who do OnlyFans. One of them is a real sweetheart, pure soul, I have nothing bad to say about him. I think, though, if you wanted to fantasize about the life, at least with respect to professional sex, you would have to really, really enjoy having lots of sex with strangers.

Maybe we're underestimating how sexy sex work has yet to get. Maybe AI and social media have only just begun. Maybe it's like bitcoin when it was $100, and you think, this thing has peaked, we missed our chance, it's too late to buy in. And it still had a few orders of magnitude to go. Sex is after all the oldest profession. Porn stars are famous now, they have a lot of status, it might probably become even more popular. Laid-off email job guys are going to have more time to jerk off right? But I can't think of anybody who got into porn and aged out and is enthusiastically promoting how good it was and how they have no regrets about anything they did. Mostly the opposite.

I think that for the journalists in question it's self-evident that this isn't a great path to pursue. It's also self-evident that there's a certain class of people who will be willing to do sex work regardless of the social stigma, and if there's some poor sap willing to pay them thousands of dollars, well, good for them I guess. I'm reminded of a conversation I had over a decade ago with a college girl who worked for me while I was with the Boy Scouts. A couple years later she was still in college and still working summers while I had left but come back for a week to help with training. I was on a canoe trip with just her and who would have been her boss. Someone had told me a couple weeks prior that she was dancing at a local strip club that the more senior staff had visited together a time or two in prior years, and we were discussing trying to go there while she was working just to see how she'd react. It never ended up happening, but on this trip she confirmed that she was working there, though our plan wouldn't have worked because she only worked afternoons.

Anyway, she said that the woman who handled the strippers or whatever told her how she could make even more money, because of course she could. The going rate was less than my salary at the time, but a lot for a broke college student, especially considering that it wasn't a 9 to 5. I told her that if you wanted to be a prostitute you couldn't be too selective about whom you slept with, since she seemed to be under the delusion that her clientele would be the same 30s office workers who stopped by the club after work. I asked her if she'd be willing to sleep with the big boss at the time, who looked like a younger, thinner version of Dr. Phil, and she was appalled at the idea. She told me that she was assured that they wouldn't pressure her into anything she was uncomfortable with, etc., etc., but I tried to explain to her that while that may be true, the ones who were overly selective weren't the ones who made the kind of money she was quoting. I have no idea who she ended up sleeping with or how much money she actually made, just that she was eventually canned from the Boy Scouts after she requested time off to work her "other job" and what must have been the worst kept secret was made abundantly clear to management. Needless to say, I didn't expect to spend that day trying to talk someone out of becoming a prostitute.

That being said, I think that the same thing applies to all of these "professions" that promise a lot of money for what looks like not a lot of work, or at least the kind of work one thinks they'd find fun. A friend on mine who teaches high school in a rural area says half the kids think they have a future as influencers and YouTubers. I'd be surprised if a single student she teaches over the course of her career is able to do it for a living, even for a brief period. Most of the people who blew up on YouTube started making videos for their own personal edification without any intention of quitting their day jobs.

Wherever you blow, there you are.

Nominating for AAQC solely on the strength of this line.

Reminds me of The Sun Also Rises.

“Hello, Robert,” I said. “Did you come in to cheer me up?”

“Would you like to go to South America, Jake?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the South Americans you want in Paris anyway.”

“They’re not the real South Americans.”

“They look awfully real to me.”

I had a boat train to catch with a week’s mail stories, and only half of them written.

“Do you know any dirt?” I asked.

“No.”

“None of your exalted connections getting divorces?”

“No; listen, Jake. If I handled both our expenses, would you go to South America with me?”

“Why me?”

“You can talk Spanish. And it would be more fun with two of us.”

“No,” I said, “I like this town and I go to Spain in the summer-time.”

“All my life I’ve wanted to go on a trip like that,” Cohn said. He sat down. “I’ll be too old before I can ever do it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money.”

“I know. But I can’t get started.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”

But I felt sorry for him. He had it badly.

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

“I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life. I want to go back in the country in South America. We could have a great trip.”

“Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?”

“No, I wouldn’t like that.”

“I’d go there with you.”

“No; that doesn’t interest me.”

“That’s because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.”

“I want to go to South America.”

He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.

“Come on down-stairs and have a drink.”

“Aren’t you working?”

“No,” I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. “This is a good place,” he said.

“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.

“Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

“Yes, every once in a while.”

“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”

“What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell.”

“I’m serious.”

“It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.

“You ought to.”

“I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.”

“Well, I want to go to South America.”

