>As an aside, for as long as my fake escort page was up, I was getting text messages to the GV number from guys in this other state trying to set up dates. would run their phone numbers and find out who they were, it was amazing how much some of them stood to lose if they were caught.
It's incredible to see cops just openly bragging about abusing the access they have.
That screenshot was really high on the "weird dude power fantasy" scale. I find it very hard to believe that a cop could waste that much effort trying to burn a single prostitute.
Being a cop is a job, and at your job your boss is on your case about productivity and numbers. "I'm setting up a fake john in a different state to try to snare a single lady for prostitution" just does not move the needle enough to justify the effort
But as a "I hate whores and dream I was a cop with the power to mess with them" fantasy that screenshot works really well
It's not a "a job". As an institution police spend a lot of effort and resources to make sure that the stuff they do is perceived as a kind of calling and very special, which is important to foster loyalty between cops and helps them psychologically endure exposing vulnerable people to violence and incapacitation.
Legally they're in a protected category and 'above the law' in many ways. They get to break into other people's homes, dig through their stuff, spy on and hurt them. Commonly they're told that these actions are what keeps society from hurtling into barbarism.
Being told you are superior to others is not psychologically innocent.
They might be above the law, but nobody is above middle management. Even cops are subject to "you spent HOW much hours trying to burn one internet prostitute?"
He explains she was in the Chief of Police's neighborhood with irate neighbors, so he clearly had leeway to expend all resources needed to get it done.
They do that kind of thing all the time. The institution as such does not get money based on some performance metric or other, it's usually politicians wanting to look one way or another in the press that determine their budgets.
Most cops do not see their job like this, and mostly just want to get home at the end of the day. Yes, they probably have more than their fair share of weirdoes (in the same way most uniformed institutions disproportionately filled with young men tend to), but you know, mostly it's a job (though the US is weird).
It's not a job. Every cop is a weirdo, they looked for opportunities to exert dominance over other people and decided against becoming social workers, medical practitioners or somesuch. Instead they joined a paramilitary force in peace time.
After I learned about her childhood, a lot of her most odious writing online, particularly coming up with poll after poll about hypotheticals in which it might be ok for an adult to have sex with a child [1] [2] [3], made much more sense. She is still dealing with the trauma, trying to bargain with it (the polls on Twitter), trying to gain control over it (much of her personal sexual expression involves simulating what happened again in a controlled setting), and completely in denial about it which means that she's causing harm to people who read these kinds of discussions and don't know this, whether she understands it or not.
You don't think that being molested by your grandfather might have something to do with replaying that molestation obsessively throughout your life, and trying to come up with hypotheticals in which it can actually be ok?
I'm just operating at the preponderance of evidence level here, and it seems far more likely to be to case that extreme childhood sexual caused the extreme sexual deviation. Do your P(A|B) work here, it's not hard, given the small probability of both of those things.
Even if you're correct that her being abused in her childhood is related to her choice of career, what do you think you're adding to the conversation by bringing that up?
What are you actually trying to do here besides shame her for having been abused as a child? That's really the only takeaway from your comment here, that people shouldn't read her writing about prostitution as a business because she was abused as a child. That seems particularly nasty on your part, even if unintentional.
>Warn others that she is dangerous and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Is this post dangerous? You certainly didn't refer to any particular dangerous content, just shouting about a couple of weird tweets doesn't seem very useful.
I really don't get it, unless you're specifically upset by her quite reasonable post about AI generated child pornography, but that'd be weird.
> However, the science is that childhood sexual abuse is an antecedent to prostitution.
Even if a causal relationship has been proven, that doesn't mean any correlation implies causation.
>Even if a causal relationship has been proven, that doesn't mean any correlation implies causation.
This is HN, not a psychology conference or a therapy session. Feel free to accept or reject my level of epistemological rigor. I just know my priors, and honestly I don't see the value in continuing this conversation if you don't (or pretend you don't). If a lifetime alcoholic died of liver failure, it's entirely possible that he got hepatitis, but I'm going to go ahead and say it was the alcohol and treat any quibbling about causation and correlation as an irrelevant diversion.
It's a bog-standard guide to escorting, similar to how some people post how-to:s on LinkedIn or corporate blogs.
You can find hundreds or thousands of these floating around, commonly among ex-escorts who are trying to pursue some adjacent but less corporeal career.
I'm sure some of these are written by more sensible people.
