THE NEW CRITIC
Overlocked 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 suggested that this attendee could be more curious — rather than dismissive — in conversation, he angrily asked, “Do you think I’m listening to you right now?”
I felt annoyed, but I never felt unsafe. I am sexually reserved and even distrustful of men. But within the confines of my experience, I did not feel like I was in danger. There was visible security all weekend, and the organizers continually stressed that our participation was voluntary.
Both my friends desperately wanted to know what Aella was like in person. And what surprised me most was how much I liked her. Online, she has repelled me; she behaves like a shock jock and postures as an intellectual, then acts baffled by the critique she invites. As a result, I have been bemused for years by how much influence she has on Silicon Valley discourse. But in person, she is maternal and funny, like a kindly high school teacher who lets you eat snacks during class. At SlutCon, she taught “Girl Game,” a seminar on how to flirt from her experiences in the escort context. In terms of body language, she told the flirt girls, we should channel our arousal. In terms of conversation, we ought to be less intellectual. Then she lowered her voice, smiled, and let down her hair. She said, “You are trying to get a million dollars. The million dollars is stored in his balls.”
A lot of the people I talked to at SlutCon told me, at some point, that they were autistic. Many had found rationalism through their friends in college, or online. I started to wonder whether the subculture had formed around a neurodivergent cognitive style, one that prized what its members saw as valuable nonconformity. One of the rationalist women commented to me, “Notice that we all wear wide shoes. Aella wears wide shoes, too!”
Abstractly speaking, I dislike a good deal about rationalists. I am not a utilitarian, I don’t care for IQ, and I hate their tendencies toward hereditarianism. But seeing them in an interpersonal setting like SlutCon made me feel for them. Many of them were just girls. We were talking about eyeliner, or Homestuck, or looking for makeup wipes together. Some rationalists spoke to me about their experiences of interpersonal rejection and the contentment of finding community outside the mainstream. Two of the flirt girls were friends because they followed each other on Tumblr as teenagers. One male attendee didn’t fit in with student organizations in college, so he attended Aella’s birthday gangbang and made friends there. So much of the programming, too, was really a data-inflected attempt to troubleshoot the experience of social alienation.
When I gave men feedback, I often watched something defensive and hurt come into their eyes, the pupil a bruise. On Saturday, one man painstakingly braided my hair. He had been considerate and had asked me how tight I wanted the braid to be. But when he asked me for feedback on his overtures, I had to tell him I just didn’t find him attractive. He then questioned if there were people in the same courtyard that I did find attractive, and I said yes — a woman seated a knight’s move from us, with artificially waved hair. I felt infinitely bad, knowing that he had paid $3,300 for the weekend.
There’s a way in which reason and measurement attempt to ward off pain. To me, the presentations felt sterile, while the people felt alive. A woman might measure her waist-to-hip ratio because she doesn’t understand why a man didn’t care about her. A man might argue with a flirt girl about how the conversation went because it hurts less to debate than to cry. People might join a community that rewards their kind of thinking because they failed to find “their people” growing up. There’s a through line in fringe communities, and sex, and social awkwardness. One man at SlutCon agreed with me that there was a sad-eyed futility undergirding the conference. 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.
What surprised and irked me was how well I fit in at SlutCon. I was diagnosed with autism late, at 17, likely because I’m a conventional-looking young woman who can manually produce an imitation of social graces. But I have always found interacting with people difficult, and my charisma is a manufactured one. I’ve been popular for most of my adult life, and lonely for all of it. The rationalists have elected to graph their people, whereas I have chosen to describe them; what people call “perceptiveness” in my prose is really just an overworked muscle. So while men practiced their approaches on me at SlutCon, I realized I had been hit on more often than I’d understood. For years, men in public have started conversations with me about my tattoos; I had always assumed they were interested in my tattoos.
There is a quote from a visual novel (a type of video game) I rather like that goes, “People are riddles. They want someone else to solve their riddle. They live life wanting someone to solve the riddle that they are, the most difficult riddle in the world.” I have a harder time solving riddles than most people — some of the attendees at SlutCon might, too. But if the quote is right, then relating to someone takes two kinds of nerve. You have to want to solve the other person, and then hold still while they work on you. I have always struggled with the latter.
A male attendee in my circling group informed me as much. He had been nursing his irritation with me since “Perception Gap,” a workshop where men would approach flirt girls as their aspirational selves, and we would give feedback on how the conversation went. While circling, he confessed that he had felt my manner was “LinkedIn,” and that he judged me for not being more vulnerable. In response, I explained my habitual guardedness as a consequence of my job as a lawyer. But he was right. I had been protecting myself somewhat during SlutCon by resorting to a professional demeanor. He was the most beautiful man I had spoken to that weekend, but I was preventing myself from being solved.
SlutCon aims to facilitate various forms of relatedness, and it often does so through a rationalist or empiricist framework. I understand the urge to render things predictable and measurable. I affirm the facilitators’ objectives, that we can make ourselves more attractive according to conventional measures. But past a certain degree, I do not think it is possible to render things more controllable, more sanitized, or more legible. That brutal and beautiful star, which is chemistry or rejection, is not truly manageable. And I resented SlutCon’s every attempt at cognizing attraction, when it’s something that takes place not with our eyes open, but between the eyelashes.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a poet, but I suspect love is inefficient. It happens in spite of reason. The only men I felt connected to all weekend had tears in their eyes, or told me they had been beaten by their parents. But I wasn’t overly interested in those men, either. My favorite room in Lighthaven was the “flirt girl floproom,” where the flirt girls rested between shifts. There was more tenderness there than anywhere else. One girl asked me to check if her hair was curled evenly at the back, so I did. Another girl told me, giggling, that she had met her husband years ago while counseling him for drug possession. A third asked if any of us had face wash. In that room, I saw the apex predator asleep in a beanbag, her arm sleeves covering her face.
I’ll credit SlutCon with putting all of us in the same venue. But for me at least, real connection has always depended on someone forgetting to be careful. It’s dangerous, because vulnerability is always an invitation for harm. And tragically, I was careful the whole weekend. I kept telling everyone I was a writer, and I skipped every evening event to have dinner with my friends. Everyone — my friends, the staff at SlutCon, my fellow flirt girls — checked in with me to ask if I was safe. I would tell them I was, which was unfortunately true. I spent three days refusing to hold still, and when someone actually noticed it, I avoided him for the rest of the event. It was safer to remain unsolved than have the answer deemed too obvious.
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