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

Thinking some more, I've known some guys who do OnlyFans. One of them is a real sweetheart, pure soul, I have nothing bad to say about him. I think, though, if you wanted to fantasize about the life, at least with respect to professional sex, you would have to really, really enjoy having lots of sex with strangers.

Wait I always thought most OF models were making videos with their boyfriends. Now you're telling me they're just actors?

I always thought it would be fun to make videos in the former scenario, but certainly not the latter.

I'm reading your post as half tongue-in-cheek but I want to reply at length anyways (although perhaps this is all obvious):

I would say the most common and successful genre is OnlyFans "performers" who "collaborate" with other performers. It's a big world out there and people will pay for a lot of things and you can make it doing solo "content" or "chat". But even a lot of that is buttressed on an ecosystem of OnlyFans performers collaborating with other performers.

Basically it works like this: OnlyFans stars are all messaging each other or networking in groupchats to figure out who they're going to fuck next. There's a lot of gossip about who's good to work with and lots of rumors about bad experiences with particular stars. Most of this content is amateur, by which I mean, it's not produced by big porn studios. A lot of OnlyFans content now does rely on hiring professional cameramen who film the content to look as if it were amateur. Lots of it is still done with just "ring lights" and some strategically-placed phones on record. Big porn studios have moved upmarket into really emphasizing higher-quality cameras and photography, logistics, and elaborate scenes. A lot of performers will also do a mix of OnlyFans and studio porn, depending on what their mood is.

There are a lot of advantages to constantly "collaborating" with other performers:

  • Every performer you work with potentially brings in a new audience.
  • Audiences get tired of watching the same sex scenes between the same performers.
  • New "collaborations" offer performers the opportunity to show off "different skills"
  • Well-established performers have networks of referrals and advertisers that are attractive to new performers
  • OnlyFans stars enjoy having sex with strangers and traveling to have sex with strangers

My friend, for example: His largest audience comes from Instagram, where he creates fairly tame videos / reels meant to advertise himself to a general audience. (Maybe he does a quick video of himself telling a story about something that happened to him today in his car, maybe he does a clip with a flirty caption where his ass looks good as he does pull-over rows at the gym.) You click through to his twitter, and he obviously has an OnlyFans, although he mostly hints at the truly hardcore stuff and you have to pay to see it. (Lots of performers post sex clips right there out in full, some approaching such length you wonder why anyone would bother to pay for the full version at all.) My friend has told me he's very cynical about how he produces content: he aims to film one new "collaboration" a month, and he spins a few clips from one video into enough advertisements to make enough tweets about it for a full month. He tells me that the kind of men he has sex with on camera aren't really the kinds of men he likes to have sex with off camera, although it looks to me like he has a good time. His fiance is pilled on all of this and doesn't seem to mind. My friend, in fact, rarely mentions his fiance at all, to the point that unless you very devotedly followed his content you would probably assume he were single and maybe even dating around.

I'll add for color a few details that are particular to gay world.

In gay world, everybody knows who the big porn stars are. They are minor celebrities. Some are celebrities. If you go to enough gay clubs in big cities you'll run into them. Everybody knows who they are. They are not really excluded in any social scenes, usually quite the opposite. Imagine if you went to a friend's large 100+ birthday party and Bonnie Blue was there. You go out to your local bar and Mia Khalifa is there. You go dancing and there's Elon Musk cavorting with Aella. What I mean is that there is no separation where porn is relegated to a seedier subworld you have to seek out to access. It is simply the default. If I went clubbing with my friend, people would recognize him.

Which is to say, if you're fantasizing about this life at all, you have to really enjoy sex with strangers. And with any success with becoming a celebrity. With very few exceptions. I have yet to hear someone recommend it whole-heartedly at all. Mostly, the ones who come to like it come to feel as though they've learned something about human nature the rest of us can't know. It's actually ironically very similar to the attitude I pick up from DC politicos who think they "know how the sausage is 'really' made". They think they have special access to some knowledge about the human condition. And it makes them a little jaded in all ways.

I'll add, as a final thought, pardon me if this is Too Much Information, that sex with porn stars is not something I would recommend either. It's very mechanical and lifeless. And in person many of them look way more fake blond and spray-on suntanned and gussied up than you would think from the pictures. The act itself is very mechanical. I've had this argument with some friends before, and some of them have told me I'm crazy. But for anyone here who feels like they're missing out I would say in strong terms that, from what I've experienced, you're not really missing out on anything you should feel jealous about. Unless you really, really like having lots of sex with strangers.