Regardless of whether or not your assessment of her internal mental state is true (and I think this is a very hard thing to be sure you're assessing correctly), I don't think that anyone is harmed in any meaningful way by reading her discussions about hypothetical sexual situations, even if you personally find them distasteful.
You have no idea how many men are going to find this and be emboldened by it. Men seek permission from women when it comes to pushing sexual boundaries.
I don't care what her mental state is. She needs to be banned from the Internet.
Ignoring that I think spending money on prostitutes is unethical as labor is coerced (either work or starve), meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this), the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children. I have said it elsewhere, but this kind of specious moral pondering was employed extensively by groups like NAMBLA and others in the 20th century to provide moral cover for themselves.
> meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this)
In a world where all labor is slave labor, rape presumably isn't particularly frowned upon. If I'm going to accept your premise that basically everything I have in life is obtained through coercion, why would I object to obtaining sex that way?
> the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children
One of these is not like the other. People advocating for AI generated child pornography are generally doing so as a means of reducing the frequency of people actually having sex with children.
"AI generated CSAM" is an oxymoron FWIW, it's impossible to sexually abuse a child which does not exist.
The problem with your argument is that you could have made the exact opposite argument in reverse as well, e.g. saying that all work is sex work, since the only goal of work is to reproduce.
The coercion framework is useless, because you don't actually care about coercion at all. If there is a parallel world without coercion but prostitution, you would probably still argue that prostitution is coercive.
This is because your argument fundamentally rests on the idea that you can just pick whatever situation has the fitting "moral consequence" and ascribe it to the thing you don't like to hide your own subjective opinion under the pretense of objectivity.
What reality tells us is that prostitutes don't need help getting their profession banned. They need help with switching careers and since society is built on musical chair economics, there aren't enough chairs to for them to sit on.
>I don't think that anyone is harmed in any meaningful way by reading her discussions about hypothetical sexual situations
She advocates for the value of AI generated CSAM, and her hypotheticals are attempts at deluded rationalization, the rationalization of could easily sway the actions of others. When I read her rationalizations and hypothetical moral scenarios, I am just reminded of the arguments from the New Left, including many of the voices of the French petition to remove the age of consent, that offered specious sophistry to not just sway others into allowing them to prey on children, but to encourage others with similar predilections to do so without moral qualms.
A good specific example was the placing of orphans in the homes of known sex offenders in East Germany, with the rationalization that it's better than the orphans endure a bit of sexual impropriety than to suffer negligence, which is a very Aella style argument.
You think Aella lived in East Germany? Obviously I was giving an example of a different situation in which her kind of specious moral reasoning resulted in the enablement of child sexual abuse.
If you cannot see the shared characteristics of the two cases, then I really have nothing to say to you. It would be impossible to sufficiently simplify the analogy.
In the future, if you don't understand, ask for clarification rather than wasting my time with a disingenuous question that requires a full comment round trip to get past.
This is an awful lot of very puritanical armchair psychiatry from a random man on the internet. She's doing something she finds interesting, in a surprisingly data driven way, and seemingly not harming anyone, you can put the pitchfork and handmaid's tale fantasies away.
Thought that this Aella at first, too bad that this is indeed her. Pretty sad and bleak story, hope her life will become better and more fulfilled, I genuinely do.
Isn't making 1200$/h while being self employed the goal for HNers ? Isn't HN supposed to be open minded ?
This is the most HN post we saw ou there in a while.
As if boasting how code was improved at GAFAMs despite actually thought challenging social implications, reduced wages and layoffs was the only point of this board.
I'm not sure how to begin to describe the feeling of reading an analytical take on working as an escort. Weird.
Side note: Every single AMA/QA with a prostitute I've seen I've posted a question I'm anxious to know the answer to, but my question has consistently not received any reply. In essence; Every single job I've ever had has left me with a little bit of muscle memory - a key combination here, a routine there. When working as a prostitute, what are the small little things you're left with that might stay with you for quite a bit after your... career has moved on?
Alas, I suspect there's no easy answer to it, considering, well...
I'm not a prostitute, but I'd guess you'll develop muscle memory for the condoms. Sure, you can get better at sex too, but it's going to be difficult to put most of those lessons into words.
As a woman, you're likely to end up learning a lot of things about personal hygiene that'll stay with you.
Which professions are similar on mileage here? I think Chappelle was spot on, when he used the book ‘The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim’ to confront the entertainment industry highlighting a concept from the book regarding "mileage on a hoe" (prostitute). He explains that a pimp understands there is a finite amount of "bad things" or work a person can endure before they "lose it" or break down.
