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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.
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.
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.
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.
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