How do you feel about professional wrestling?

I don’t have stats on the OF talent base, other than knowing it has pretty extreme earnings disparities. It is possible that the bulk of content is small-scale amateur film by couples even while the bulk of the cash goes to a smaller pool of celebrities. Can’t say I find it likely compared to the alternative where almost everyone is shooting solo videos.

My hot take is that these sorts of stories reflect more on the ethics of journalists than escorts or the nerds using them. You've already gotten a variety of comments saying "duh." What irritates me about these sorts of stories is that (as @ToaKraka points out) this is an extremely unrepresentative sample of escorts. But there are a number of people who read things like this and think "well for that price I'd do that" and the most likely outcome is that they do that and don't make that price.

Traditional morality was much better at not talking about things than it was stopping things from happening but I think at the end of the day that extra layer of friction - refusing to discuss such things in polite society, highlighting the downsides through didactic tales - serves a function, not in absolutely preventing vice, but in stopping people who might be enticed into thinking (incorrectly! at least statistically speaking) that such a path is a get-rich-quick scheme with few downsides.

There are, however, downsides to this approach, including making it easier to conceal misconduct, so I am not necessarily calling for a RETVRN here. And no, this is not a "we should get rid of the freedom of speech" comment, but there are certain ethical consequences to failing to properly contextualize things and the world is a better place when people try to do that. (One of the upsides of The Motte!)

“Actually, it’s about ethics in e-thot journalism”

The culture war really has come full circle, hasn’t it?

(I kid. Mostly.)

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country

So why don't you leave? This probably sounds harsher then I mean it too. But I did. Life outside the US can be pretty good you are right. So why not go to a first world country like Singapore that's business friendly, or some cheaper country, you could choose a place like Georgia where most people are Orthodox ot as you say Thailand. Those doing NGO grifts probably make less than you so it'd be a downgrade materially and morally. But leaving? You should seriously consider it the rest of the world is fine for an American willing to work with it. Jump on in the water is fine.

Well, a lot of it is that I have close family and friends here that I care about. I live an hour from where I grew up and I am the type of person who cares about roots and really knowing a place.

As I said it gets more attractive, but ultimately my relationships with other human beings are the most valuable and irreplaceable thing in my life, so that weights quite heavily in favor of staying put.

No harm perhaps in taking up travel outside the US a little more if that’s the case. It doesn’t make sense to me to think about moving to another country until you first ask yourself what it is you’re looking for. Take a bit of the page of Nomad Capitalist (guy always struck somewhat as a conman by his personality, but a lot of his content is solid and informative).

This would be difficult to achieve with a hybrid job that requires me to be in office multiple days a week. If I were full remote I’d consider it.

That’s my primary stumbling block as well. I doubt I’d ever leave the US but I’ve thought about it at times. I’m in the same boat as a lot of other people; it’s mostly extended family and friends keeping me here. Something of a new publishing pipeline has opened up the last few years detailing remote careers geared toward travelers and expats. It originally emerged after COVID and has somewhat had a bit of a small takeoff. Consider checking it out on Amazon.

K-Shaped economy plus I'm surprised a lot of the twitter takes are of the 'these guys could get a 11/10 Russian who could suck a golf ball through a straw for cheaper' thing. Maybe I'm overly stereotyping but I'd imagine there's a lot of nerdy types who've been massive beneficiaries of tech money who'd prefer a 7.5/10 who can converse enthusiastically about rationalist stuff over Svetlana.

Hell, I'm not into escorts (I don't mind the act of selling sex I just find that I am totally turned off by the act of buying it) and I'd probably prefer the Aella escort experience to the Svetlana escort experience and those numbers are largely a rounding number at that end of the economy. Also signalling and weird findom/whale-flexing things with substantial rebates or negotiated lower prices are rife in these kinda things. Sophie Rain's purported numbers are baffling to me but the only real possible explanation I can think of would be some sort of whale flexoff.

One thing I’ve learned through history has been just how much sexual attitudes have been culturally conditioned. Napoleon made an observation once (I know I’m butchering it to some degree) about just how much beauty or sexual attraction is environmentally derived. I thought it was a foolish notion at the time but maybe he was onto something. In medieval Scandinavia, it wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to actively observe a newlywed couple having sex in the bridal chamber, right at their damn bedside, on the night of. Loose sexual mores among the women also weren’t considered shameful provided it was kept within the same genetic community and they weren’t racially exogamous. Homosexual butt sex was every bit as disgusting then as it is now. It wasn’t until Christianity spread through the region that modern notions of “privacy” became a thing to the region.