Why wouldn't she? That's hardly crazy for any bigger city, and she's got a massive online following.
Even if she looks a bit more plain than the average girl charging that much, there's a plenty of customers who want just that and her platform is massive.
GP seems to live in a small European city with a pretty small market for this stuff. I seriously doubt there are any Zurich-based escorts earning $1200 hour.
In London anything between 200 and 1000GBP per hour is completely ordinary, there will not even necessarily be a strong correlation between pricing and the quality of service. It is not super unusual to see people charging more than 1000GBP/h either.
There's a huge discovery problem in the prostitution market, it's really hard for a customer to differentiate between providers without actually visiting them. In many places it's hard to find useful reviews, so you're stuck choosing a provider based on heavily photoshopped photos and hoping for the best. Charging more is probably a good strategy to differentiate yourself.
Damn, that's a damning screenshot from the cop forum https://i0.wp.com/knowingless.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10...
>As an aside, for as long as my fake escort page was up, I was getting text messages to the GV number from guys in this other state trying to set up dates. would run their phone numbers and find out who they were, it was amazing how much some of them stood to lose if they were caught.
It's incredible to see cops just openly bragging about abusing the access they have.
What does BP mean, in the context of the screenshot?
BP stands for Backpage, a now defunct online classifieds site, which was utilized by sex workers of all kinds in its heyday.
backpage.com
That screenshot was really high on the "weird dude power fantasy" scale. I find it very hard to believe that a cop could waste that much effort trying to burn a single prostitute.
Being a cop is a job, and at your job your boss is on your case about productivity and numbers. "I'm setting up a fake john in a different state to try to snare a single lady for prostitution" just does not move the needle enough to justify the effort
But as a "I hate whores and dream I was a cop with the power to mess with them" fantasy that screenshot works really well
That forum post was made by George Erdel of the Beaufort Police Department, an actual cop.
It's not a "a job". As an institution police spend a lot of effort and resources to make sure that the stuff they do is perceived as a kind of calling and very special, which is important to foster loyalty between cops and helps them psychologically endure exposing vulnerable people to violence and incapacitation.
Legally they're in a protected category and 'above the law' in many ways. They get to break into other people's homes, dig through their stuff, spy on and hurt them. Commonly they're told that these actions are what keeps society from hurtling into barbarism.
Being told you are superior to others is not psychologically innocent.
They might be above the law, but nobody is above middle management. Even cops are subject to "you spent HOW much hours trying to burn one internet prostitute?"
He explains she was in the Chief of Police's neighborhood with irate neighbors, so he clearly had leeway to expend all resources needed to get it done.
They do that kind of thing all the time. The institution as such does not get money based on some performance metric or other, it's usually politicians wanting to look one way or another in the press that determine their budgets.
Most cops do not see their job like this, and mostly just want to get home at the end of the day. Yes, they probably have more than their fair share of weirdoes (in the same way most uniformed institutions disproportionately filled with young men tend to), but you know, mostly it's a job (though the US is weird).
It's not a job. Every cop is a weirdo, they looked for opportunities to exert dominance over other people and decided against becoming social workers, medical practitioners or somesuch. Instead they joined a paramilitary force in peace time.
God, why do americans assume everywhere is like their weird place. Most countries designed their police to very specifically be civilian.
What else would you expect from cops? Why do you think people say ACAB?
After I learned about her childhood, a lot of her most odious writing online, particularly coming up with poll after poll about hypotheticals in which it might be ok for an adult to have sex with a child [1] [2] [3], made much more sense. She is still dealing with the trauma, trying to bargain with it (the polls on Twitter), trying to gain control over it (much of her personal sexual expression involves simulating what happened again in a controlled setting), and completely in denial about it which means that she's causing harm to people who read these kinds of discussions and don't know this, whether she understands it or not.
Best to just avoid her altogether online.
1: https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1643703433516441602
2: https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1721238228458430785
3: https://substack.com/home/post/p-161405272
Yeah, the polls are weird, but I'm not sure your armchair psychologists interpretation of her life is any less weird.
You don't think that being molested by your grandfather might have something to do with replaying that molestation obsessively throughout your life, and trying to come up with hypotheticals in which it can actually be ok?
