Christina

scattered thoughts on slutcon the morning after 1. slutcon was extremely healing for me personally. there were several specific women i interacted with (flirtily but non-sexually) who together helped me forgive myself for something in my past involving a woman i loved that i haven't forgiven myself for in 8 years. i am more grateful than i can really express for this, and it might not be an exaggeration to call it life-changing 2. slutcon is a very wholesome event disguised somewhat as a degenerate event. nearly everyone in the discourse is way overupdating on a combination of the name and aella's reputation and vague rumors about CNC parties, plus some reports about last year (which i can't speak to as i wasn't there, but the first year of an event is always difficult, and afaik they took a lot of feedback and made a lot of changes for this year). slutcon is not a CNC party, it is not really a sex party, it is not about promiscuity, it was not filled with sex workers, the women did not have to be promiscuous or kinky or polyamorous or sexually available, women do not have to be any of those things to be in this community or adjacent communities. nearly all of you are projecting intensely based on almost zero information about the event itself 3a. the actual point of slutcon, as i see it, is to teach men that they are allowed to be attracted to women and to act on that attraction (with, of course, appropriate discernment), and to give them tools, ideas, encouragement, and a very unusually real and specifically designed context to practice doing this well, in a way that is delightful for both men and women 3b. this is a meaningful project. it is an attempt to fix the debilitating side effects of the last few decades of feminist discourse (and other major societal shifts, eg the rise of digital addiction) which have, frankly, castrated an entire generation of men. this has been extremely bad for people of all genders in ways that should be obvious to all of you. i view the undoing of this castration as one of the most important tasks facing us today, and it directly feeds into the project of enabling more wholesome loving marriages with children in the world, as well as other kinds of happy, satisfying relationship arrangements 3c. it is necessarily the case that encouraging men to flirt with women more will make more women uncomfortable (unless you are able to very significantly increase their skill level at the same time, which is hard). obviously there is much more that can be done that it would be good to do to ameliorate this, but at slutcon itself women were extremely empowered to say no to anything and to raise safety concerns with the staff, and as far as i know every woman i saw there felt very safe and capable of doing that. in the broader world, again, obviously there is much to be done, but if you aren't willing to make any tradeoffs wrt female discomfort you are moving towards a world in which flirting is illegal, which, i cannot stress this enough, is extremely bad for everyone 3d. lurking beneath this discourse is the specter of rape. this is much too large a subject to get into here, but i'll note that insofar as humanity in general and many women in particular have significant karma involving rape, there is meaningful work to do in confronting that karma, and kink and CNC specifically have something to do with this 4a. at the time that slutcon was named, the baleful eye of sauron had not concentrated itself on the rationalist and AI safety communities to anywhere near the degree that it has now. i see it as a kind of joke that went way further than it was supposed to. you should understand the organizers as, in a very fundamental way, dorks. if i were in charge i would rename it to flirtcon, which would be significantly more accurate 4b. there is a jewish idea of mar'it ayin, which (as i understand it) has to do with not only avoiding sin but also avoiding the appearance of sin, as in doing actions that are in fact fine but could be interpreted by an onlooker as sinful. the idea is that doing fake sin is confusing and might encourage others to sin. slutcon is arguably a violation of this principle, which is the strongest case i can make in favor of changing its name to flirtcon 5. the reason there is no "AI safety for people who are normal about sex" community is that people who are normal about sex did not spend the last 15 years working diligently to build one. i have no idea what to make of this. probably it's a deep hint about human nature as well as some sort of cosmic joke. we have an interesting opportunity here to reflect on how much the wheel of history has been turned by perverts in general