It wasn’t until Christianity spread through the region that modern notions of “privacy” became a thing to the region.

I'd quibble that a lot of these norms remained even after Christianity entered the space, and even after it popularized among the common man. The mainstream academia overstates the 'invention of privacy' as a thing, but various levels of invasive 'bedding ceremony' or tolerated prostitution remained in a lot of Christianized spaces up until the 1600s. Increasing quality of life making modern privacy possible rather than consisting of stolen moments seems to have had some impact.

((I'm not sure on anal sex. It seems like it should have had massive problems, since between the lack of antibiotics and the cost of oils it gets unpleasant fast, but there's a lot of records that seem to heavily treat a lot of nonreproductive sex in the same category, and handjobs and blowjobs get really outsized focus even as they may have been less prone to UTIs than PIV.))

”In medieval Scandinavia, it wasn’t uncommon for a group of people to actively observe a newlywed couple having sex in the bridal chamber”

This makes a surprising amount of sense when you think about it. At its core, what a marriage is is a public announcement that these two specific people are having sex, and that the community is okay with it. There is no better representation of these values than for the community to literally watch the consummation of the marriage.

I understand the logic fully. My comment was more to the point about how Napoleon’s observation now seems startlingly correct, because my instincts revolt against that kind of sexual norm as a Catholic (that’s a cultural difference, which is to his point). The reason they often did that back then was because it constituted “proof,” as a way to cement relations between family clans and noble estates. It wasn’t just a tool of the societal elite though, it was more common than originally believed, but most documented cases focused on the upper crust of society. Often times they’d also station someone outside the room for the morning after, so when the clothing and linen was all collected, there were bloodstains of proof that the woman was a virgin when it happened. Nowadays though if someone propositioned me with something like that I’d tell them hell no.

This was all from Walter Darre’s book, particularly in the last couple chapters. Book had me scratching the back of my head throughout, but was certainly interesting.

We're actually getting hetaerae!

Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Everyone else seems to be pushing back with varying amounts of sarcasm and vitriol, so I want to chime in and say that I actually really feel you man. It is disheartening and demoralizing to be young working-age man in a feminized and rapidly aging society, where the only subject that appears to be up for debate is if our daily sacrifice-quota to the Boomer-Emperor on his Golden Stool should be 1,000 or 1,100 Psykers. My protestant work ethic was once strong, but lately when I look around me that motivation to doggedly pursue duty has diminished. Why do we work? The fortune you need to catch even a semi-pretty girlfriend today (which is one of the main benefits of such fortune, as it ever was) is vast indeed if you aren't a natural with the ladies, and the money one does earn is increasingly siphoned to sustain pensions and elderly care in the World's least subtle Ponzi scheme. And many times that care goes to those so marred by sickness that it is doubtful if their lives is of benefit to anyone, least of all themselves.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. (Revelations 9:6)

I don't believe in surrendering to sadness, but it's a sign of health to be distraught about a future where a small number of capital-owners live like kings while the rest of us are relegated to the saddest jobs in existence. I would in my heart think less of any young man who felt otherwise.

I sometimes feel the same way until I look at it from the other side. If I had no dignity and was completely willing to sell out any self-respectability I had, I could accomplish the same end. I truly don’t envy the lives these people lead. They’re hollow on the inside and can only live a psychologically comfortable life, living in the most supreme level of ignorance one can possibly imagine. Never believe these people when they put so much energy and emotion into telling you how happy they are. They aren’t trying to convince you, they’re trying to convince themselves. True happiness isn’t performative, it’s quiet and content.

I’ve also had the same opportunity to make much more money than I currently do but one thing I always come back to is “what am I doing this for?” I don’t need that much money, and I don’t have a family of my own to support. I was never one of those guys who if I had a billion dollars I’d be living the high life, chartering private jets to Dubai and dropping hundreds of thousands on gold chains. Even at my greediest I’d just be doing more of the same. Ordinary people don’t really envy the rich, they envy the lives they ‘think’ rich people live.

I made my money in a very negative-sum, anti-social space and am now fortunately enough to be largely post-work but yeah I echo this. So much siphoning, so many of the tasks that are offered have no particular direct association with the creation of value and are poised to optimize meh processes. Not to echo the Margin Call sentiment, but few jobs are fortunate enough to actually be involved with the building of bridges these days.

What space? And do you have plans to try and fix things in society as a recompense for the harm you caused? Just curious, trying not to judge.

