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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2995 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.

By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.

My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".

I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.

I'm sorry you're in this situation, but if it's any comfort there are stone tablets from guys who had the exact same problem 7,000 years ago. "My best friend got promoted to Captain Save-a-Hoe" is just as universal as "my best friend's bf is a scumbag."
And in this case she really (to me) doesn't sound like an outright gold-digger, or that it's likely to have any more impact on their relationship than the usual carousel antics.

I almost never tell people not to worry about things, and always suspect that most people who do are just pro-the-thing-they're-telling-you-not-to-worry-about. So hopefully you'll trust me when I say this woman isn't worth worrying about any more than usual.
That said, stopping guys from walking into stupid shit is a problem in any marriage. But that should be your focus rather than trying to undermine the whole relationship.

Convincing in matters of the heart is always hard. I might recommend posing some pointed (read: leading) questions:

  1. "If Alice was so nonchalant with her sexual autonomy/privacy/choose-your-word when she was younger, what made her change?" You're looking for a discrete response with a very concrete experience-evaluation-decision-value update cycle. If Bob gives a wishy-washy "oh, she got more mature. She grew up" Press the issue.

  2. You say "After it proved less hot than she anticipated." Assuming this is faithful reporting (I have no reason to believe it isn't, I'm just highlighting that this is an assumption) ask Bob, "How important is 'hot sex' to Alice? Pretty much every study on long term relationships shows that passionate love declines rather steeply, especially after marriage, and couples make-or-break based on companionship and shared values. What's the risk of Alice losing interest?"

  3. This would get deeper and open up a larger can of worms and would, frankly, risk your relationship on the spot with Bob. However - "Bob, we can both agree that teenage self-prostitution isn't a normal thing. What do you think caused this, and what other less-than-common behaviors is Alice prone to?" You can see where this leads ... it's asking if Alice has a history of bad decision making, potentially some mental health issues, maybe even SA trauma from childhood (caveat, of course, those are all generalized "maybes" I am not saying or even forecasting that this is the case with Alice, but that would be part of the discussion).

Suffice it to say, both you and your buddy in deep waters. The best thing you can do is remain honest yet compassionate. Avoid "I told you so" if it comes to that in a few years. Avoid "Fine man, whatever" in the next couple of months. Be there for your Bro, Bro.

  1. It's cool that you care enough about your buddy to ask, I hope my buddies also care about me this much

  2. You've gotten 19 responses already and none of them have given you the right advice. My priors are updated (again) against asking about human being stuff here. Inanimate stuff is still the best place around, no doubt

  3. Presumably your buddy is going to someday have a child, which has a good chance of being a girl. If he does not marry a hooker, his daughter's mother will not be a hooker.

I'm actually surprised by how strong themotte's negativity toward the prostitution is here. It's not a good thing, don't get me wrong. But if the app dating/hookups are of a normal quantity, and she's great otherwise, I don't think it has to be a dealbreaker. Teenagers are stupid and horny, shit happens. At least we know she's honest. (Or, more honest than she had to be. I guess she could have been a hooker for years, who knows.)

I also have some question as to what "a couple of months" means. That could be a single digit number of johns, and prostitutes aren't in general indiscriminate in selecting them. Really, "prostitute" is perhaps an unnecessary term; if, a few times, you tutor math or fuck a goat, are you a math tutor or a goat fucker; or are you just someone who tutored math or fucked a goat?

Being that young, she probably had enough sway to pick attractive men. So it's entirely possible that the only difference in Alice and the modal woman is that she got paid explicitly. Is that really so different from if she had casual sex, which not infrequently entails the man paying for drinks/dinner/a hotel anyway?

I'm actually surprised by how strong themotte's negativity toward the prostitution is here.

