It took her a while to figure out what version of herself generated the most income. Printing out a list of rules helped. She taped it up behind her camera so that she could refresh her memory every time.
Smile more. Talk slower. Use smaller language. Look directly into the camera and laugh.
It was like a puzzle. She loved solving puzzles. She was still missing some pieces of this one. But she was close. Then one day, she finished it.
For three months in a row, she made $100k a month. It was simple: Take the same selfie, every day. Post to the spreadsheet. Take the selfie. Post it. Snap. Post. Snap. Post.
After a while, she stopped taking those selfies. It was too samey. She needed a new puzzle.
Now, she has a new spreadsheet, full of names and columns. A column for age—what they told her or what she guessed. A column for their marital status. A column for where they worked. For where they met her. For how long. For how she rated them. For who climaxed, and for how many times.
If you ask her what all this data is for, she’ll say she couldn’t tell you. She never knows when something will come in useful. As a rule of thumb, more data is better.
The tech entrepreneur is impressed, but he’s curious to know if this has affected her normal sex life. She doesn’t think so. She explains that she’s very good at compartmentalization. “After the appointment, it just vacates my brain and I just don’t remember it at all. It’s like some other thing that randomly happens: it’s not important.”
The YouTube podcaster asks if she thinks sex loses its meaning when you remove all the barriers. “Maybe it doesn’t have meaning,” she shrugs, the camera cropping out all but her head and bare shoulders from view in a bathtub. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s fine.”
The English journalist is polite but astute. What would her 14-year-old self think of her now, he wonders. Go back in time, he asks, and give us her thoughts.
She throws back her head and laughs. “Oh, she would be horrified! She’d be like ‘You’re going to hell? Oh my God! You stopped believing in Jesus, and other people see your body?’”
This is Aella. That is not her real name, but it’s the one she’s chosen.
I was introduced to Aella through an interview in a newsletter by Antonio Garcia Martinez (the “tech entrepreneur” above). The paid Substack features regular deep dives with an eclectic mix of thinkers and influencers. Martinez met Aella this past month at the Hereticon conference in Miami, which billed itself as “a conference for thought-crime.” The website’s ad copy sets the mood:
We believe dissent is essential to the progressive march of human civilization. We believe there’s more in science, technology, and business to discover, that it must be discovered, and that in order to make such discovery we must learn to engage with new — if even sometimes frightening — ideas. So:
Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences. Imagine a safe space for people who don’t feel safe in safe spaces. Over three nights we’ll feature many of our culture’s most important troublemakers in the fields of knowledge necessary to the progressive improvement of our civilization. Topics including but not limited to: biological self-determination (modification, design), geo-engineering, transhumanism, the abolition of college, transgressive media, sex, the softer side of doomsday prepping, the nature of conspiracy, the benefits of starvation, constitutional monarchy (what?!), revisionist demography, immortality, drag culture, and building nations. After dark, on the top floor of our hotel, in a hidden room plastered in newspaper clippings of sightings and secret bases, there may be a talk or two on UFOs and literally a séance. Let’s get weird.
Aella’s contribution was a talk entitled “How to Pay for Sex.” In the interview with Martinez, she discusses her preference for one-on-one escorting over the OnlyFans model, though she still believes “online sex work is better than the lack of online sex work.” And she’s still keeping her OnlyFans account around, just so she can “f**k with it” for extra income as the mood takes her.
How did a nice, intelligent girl like her wind up in a place like this? How did 14-year-old, Jesus-loving Aella get here?
She reveals in various interviews that she grew up the daughter of a Christian apologist. He had a successful speaking ministry, and she would often tag along as he did battle with atheists on church stages. Her subculture was deeply fundamentalist, but they were the sort of fundamentalists who knew their stuff, and they made sure she did too. Strangely, she tells Unherd’s Freddie Sayers (the “British journalist”) that she believes her experience growing up in one marginalized subculture was an odd kind of preparation for her entry into another. Her father used to get hate mail, and now so does she. She probably gets other things from him too, like her Asperger’s syndrome. She’s high-functioning, but just for fun, she’ll sometimes call herself a “semi-autistic prostitute.” Peter Thiel picked it up in a recent passing comment on her work. She likes it. It’s catchy.
