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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'd be surprised if more than a dozen escorts in the Bay Area actually make more than $1M/year from escorting. It might even be substantially less. Their customers comprise a market that, though not exactly thin, is at least ragged enough and demanding enough that escorts can't simply line up a constant stream of guys to occupy all their working hours. And, if you treat $1M/year as an earnings cap for the very top performers in your career (that will last, very optimistically, a decade), in the Bay Area that isn't really shocking or impressive.
It's not even the best strategy if you're a woman looking to trade her looks and charm for money. Just marry a well-off guy, of which there are plenty. Or be like Lucy Guo: join a company early as the token pretty-ish woman, get fired, and walk away with billions.
Also, it seems like there's much better options for the guys? There was an article a while back about a somewhat autistic SF Tech guy that described his situation in which he basically had a subscription service with an Eastern European group that would send him an English speaking, very attractive, attentive Eastern European girlfriend of his type (given the pricing, probably Ukrainian) on a rotating basis every few months (I'm guessing on a tourist visa and they head back when the visa was running out) at an annual cost comparable to that 30k one weekend above. If you're into Asian woman you could prob. get even cheaper with Philippines/South East Asia or the like. This seems a lot more appealing to me if you're already going the escort route.
What's missing is the intellectual companionship, which is the selling point of the Aella sort to their particular clientele. The Eastern European woman might be attentive and attractive, and she might speak English, but she also is from a very different background and worldview, and possibly has a very different personality and level of intelligence.
Which is definitely strange to me -- surely there are enough decently-smart, decently-attractive, actually kind of geeky ladies for men with the kinds of money we're talking about to find one who might fall in love with him non-transactionally, but maybe the Bay really is a harsh place for straight love.
I don't think there are, and this unfortunate fact has been one of the driving engines of the sex-relations theater of the culture war going all the way back to Elevatorgate. It drives the differences in how many women get into STEM, it drives the "I'm sorry, but I'm just flat-out exhausted by the constant string of even decent suitors thinking I'm their last romantic shot" that women in STEM/atheism/whatever have been writing about for 25 years, and generally it's pretty hard to find natal women who are into any given nerdy thing.
Hm, I guess this hasn’t been my experience. It’s true that you’ll find it hard to find a woman into, say, retro gaming, PC hardware, AI inference as a technology (rather than as a tool, which is controversial but not as much as the internet wants you to believe) or whatever particular nerdy thing you’re into, but from my zoomer perspective women who are geeky in general alongside a feminine disposition to geeky things aren’t rare. They’re often not the most beautiful women in the world, but male geeks are rarely the most handsome, and they’re good matches for each other.
My first girlfriend in school was very into Doctor Who (very “girl, but geeky” of her), I dated a girl in college who loved anime and went to conventions in cosplay (dressing up and being cute — very “girl, but geeky”), and my current girlfriend is a woman who works in biotech, is obsessed with molecular genetics and is learning Python for bioinformatics work (biology is peak “girl, but in stem”) who I met actually at an atheist club, if you can believe that. She also, of course, is fascinated by true crime (and reverences Othram’s genetic genealogy program), likes cute things, loves to call animals silly names, and reads dark academia novels.
I think geeky guys often make the mistake of looking for women who are essentially men — and yeah, there aren’t many of them. Men generally enjoy machines, systems, engineering, to a degree and in a way that women don’t, and likewise women generally enjoy creatures, cute things, fashion, social issues, learning about the dark side of the world, to a degree and in a way that men don’t. You’re unlikely to meet a woman whose personality and interests line up with men’s, or with yours.
So? You look for a woman who shares your disposition towards the world, your attitude towards the things you like even if applied to different interests, and that’s what geeky girls are like and have always been like. They’re not men with boobs, they’re women with geeky traits.
And a lot of things that are traditionally male-geek have surprising crossover: TikTok has found a way to market mechanical keyboards to white collar women, which is why my girlfriend now has two keyboards with “thocky” or “creamy” (gag) linear switches. And my girlfriend and I share an interest in history and church architecture, and relentless curiosity.
I had a coworker when I worked in PC repair who had an adorable girlfriend who played games on a PC he built for her. The dude was built like a blueberry, but he and his girl seemed to really love each other. What did she do? She was an English student aiming to become a teacher. Peak girl energy.
You don’t have to date in STEM to meet a woman that’s cute, affectionate, culturally compatible, and a good match. I like women whose hobbies and personalities are notably feminine; I like women, I want to be associated with a woman who is a woman and does woman things, but also shares my intellectualized, obsessive, fascinated posture towards the world. Such women are not so rare.
If SF makes finding such women particularly hard, my advice would be to build a nest egg and get the hell out of there. The kind of money we’re talking about counts as exquisite to most women of this country.
I disagree. I think geeky guys would love women into geeky pursuits. From your own personal antecedents, all I can say is I wish I went to your high school, as growing up, I can count the number of women who were interested in such things on one hand with fingers left over.
In modern times, things are different, but I can't help but look at the cultural landscape and note that the reason a number of women are into such things nowadays is due to it being the 'popular thing'.
Women who are into weird and geeky hobbies are pretty thin on the ground, and can be difficult to find depending on your overall location.
But that's urquan's points; are these men looking for girls that are into the same things they are, or for girls that are into "geeky girl" pursuits?
I have been single for most of my adult life, I couldn't find many girls that were into the things I was in. The few dates I had where it clicked with the girls were into museums and arts, one of the girls I had a very enjoyable date with was a jazz musician. These are geeky things, those girls were geeks, but not "guys with boobs".
More recently, and after I found and married by wife, I ended up having to work, for a little while, for a company that did services for libraries (like categorizing, writing descriptions, and stuff like that). The whole place was filled top to bottom with mousey, shy librarian-type girls, some very good looking, that were for the most part a bit awkward interacting with a straight guy like me. That's when it really hit home; there are a ton of geeky girls, they just define geeky differently.
I've been lucky enough to stumble into a relationship with a nerdy girlfriend, but if I hadn't, I'd be asking if that company was hiring. I think you're right.
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