I appreciate it. I am a bit surprised at the amount of vitriol and "duh you idiot" I am getting in the replies, but it is what it is.

I agree that surrendering to sadness and despair isn't the way. Despite my frustrations above I've found a lot of meaning and goodness in life outside of work. I do a job that I don't hate, that doesn't destroy me with stress, and focus on other areas of my life.

What exactly is new here? "High class escorts" have existed for many years (see Pretty Woman in 1990). The incredible earning power of female sexuality has been known for not quite as long but a very long time. OnlyFans blew up more than 5 years ago, and the top OF models make far more than the earnings quoted. Even if we're talking only the sale of intimacy, I'm pretty sure pornstars have been selling themselves for very high fees online for quite a while. Or see the numerous stories about Instagram models going to the Middle East for some "Dubai Chocolate". As another poster mentioned, the media has a peculiar fascination with the sex lives of Silicon Valley, but that's the only unique thing about this.

Waaaaait a minute...isn't this just courtesans all over again?

When people call it the oldest profession in the world, this is actually what they mean.

I’m pretty sure that covers “camp follower” too, mind you.

Apparently women selling themselves for lifelong indenture to a man and in return sharing in all he has is totally fine, but the instant a woman sells herself for only a fraction of her life and in return shares in a fraction of a man's wealth...

Timeshares?

Are we not more than the mere sum of our economic relationships?

If you can afford to be.

Fairly certain Aella’s crew of whores have implied that they are looking for marriage. The whoring is just skipping the dating part of skipping to the sex. Which is many ways is rational since both sides want that. And then maybe you fall in love with her skills.

Aella though lack of showering and saying she still wants to get gang-banged a few times a year might put marriage out of reach.

But that's what's so strange about this story. These are mistress prices, not escort prices. It's all the expenses of maintaining a mistress without any of the exclusivity or veneer of respectability. What exactly are these men actually paying for?

It's like paying $500,000 for a year-long lease on a car that only costs $300,000 to buy. Just, why?

I'm not able to access the article, but they may indeed be selling temporary fidelity; the grandes horizontales would take a lover for a while and then move on when he or they tired of the association. Plus there's probably an element of showing off on the male side here, the extravagance of "yes I'm paying for this woman at the kind of rates you all know are nosebleed high", since extravagance showered on one's mistress was another way of demonstrating wealth, status and power: you can afford to throw away this kind of money on this kind of expenditure.

Just be glad you don't have a mistress or kept woman like this!

La Païva, as Lachmann became known after her second marriage, crossed paths in 1852 with the 22-year-old Prussian industrialist and mining magnate Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck. ...The young Reichsgraf was smitten, and upon meeting her again in Berlin, he offered to make La Païva his mistress and declared that, if she agreed, she would share his fortune. La Païva, who craved riches more than anything, was reported to have said, after settling down with the count, "All my wishes have come to heel, like tame dogs!"

On 16 August 1871, La Païva obtained an annulment of her marriage to Albino Francisco de Araújo de Païva, and two months later, on 28 October, Thérèse Lachmann (the name she used on the marriage certificate) wed Henckel von Donnersmarck in the Lutheran Church in Paris. The groom's gift to the bride was a triple-strand diamond necklace formerly owned by the deposed French empress Eugénie.

...In addition to purchasing Château de Pontchartrain, near Paris, for La Païva and giving her an annuity of £80,000, Henckel von Donnersmarck financed the construction of the most ostentatious mansion in Paris: Hôtel de la Païva, located at 25 avenue des Champs-Élysées. ...Among the mansion's celebrated features is a central staircase made of Algerian yellow onyx (far more expensive than marble), which matched the Donnersmarck yellow diamonds, and a tub of the same North African stone; another tub, made of silver, had three taps, one being for either milk or Champagne.

As per the oft-misattributed quote, they aren't paying her for what she does, but to leave afterward.

Do women who conceive themselves as selling themselves get looked on kindly? I think if there is evidence they don't like their husbands and are just marrying as a resource transaction, they will be judged fairly negatively.

As far as I'm aware marriage for love was quite rare in the era before the suffrage.

You might say that wives probably liked their husbands some, even if it was usually not the primary stimulus for marriage, but then I'm willing to believe high-end escorts like their clients some as well. It's not like liking your job is entirely unheard of when you're not working in a gutter.

Yeah I mean I've had friends who've gone through the Indian arranged marriage process and like even when a good match is found there's still a meeting or two to see if there's any immediate chemistry, then go from there. It's rare (though I'm sure it does happen sometimes in certain poorer regions) that a modern, affluent Indian arranged marriage is done at knifepoint where one party is an obese 75 year old slumlord and the other part is a 18 year old with hopes of romance.