I think the people who would post a semi-thoughtful response are too busy enjoying the delicious irony that is men who [claim to] sleep around a lot complaining about their "visceral revulsion" to whores (alongside the traditionalists talking about "violation of duty to her future husband" as if that was a real thing in any post-dowry society). I think I'd rather have someone who both drinks and already knows alcoholism isn't going to be for them than someone so scared of any risk whatsoever that they don't trust themselves to reject it, something something Parable of the Talents.

Anyway, that's the end of the reasonable part of this post.

Or, more honest than she had to be.

imagine marrying someone who doesn't want to be overly honest with you even when it's real bad (and its mirror image, "imagine marrying someone who's psychologically incapable of not going full Madonna-Whore on you").

Is that really so different from if she had casual sex, which not infrequently entails the man paying for drinks/dinner/a hotel anyway?

technically speaking, marriage is just really expensive prostitution that costs half your income and comes with an exclusive supply agreement

The goats that people fuck live after them; the math is oft interred with their bones.

You're basically buying into the whole Cancel Culture idea here. Someone made a series of youthful indiscretions and now you're demanding that they be permanently barred from polite society as a consequence. Would you feel the same about someone who made racist tweets at the same age?

The wiseness of marrying her or not is going to depend on who she is now and in the future, the past is useful in-so-far as it informs those.

Having promiscuous sex is a sign that someone

  1. Does not treat sex as special or sacred or important, at least not to the extent that a chaste person does.

  2. Does not have a proactive loyalty or consideration towards their future partner. A chaste person who saves themselves shows respect and loyalty to the person who they will eventually end up with, before they've even met them. This means that once they do and that person fills that role they are irreplaceable.

  3. Does not think about long-term consequences of their actions, or highly value things like reputation and honorable behavior. A lot of people are going to find this behavior icky, which both severely narrows down the promiscuous person's future partners, and leaves a permanent regret in the heart of partners who decide to forgive their past but still have to know about it.

All of this together means such people are more likely to cheat, and more likely to divorce when they get bored and find someone new. Their current partner may be special, but they are unlikely to be the same level of special that a purely monogamous person would have. However, this is correlational, not guaranteed. And people can change. I don't know Alice, I don't know how much she's changed since then, how loyal she is, how devoted she is to Bob, how much she does or does not regret her past. All I know is that however many years ago she thought that sleeping with however many guys was an acceptable thing to inflict on Bob before she ever met him. But ultimately, the decision is up to Bob. He has to figure out whether he's willing to be guy #537 to Alice, whether he can accept that without it bothering him for the rest of his life. And decide how much he trusts her, whether he's actually truly special to her or just another notch in her belt. And he's allowed to choose to marry her. And it might even be the right decision, I don't know her, I don't know how much her past speaks to her current character, whether she's still the same kind of person or whether she's truly changed.

But when making an argument, it should be focused on Bob, his future, and what's right for him. Her past only matters in-so-far as it affects those.

If anything, it sounds like potentially a good thing. Someone who tried whoring but didn't like it seems less likely to try it again than someone who never tried it and might think it's what they want.

Moreover, it doesn't seem like cucking. If anything, it's the hundreds of men who came (lol) before him who are being cucked, because in the end, she chose Bob. They might have came, but he conquered.

My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him.

Point of order: if she doesn't have her own kids (and isn't demanding to be able to make more kids with other men), he's not a cuckold. A cuckold is one who raises kids not his own.

Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".

I think that you're going to have a bit of a problem doing deterrence this way without systemic change, because with SJ control of the education system and the teen-girl social life, information about this punishment will not actually reach teen girls except when packaged with a "these people are terrible and you must defy their deterrence".

What kind of misogynistic incel prompt is this?

The past is the past. Just because a woman is sexually experienced or has been a sex worker doesn’t make her any less deserving of a proper engagement ring, a wedding of her dreams in front of all their friends and family, a lifetime of love, devotion and commitment. Her experiences of being a sex worker, her experiences with random app hook-ups, only contributed to her growth and maturation as a woman, and made her a more fulfilling partner for your friend. A journey that led her to meeting him. After all of her experiences being a sex worker and having casual sex, she still chose your friend to spend the rest of her life with, so he’s the winner here. The men of her past are missing out on her company, her partnership, her actualization as a woman.

