Aella: Sex Work, Sex Research, and Data Science — Manifold #42

 

Aella is a sex worker, sex researcher, and data scientist. 

Aella on X: https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl 

Interviews with ex-prostitutes on the pimp life (Las Vegas) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAlXdyjmWUo 

An earlier Aella interview with Reason: 

https://reason.com/podcast/2022/04/27/aella-libertarian-sex-worker-turned-data-scientist/ 

Audio-only and Transcript:

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/aella-sex-work-sex-research-and-data-science-42

Steve and Aella discuss: 

(00:00) - Introduction 

(01:22) - Aella's background and upbringing 

(12:45) - Aella's experiences as a sex worker and escorting 

(29:52) - Pimp culture 

(38:01) - Seeking Arrangement 

(43:50) - Cheating 

(46:50) - OnlyFans, farming simps 

(51:49) - Incels and sex work 

(56:24) - Porn and Gen-Z 

(01:12:43) - Embryo screening 

(01:21:43) - How far off is IVG?

Joe Rogan interviews Dan Bilzerian

This is one of the best interviews I've heard in a long time. Warning: NSFW.

Joe Rogan interviews professional poker player and social media icon Dan Bilzerian. If you don't know who he is, check him out on Instagram (guns, girls, private jets, high stakes poker = 20 million followers = NSFW).

Among the topics covered: DB's experience in Navy SEAL training, high stakes poker, online poker in the early 2000s, sex, drugs, heart attacks, life, happiness, hedonic treadmill, social media, girls, fame, prostitution, money, steroids, stem cell therapy, and plenty more.

You can get the interview in smaller topical chunks (one of the best segments is embedded below). At bottom is the full 3 hours.

Price and self-deception

Is the letter below for real, or just a clever parody? ("Shoes!") This old joke says it all:

A man meets a woman in a bar and asks her if he will have sex with him for a million dollars. The woman thinks about it for a moment and says yes.

The man then asks the woman if she will have sex with him for $20. The woman becomes incensed and says, “What do you take me for, a whore?”

The man replies, “Ma’am we’ve already established what you are, now we’re just negotiating price.”

Related posts. Via Maoxian.

Why I Love My Sugar Daddy: ... The dating pool in my town wasn’t the most appealing, so I took my search online. I was bombarded with messages from guys who couldn’t spell, took shirtless pictures of themselves in mirrors, and were perfectly content to be living in their parents’ basements. I was a driven pre-law student with a 4.0 GPA and dreams of a pitbull-esque career in corporate law. These candidates weren’t cutting it. I wanted a man who was ambitious and successful, someone who knew what he wanted and exactly how to get it. I wanted an established man.

I entered my specifications into Google, and the first hit was a Sugar Daddy dating site. “No way,” I thought. “I’m not a golddigger, I just want a man who has his shit together.” But the tagline had already hooked me– “Meet Wealthy Men Seeking to Spoil Beautiful Women!” It felt like I had just been challenged… was I attractive and charming enough to pique the interest of a successful millionaire? My mind raced. Is this thinly-veiled prostitution? Were there really men out there who wanted to buy me shoes? I like shoes! Was this going to affect how I identified myself as an intelligent, independent woman? PRESENTS! I caved. I set up a profile, paid the membership fee, and waited to see what would happen.

The difference in quality (my idea of quality, at least) between the two dating pools was… slightly disappointing. I was expecting some kind of Mensa utopia, but apparently shitheads exist in all tax brackets. Once I became more realistic about my expectations, the outlook was less bleak. There were men who read! Books! These men had careers and dreams and ambitions! I was getting messages that were entirely free of grammatical errors!

I learned very quickly that there were many different types of SD relationships, ranging from blatant prostitution/escorting to regular relationships with the perk of total financial stability. After going on a few dates and being flat-out propositioned, I decided I wasn’t into the whole sex-for-cash-in-an-unmarked-envelope deal. I received offers to be a travel companion– jetsetting to Bali or Brazil whenever a SD’s schedule allowed it– but as a busy student, that option didn’t seem too viable. I decided that I wanted a more traditional relationship, which is slightly harder to find, but (IMO) is the most rewarding. I was looking for someone who, like myself, was busy building their career and simply didn’t have all the time in the world to commit to a normal relationship. Something easy, fun, and drama-free, with a guy who could help me better myself in all areas.