Sworn men have always been looked on more kindly than mercenaries. For that matter, so have people who change companies every two years. People distrust those whose loyalties seem too loose.

It is not unusual for escorts in NZ to work full-time corporate day-jobs, because if you wish to buy a house in this economy, it just makes sense to put a price tag on the goods your genetics so generously gifted you with. And the number of johns willing to cough up their entire week's paycheck for a couple hours of your negotiable affection is not insignificant. Welcome to capitalism, baby!

I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!

Wouldn't sex work count as physical labour? Also, electricians make bank in NZ. Their wages are only gonna go up as population ages and the pool of able-bodied young men busting their asses in physical labour starts shrinking.

Also, electricians make bank in NZ.

Your definition of bank is very parochial and whilst ANZ tradies are in a great position (though I'm pretty sure New Zealanders happily flee over to Australia to get the 50% wage premium) that could always disappear in an instant if their unions ever submit to the pressure to let immigrants on the tools.

Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living.

Dude, you're in corporate marketing. Complaining about what whores make is a bit ironic.

If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?

Somebody's gotta do the disgusting jobs, and it makes sense that they'd pay well if few want and/or are able to do them compared to the demand for them.

What a pleasant comment! No actually, I do not think marketing is equivalent to prostitution. I admit that it has moral qualms but I do mostly on site a/b testing, so I don’t lose sleep at night.

Someone does indeed have to do the disgusting jobs, but we can still comment on the state of society and the market based on the policies and general cultural values we have enacted. Once again your approach here, as always, is extremely defeatist.

There's no real comment on cultural values from what whores earn, only economic ones; this is just supply and demand as applied to jobs you find distasteful for some reason. And you may not like supply and demand, but that dislike is about as useful as not liking the second law of thermodynamics; it's going to work anyway.

I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.

Meanwhile, in the gospel of Mark:

And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.

And of course, long before that, in the book of Esther:

Then said the king unto her, What wilt thou, queen Esther? and what is thy request? it shall be even given thee to the half of the kingdom.

Going by memory: that's Herod's stepdaughter fathered by his dead brother and I believe aunt through incestuous marriage. He then married his widowed aunt/sister-in-law. John the Baptist was killed for criticizing this doubly forbidden marriage; as young Salome demands his head after dancing. She's not a courtesan getting the king horny, she's his stepdaughter. Unless you imagined some higher grosser level of incest where he goes for his aunt and niece.

This exchange reminds me of an old poem by the Finland-Swede Bertel Gripenberg. I permit myself a very self-indulgent excursion.

Begär vad du vill, Salome, jag kan icke säga nej, och bad du om Döparens huvud, vid Gud, jag nekade ej! Vad äro himlens profeter mot jorden fagraste mö! En vink av din hand, Salome, och Döparen måste dö!

En Gud som vi icke känna, en himmel som ingen sett, och hotande ord som larma om straffet och helvetet, vem bytte väl ej all denna bedrägliga sagoskatt mot jordens skönaste kvinna och livets ljuvaste natt!

In my own rough and quick translation:

Ask what you wish, Salome, I cannot tell you no, and if you asked for the Baptist's head, by God, I'd make it so! What are the prophets of heaven to the fairest maiden of all! A sign of your hand, Salome, and the Baptist must fall!

A God we do not know, a heaven which none can tell, and darkened words that threaten us, with punishment and hell. Who would not give up all of this fraudulent fairy-tale gold, for the fairest women on Earth in sweetest pleasure-night to hold!

In practice, do you think either could have actually gotten "half of the kingdom" if they said that? Or is that effectively an indirect marriage proposal?

Half? You can get a man to give up his entire kingdom!

"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" -Richard III

The niche tastes cost the most.

Herodias' daughter got the head of John the Baptist, which by most accounts is worth rather more than half the kingdom. (Note that this isn't Herod the Great, it's his younger son Herod Antipas who ruled a postage-stamp size kingdom in Galilee as a client of the Roman Empire).

Can you unpack some of the context here for me? You’re just saying women suck essentially?

No, he’s saying there’s nothing new about women gaining obscene amounts of money/power if they can suck well (so to speak)

I'm saying women extracting ludicrous amounts of wealth from men simply by being hot is something that's been going on for millennia.

Ok, fair. I'm aware it's not necessarily anything new under the sun. I suppose it just feels extremely brazen at the moment, but hey what do I know. Apparently it used to be pretty much the same.

