Safe at SlutCon

THE NEW CRITICFish Being Born, Sabine SpierOverlocked is the pseudonym of a 26-year-old lawyer from Auckland, New Zealand.The two men in our circle were about what I expected. Both were readers of the blog LessWrong and worked for some kind of amorphous tech venture. The other girl and I were “flirt girls,” a compensated worker or volunteer whose job for the weekend was to let men practice flirting on them. The four of us sat cross-legged on a mattress somebody had pulled to the floor. The mattress was so soft that every time the girl next to me shifted her weight, I slid toward her. The people at Lighthaven call this practice “circling”; it asks you to narrate your inner state to others while it happens. If your throat dries when someone looks at you, you announce the dryness to the group.I was dressed in my nondescript college girl outfit: a white top and jeans. The other girl wore black arm sleeves and eyelash extensions. When it was her turn to report, she said she felt bored. I’m good at flirting, and it isn’t hard to get a man to sleep with you, she said. Once I start, I can see exactly where the evening will end. Here, she told me that she felt like an “apex predator.” I laughed. Then I sat there sinking into the mattress, trying to work out what the laugh was for.It was my first time at SlutCon, a three-day retreat in Berkeley for men who wanted to get better at seduction. It was my first time at Lighthaven, the venue that hosted it. I had never been to Lighthaven, but it reminded me of my co-op at Stanford. There was an open kitchen stocked with more food than anyone could eat. People were wealthy — I mean, “high-trust” — enough to leave their laptops lying around. The sunlight was Californian cashmere on the skin. We often sat on the ground like college kids. People were visibly nude or Dionysian in places, but the atmosphere as a whole still struck me as neutered and millennial, like a hackathon that had changed its prize.Lighthaven used to be a hotel, and it still has a hotel’s bones — it has courtyards and garden paths. Now it is operated by Lightcone Infrastructure, an organization closely associated with a subculture known as “rationalism,” which formed online in the 2000s around writers including Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, and now Scott Alexander. The subculture is interested in avoiding cognitive biases and applying Bayesian inferences toward real-world objectives, including artificial intelligence alignment.Rationalism is physically instantiated as reading groups or “meet-ups” across the world, but its adherents are particularly active in Silicon Valley. They have visible discourse norms and vocabulary — “attack surface” (a total set of vulnerabilities), “priors” (a baseline), “scope insensitivity” (a cognitive bias with regard to scale). They like to measure things. Aella, a sex worker associated with the subculture and one of three founders of SlutCon, is known for running controversial online surveys querying niche sexual ethics. She is best understood as a hobbyist researcher and internet provocateur.When I interviewed to be a flirt girl, the organizers gave me the thesis of the event: We love men (do we? I wondered) and we want men to be better at seducing us (of course). In our training, we were instructed to approach the event with high degrees of openness, along with curiosity and candor. Each flirtee would wear a wristband; when it was on, we could be approached by the attendees. People would be finding the edges of their “seduction style” over the weekend, the organizers said, so some of them would try things we might find awkward. When that happens, we should offer a gentle correction, or end the interaction by naming our intention to exit out loud. If possible, we were to avoid “crushing their spirit.”There were roughly as many flirt girls as ticket holders. Tickets to SlutCon cost between $3,300 and $18,000, with the more expensive tickets providing limited-space workshops, personalized feedback, and what the materials called “spicier educational sessions.” While nothing in the paperwork required ticket holders to be men, or flirtees to be women, I did not meet any exceptions.All my friends wanted to know what the SlutCon attendees were like. I told them I had never met anyone at the conference before. To my eye, the event skewed white and nebbish but not drastically so. The men I met were often rationalist or rationalist-adjacent and knew each other from previous Lighthaven events. They ranged from being in their 20s to middle-aged. They were typical heterosexual men, which is to say they conveyed a lack of style rather than having overtly bad style, though a few wore actual fedoras, like Magic the Gathering players. They were sincere and awkward, possibly Redditors, the next Pokemon evolution of the startup guys I knew in college. Some were involved in the poly and/or kink scene, and some of them were not.The women varied more but were also largely