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SlutCon

122 points · 40 comments · ekluger

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tonetheman · 1790883523 · focus · HN ↗
That is a crazy essay. I am assuming it is a true story.
It is wild that such an event exists but it is a great read from someplace I would never be.
AnodicElegy · 1790884167 · focus · HN ↗
Interesting read. Sure, there's still sex and acid, but man, we're a long way from John Phillips' San Francisco.
m_a_g · 1790884248 · focus · HN ↗
Nuke San Francisco
arm32 · 1790884684 · focus · HN ↗
This is delightfully written.
schainks · 1790884690 · focus · HN ↗
Great read, but I'm a little puzzled.
My takeaway is SlutCon has successfully re-skinned The Argument Clinic. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM). Someone enters a commercialized, scheduled space to pay for a raw, spontaneous human experience, only to get trapped in an infuriating debate over the technical definition of the experience itself.
Or am I missing a read-between-the-lines that this event is really to facilitate successful Autistic people in flirting, dating, and relationships?
1. ben_w · 1790886363 · focus · HN ↗
  > Or am I missing a read-between-the-lines that this event is really to facilitate successful Autistic people in flirting, dating, and relationships?
  It's made by Aella, a self-described "probably autistic" sex worker well known in the LessWrong/Rationality circles owing to her nerd speciality turning out to be getting really good at doing large-scale sex surveys right*.
  So, yes, I think?
  * or at least, if you'll excuse the phrasing, less wrong.
2. michaelt · 1790894117 · focus · HN ↗
  Being instructed in things you're bad at can be a humbling experience. Being corrected in a humbling way triggers an instinct, in some people, to try and argue with the correction.
  When my 20-years-of-ballet ass goes to a salsa class, I get told I'm doing it all wrong, because I am. And every time I feel an instinct to say - how dare you call my perfect Balanchine hand position wrong? What do you mean we're going to face some random direction where the audience clearly won't be able to see our performance?
  Obviously I keep my mouth shut; I am a complete beginner, and salsa is the instructor's area of expertise. The instinct to reject the instruction, the notion I know salsa better than them, is absurd. One has to clamp down on base instincts that tell one to do dumb things.
  I don't think the attendees at SlutCon are supposed to argue with the people they're flirting with. They're supposed to flirt with them. The instinct to disagree and argue is them letting their bruised egos get the better of them.
kazinator · 1790886568 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
Tenoke · 1790887593 · focus · HN ↗
Pleasant read, which feels as if it's from an outsider to the event. Alas, I just don't think there's that much to report.
alphawhisky · 1790888074 · focus · HN ↗
This is hilarious. The intersection of rationalism and horniness will be remembered in the future much like the old English aristocratic social order or the social circles portrayed in The Great Gatsby. Just a bunch of pompous, self involved assholes wasting their money in increasingly more stupid ways.
1. alphawhisky · 1790888730 · focus · HN ↗
  Damn, sorry rationalists. Don't come to the midwest though. We're normal here and don't have any events celebrating literally shitting where you eat.
gorgoiler · 1790888100 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. jtmarl1n · 1790891222 · focus · HN ↗
  Here is my read of that portion:
  “Many of the panels were organized with the idea that being attractive/desirable can be reduced to a numerical value. Higher scores can be obtained by learning what traits are desirable and which are not. Using experience, you can learn which types of people desire which traits and improve their perception of those traits in yourself.”
nkg · 1790888109 · focus · HN ↗
It felt real and, for a moment, I was worried that it was journalism and not fiction.
1. alphawhisky · 1790888520 · focus · HN ↗
  I got some bad news for you...
2. gavinray · 1790888527 · focus · HN ↗
  It's entirely real.
  <a href="https://www.slutcon.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.slutcon.com/
  1. nkg · 1790945571 · focus · HN ↗
    Okay, I am scared.
slopinthebag · 1790888116 · focus · HN ↗
i can't be the only person who thinks that the concept is entirely irrational right? :P
brnt · 1790888178 · focus · HN ↗
For some reference, an earlier post: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
delichon · 1790888558 · focus · HN ↗
> Notice that we all wear wide shoes. Aella wears wide shoes, too!
I wonder if the same women would wear less comfortable shoes when clubbing, and the more comfortable shoes were a symptom of their disinterest in finding partners at this event.
ArcHound · 1790888723 · focus · HN ↗
If you're asking yourself WTF, here's an explainer:
<a href="https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse" rel="nofollow">https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...

Insimwytim · 1790888891 · focus · HN ↗

  One male attendee didn’t fit in with student organizations in college, so he attended Aella’s birthday gangbang and made friends there.

