SlutCon’s Emotional Void

The tech-rationalist phenomenon “SlutCon” caused quite a stir online, perhaps predictably. SlutCon was a multi-day retreat and series of workshops, held in the East Bay in late September and organized by the OnlyFans creator and writer Aella, a notorious fixture of the Bay Area rationalist scene. The conference was aimed at improving romantic and sexual dynamics between men and women, with the vast majority of paying ticket holders being men. Workshops covered basic topics like boundaries and advanced topics related to sexual kink. “Flirt girls” at the conference wore wristbands indicating their openness to being approached. I wasn’t there but SlutCon’s stated premises are public. 

From what I can gather online, SlutCon seemed predicated on a few related assumptions: that men are in need of assistance in learning how to woo women, that this skill can be trained, that radical transparency can improve behavior, and that the average woman—averse to radical transparency—is a suboptimal training ground from which to learn the social grace of seduction. At a high level, SlutCon’s view of sex and relationships seems to mirror the inner workings of machine learning models. Its language is even framed in utilitarian terms, ranging from the catchy “Get practice. Get feedback. Get good.” to the robotic “rapid-iteration practice reps.”

While others have criticized SlutCon for its ties to the effective altruism movement, with some worrying that its libertine branding would hurt the advancement of effective altruism’s political goals, I am more interested in the stated intent of the event. It seems a product of the optimization mentality endemic to Silicon Valley, a mentality harvested from the algorithm that increasingly permeates our world, inviting us to maximize the “good” in every dimension of life. SlutCon is an encapsulation of this spirit, an edge case perfectly designed to offend both the pearl-clutcher and the ostensibly permissive humanist. What could be more horribly suited for rationalist logic than the most intimate act two people can engage in? 

The New Critic published an essay by one of SlutCon’s flirt girls, who described the event as trying to make attraction “more calculable, and thereby tractable,” and the programming a “data-inflected attempt to troubleshoot the experience of social alienation.” She also described feeling guilty for rejecting the advances of a man who had paid at least $3,000 to attend. That guilt reveals the emotional void in the rationalist project, which can accommodate feeling only as a function relative to some optimized end. Of course, she owed the man no reciprocation simply because he had paid to attend. But her feeling is evidence that some aspect of their relationship exceeded the stated bounds of the framework of transaction.

There’s a real half-truth baked into SlutCon’s philosophy. Modern sexual alienation is omnipresent, flirting is fraught, and sex is often bad. Our society is filled with the lonely and socially awkward, a problem that the thin prescriptions of a sexual ethic built almost entirely around consent cannot address. But instead of asking whether sexual alienation might arise from the logic itself, SlutCon doubles down on the same logic, treating people as bundles of preferences, as if ever more granular binaries and flowcharts could make desire clear and manageable. Did she consent? Yes. Did it go well? No? Okay, did you read the signals accurately? Did you escalate in the right way? No? Okay, adjust. Try again.

This logic picks up where the consent model of sex runs out, but adds nothing new. It is as if the consent model had been isolated and allowed to propagate into ever more minute clones of itself. It treats the human matter of sex as a practical problem to be solved by putting socially inept men in a room with specialized interlocutors—women treated as training fields, oriented to rapidly guide and polish these men into optimized objects. But the average woman is neither a sex worker nor a “flirt girl,” paid or trained to guide helpless men through the dance. And no woman is reducible to simple flesh and an abstracted bundle of incentives. Guilt, fear, compassion, and love constantly, inconveniently complicate the story. Nowhere can proceduralism explain the feeling of care one person may have for another, the inexplicable tenderness that arises in an encounter with another person’s weakness or need, the affection that arises in an encounter with another person’s particular laugh.

Proceduralism can describe behavior forever. Sex arises here as an outcome, good sex as a reward for right behavior, rather than as the natural culmination of love and the deepening of emotional intimacy. Every complication, every human feeling thwarting your goal, becomes another input in the model, and every desire becomes an end guiding it. But imagine the difference in a woman responding to your perfectly timed performance versus responding to your being: not to what you do, but to who you are. The rationalist says there is no difference: You are what you do, or you are what I have cataloged about you. But then what is there to say of the person she has come to know: the particular you, the spirit animating your actions? Silence.