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Comment by localuser13 | Hacker News Reader

>To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.

I'm married now, and never used any parasocial platform OnlyFans or another, but trivializing the problem of young adult loneliness is either ignorant or condescending.

A large fraction of young males don't have anyone to "take out for a dinner", or at least have no idea how to initiate that. You may scoff at that, but I certainly wouldn't know how to do it, and money was not a problem. Paying for human connection, especially online, was tempting.

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Taking someone out for a dinner and footing the bill does not require you to be some cassanova. Escort services are a thing and honestly somewhat increasingly normalized. The latest chris hemsworth movie had him using an escort and didn't paint him as weird for it or anything, kind of just seemed like a gym membership or any other service the way it was casually broached (he played a certain healthy/rich/clean cut professional thief/perhaps even autistic character).

Escorting is more similar to OF than to "real" dating. In both cases the "service provider" pretends to be a perfect match for the customer, actively molding their persona to fit them. The more someone interacts with such tailored experiences the harder it is to adjust to the "real" experience.

Which is probably fine if you're a successful man in his 40s who has more time than money and treats escorting as a shortcut. Not so fine if you're a man half his age who is struggling to find a partner.

LA is weird and not everyone wants to live there.

Escort services are still a very niche interest in most of the world.

And they provide a simulacrum of human connection.

I bet a lot of people would get into escorting if they expected their customers to look like Chris Hemsworth. Who's Hollywood got playing the next normalized John, Emma Watson?

The solution to loneliness isn’t fake connections. And I think makes it even worse because fake friends don’t act like real people and make it harder to form real relationships with people who have their own desires and needs and aren’t just sycophants receiving pay.

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