After a year and a half of casual relationships with great guys, I met my current Sugar Daddy, The Lawyer. My first date with The Lawyer was… probably one of the most surreal experiences of my lower-middle class, smalltown life. After exchanging a few e-mails, phone calls, and Skype sessions (who knew 45-year olds knew how to use Skype?), we agreed to meet. Normally, a quick date at Starbucks would suffice, but The Lawyer lived 1500 miles away. Since I didn’t have a law firm to run, we decided it would be easier if I travelled to meet him. ...

... I had never even flown business class before, so a private jet was… well, it was fucking awesome. ...

When I first got into the whole Sugar Daddy relationship world, I was worried I was going to lose myself. I didn’t want people to think I was some kind of brainless, golddigging bimbo. I was worried that other people’s opinions of my love life would somehow change who I was and what I believed in. Of course, that’s total bullshit. I’m the exact same person I was two years ago, except with more shoes and less debt. SD relationships work for me, and not just monetarily. They fit well into my busy life, and most of the men I’ve met are smart, kind, and incredibly charming. I’m in a great relationship, and I have no reason to be ashamed of it. I’m not a brazenly parasitic adult baby. I’m just an intelligent, driven, career-oriented woman with a boyfriend who likes to buy me presents.

Click through for marvelous comments.

Big pimpin'

You may have read recently about physics professor (Farleigh Dickinson University, NJ) David Flory's arrest in connection with a web site promoting prostitution.

What I don't understand is how sites like Seeking Arrangement (previous posts here and here) avoid this kind of attention from law enforcement. The fact that the arrangements are negotiated privately between users of the site may insulate SA, but surely the police could nab plenty of Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies in a sting operation.

SeekingArrangement: all about the Benjamins

We wrote about the high-end "dating" site SeekingArrangement.com (founded by an MIT grad) here. See the SA blog comments for back and forth between real life sugar babies and sugar daddies :-)



This article, by a would-be writer, appeared in Vanity Fair recently.

Vanity Fair: ... I had become a member a few weeks earlier, partly as a social experiment and partly out of genuine desperation. I was frustrated with my job, which offered little upward mobility, and was thinking about quitting it to pursue my goal of becoming a full-time freelance writer. Holding me back were my lack of savings and my fear of sacrificing a regular paycheck. If I had a hefty allowance from a generous benefactor, though, I figured that I could take the leap comfortably.

... The site, which launched in 2006, has about 420,000 members, of which roughly one-third are sugar daddies and two-thirds are sugar babies (sugar mommies account for less than one percent). While sugar daddies pay $49.95 per month for a premium membership (or $1,200 a month for Diamond Club certification, which requires verification of one’s net worth through tax-return data), as a sugar baby I was able to join for free. I uploaded two photos and listed some general information about myself, and I stated “open, amount negotiable” in the space that asks what you’re looking for. (Seeking Arrangement skirts the issue of prostitution by promoting the exchange of “intimacy and companionship” for “gifts.”) I took a deep breath and posted my profile, determined to focus on New York–based single men claiming to be worth at least $10 million.

... When Charlie—divorced, late 50s, worth about $50 million—asked to meet me, I tried to remain hopeful. I sauntered into the Mercer Hotel in jeans and a gray cardigan one frigid Sunday morning, scouring the crowd for a tall, gray-haired man. He spotted me first and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Here you go—just a token,” Charlie said, extending his hand.

I examined my gift—an iPod—and said, “Thank you,” determining to be extra pleasant during brunch.

We both ordered eggs, and by the time our food arrived I had grown to like Charlie. For starters, he provided an earnest explanation for joining Seeking Arrangement.

“I can’t separate the fact that I have resources from who I am,” he said. “It’s part of me. And it’s something I have to offer twentysomethings.”

“I completely agree.”