Joking, of course.

It’s somewhat of a fiduciary duty to voice any concerns to friends and family if they’re about to make life-changing decisions. If Alice were a child molester or false rape accuser, or someone deep in dept, surely many would agree that you should have a “Come to Jesus” moment with your friend Bob. Why not her historical hoetry? Especially since it triggers the male ick, an ick that generally increases with the length of a woman's sexuality (much less prostitution), especially for commitment.

If you’ve already voiced your objections once or twice, then you’ve already done your part. It’s tough talking a man out of being pussy-whipped or cunt-struck, talking him out of one-itis. Additional reminders may only result in the messenger (you) being metaphorically shot, as it could be perceived as nagging. And few people like naggers.

Women wouldn’t be nearly as cautious, charitable, or merciful if the script were flipped. If your friend had used prostitutes before, done some sexual experimentation with other men, done some SEA-maxxing, a hypothetical normie (non-prostitute) fiancée’s friends would hardly grant him any charity. Or if he gave them any other ick, for that matter, such as being short or poor. They might find more subtle ways to express this ick to the girlfriend, though, such as undercutting sayings like “if you two have a son he’d be so cute and fun-sized like your boyfriend” or “aww, it’s so charming how your fiancé likes cozy houses and modest cars.”

The female ick is far more transmittable than the male ick given preselection and female male-choice copying, the general susceptibility of women to social influences. A woman is much more likely to acquire a sense of ick for her boyfriend from her female friends’ feedback than a man is for his girlfriend from his male friends’ feedback.

You should also consider whether you want to be friends with him going forward. Couples are basically a package. If you continue your friendship with him, this woman will likely spend time in your house, spend time with your wife/girlfriend, spend time with any children that you have now or in the future (especially daughters). Is this something you’d be comfortable with? I’d personally prefer not to have former prostitutes in my house, much less interacting with a wife/girlfriend or children (as mentioned, especially daughters).

This seems so normalize today I don’t even see why it would be an issue.

And prostitute does feel to need to be a little clarified. Did she just create a sugar baby account and bang a few guys or was she renting a hotel room seeing 10 guys a day? The difference between the former and just a girl who ran around in her 20’s etc doesn’t even seem like a big difference.

So leaving aside the arguments about whether you should do this, here's how I think one would approach doing it. (I always enjoy @Walterodim 's opinions on personal matters, and think you should seriously consider what he said)

You aren't going to rationally argue him out of this decision. You're at a distinct disadvantage: she is sleeping with him, you presumably aren't. And hey, even if you were, my buddy quit cooking because the hours for a chef were terrible, but he's still a hell of a lot better in the kitchen than I am. Marriage is an extremely serious and sobering choice for any male. If he's taking this seriously, he's already thought about all this. If he isn't taking it seriously, well, what are you really protecting Bob from anyway? He'll just get got anyway, a fool and his money etc.

I've never seen anyone successfully argue someone out of a relationship rationally. Women tried it on me some years ago, it didn't work. I've tried it on friends. Didn't work. But what did occasionally work is slipping a meme into one's conversations about the partner, that slowly eats away at the relationship. Create a conflict and feed it until it goes.

My buddy has bad taste in women, historically. He dated a truly crazy woman, she was five years older than him, picked him up at a bar, had been arrested twice for domestic violence (it wasn't her fault it was her BF's, yeah sure, the cops definitely showed up and arrested the 5' blonde girl over the puerto rican guy...), her ex bf still had all his bills mailed to her house, got in trouble at her sales job for showing everyone photos of her labiaplasty, etc. Just a real peach. The capper of it all was when she accused us of being gay together the first time I met her. I told him she was nuts, he didn't listen, they went on a resort vacation together and he wound up wandering the resort in his underwear after getting into yet another drunken argument in the middle of the night. All my rational arguments achieved nothing.

