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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.
1990? I was going to mention Mme de Pompadour and du Barry. In their milieu, many pretty women were given education in arts, conversation and refined taste to hold salon with the chief career prospect of marrying well and/or becoming a mistress to far richer man than they'd hope to marry, such as King of France, and live in opulence. (One of revolutions of the French revolution was that Joséphine de Beauharnais become an Empress, not a royal mistress.) One famous necklace of the Diamond Necklace Affair was worth of 2 million livres, dunno, several tens of thousands times of skilled artisan s yearly income. And it was only a single item part of such lifestyle.
Generation of queen Victoria and Albert made such affairs less visible and uncouth for members of royalty in anglophone and protestant countries, but it was a conscious reaction to rise of middle class and middle class values. Courtesans never disappeared with Victorians, though, just become more drowned-upon. And I don't think it is surprising that they eventually return prominently into the public sphere with the disappearance of middle class and Victorian middle class values.
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