“I married young, you know. And I remained married for nearly 30 years while I was raising my kids.”

“How old are they?”

He chuckled before admitting, “It’s kind of weird. They’re your age.”

“It’s not weird at all,” I said.

Charlie turned to Seeking Arrangement, he explained, because most of the women he had been meeting wanted to settle down. “I don’t want another family,” he said.

“I promise you I’m not in the market for one,” I told him, and then asked, “Have you ever done this before?”

“I’ve never been in one of these relationships, exactly. But I’ve certainly been generous with previous girlfriends. And since joining the site, I’ve been on a few coffee dates. Pretty positive experiences, actually. I met an editor for a fashion periodical, a translator for the U.N., and a girl whose dad”—he stopped to laugh—“whose biological dad had just cut her off. The only negative experience I had was with a girl who was dating a hedge-funder. She said he had given her her nose and her Birkin bag, but that she needed cash. A bit mercenary for my taste.”

Here is a segment that features the founder:

Sugar Daddies: MIT grad starts high end prostitution web site ;-)

The Times magazine has a long piece about SeekingArrangement.com, a web site that helps "sugar babies" find rich "sugar daddies" :-) On the site there are 10 babies for every daddy.

I would say that a large number of financially successful guys I have known have analyzed the dating situation (usually over a few drinks) and come to the same conclusions as the users and creator of the site. (See further down the excerpt, and especially the guy called Sam.) I don't personally know very many women who have analyzed it from the other side and come to the sugar baby perspective (or at least will admit to it), but there are obviously lots out there. See the sugar daddy blog for hundreds of comments from sugar babies.

For the Asian version of all this, see Enjo kosai, or "compensated dating" in Japanese (also here and here).

NYTimes: AT FIRST GLANCE, the Web site SeekingArrangement.com seems like any other dating site. Most of the men are looking for fit, sexy women, and most of the women want nice guys who can make them smile and laugh. But if eHarmony or Match.com is a chatty social mixer, Seeking Arrangement is a down-and-dirty marketplace where older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions. They’re not searching for longtime soul mates; they want no-strings-attached “arrangements” that trade in society’s most valued currencies: wealth, youth and beauty. In the cheesy lexicon of the site, they are “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies.”

There’s the 18-year-old from France asking for $5,000 to $10,000 a month from “a mentor who can provide me with the finer things in life and keep me happy!” And the 49-year-old investor from upstate New York willing to pay $5,000 a month for a “daytime playmate” for “intense connection without commitment.” Critics say the site is at best a convenience store for adulterers and at worst a virtual brothel, but Brandon Wade, Seeking Arrangement’s 38-year-old founder and chief executive, is unperturbed by the criticism. “We stress relationships that are mutually beneficial,” he says. ...

ABOUT 30 PERCENT OF ARRANGEMENTS on the site involve the daddy paying an “allowance,” usually a thousand or two a month, though the site claims some reach $10,000. The rest provide the baby with incidental cash, shopping sprees, gifts, travel or the fleeting illusion that theirs is a high-end, easy life. “I get flown to whatever city I want,” wrote a North Carolina college student, who goes by the name gurlnextdoor on the site’s blog, a mix between an online support group and a kaffeeklatsch. “He pays for it, takes me shopping, we talk, laugh, go out to eat and do whatever we want to do for our days together. . . . I don’t bring up mundane problems about my home life, and he does the same. . . . If I wanted someone to talk to about my life problems, I’d get a boyfriend or a therapist.”

...In fact, Seeking Arrangement pays to have its ads pop up on search engines whenever someone types in “student loan,” “tuition help,” “college support” or “help with rent.” Lola was one of many to stumble on the site that way, when — behind on her rent and tuition and down to one meal a day — she Googled “student loan.” What popped up was hardly what she expected, but she was willing to try almost anything to stay in school.

...Whether sugar relationships amount to prostitution is hotly debated among the site’s members. “Let’s get real here,” wrote GoldenGate on the blog. “I’m with a guy who’s old enough to be my dad, short and balding. Not to mention his other shortcomings, ahem. But he gives me a great big fat allowance every month. If that wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be together.”