On the other hand, he once dated a girl, I didn't really like her when I met her. He asked me my opinion of her. I said she was like pound cake. Tasty but just fine, you'll eat it if it is there, but nobody's favorite food, nobody LOVES pound cake, they just eat it because it's around. This ruined their relationship. We started calling her "pound cake" in our conversations, he started thinking about her like that, the relationship was dead. Reread everything Scott Adams wrote about Donald Trump in 2015-2016 (he's since gotten even weirder, but his early stuff was interesting); read about Trump's application of OODA loops here.

What you need to do is drive a wedge between them, throw an Apple of Discord into their relationship, create a bone of contention between them regarding the marriage. How you do this is up to you, I know nothing about either Alice or Bob, so I realize I'm kinda riffing off my own relationships and social circles in this example, but here's what I'm thinking:

Talk to Bob about his impending proposal, and talk to him about a Pre-Nup, and about structuring his assets to protect them from Alice in the event of divorce or in the event of Alice facing major liability. Idk how bright Bob is, if you think you can pull it off try to tie the past in and persuade him that Alice could face some kind of legal liability for things she did, and that he needs to make sure that their assets are separate for that purpose, to protect them both. Provide examples of spouses losing their assets after one spouse gets busted, and bring up, ever so gently, that even though you absolutely love Alice she does have a criminal past, and you wouldn't want to see either of them run that kind of risk, after all if she were to face that kind of civil or criminal liability it would be better for both of them if he had assets to use to protect himself and her, so even though you adore Alice it's so important that he protect himself from the possibility of her past dredging itself back up.

If he won't fall for that, or in addition, try to tie in the past by bringing it up as an example of how Alice can be impulsive and mercurial, you love Alice of course and hope this never comes up!, but you are first and foremost Bob's friend and it's your job to give him advice, and part of that is making sure he's making clear eyed decisions and you won't let his or your judgment be clouded by how much you both love Alice. You want to emphasize that you have nothing against Alice, you just want to be realistic about the many possibilities in a long future together.

It's important he protects himself, it's standard for men like him, and one can never know how people might change over time, you adore everything you know about Alice but people do change... Bring up examples of people who made sudden life changes, and how it shredded their spouses. I'm thinking of my neighbor, a doctor, who got some kind of brain tumor that pressed on his prefrontal cortex that caused him to suddenly abandon his family and knock up a nurse two years older than his son. The new girl sent his son a letter, at the father's urging, offering to abort the baby if the son didn't approve. That fucked with the poor kid's head so bad that he wound up dropping out of undergrad. I'm sure you have someone like that in your mutual circles with Bob. Bring that up: you never really know who you're marrying because the person you'll be married to ten years from now will be different than the person they are now. Hell, look how different we are than how we were ten years ago! Which will lead his mind naturally to thinking how different Alice was some years back...

Emphasize that as long as there's no divorce or liability problem, it doesn't matter anyway, so if she isn't intending to divorce Bob it won't matter anyway, she's only harmed if she leaves him! Try to portray the prenup as a standard thing for men like him, just a normal thing to do, and contesting it as the odd and notable thing. Implicit is that if she balks, she is plotting to divorce him. You want to plant that thought as deeply as you can, without ever under any circumstances saying it out loud in a way that he could attribute to you. You're trying to do Inception here.

Best case scenario, she balks, and in the ensuing argument over "Why would you need this protection when we're never getting divorced, Bob!" Bob drops the "Look, I love you, but you used to be a hooker, you've changed before you could change again..." bomb, and they never recover. She attacks you for putting this in his head, but because you have emphasized how much you love her it makes her look petty and antagonistic, like she's trying to separate him from his friends, a classic tactic by manipulative abusers. He talks to you about it and you say, hey, I love Alice and I'm sure she's not scheming and evil, but you have to stand your ground, brother!, or you'll be in for forty years of this. Alice is great, but that doesn't mean she can walk all over you dude! You have to stand up for yourself!

