An anonymous rationalist-adjacent writer who analyzes sex work, dating, power dynamics, and online community behavior in a data-minded way.
HN links it in threads on sex work, parasocial relationships, and rationalist communities; commenters mostly use it as a reference point, with little direct judgment of the writing.
Nonsense. Aella grew up in an extremely fundamentalist Christian household. We're talking 'non-Christians lead to the devil, don't be friends with them"-type. It is absolutely seriously uncomfortable breaking up your entire programmed worldview from that.
"I grew up in an isolated, homeschooled environment. I’d moved up to northern Idaho in an attempt to go to college, but my parents were very “use your bootstraps” people and wouldn’t help me financially or cosign on any loans. They also made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid, so I was screwed; a few months into college I got an ominous letter and had to drop out shortly afterwards.
I’d been brought up with the expectation of being a submissive housewife – but here I was, 19 years old, no support system, education, or future, and with an unsettling cultural disconnect from everyone around me. Everyone used words I didn’t know, references to movies I hadn’t seen, attitudes drawn from music I hadn’t heard.
So I worked whatever I could. I occasionally went hungry, unable to afford food. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a large group house. I ended up working very long hours at a factory with no windows where I wore a uniform and stood on my feet all day and saw the sun only on weekends."
https://knowingless.com/2020/05/25/readjusting-to-porn/
Luckily, her intellect allowed her to figure a way out of what would usually be a tough upbringing to bounce back from. But "absurdly comfortable"??
Twitter [0] explicitly allows sexual content:
> You can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your Tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.
But since we're on the topic, one social media service that you didn't mention is TikTok. I haven't seen anyone write about this and find it a bit fascinating. Although TikTok claim that sexual content isn't allowed, a lot of adult sex workers continuously skirt or outright ignore the rules. Some sex worker's strategy seems to be to continuously create multiple new accounts, as new accounts have a time period and size limit where growth and reach is really easy in order to get creators initially hooked. Two trends I've encountered are women flashing their vaginal lips through a see-through dress with a backlight and women flashing their breasts on reflective background items while seeming to engage in some mundane activity. But even the sex workers that don't engage in blatant TOS violations clearly create content to lead you towards their OnlyFans page. A breakdown of the evolution of the sex worker advertisement meta on TikTok is a YouTube video waiting to be made, especially as TikTok dies off and the strategies no longer remain viable as a vehicle for growth. A modern-day version of Aella's classic "Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" [1].
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy
[1]…
It's also possible that the woman you know is, for predominantly genetic or personality reasons, highly sexed and sociosexually unrestricted, and her parents' efforts at best delayed some matters. There's a line of thinking, articulated in Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and elsewhere, that a large component of personality is innate and parents spend way too much time trying to micro-shape their kids.
There is an interesting writer and tweeter named Aella: https://knowingless.com/ who has described at length how she was born into a fundamentalist Christian family, found herself doing work she hated in a factory at 19, and escaped it via nude camming and then sex work (both of which she likes a lot, relative to alternatives). She's tweeted about how her mom appears to LOVE the trad Christian life, and how Aella and some of her siblings hate it. Who is "right?" Maybe no one: people's personal propensities and desires vary in many ways that appear to be genetic in origin, even if their expressions may change across cultures, and this may also include in matters of sex.
There are lots of pseudo-Freudian theories about how the way one is raised affects one's adolescent and adult sex life but I'm not sure any of those theories are true.
My favourite part about the rationalists is that they are a completely normal community apart from the rationalism. You'd think a group of people devoted to being rational would be a group of monk-like beings, cerebral, disconnected from the concerns of the flesh.
Instead we get this weird hotbed of fanfiction, cults, wild sex crime allegations, financial schemes so brazen they almost wouldn't qualify as fraud and a vague sense of some sort of group that are capable of any evil. Plus I can't stop laughing at the idea of Aella as "that rationalist hooker" [0] - a combination of words which never fails to make me chuckle.
The whole scene really deserves some sort of film, book, video game or something. I can't get a vision out of my head where some straitlaced person realises rationalists are involved and their face twists in horror. Keeping an eye on them over the years the communities that grew up around LessWrong really are as good as any work of fiction. Plus they're doing their best to make the world better and maybe people will learn something about Bayesianism, who knows.
[0] https://knowingless.com/about/
There's a strong parasocial element to traditional prostitution, although it's used more by high-end "escorts" who deliberately cultivate conversational skills. So none of this is new.
"My default strategy was this: I would invite the man in, we’d sit down and talk for a while. I’d establish physical contact in the conversation by touching his hand when laughing at a joke, or crossing my leg so it bumped into his. I would become increasingly charmed, utterly fascinated by his life, and I asked him to explain to me concepts I already knew (remember, they like you smart in order to validate their identity as a man who likes smart women, and they still love teaching you things)."
https://knowingless.com/2021/10/19/becoming-a-whorelord-the-overly-analytical-guide-to-escorting/
Hmm
https://knowingless.com/get-my-eggs/
> Get My Eggs
> I think my genes are wonderful, I’d like to see more of them in the world, and I don’t have any immediate plans for reproducing myself.
> If you’re interested in using my eggs to reproduce, I’m down to discuss this in exchange for payment for my time and fear of needles. I have ancestry, health testing, and family history I can share.
> Contact me at aellasinbox@gmail.com; sometimes my responses go to spam, so be sure to check spam!