I'm just operating at the preponderance of evidence level here, and it seems far more likely to be to case that extreme childhood sexual caused the extreme sexual deviation. Do your P(A|B) work here, it's not hard, given the small probability of both of those things.
Even if you're correct that her being abused in her childhood is related to her choice of career, what do you think you're adding to the conversation by bringing that up?
What are you actually trying to do here besides shame her for having been abused as a child? That's really the only takeaway from your comment here, that people shouldn't read her writing about prostitution as a business because she was abused as a child. That seems particularly nasty on your part, even if unintentional.
>related to her choice of career
Didn't imply this. However, the science is that childhood sexual abuse is an antecedent to prostitution.
>What are you actually trying to do here besides shame her for having been abused as a child?
Warn others that she is dangerous and shouldn't be taken seriously.
>Warn others that she is dangerous and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Is this post dangerous? You certainly didn't refer to any particular dangerous content, just shouting about a couple of weird tweets doesn't seem very useful.
I really don't get it, unless you're specifically upset by her quite reasonable post about AI generated child pornography, but that'd be weird.
> However, the science is that childhood sexual abuse is an antecedent to prostitution.
Even if a causal relationship has been proven, that doesn't mean any correlation implies causation.
>Even if a causal relationship has been proven, that doesn't mean any correlation implies causation.
This is HN, not a psychology conference or a therapy session. Feel free to accept or reject my level of epistemological rigor. I just know my priors, and honestly I don't see the value in continuing this conversation if you don't (or pretend you don't). If a lifetime alcoholic died of liver failure, it's entirely possible that he got hepatitis, but I'm going to go ahead and say it was the alcohol and treat any quibbling about causation and correlation as an irrelevant diversion.
Even if you were correct, none of that really seems relevant wrt the actual content of this blog post.
It's a bog-standard guide to escorting, similar to how some people post how-to:s on LinkedIn or corporate blogs.
You can find hundreds or thousands of these floating around, commonly among ex-escorts who are trying to pursue some adjacent but less corporeal career.
I'm sure some of these are written by more sensible people.
Regardless of whether or not your assessment of her internal mental state is true (and I think this is a very hard thing to be sure you're assessing correctly), I don't think that anyone is harmed in any meaningful way by reading her discussions about hypothetical sexual situations, even if you personally find them distasteful.
You have no idea how many men are going to find this and be emboldened by it. Men seek permission from women when it comes to pushing sexual boundaries.
I don't care what her mental state is. She needs to be banned from the Internet.
Emboldened to ... spend money on prostitutes?
Ignoring that I think spending money on prostitutes is unethical as labor is coerced (either work or starve), meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this), the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children. I have said it elsewhere, but this kind of specious moral pondering was employed extensively by groups like NAMBLA and others in the 20th century to provide moral cover for themselves.
> meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this)
In a world where all labor is slave labor, rape presumably isn't particularly frowned upon. If I'm going to accept your premise that basically everything I have in life is obtained through coercion, why would I object to obtaining sex that way?
> the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children
One of these is not like the other. People advocating for AI generated child pornography are generally doing so as a means of reducing the frequency of people actually having sex with children.
"AI generated CSAM" is an oxymoron FWIW, it's impossible to sexually abuse a child which does not exist.
'"AI generated CSAM" is an oxymoron FWIW, it's impossible to sexually abuse a child which does not exist.'
Would you agree that fictional stories about how blacks want to and commit rape and murder are fine?
Is it OK to 'grok' out simulated undressings of small children because the image technically no longer depict them and instead are fantasy?
>Would you agree that fictional stories about how blacks want to and commit rape and murder are fine?
"Fine" in what sense?
>Is it OK to 'grok' out simulated undressings of small children because the image technically no longer depict them and instead are fantasy?
Why would it not be OK? There is nobody being harmed.
The problem with your argument is that you could have made the exact opposite argument in reverse as well, e.g. saying that all work is sex work, since the only goal of work is to reproduce.
The coercion framework is useless, because you don't actually care about coercion at all. If there is a parallel world without coercion but prostitution, you would probably still argue that prostitution is coercive.
This is because your argument fundamentally rests on the idea that you can just pick whatever situation has the fitting "moral consequence" and ascribe it to the thing you don't like to hide your own subjective opinion under the pretense of objectivity.
What reality tells us is that prostitutes don't need help getting their profession banned. They need help with switching careers and since society is built on musical chair economics, there aren't enough chairs to for them to sit on.