Risk of a worst case scenario, she calls his bluff and signs it right away, cementing her position in good faith, and making you look petty and antagonistic, certainly painting a target on your back for Alice. But still a lower risk than if you tell him that he shouldn't marry Alice to punish her for her past sins.

It doesn't have to be the prenup thing, maybe it's moving to Bob's hometown, or it's career questions, or it's differences in childrearing or politics or religion. But you need to start a fight, where Bob is absolutely certain he is right and just doing what needs to be done, without directly attacking Alice because you will lose to the girl who is sucking his cock.

Great post, it's like Sir Humphrey but for relationships: you have to get behind someone before you can stab him (or her) in the back.

I think you'd do better to emphasise personal risk to him. In the vein of 'she clearly has a high libido and seeks sexual novelty, how do you think she'll react when she gets tired with her married sex life?'

Appealing to (your) revulsion or asking him to not marry the woman he loves because of abstract second order effects isn't going to help.

If I were Bob, I would want to know that you feel this way so that I could excise you from my life. Who wants to be friends with a guy that has contempt for your wife and thinks you're a cuck for marrying her? Even if your instincts about her turn out to be correct, nothing about this sounds like it's coming from a place of genuine care, it all sounds like playacting as the most toxic strains of the online right.

Who wants to be friends with a guy that has contempt for your wife and thinks you're a cuck for marrying her?

I think this might be going down a dangerous path. The road from this to "build yourself a bubble and shun all unbelievers" is shorter than it looks, and the latter universalises as civil war.

I don't buy it. The slope would have to be pretty slippery to go from, "I don't want to be friends with people that despise my wife" to "I refuse to be friends with people I disagree with".

Given how many people have slid down it, I'd say it's pretty slippery. Even then, I did say "might".

If Butlerian were actively acting against her outside of his advice to Bob, that's a legit reason, but if mere disapproval is enough then you're edging toward "friendship is transitive" which sorts people into bubbles (proof: assume by contradiction that a connected subgraph contains a prude and a prostitute. Then the prude and prostitute must be friends because friendship is transitive and (because there are finitely many people) there is a finite-length path between them. But they're not. -><-). Like I said, shorter than it looks.

If you think you can avoid sliding down, fine, whatever, it's your life. Just pointing out the pitfall.

You’re smuggling in the assumption that it’s symmetric in the first place. Model as a directed graph imo.

Just to make sure that we have some shared experience that we're drawing from, are you married? Where I'm coming from is that if I knew that someone expressed the degree of contempt for my wife that OP is expressing towards Alice, I wouldn't just want to defriend them, I would want to beat the shit out of them in the process. This isn't anything like a disagreement about policies or even religion, it really is just about the mostly deeply insulting thing you can say to man. Seriously, is there anything more negative you can say about a guy than, "I despise his whore wife and he's a cuck for marrying her"? Trying to bridge interpersonal gaps can certainly be a good thing, but being friends with a guy that has contempt for you because you're worried that doing otherwise might lead to harshly judging others is just going full quokka.

if I knew that someone expressed the degree of contempt for my wife that OP is expressing towards Alice, I wouldn't just want to defriend them, I would want to beat the shit out of them in the process.

"I would respond to someone's principled, albeit harsh, verbal condemnation with physical violence." I'm really not sure that's the kind of argument you want to advocate.

Trying to bridge interpersonal gaps can certainly be a good thing, but being friends with a guy that has contempt for you is just going full quokka.

I don't read OP's comment as having contempt for Bob. He has a sincerely held belief that marrying Alice is a bad move based on his sincerely held values regarding prostitution and promiscuity. He's try his best to articulate that to his friend, Bob. This seems, in fact, like the opposite of contempt. Contempt would probably take the form of a quiet chuckle followed by, "You do you, man" on the part of OP.

Slippery slopes are greased by the shrugging nonchalance of the agnostic and conformist.

"I would respond to someone's principled, albeit harsh, verbal condemnation with physical violence."