LOL, WTF am I reading?

idan · 1790889616 · focus · HN ↗
This is how Epstein happens
Nobody should be tolerating this, let alone celebrating or venerating this. It's a misogynistic sex cult with a thin veneer of science. Incels but with fancier words. Repulsive to the core.
1. satisfice · 1790894760 · focus · HN ↗
  What would you change about it so that you would accept it as a good faith event to help people relate better?
  1. idan · 1790897901 · focus · HN ↗
    That there's a question in your mind about what can "rehabilitate" this is troubling, but sure:
    An event centered on what men want, costing thousands of dollars a ticket, with paid female talent there to "help" them is skating around the definition of prostitution in the same way that Kalshi skates around the defintion of gambling.
    I'm sure Epstein and his buddies justified their rape and abuse by throwing bags of money at the girls too. If that's not enough to make you call bullshit on the entire enterprise, that's on you.
    I don't believe in regulating how people have fun. But when you create an environment where it's hard to tell the difference between fun and coercion, throw money and power into the mix, claim it's not about trading money for sex but everyone paid money and there's quite a bit of sex happening, pretend that it's about some high minded principle like "helping people to relate better"? Please.
    satisfice · 1791127704 · focus · HN ↗
    This sounds emotive and judgmental, which is totally okay-- but I don't see any reason I should change my opinion, which is that there is nothing to rehabilitate. This event involves consenting adults, experimenting with life. There's no reason for you to conclude that anyone was coerced or trafficked.
    I guess you are convinced that women were being exploited and raped at this event, but I fail to see how that conclusion springs from anywhere other than your cynical imagination.
paimapi · 1790889894 · focus · HN ↗
>Many of the workshops focused on outward signs of confidence like posture and clothes but left alone a history of deeper maladjustment. You can remove a guy’s fedora in an afternoon, but the rest takes years.
aye, and if this isn't the core issue for pretty much everyone who feels out-of-place, unloved, and had issues dating
I think there was a small chance in my past that I might've tumbled down the angry atheist / LessWrong pipeline. I actually knew a guy who did. I have to thank an English teacher who had us read Slaughterhouse-Five for steering me clear and leading me to secular humanism. that moral philosophy meant anyone as low and terrible as me (at least as low and terrible as I thought I was) still deserved to be treated with compassion and it made me feel loved for the first time in my life
I'm one of those people who benefited immensely from therapy (CBT at the time though I'd probably try ACT now). the me before therapy had the emotional maturity of a teenage boy, who thought you could and should rationalize away feelings, that they were fundamentally illogical. I'm decades beyond that now, in the best relationship of my life, equal partners with someone I deeply respect and love, and who everything feels natural with even after ten years. the key to all of this has been the fact that we validate one another, that we give each other the grace we would want for ourself. it's a real change and a watershed thing for me - realizing that you don't have to internalize your experience of having your feelings invalidated
that sad version of myself, who thought you could somehow extrinsically 'solve' despair and loneliness through some kind of scripted performance, that's the multi-verse version of myself that needs someone to tell him that he can be loved, that he doesn't deserve to suffer. here's to hoping these attendees are able to grow out of that same phase I had once been in one day - it's sure to do the world a lot of good if they did
1. ArcHound · 1790891274 · focus · HN ↗
  Looking back, I also realize how close I was to falling into various shit. MLM schemes, 4chan far-right, this thing to name a few...
  Somehow I got lucky. Somehow I read Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Immanuel Kant to name a few.
  And somehow knowing that "humans are never means to an end" or "humans are more than things", truly putting that as a cornerstone is great immunity against these viruses.
  Look at this event. It's not seduce con. It's slutcon. Reducing women to an object of desire. That's what's inherently repulsive.
  1. paimapi · 1790894075 · focus · HN ↗
    true enough, there's a reductionism at play here where it seems like it'd be easy to mistake the small percentage of women who like many partners (which presumably isn't even every 'flirt girl' like the author) to any broader category
    that said, I have more sympathy for these types than the assholes I've known who literally used pick up artist shit to get with women. that line about so many attendees revealing autism diagnosis softens the angle a bit for me. if you're made to be subaltern, it is by the grace of luck that you don't fall down an extremist rabbit hole. I think about that passage by Solzhenitsyn a lot -
    "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
    During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
    Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
    Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t."