Courtesans have been a thing forever.

Yeah, it's a rare positive sign for modern sexual morality that many of us have forgotten the distinction between lower class prostitutes and upper class ones and assume the latter doesn’t exist.

That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.

Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.

If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?

One of these things is not like the others. Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.

Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.

There's shades between 'Mandatory execution at 70' and 'Let us commit endless resources to squeeze every possible additional moment out of boomer lifespans'. There's a plethora of medical jobs and procedures which are difficult, require large investments of education and equipment and yet make essentially no sense from any sort of $/QALY metric.

Sure. Unfortunately, cutting off the spigot that keeps grandma alive isn't popular with grandma or her kids, for the most part. Personally, I'm 100% in favor of Medicare death panels. I suspect it's a minority position though.

Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.

Yes they are real jobs, but they're also extremely menial and service focused. I suppose you can take a certain pride in your work, but there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders. So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know. Pretty dark if you ask me.

they're also extremely menial

The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.

service focused

Sure, but you already work in the service sector, along with 80% of Americans.

there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders.

This is indeed bad, but one must hope the present levels of spending will prove unsustainable with a bigger dependency ratio.

So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know.

Anybody on the receiving end of the $7T of government spending (including, for example, highly paid Amazon engineers) is also in this situation. I'd rather the government did and spent less, but it's hardly an apocalyptic scenario.

As @KMC said, you are being a bit disingenuous here. The vast majority of actual job growth has been menial healthcare jobs.

I do work in the service sector in a way I suppose, but I mostly do onsite product marketing. Depends on how you define "service."

I'm not necessarily saying it's an apocalyptic scenario, though it may well turn into one if we don't course correct somewhat soon. What I'm saying is that my personal experience and outlook on economic participation is getting more and more bleak.

The vast majority of actual job growth has been menial healthcare jobs.

Debatable. There's 400k more RNs than there were ten years ago. I'd say being an RN is no more menial than being an onsite product marketer.

I do work in the service sector in a way I suppose, but I mostly do onsite product marketing. Depends on how you define "service."

I think it's pretty unambiguous. Do you grow crops? Do you extract resources from the earth? Do you produce any physical goods?

Have you spoken to RNs? One of my close friends is one. It's extremely menial, if by menial you mean physically demanding and focusing on servicing other people directly.

My mother wasn't home most evenings when I was between ages 4 and 7 because she was going to night school to become an RN, which paid more than my dad's job as a machinist. No, they aren't doctors, but most of the menial work you describe is done by Aides, LPNs, Medical Assistants, orderlies, and housekeepers. You don't need a degree to empty bedpans. I doubt the state has any mandatory training requirements for whatever you do, but you don't seem to consider it menial.

Most Americans are already employed in servicing other people directly! I don't think that most Americans would be working a menial job if they had to walk around rather than sit at a desk to do what it is they do.

Isn't this almost tautologically true? Jobs aren't supposed to be not in the service of helping meet the needs of others. I suppose "subsistence farmer" doesn't do that directly, but as far as I know, nobody is making paperclips qua paperclips in capitalism, but because people are buying paperclips.

Maybe if you have a command economy and a five year plan for paperclip production regardless of paperclip use.

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When healthcare is the largest employer in most states, it isn't because of all the orthopedic surgeons that are employed.

Did I imply that healthcare employment is solely due to orthopedic surgeons?

The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.

Here you implied that simply because not everything is menial, that the vast majority of jobs in the sector aren't menial. That's wrong, they are menial, and that's why there's so much employment. The top of the pyramid doesn't change that.

The question is not whether X% are menial or not. The question is whether marginal new healthcare jobs are more menial than the marginal new non healthcare job. My contention is that it isn't.

If it makes you feel any better, a guy like Dac Prescott makes more in one weekend than you probably will after taxes in your entire working career, though it can be argued that he has to do more for the money. I wouldn't worry too much about AI. If it were all it's cracked up to be you'd have heard at least one story about someone who is making high-end prostitute level income from software he wrote without the help of a staff, and if such stories exist (cue links to prove I'm an idiot), they aren't being heavily publicized. Instead all you hear about is how software companies are telling their employees to use more AI, a trend that appears to be coming to an end now that the bills are in the mail. Supposedly on unnamed company spent $500 million on Claude in a single month, and the rumor is that it's Microsoft, as they cancelled their subscription recently. I don't know if this story is true, but if the impressive Q1 revenue growth shown by these companies was due to the short-lived tokenmaxing trend, there may be some pain when they don't look so good next time around.