LOL + YesChad.jpg -- honestly the responses here are brutal, you guys seem to be all about the traditional values without wanting to accept the traditional consequenses.

There not one thing in the world more trad than beating the shit out of a guy who runs down your woman, regardless of whether he thinks he's being 'principled' about it -- you must run in some awfully rarified circles if you don't know this.

OP is talking about his friend and about his (OP's) intention to relate his own reservations about a potential mate.

This isn't a random guy drunk at a bar smacking your lady's butt or making lewd comments.

Context is important and I think it's important you've decided, on purpose, to de-contextualize in order to make an "omg look at these dorks argument," Chad.

There not one thing in the world more trad than beating the shit out of a guy who runs down your woman...you must run in some awfully rarified circles if you don't know this.

I am willing to bet all of my Confederate script you have never beat the shit out a guy who "r[a]n down your woman."

More comments

"I would respond to someone's principled, albeit harsh, verbal condemnation with physical violence." I'm really not sure that's the kind of argument you want to advocate.

I wrote that this is what I would want to do. Personally, I have pretty strong impulse control, so it's unlikely that I would actually react that way. I wouldn't think less of someone that replied to OP's "advice" with a physical challenge though.

I don't read OP's comment as having contempt for Bob.

This is not consistent with, "as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him".

Slippery slopes are greased by the shrugging nonchalance of the agnostic and conformist.

Yeah, that's why I think the correct response to your putative friend expressing how much they despise your wife and calling you a cuck is feeling an impulse towards violence. I'd be a lot more concerned about the slippery slope of thinking, "well, my wife is a bit of a whore and might deserve to be lonely and miserable forever" than the one where your first impulse is to defend her.

I really don't know how you can read that post and think it's about sincere concern, respect, and values.

Unless Bob shares your morals (which given he is considering marrying this woman, he probably isn't), I doubt that an argument that he should punish ex-whores by shunning his girlfriend will be a winning one.

I also doubt calling him a cuck or spewing disgust will deter him. Maybe, if he values his relationship with you more than he values his relationship with his girlfriend. But otherwise you're just likely to be cut out of his life.

If I were you, I'd think hard about whether you want to speak to him as a concerned friend, or as someone with a lot of feelings about punishing whores. Because the strategy for the first is to be tactful and express your honest concerns about whether she is really wife material. The strategy for the second is to talk to him like you're talking to us here. But don't fool yourself if you really just want to express your disgust. That's like the guy who calls fat people pigs and then says he's just trying to encourage them to lose weight for the sake of their health.

Because the strategy for the first is to be tactful and express your honest concerns about whether she is really wife material.

Which, obviously, can't really be heavily mediated by the fact that she was a hooker. This is already priced in! Bob isn't going to hear that line of argument and think, "wow, I failed to realize that there are some negatives to consider about the fact that she was a hooker". Bob either has different object-level beliefs about prostitution than the mainstream (possible, and if true, you probably won't convince him otherwise) or already knows the same things that everyone else does and decided that it was still an acceptable tradeoff for him. Maybe he'll be wrong, but it won't be because he has never thought about this before.

So, separate a couple things out.

  1. The fact that she was deviant and horney and naive enough to do this, is certainly a flag. "Youthful indiscression" is a bit of a euphemism or handwave or cope, because most youths don't make that kind of indiscression. I would be wary that this kind of outside-the-norm behavior is not some isolated trivia but representative of unreliable behavior traits that could be easily avoided in most other women. I'd be curious whether, aside from this she really is super normie now and what exactly that means. Sex norms and appetite vary widely with young women.

  2. What's exactly her disposition now? Does she find prostitution morally wrong? (does Bob)? is this a repentance situation or a "not for me" scenario? These are very different starting points. Has she done actually 'work' to change? Has she had a transformative epistemic outlook, or was it more like, whoops! that went to far, etc? Would she disapprove of her daughter doing the same? If she's "reformed" and frames her past perspective as a moral failing and a cautionary tale, I'd probably leave it alone with Bob. Sinners deserve forgiveness. If she's still open-minded and women's choicy about it, but it's just not for her... I'd really talk Bob out of this one.

