Posted on | October 18, 2025 | No Comments
Four years ago, Bari Weiss published an interview with a “sex worker” who goes by the name Aella. Some of what Aella said about “the imbalance in value” between men and women was intriguing enough that I wrote about it (“Wisdom From a Whore,” July 28, 2021). And then, as is my habit, I forgot all about her. Decades of deadlines accustomed me to work in “file-it-and-forget-it” mode where, once the story’s done, you move on to the next story. At times, people I’ve written about (when covering what I think of as “the kook beat”) have accused me of being “obsessed” with them, when in fact I don’t care about them at all. They just happened to do something that made them worth coverage (e.g., as an example of feminist lunacy) and as soon as I finish whatever it was that drew my attention to them, I forget all about them. Of course, some of these stories may go on for months, the way the #FreeKate case did, but once the story drops off my radar, I forget about it and move on.
All of that is preamble to a weird coincidence. While I was minding my own business this week, there was an online conversation about the recent “SlutCon” in San Francisco, which prompted a question from my old friend Ladd Ehlinger about the headliner of the event and, in response, Deanna Prince mentioned my 2021 article about Aella.
When I wasn’t paying attention last year — there was an election, remember? — Aella gained notoriety for her birthday gang bang:
She wrote an entire Substack article about the experience of having sex with 37 different men in celebration of what was, by my calculations, her 32nd birthday. Now let’s return to what I wrote about Aella in 2021:
“Aella” grew up in a strict Mormon household, left home at 17 and — judging from her own published self-history — went wild at age 20, when she had eight different sexual partners in a year. That was about the time she started her “sex worker” career as a camgirl, and now her number of lifetime sexual partners is 38, including 11 women. “Aella” is currently 29 and peddling herself via OnlyFans, and I’m sure her family must be mortified by her career choice. It’s impossible for me to view such matters except from the parental perspective. Whenever you see this kind of behavior, you must think, “What went wrong? How did she get so messed up? What could lead her to disgrace her family this way?”
When I was a young bachelor, of course, my attitude might have been different, but as a father (and now a grandfather) I find myself appalled by the normalization of such shameful behavior.
The “published self-history” refers to this tweet:
In 2021, I didn’t notice some of the details of that history, especially the part noting the “average age difference” between her and her partners. At age 18, she had a boyfriend the same age, but at age 19, she had two partners — one male, one female — who were an average 11 years older, i.e., 30. My guess is that she got involved with a couple of “swingers” (an older couple) who had her as the third member of a ménage à trois. Very interesting, as this precedes the next year, when Aella went wild, averaging a new partner every six weeks or so, with most of those partners also being substantially older than her. At an age when many young women would have been college juniors, then, Aella was already well on her way to being a notorious whore. In 2014, when she was 22, she had 10 different new partners, seven of whom were female. Since she was performing as a “camgirl” by then, my guess is that most of those involved doing girl-on-girl performances on video.
Eventually, it seems, there was a sort of burnout leading to a period of celibacy or else she got into a monogamous relationship for a couple of years (ages 26-27) when she had zero new partners. In order to protect her self-esteem (or as a matter of reputational management), Aella presents herself as an exemplar of “sexual liberation,” making rational choices and exercising independent agency. But no one with the least bit of common sense could believe this. A gang-bang with three dozen dudes to celebrate her birthday? That’s objectively insane, and it brings me back to the questions I raised in 2021: “What went wrong? How did she get so messed up? What could lead her to disgrace her family this way?”
What if . . . disgracing her family is intentional?
We know very little of Aella’s background, but it seems like a reasonable inference that she is from a small town or suburb, where her family is (or once was) regarded as respectable people. It’s a small enough community that Aella’s shameful behavior is well known — her former high school classmates are all aware of what she’s been up to the past decade or so — and the disgrace felt by her family is very painful to them. Inflicting pain on her family is the whole point of what Aella is doing.
That’s my theory, anyway. It is difficult to find any logical explanation for why someone would deliberately seek notoriety as a whore, but that’s the best I can do, based on the available information. As for my use of the venerable English noun whore, it is always preferable to euphemisms like “sex worker.” If you don’t want to be called a whore, don’t be a whore.
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