Dear
@Aella_Girl,
Iโve heard a lot of people seeming to think that I reject you wholesale, or that I donโt approve of you for being a sex worker. I want to set the record straight about why I do not want to work with you and have made certain comments, and offer the chance for a dialogue if you want. I also want to apologize.
I donโt like you because of how my ex-husband, Ronny Fernandez, your plzdontkillus cofounder, would make sexual and romantic bids at you in front of me (presumably also in private) while we were in a monogamous relationship. This was his fault, and it contributed to our divorce, but because it caused me to resent you as well, I came to you about it, hoping to give you a chance to show you werenโt down with it. You were cold to me, dismissing my concerns with โheโs not my type.โ At that point I realized we were not friends. It wasnโt your responsibility to stop him, but your priority was him and my feelings werenโt part of the equation.
When youโre in an abusive relationship, itโs easy to feel more angry and betrayed at the people around you than at the abuser. I felt angry at you and many others from the rationalist community, as well as general rationalist culture, for supporting him. Itโs not your fault that I was in an abusive relationship. It was his fault. Even though I think my feelings are valid, especially when you opted not to help me when I reached out, I recognize that Iโm transferring anger onto you that really belongs to him.
I saw you once say that I judged you for being a sex worker. I think you were remembering a time when I argued that, because Ronny had your nudes, you didnโt just have a platonic relationship. I have also critiqued the blurred line between your sex work and your intellectual content, where engaging with you without sex is still a form of flirtation and erotic connection, for a similar reason. My issue has never been with the sexuality. It had to do with how you and our mutual friends were insisting that I had no recourse against my partner cheating on meโ that I was in the wrong for feeling jealous.
Perhaps you regret this, or would regret this now that you know how I felt. It would make a big difference to me if you did. There are also subject matter disagreements I have with you on AI Safety work, and I wrote a lot of them up, but upon introspection I think that discussion would be pretty collegial if I saw you have empathy for a wound in me thatโs still healing. The breach of trust was really a personal thing.
Iโm also writing to share my concern about your current relationship with Ronny. Ronny lovebombs you epically on main, and I think that could lead to epic devaluation and exploitation if youโre not careful. I have wondered if heโs pushed you to do and share more and more extreme things when I see him seeming to get dividends. I saw him negging you and undercutting you even when he and I were together, and heโs good at portraying that destruction of self-esteem as rationalist introspective virtue and fucky intimacy. No matter how annoyed I may feel at you, I would never want you to go through what he did to me.
Iโm going to unblock you, and you can DM or reply if you wish.
Holly