Are they still flogging this horse of "the inner secrets of the weird sex lives of Silicon Valley nerds"? 'Guys with lots of disposable income and no regular girlfriends hire escorts, shock horror!' well lands sakes Zephaniah, what are the youth of today coming to at all?

Worse…they’re weird escorts!

Such is the burden of tabloid news.

what are the youth of today coming to at all?

High-end hookers, apparently

Pardon me while I reel back in horror onto the fainting couch and apply hartshorn to recruit my failing senses! Men pay for sex, you don't say! Mercy me! 🤣

It'd be more of a story if it was "well-off single men without wives or girlfriends don't pay attractive, intelligent women for negotiable affection".

Please use periods. We have standards here on proper grammar, dangit!

aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money.

If it were an easy niche to fill, the price would be driven down. Aella is genuinely a uniquely talented person in her ability to occupy the two different niches involved at the same time. That's obvious when I listen to her on podcast appearances.

Also her ability to not get caught. That is where most of the value add is.

Who is trying to catch her? These women are getting glowing hagiographies in Forbes, for Christ’s sake. They are not in serious danger of going to jail for breaking the laws around prostitution in California.

Are there even laws around prostitution in California? Genuine query but I'm too damn lazy to give two minutes to look it up.

Yes.

Prostitution is entirely illegal under state law in 48 of the US's 50 states. (Nevada has devolved to its less populated counties (not including Las Vegas) the ability to permit brothels. Maine punishes only the buyer of sex, not the seller.)

Be the change you want to see in the world.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/contact-and-directory/anonymous-tip-lines

San Francisco is a haven for criminals. Cops won't even bother showing up for car break ins. Fill out that web form and watch nothing happen.

If I thought this had even a 1% chance of working I would try it. Alas...

I have to disagree. In my experience I feel like the whore market is one of the least well arbitraged markets in the world.

One limit to arbitrage would be that market participants have a limited shelf-life to figure out the market and outsourcing to management (pimping) is much enforced criminally. And sharing information and tactics online seems more difficult than other markets.

I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.

And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.

So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.

I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.

I am going to assume the very best girls don’t even become whores. Steve Jobs wife would never become a whore because Stanford MBA and attractive makes it trivially easy for her to marry well. So I feel the supply side of the whore market can’t be power law because the far right tail just does marriage. Depending on your taste the far right tail of females are Tom Brady or Steve Jobs wives.

And then you have Miami. Where the strip clubs are basically brothels and like $500 gets you a girl hotter than these SF escorts. The price in Miami really is 5-10% of San Francisco. If you believe these girls and their $4k/hour claims.

So my guess is this is much more a story of market inefficiency. Some girls probably did find a magic marketing technique and location. And few hot girls want to live in San Francisco. So the high price is a lack of knowledge by other whores on marketing and a huge premium for having to live in San Francisco.

I believe a lot of this is just search costs. Whores don’t know how to market to tech nerds. Tech nerds don’t know how to find whores. The ones that know how to connect the two make a lot.

Listen I get all this, this all makes sense to me. What I'm saying is that the subset of women who are likely to become escorts don't get this and it doesn't make sense to them. Start talking to them about arbitrage and they'll fall asleep before you finish, in either sense.

You don't have to be a genius at economics to understand "Less hot girls are making more money than you in escorting while doing less. If you want to make more money, you just need move to where there are more rich, lonely, awkward guys." While I don't finish that fast, I'm pretty sure you don't need to elaborate much more for this to be within intellectual reach of anyone with an IQ of 95. Probably 90.

And I think the market situation tells us, clearly, that women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.

The art of the courtesan, revived?

Dang, you beat me to the Noticing

An article

It says "a small group of high-end companions" right at the top (before the paywall). These numbers obviously are not representative. A cursory Internet search indicates that, in places where prostitution (including advertising) is legal, prices are 200 US dollars per hour, not 5000.

And that's before we get into the gradations of the scale from "streetwalker down by the docks" up to "hetaira who provides sparkling wit and entertainment at the symposia".

Exactly. People are focusing way too much on pure physical attractiveness as the definition of one's value in the sexual marketplace. Aella and her ilk have clout + can likely offer mental stimulation to their clientele that the Miami equivalent couldn't.

I'm pretty turned off by sex work (despite not minding its legality so long as safe and consensual) and I'd rather do the Aella GFE than Miami's greatest 11/10 for an evening personally, and I'd expect my tastes align with most of the SV rich-types.

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