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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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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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.
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