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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   1998 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.

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.

In the west, traditional courtship might not be romance by modern standards, but they would usually have considered themselves as 'in love' on their wedding day for hundreds of years. Upper class arranged marriages were the exception.

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.

Yeah from what I've gathered knowing Indian immigrant tech workers it is lots of phone calls, in person meetings, meeting family members, etc. It's just not dating in a modern sense. There's a lot more involvement than "my parents assigned me someone".

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.

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