SlutCon
thenewcritic.com
thenewcritic.com
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
My takeaway is SlutCon has successfully re-skinned The Argument Clinic. (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?
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.
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.
Also as a furry I dunno if I would say the community has a culture for looking out for each other.
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
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.
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."
I just wanted to pinpoint what bothers me (and probably others) about this event.
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
I came away from reading this article with the feeling that so much of the underlying strife is due to a bit too much "west coast". And to be clear, I found that west coast mindset very refreshing when I was younger (along with "rationality", lesswrong, etc). They all expanded my mind and let me see more of the map. But this event as described feels like hollow left brain self centeredness run amok -on the part of both the author and her subjects (like do you notice how I am saying subjects here and not fellow partygoers?). And this is most certainly not a substitute for actually throwing yourself into it and living.
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
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.
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.
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.
It is wild that such an event exists but it is a great read from someplace I would never be.
This is undoubtedly very clever writing — perhaps I’m missing an ironic in-joke, even? — but the intractable density of syllables renders its empirical tractability incalculable.
It’s a shame. It would be cool to get the simplified version. There’s something interesting here for sure, nestling under the pile of words.
“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.”