in their mid-20s or 30s. The rationalist or rationalist-adjacent women were dressed comfortably in flannel or skater skirts like SuperWhoLock posters, and they greeted their friends wherever they went. Others were outsiders to the Lighthaven culture entirely. There was a beautiful former camgirl, who told me that Aella’s writing about escorting had described her own life. There was a sex-positive painter who had flown in for inspiration. There were two stunning housemates from another country, intrigued by the gender relations angle of the event — one wished to repair a relationship with her misogynistic brother. Somewhere in the mix was a journalist from Playboy, wearing sigil-shaped jewelry.The crowd at SlutCon wasn’t limited to rationalists and sex workers, but both demographics were overrepresented. What everyone at the event seemed to have in common was a directness in cognitive and interpersonal style. To my surprise, I found this appealing. I’m a lawyer and am accustomed to a certain guardedness and artificiality in my professional life. For years, I’ve behaved through signs or euphemisms, like a character in an Edith Wharton novel. At SlutCon, it was fun to talk with people who would name the subtext out loud. I had a social license I usually don’t.Many of the panels were organized with legibility and empiricism in mind. It seemed to me they attempted to render attraction more calculable, and thereby tractable. Some of the events targeted flirt girls rather than the male attendees. One such presentation, titled “Get Sexier,” drew on survey data from the looksmaxxing corner of the internet to explain what men find attractive: canthal tilt, BMI, contrast, neoteny. It went looking for evidence in sex doll sales and galleries of AI-generated women. I found its handling of race lightly distasteful; the presenter suggested that Wasians might be the most attractive, since they turn up so often in AI-generated pornography. Later, a white audience member contended that Asian women are popular because of our culture of deference, because we don’t go on about equality the way Western women do. Nobody corrected her, including me.Other panels taught what I recognized as cognitive reframing. In one called “Rizz Under Uncertainty,” the presenter sought to make men more comfortable with rejection. Unlike a therapist, she deployed the language of data, encouraging them to see “no” as new information, rather than a referendum upon a person’s value. Then, we practiced rejection with each other: we asked the person next to us for something they would certainly refuse before asking them for something they might reasonably refuse. I suggested to the boy next to me that we re-enact 9/11, since it was September — wouldn’t it be festive? Then I asked him for $20. He declined both times.I skipped the evening events. Instead, I had dinner with two of my friends from high school and college, one starting her PhD at Berkeley, and another continuing theirs at Davis. Both spent a good part of the meal worrying about whether I was safe at SlutCon. My friend from Davis pictured SlutCon as something adjacent to pick-up artistry, a “training camp for rapists” that took sexually median men and emboldened them. They had this impression because social media appeared to conflate SlutCon with parties like the “consensual non-consent” orgies some Lighthaven affiliates participated in. My friend from Berkeley made a material argument: the event catered to the desires of straight men, and by charging men and paying stipends to women, it commodified women into products.I understood their concerns. The event had an unclear identity; on social media, the organizers occasionally pitched it as “wholesome” — a place where socially awkward young men could learn to hold a conversation. It was true that there were banal activities on the schedule, such as eye contact practice or guidance on fashion, and that I was giving men feedback on conversational norms like not hovering or speaking more slowly. (Some of them reminded me of the kind of dog that does not know how to behave at the dog park, like a poorly socialized COVID-19 puppy.) But the event simultaneously had an explicit edge. The program included sessions like naked circling and rope bondage. People talked about sex frankly and constantly, and there was visible heavy petting between flirt girls and attendees.I’m also skeptical of building one more institution for straight men in a world that’s already organized around them. The name (“SlutCon”) and financial structure of the conference may have subconsciously fostered feelings of entitlement. And there were men who behaved poorly at the event. One flirt girl confided in me that a male attendee had commented to her, “If I were a shooter, I’d have a girlfriend.” Two male attendees responded aggressively in response to my feedback; one even sought to argue with me about whether I was “right,” as if a disagreement about charm could be won on the merits. When I