She desperately wanted to go to college. But that dream never materialized. She tells Martinez she cried when she finally gave it up, looking ahead to the prospect of “minimum wage jobs…forever.” That was when she decided she would rewrite her future. She would succeed. She would excel. She would be free.
Now, she wants to turn the question around: Why shouldn’t more nice, intelligent girls wind up in a place like this? It’s a business. It’s a skill you can master, like any other skill; a system you can game, like any other system.
Martinez says she reminds him of a girl he dated in grad school, a sharp, put-together Ph.D. student for whom this was just “what she did on weekends” to make an extra thousand. “Huh,” he remembers reacting. “That explains the other closet with all the fancy clothes you never seem to wear.”
Listening to Aella’s story, I couldn’t help thinking back to a sermon I recently stumbled on from an old Scottish Episcopalian minister. Here he is preaching to his small parish in 1937, on the great threat and demand of Dogma:
Dogma frightens people. But the Creed has a practical bearing on the ideal of mankind, of much importance in these dangerous days, and we are tempted to forget this. A dogma is a truth plainly stated. It is not peculiar to religion….If we’re to overcome the barriers which shut off men’s souls from each other, we must take the risk of formulating a statement which we can all believe. And this formal statement is Dogma. These are dangerous days, with the more insidious dangers in the moral atmosphere. Possibly this is not unconnected with our failure to maintain a high physical standard. Take an example only—the dangers of the relations of sex. I foresee the disappearance of Rescue homes, such as St. Andrew’s Home. The age of the girls whom they are out to help grows younger every year. And the older women refuse to be rescued—they see nothing to be rescued from. And so these Homes will cease to exist.
The old minister wasn’t too far off. Only now, the younger women see nothing to be rescued from either. They can even conceive of a future where they sell virtual reality versions of themselves. “Imagine a VR porn version of Aella,” Martinez invites. “Would you do it?” She already sold an NFT of herself at Hereticon. (NFT is short for “non-fungible token,” a digital asset representing a piece of media whose rights are transferred to the buyer on purchase). It netted her $6,000-7,000 a pop. “So it was a ridiculous amount of little effort for ridiculously high payout, and I feel a little stupid I haven’t kept pursuing it.”
Would she ever be open to a “serious relationship”? She gets this question a lot, and she says yes, provided her boyfriend understands that there’s personal sex, and then there’s work sex. The twain needn’t meet, but there will always be twain. She’s a modern woman, after all.
One thing she has discovered, perhaps the most surprising discovery of her career, is how many men don’t want the sort of thing you would expect them to want—the “pound-pound, fake moan” package. What many of them actually want is intimacy. “They’re not here really looking for sex alone,” she tells Freddie Sayers. “They’re here looking for a woman who loves them.”
I’m reminded of an anecdote from the gay playwright Mart Crowley, about chatting it up in a club on Fire Island with a young sailor-suited hustler. “Are you good in bed?” Crowley asked. “Well,” the boy answered, “I’m not like the average hustler you’d meet. I try to show a little affection. It keeps me from feeling like such a whore.” After a beat, Crowley excused himself, jostling his way through the mass of sweaty bodies to the cocktail bar. He grabbed a napkin and called for a pen, all the while thinking Don’t forget the line, don’t forget the line, don’t forget the line…
I don’t know her name. Not for certain, at least. But I can make a good guess. A 99% sure guess, we’ll say. Her father is a Christian apologist. My father is a Christian apologist—granted, a very different kind, who raised me in a very different world from the world she knew. Even so, Christian apologetics is a small pond. Sad news travels fast. If you don’t know someone, you probably still know someone who knows someone.
But it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone reading this. It would just be a name. A lost name. A dead name.
If she woke up tomorrow with X million dollars in her bank account, Martinez asks, would she stop? She says she would. She likes tweeting. She likes research. She would definitely stop the other stuff, if she could.
“It’s not that I’m against it,” she says. “I’m just tired of it.”
Good grief. That's chilling (at best) and so very sad.
This was a really great write-up! Very thought-provoking.