    ArcHound · 1790929217 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh sure, I don't deal in absolutes and there are plenty people with good intentions.
    I just wanted to pinpoint what bothers me (and probably others) about this event.
    paimapi · 1790954080 · focus · HN ↗
    I think attendees would probably claim that they don't see women as objects and the 'slut' label applies to all attendees (at least that's what a nominally sex-positive convention would portray it)
    even if you and I know it's more a convention for predominantly hetero dudes lacking certain kinds of functional insight into their own self and the many people who want to sell cure-alls or culty thought-terminating cliches for the downstream symptoms, you'd probably get a lot of resistance to change if you were to push on that angle
    I think there's a lot to be said about positive reinforcement > positive punishment (ie shaming) for actual behavioral change. that might be a bit of a utilitarian perspective but aye, I would pull the lever for the trolley
2. mindslight · 1790904731 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. paimapi · 1790954406 · focus · HN ↗
    the only thing I would disagree with is the regionality. in my younger days, I bounced around quite a few predominantly white and hetero-ish polyamorous/relationship-anarchy spaces. people who were anything from tenure-track professors to trust-fund kids to middle-class suburban types and I've never lived west of the Mississippi
    I would say the only thing that was a commonality were the internet spaces they inhabited - FetLife predominantly with AO3, tumblr, nerdy conventions as secondary (with a few of those wealthier/higher-educated types drawing from things like German bondage scenes instead of online). whether or not the cultures of those online spaces originated in the West Coast, I don't know
blurgrin · 1790890711 · focus · HN ↗
There're people with professions that I wouldn't have imagined. I'm 50+, thought I had seen it all.
iamnothere · 1790893855 · focus · HN ↗
All the over the top sex positivity stuff used to annoy me, but the whining sex negative puritans are just as bad. Oh my god, nerds want to learn how to have sex! Give me a break. This is way less weird (and much less worrying) than a lot of stuff from the 2010s.
eleventen · 1790894313 · focus · HN ↗
Why is this flagged. It’s interesting, well written, and on topic (AI Safety Sex Cult etc.)
nojvek · 1790905689 · focus · HN ↗
Not sure why flagged. Well written by a human. Breath of air from all the Slop on HN nowadays.
metalcrow · 1790907309 · focus · HN ↗
I gotta say I'm confused about the entire reason this is important. Any furry convention has just as many IT professionals (and probably a few AI devs), but people aren't posting about Anthrocon and talking about how many people get drugged and assaulted there in the context of IT. Why is this different?
1. plorkyeran · 1790913299 · focus · HN ↗
  Because people get drugged and assaulted at Anthrocon a lot less often?
  1. metalcrow · 1790915487 · focus · HN ↗
    i honestly don't think that's true actually. especially since a lot more people go to anthrocon, but even per-capita i bet AC is higher
    agos · 1790930892 · focus · HN ↗
    Yikes, then it should be talked about even more
    zparky · 1790943224 · focus · HN ↗
    do you have any basis for that claim? the furry community is very tight-knit and there is a culture of looking out for each other.
    metalcrow · 1790946207 · focus · HN ↗
    I've been going to anthrocon for 10 years and a furry for longer. Ever year there are multiple posts about it, both on Twitter and in telegram. In fact once a friend of mine was drugged there.
    Also as a furry I dunno if I would say the community has a culture for looking out for each other.
    cindyllm · 1790946479 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    Hizonner · 1790963521 · focus · HN ↗
    I know nothing about furries, but I've been involved in, or close to, more than one subculture where there was tons of unrecognized and uncorrected creepy or outright abusive behavior, while lots of people kept saying pretty much exactly that.
2. dgellow · 1790929287 · focus · HN ↗
  Maybe they should be talking about assaults in other places…
3. ben_w · 1790955346 · focus · HN ↗
  I have the impression that the difference here is it is for people who know they have limited social skills and want to be better, and who may be into things where the roleplay about consent itself can get mixed up with the reality.
  Other differences with furries specifically are that furry conventions are a lot more gay than general IT (and I mean gay, not just male). Because we're all in one big mixed pool, the social cues (and knowledge sharing for who is suspicious and may need to be reported to security) is more equanimous than it might otherwise be.
  This is absolutely not perfect in a whole lot of ways! There's still problem people (and I'm saying this with reference to smaller European cons, not been to AC), but does change the dynamics somewhat relative to heteronormative events.
  (Thinking back to one time a business, I think an energy drinks company, tried to set up some booth babes to sell their wares at Eurofurence. Scantily clad human women are not exactly the demographic to use when trying to sell to people who fancy hyper-masculine latex dragons, hermaphrodite gryphons, or ship Robin Hood with Nick Wilde).

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