  3. On a personal, disgust level, yeah I wouldn't personally be able to handle it. It's possibly worth mentioning that to 'normalize' the disgust reaction and give Bob an out to interrogate whether he's accurately evaluatoin his own. But I wouldn't take it to far.

In sum, the current nature of her today and her position on her past mistakes is super important to judge the context. Plenty of people are repentant of their past and it's good that they find people who can forgive them. Other people get fucked by overlooking severe lapses in discernment. Overall, I'd consider how she feels about prostitution in general today as more important than what's she's done in the past. Based on what you've written it's impossible to tell which is which here.

If forced to choose, I'd rather marry a hardcore born again trad-wife who stood firmly against sexual misconduct but had dabbled in the past and repented than a progressive minded virgin, who was outspoken about the right to sex work and rejected sexual prohibitions as patriarchical and unjust.

I will approach this in a utilitarian way for you.

By trying to intervene there is a good chance that Bob will cut you off as a friend and marry them anyway. I've experienced this with close friends trying to talk other close friends out of serious relationships/marriage before using 'they aren't right/good/healthy for you' as a justification. In one case they became friends again years later after the inevitable breakup. But they weren't ever as close.

This might be worth it to you, it might not. But interventions on this scale (eg interfering and trying to stop someone from marrying their partner when love/limerance is at it's highest) is a recipe for disaster dangerous game.

You have been warned.

Edit: some strikethrough and extra words.

Who is 'them' in this context? Bob isn't planning to marry twins, he's planning to marry an individual woman.

Sorry to call you out over a minor thing but the misuse of the gender neutral they is a terrible grammatical trend. Why withold information from your listener if that information is built into the grammar of the language you're using?

I definitely agree with this. If you have serious concerns about a friend marrying someone, you should mention it gently, once. It probably won't make an impact because well, people do stupid shit when they are in love. After you mention it once, your obligation as a friend is met, and the best thing is to hold your tongue. Badgering someone about "man that girl is bad for you, don't marry her" is only going to cause your friendship to end.

I've watched parent-child relationships (which are generally more durable than friendships) die over this sort of thing. It's just not worth making a big deal out of it, don't do it.

I never really figured out what you're meant to do after the fact though. I think it's 'acknowledge your friend is fallible and making a bad choice. Decide that you care about them enough to help them pick up the inevitable pieces.'

I think most people make this choice to a greater or lesser intensity every single day.

Yeah, that's what I've done in the past when I have had friends make bad decisions about romantic partners. I would say it worked out pretty well.

Yeah. Not just romantic partners; basically any life choice.

Moving somewhere else, taking a crazy job, dropping out of college/uni. Pick your poison.

I agree, beyond ‘think carefully, make sure you’re sure’ these things are best stayed out of. There’s a reason the best advice for parents who disapprove of a child’s spouse is usually ‘try to be nice about it’. You’re ‘competing’ with someone who is providing sex and companionship on a constant basis, that isn’t a fight most friends or even immediate family can win.

CUCK CUCK CUCK

Is it cucking if you marry a woman who has had any type of sex with another man before?

I don’t see why prostitution is so much worse than other types of previous relationships.

I mean, prostitution is one of the more pronounced forms of gold-digging, so it's Bayesian evidence of more subtle forms of gold-digging (which you might be fine with, but which you definitely don't want to get into by accident), but not necessarily strong such evidence depending on time, on why she quit, on how honest she is about it. In this circumstance she seems to have a more recent record of not-gold-digging so that's much less of a concern.

my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than…

If all you have to go on is an internal sense of revulsion, I’m not sure you should be trying to convince him the first place.

The argument that you want to disincentive teens from becoming prostitutes seems weak to me, since it seems really inefficient — how many girls are you saving from a year of prostitution in return for condemning this woman to never have a family for the next 60 years?

