The Filler Episode
A guest post by a boyfriend
Hey folks. Nate (Aella’s partner) here. Aella’s taking a break this week, so I’m filling in for her. You might have seen that her twitter account is now private. (She may continue to post on substack notes, we’ll see.)
You may be wondering how things got to this point.
It all started when Aella escaped her abusive family by jumping out of a moving car at the age of 17, and then escaped a grueling life of hard labor on a factory floor by diving headfirst into the wonderful world of sexwork, where she eventually discovered that many people enjoyed her being herself online, in all her goofy glory. Others enjoyed it less. Which more-or-less brings us to the events of the last couple weeks.
A week and a half ago, Aella (and I) attended a series of conferences at Lighthaven: LessOnline, Arbor Summercamp, and Manifest. It’s a lovely event space, attended by lovely people. Aella, as it happens, is something of a celebrity in those spaces.
You might think that sounds nice, right up until around the thirteenth time that you’re having a fun conversation with your friends, and somebody interrupts to siphon you off into a solo conversation with a lengthy compliment or a question like ‘why do so many people hate you?’ (and otherwise center the conversation on you or their parasocial relationship to you). It’s probably worse if they’re also trying to flirt with you, and if they are (no shame) so lacking in social tact that they couldn’t tell you were enjoying the conversation they just interrupted.
(While editing this post, Aella clarified that she enjoys brief unobtrusive compliments, and appreciates the sentiment of people who engage, and doesn’t want people to feel bad.)
This relentless dynamic had her lamenting, after hours, that being a microcelebrity kinda sucks. By the end she took to wearing a blanket over her head when walking through public spaces, and then bolting out of the room when someone said ‘is that Aella??’
(It’s not the first time she’s lamented this. Even the kidnapping attempt wasn’t the first time. Over the last couple years, as her fame has grown, she’s been grappling with how it affects her at any relevant event she goes to, where suddenly everywhere she turns there’s someone with a parasocial relationship. Including people who merely pretend not to know who she is for a time, which might sound fun but actually only deepens the sense of unease when she learns that she can’t trust anyone to just be chill with her. But she was noticing it again and especially during the LessOnline and Summercamp events.)
Then Manifest started, and one of the main sponsors brought merch. With Aella’s face on it, and the text “I’m in a polycule with Aella”. Which didn’t exactly help matters.
The sponsor had made their own merchandise and sent pictures to the Manifest organizers. One of the organizers said “um.” She’s a friend of mine, and she texted me. I was excessively busy that day, and referred her to Aella’s sister (to retain the option of surprise). Aella’s sister never answered. Nobody vetoed the idea. Nobody asked Aella.
They sent 71 boxes.
I broke the news to her by walking into the end of one of her data-collection workshops with the shirt on, sparking much laughter. But for some reason, it did not exactly make the celebrity effect any better during the Manifest conference.
Other factors that weighed on her that week:
Various people felt awkward about wearing the merch, and went out of their way to tell Aella so -- that they though it was weird, or that they couldn’t wear it out in public, or that it was cringe and they’d feel embarrassed. Which is fine, but maybe not the most fun message to have repeated to you by every third passer-by, for merch that she had no hand in and no knowledge of.
She’d organized a silly photo of her and a handful of our ladyfriends surrounding Nicholas Decker, after he acquired a track record of boldly posting his controversial beliefs in a manner many analogized to Aella. He later posted a pic of him wearing some of the merch. The twitter engagement with those posts largely had the form of lauding Nick and/or insulting Aella. Comparing those reactions to the reactions to her own promiscuity (such as the birthday gangbang), she was struck. She’d known that men get lauded for (implied) promiscuity whereas women get hate for it, but she hadn’t expected the gap to be quite so large or quite so obvious.
She was feeling pretty raw and stressed out, and was trying to figure out how to handle this. Then, “like an idiot” (she says), she tried searching her name on twitter.
She received an enormous flood of hate in a vulnerable moment, and decided that the internet could get fucked and took her account private.
On Sunday morning, seeing that she was distressed, I scrambled to help her have a better day. I rallied friends to give her emotional support. The fine folks at Substack worked seamlessly to reschedule a Substack event Aella was supposed to appear at.
In the following days, she’s been touched by the support, although less than you might hope — she’s aware that many people in her life love her, and that many of the people closest to her have been touched by her openness and realness and courage. But everywhere else on the internet, she’s become some sort of dread meme; an acceptable target to hate on. Usually for false reasons. Plenty of people in far reaches of the internet have heard nothing about her except that she’s some e-girl who does all her studies via twitter polls (false; the twitter polls are for fun and for question testing, the real data comes from wider surveys); or that she doesn’t know about selection bias (false; most people criticizing her research don’t seem to know how much more high-powered and representative her samples are than most anything found in academia); or that she grooms young women for Silicon Valley billionaires (false; the parties are in especially high demand among women compared to men, and both genders pay equally). And sometimes people just completely make shit up (like the “drug roulette” legend). But the lies have a lot more legs than the truth — that she’s curious and joyful and meticulously kind. Here’s a quick example I dug out of her twitter replies (and shared with permission):
Or this example, from a few months ago:
She’s consistently like this, even as people pile hate onto her. She’s a living example of “turn the other cheek,” more so than almost anyone else I’ve ever met.
By contrast, for those who dogpile her, the falseness of their justifications doesn’t much matter. To those who have barely heard of her except as an object of contempt, and who are happy to hop onto a thread and pile some of their own contempt on to boot. That dynamic sucks. She’s written about it some privately, and I’ve gotten permission to share some excerpts below.