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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.
I'm not an enjoyer of these services either, but I imagine I'd be completely opposite of you. I can already talk about nerdy stuff I'm into with friends or on the internet, I don't have to talk about it with a woman I'm paying money to slobber on my balls. Would I prefer her to be smarter than a balloon just so that she can make an experience more smooth and enjoyable? Yes, but at the end of the day her main task is not that.
I imagine if you're a 7-8 figure SF tech guy, either a founder or a D+ level at a big well known tech company, you would definitely prefer paying more to a reputable escort that won't take sneak pics of you or brag to her friends about who she fucked yesterday though.
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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.
Oh, do I have opinions on this, particularly after reading Against Neaera 😁 Now, this was politically motivated against the man in the case, but the attack on the woman's character is very enlightening about the attitudes towards prositution.
Naera is presented as this vile, immoral woman (and by association her daughter), but reading it, you get a different picture. She was a slave, owned by someone who groomed her from childhood to this profession, turned out when she hit puberty, with no ability of her own to refuse clients or have any say in who she would have sex with. She got passed around, sold on, was even divided between two men who, when it was time for them to marry, wanted to get shot of her so told her to get out of the city but they would graciously allow her to buy her freedom from them.
Her daughter is married off to a miser (if you read between the lines) who sends her back home after a year of marriage, while she's pregnant, and keeps the dowry/bride price (there's a court case over this between him and the father). The pretext is that she is the child of an alien woman, and hence not an Athenian (since Athenians could not legally marry foreigners) and so he cannot legally marry her and any child of hers will not be an Athenian citizen.
There is no similar outrage about the men who patronise courtesans/prostitutes. Only whores go drinking and dining at banquets openly with men, but the men can drink and be entertained and have sex and nobody blinks an eye. The men can buy slaves for the sole purpose of sex. The men can have sex with slaves who are pimped out until they get too old and are then sold on. Nothing wrong there, the men can participate in civic life to the full without moral opprobrium.
This two-sided cultural conditioning around sexual attitudes is why you won't get rid of prostitution, not even by condemning the women who trade in it. Selling sex is shameful but buying sex is fine, so there will always be a market.
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Sure and prostitution used to be a lot more mainstream and casual in the West. Still is in some cultures like Japan
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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.))
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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.
The medieval catholic church allowed sex in front of witnesses as a proof of consummation in annulment trials.
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