Others on the blog were shocked, saying they could never be with a man, even a rich one, if they weren’t somehow attracted to him. Indeed, most go to considerable effort to distinguish between “sugar” and prostitution. (Legally, at least, they are right; since the 1970s, courts have ruled that as long as the woman is paid for some service besides sex — housecleaning, companionship — the arrangement is not the equivalent of prostitution.) They say being a sugar baby is no more an occupation than dating is, especially when the goal of dating is to find a rich boyfriend or a wealthy husband. ...

Some sugar babies also insist that wives who stay in miserable marriages for an American Express black card, mansion or country-club membership are more like prostitutes than they are. And yet the blatant financial transactions leave many uneasy.

...a 22-year-old named Mercedes told me, “I don’t see how people can view this as exploitation.” Mercedes is a junior who pays her own tuition at a Georgia university. She has had six sugar daddies in the past year to supplement her wages busing tables and washing dishes at a bar. “I could go out and work three jobs and still go to school and probably make decent grades, but is that really what I want to do? I make more money this way, and I have a lot more fun because I get to go out to concerts, go shopping, see movies and make money off of it. If instead of this I was just dating a rich guy, it’d be almost the same thing, and society wouldn’t look down on that. You know with a sugar daddy that they’re spending a lot of money on you and they clearly want something in return, but is that really any different than how it is with a boyfriend?”

BRANDON WEY GOT THE IDEA for the site from his own dissatisfying love life as an M.I.T. student and then as a well-off but awkward tech executive. Traditional dating Web sites were no help. “It was difficult to advertise the assets I had compared to hundreds of thousands of guys who had better looks or better pickup lines,” says Wey, now married to a woman 13 years younger than he is, whom he met before the site went live. “I needed to find a way to put myself at the front of the line.”

One sugar daddy whose screen name is Sam has tried long-term girlfriends, mistresses, prostitutes and a brief marriage. ... Sam’s profile on Seeking Arrangement is audacious. He advertises for a woman who is “drop-dead beautiful, sexy, fun and elegantly mannered in a fancy setting. She must turn heads . . . and make me the envy of the crowd.” ... When I asked to chat in person, Sam suggested meeting at CORE, a private Manhattan club where membership is by invitation only and costs $65,000 the first year and where Sam’s assent was required before I could be admitted. Sitting alone at a long conference table in a room set aside for him, he looked utterly unremarkable, a man of average height with a buzz cut and an aloof air. But once Sam got talking, he became affable and witty, especially as he described his unorthodox history with women. He started college when most kids his age were still in middle school. “When you go to college at that age, you’re pretty undatable,” he said. “I was somewhere between a curiosity, a mascot and a friend. I tutored freshman physics and calculus so I could at least be near women. Of course, all they’d do is talk about their boyfriends.”

He has an almost mathematical approach to assessing relationships, and once even computed the costs for a girlfriend, mistress, prostitute and wife — mistresses turn out to be most expensive by the hour; wives, by the year; girlfriends are cheapest all around. But he’s not as calculating as he seems. In fact, he concluded there’s little correlation between cost and quality. Still, he is relentlessly searching for an algorithm that will predict relationships’ success.

Sam is also more determined than most to try separating a sugar baby’s affection and the money she’s paid to provide it. In his arrangements, he says, he establishes a trust in the woman’s name that pays a monthly stipend of at least $5,000 for the length of their contract. If the woman decides to quit sleeping with him at any point, he may quit serving as adviser and pamperer, but the stipend continues regardless. “If I didn’t do that, then it’s like a leash I’m putting on somebody, and that seems really unfair,” he said. “Besides, then I’d never know what the relationship was really about.”

Sam runs these relationships with an explicit business plan, a set budget, measurable goals and quarterly reviews. From the outset, the contract has an end date. It’s a brilliant, if contrived, way to protect his pride. The contract specifies that the romance and sex are to end by the preset date, so there’s no break up, no rejection, no bruised ego. She’s not dumping him; the gig’s just over.