I’m guessing very small — probably less than 0.1. Prostitutes are pretty rare in the US so it’s hard for interventions targeted at random people to actually hit their target, and even then, how many teens are going to know she’s single because she was a prostitute (the answer is zero), and finally, your targets are unlikely to have great impulse control anyway.

Or, to make it simpler: how often did you, as a teen, think about the life of an adult you knew when making a decision? The answer is: never, because you didn’t know anything about the personal lives of more than 6 adults, and you didn’t see their lives as relevant predictors of your own life anyway.

Arguments? Spew your disgust at him. Chances are that'll have more weight than any attempt to reason him out of something he didn't reason himself into.

That is definitely the way to speedrun the end of the friendship. It won't make a positive impact, unfortunately.

Of course not, but what the hell will? He's disgusted by his friend.

This astute mind of the Motte is going to suggest that your revulsion is misguided. If you so desire to talk him out of it, you should focus on the (presumably) larger amount of NSA sex she had for free. Feels more befitting of the "CUCK CUCK CUCK" screaming.

Alternatively, it's perfectly acceptable to feel that revulsion, I have no desire to talk someone out of it, but would bet a lot that you can't talk someone into feeling revulsion that they currently don't. Personally, I would never date a fat woman because I am disgusted by fat women. Nonetheless, people do date fat women and informing them that they shouldn't because obesity is bad, actually, probably won't move the needle much.

What woman would admit (edit: to her boyfriend) she had been a prostitute for a couple of months in her late teens? There’s almost no risk of anyone finding out and (obviously) nothing to gain. In general the only women who would admit to escorting / prostitution are pornstars, strippers etc whose reputation is undeniable and/or those like Aella who try to build some kind of commercial grift around it. But that’s again very rare. The concerning thing is less that she did it (although that is a problem) and more that he knows about it, since it suggests an astonishing lack of understanding / naïveté about men on her part that could be dangerous.

As far as arguments go, it’s practically tautology that people with low sexual inhibition are prone to infidelity.

Maybe she had some social media profiles or something for the purpose that didn’t get scrubbed, and he(or his mother- there is a certain kind of middle-aged to older woman who will cyberstalk her son’s girlfriend) found it?

I’m equally confused that the man told his friend. “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”, indeed.

Honestly, that's probably most of the red flag right there.

I don't think it's out of the ordinary to mention sexual histories, though certainly the timing/how it's brought up has something to do with it (the alternative being the standard? way of doing things where there actually aren't things you should ever trust your spouse with). Because clearly someone you can't trust is definitely someone who you should get married to, not that "someone you can trust" has ever been a rational basis for marriage before- naturally, the shrewd thing would be to just lie about it even if directly asked, but the tension's still there.

Of course, that also goes both ways- why's he talking to his friends about it (and this one in particular)? Is it because he has the "muh virginity for virginity's sake" pattern installed and legitimately needs help dealing with the tension that creates, or some other reason... either way, speaks to either potentially poor or otherwise purely self-gratifying judgment on his part when it comes to keeping things said in confidence, which is not a great outlook for that relationship for other reasons.

Right, surely the prudent thing to do if your partner tells you they’re a (hopefully former) whore is to privately make the decision to stay or go and then to do so. That said, clearly she must have known he might tell someone, given she did.

I'm going to do the opposite. Consider that he's getting for free what other people used to pay for. And to her defense, she didn't enjoy the experience.

I'm not wading into third-hand relationship drama other than to say that I for one believe in redemption, but I do have to point out that this:

he's getting for free what other people used to pay for

is weapons-grade copium. Paying for it is the easy way of getting sex, otherwise no one would buy it.

Whether it’s the easy way or merely the expensive way depends, presumably, on your own hotness.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say people for who it's merely expensive tend to not bother with buying it, which is part of my point. They are the only ones who could plausibly say "I get for free what you have to pay for".

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