>I don't think that anyone is harmed in any meaningful way by reading her discussions about hypothetical sexual situations
She advocates for the value of AI generated CSAM, and her hypotheticals are attempts at deluded rationalization, the rationalization of could easily sway the actions of others. When I read her rationalizations and hypothetical moral scenarios, I am just reminded of the arguments from the New Left, including many of the voices of the French petition to remove the age of consent, that offered specious sophistry to not just sway others into allowing them to prey on children, but to encourage others with similar predilections to do so without moral qualms.
A good specific example was the placing of orphans in the homes of known sex offenders in East Germany, with the rationalization that it's better than the orphans endure a bit of sexual impropriety than to suffer negligence, which is a very Aella style argument.
Can you link to the tweet / blog post in which Aella advocated for the actual placement of real children with known sex offenders?
You think Aella lived in East Germany? Obviously I was giving an example of a different situation in which her kind of specious moral reasoning resulted in the enablement of child sexual abuse.
Obviously I didn't think Aella lives in East Germany for a single moment.
I was interested in your reasoning as you appeared to be off on a tangent making what is known as a strawman argument.
If you cannot see the shared characteristics of the two cases, then I really have nothing to say to you. It would be impossible to sufficiently simplify the analogy.
In the future, if you don't understand, ask for clarification rather than wasting my time with a disingenuous question that requires a full comment round trip to get past.
This is an awful lot of very puritanical armchair psychiatry from a random man on the internet. She's doing something she finds interesting, in a surprisingly data driven way, and seemingly not harming anyone, you can put the pitchfork and handmaid's tale fantasies away.
Thought that this Aella at first, too bad that this is indeed her. Pretty sad and bleak story, hope her life will become better and more fulfilled, I genuinely do.
Why was this flagged ?
Isn't making 1200$/h while being self employed the goal for HNers ? Isn't HN supposed to be open minded ?
This is the most HN post we saw ou there in a while.
As if boasting how code was improved at GAFAMs despite actually thought challenging social implications, reduced wages and layoffs was the only point of this board.
It's obvious the flagging system is not working anymore, and still the mods are not doing anything
I'm not sure how to begin to describe the feeling of reading an analytical take on working as an escort. Weird.
Side note: Every single AMA/QA with a prostitute I've seen I've posted a question I'm anxious to know the answer to, but my question has consistently not received any reply. In essence; Every single job I've ever had has left me with a little bit of muscle memory - a key combination here, a routine there. When working as a prostitute, what are the small little things you're left with that might stay with you for quite a bit after your... career has moved on?
Alas, I suspect there's no easy answer to it, considering, well...
I'm not a prostitute, but I'd guess you'll develop muscle memory for the condoms. Sure, you can get better at sex too, but it's going to be difficult to put most of those lessons into words.
As a woman, you're likely to end up learning a lot of things about personal hygiene that'll stay with you.
Which professions are similar on mileage here? I think Chappelle was spot on, when he used the book ‘The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim’ to confront the entertainment industry highlighting a concept from the book regarding "mileage on a hoe" (prostitute). He explains that a pimp understands there is a finite amount of "bad things" or work a person can endure before they "lose it" or break down.
Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28924751
I know we are currently very early in the comment section, but I cant help compare and notice the shift in tone and response.
She's not making $1200/hr. Total b.s.
Why wouldn't she? That's hardly crazy for any bigger city, and she's got a massive online following.
Even if she looks a bit more plain than the average girl charging that much, there's a plenty of customers who want just that and her platform is massive.
Sounds normal to me... see Eliot Spitzer [0]:
> $4,300 is not an altogether alarming sum of money in the high-end sex market
> In New York, it’s not hard to find sex workers who charge $10,000 per “session,” which can last for 15 minutes or two hours.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2008/03/did-eliot-spitzer-get-cau...
I know literally nothing about the financial aspects of the industry.
Can you expand the on that?
GP seems to live in a small European city with a pretty small market for this stuff. I seriously doubt there are any Zurich-based escorts earning $1200 hour.
In London anything between 200 and 1000GBP per hour is completely ordinary, there will not even necessarily be a strong correlation between pricing and the quality of service. It is not super unusual to see people charging more than 1000GBP/h either.
There's a huge discovery problem in the prostitution market, it's really hard for a customer to differentiate between providers without actually visiting them. In many places it's hard to find useful reviews, so you're stuck choosing a provider based on heavily photoshopped photos and hoping for the best. Charging more is probably a good strategy to differentiate yourself.
2021