At various points last weekend, 10 different men asked Cassie, a 28-year-old petite brunette wearing a lime green wristband, if they could squeeze her breasts. She rebuffed three, but gladly consented to seven of them.
This was not harassment but homework. The men were attendees at SlutCon (opens in new tab), a three-day conference held at an undisclosed location in the East Bay, which promised to level up men’s seduction skills. Cassie’s wristband designated her as an official “flirt girl” — one of 46 women who men could approach to practice flirting assignments.
“I’ve been giving good feedback in teaching men how to touch me,” she said. “I’ve also taught a lot of guys how to pull hair. You’ve got to really go into the scalp and make a fist.”
Practical, actionable instruction was the main point of SlutCon, billed as a combo self-help seminar and social experiment. The goal was for anxious, analytical men to improve their skills with the opposite sex. Around 220 people, mostly men, attended, many paying from $1,000 to $9,000 for their tickets — the most expensive of which included access to more intimate sessions with women. (Other men got in for free by volunteering to help set up and break down the activities.)
The event was the brainchild of local one-named podcast hosts Pandora and Chesed, along with a more famous friend, sex researcher and sex worker Aella. It was born out of two workshops Pandora and Chesed ran this summer at conferences devoted to the “rationalist” ideology, a worldview said to be based on logic, reasoning, and mathematical models. Their seminars, entitled “Reinforcement Learning from Ho Feedback,” were smash hits, with men clamoring for the chance to have their romantic skills dissected on stage. This, they realized, presented a market opportunity.
“There was an unmet need … for iteration and direct feedback,” said Pandora. So SlutCon was born, an event Pandora describes as “shamelessly heterosexual,” with male attendees “trying to learn how to attract and please women and cocreate excellent experiences.”
(“We tried to come up with something less embarrassing than SlutCon,” said Chesed, but the name just had a ring to it.)
The crowd was diverse, though the majority worked in tech: Google engineers, AI safety researchers, and scientists on sabbatical. Rationalist men were there, as were men who’d never heard of the Bayes theorem. There were blonde men, bald men, men with comb-overs. Virgins and recent divorcés. Men who’d never kissed a girl, and men who’d been laid off and finally had a chance to be laid on.
They flew in from New York, London, and Puerto Rico; others walked 15 minutes from home. One came to “bootstrap his social life.” Another, who called himself a “local politico,” came to understand why he kept getting fired for being “too friendly” to women and told, “You know what you did.” He did not know what he did. And he hoped at SlutCon he might find out.
Though the content was often NSFW, the vibe was typical tech conference, with talks spread out across rooms, breakout sessions, slide decks, and seating that ranged from folding chairs to beanbags. Men wore name tags on color-coded lanyards that denoted their level of access. They looked eager. Awkward. Hopeful. Some took copious notes.
In her opening address Friday, Aella, clad in a sheer faerie-queen gown, framed the programming as caring but candid. “We are here to level you up and get you to be the sexiest you can be,” she told attendees. “We are pro-men here. We want baseline empathy for the plight of semen.”
But the invitation came with a caveat: “You may find out in gruesome detail how much you are giving women the ick.”
Ari, a 28-year-old chef, was the first to raise his hand for live flirting feedback on the main stage. He told The Standard that his goal for the weekend was to improve his physical intimacy skills. “I’m good at the initial being-friendly phase. I want to get better at the escalation, especially physical,” he said, describing himself as “mostly heterosexual and strictly polyamorous” and also a rationalist.
A male coach directed Ari to ask a flirt girl named Jade for a compliment, and then for a touch. She complied with the first — “I like your cloak” — and politely declined the second. The audience laughed. The scene was awkward but oddly mesmerizing, with Jade nodding or pursing her lips at Ari’s approach.
“A big takeaway,” Ari shared later, “is that I can ask for so much more than I habitually ask for, and it’s totally fine.”
That was the point of the exercise, Pandora explained. “Flirting doesn’t have to be, ‘I’ve succeeded if I have sex tonight.’ It can be about enjoying somebody’s attention and interacting with them.”
Some of the advice offered during workshops felt surprisingly basic. At a home-design panel about how to make your space more palatable to women, a presenter told the men that rooms should have rugs. Applause ensued. A men’s fashion session dispensed zingers like “avoid drawstring pants” and “fit your clothes to your body.”
The prescription drug Tretinoin was suggested for skin woes. Lumina, the genetically engineered toothpaste, was touted for its supposed “better breath” effect. Other sessions, like “Applying Design Thinking to Sex” and “Game Theory: Relationships” were tailored to pique the interest of the delightfully nerdy crowd.
There was so much on the schedule that many attendees were torn between panels and practice time with the flirt girls. “Should I be going to all the sessions, or should I be flirting more?” was a common query.
Mark, 44, a software engineer from New York, said he’d come to sharpen his rizz. He wanted to “make sure I’m coming across the way I want to come across.” Over lunch on Saturday, he pointed to the morning’s “Aggression in Intimacy” workshop as his favorite so far, in which men shoved each other, hard, to access assertive energy before approaching two seated flirt girls.
“You want to leverage that feeling and intensity to be more confident,” Mark said. It was playful, not violent, he added. “The people all feel like fellow nerd travelers.”
Sitting near the outdoor hot tub late in the afternoon on the second day, Michael, a 25-year-old space engineer, noted that he had traveled from Texas to probe his conflicted feelings around polyamory. “My cultural default is monogamy,” he said. “I don’t know if I can deal with feelings of jealousy. I’m trying to figure that out.” He was excited to process those emotions with other like-minded men.
With a limited number of flirt girls making the rounds, guys spent lots of time together. Michael said that led to real vulnerability and sharing. “Dudes don’t share deep things very often, [but] when you’re in a contrived container like this, it opens doors mentally and emotionally.”
One such opportunity came during the “Confidence Engineering” workshop, led by attendee Aaron, a 37-year-old engineer from Minneapolis, who had prepared a presentation on “Metacognitive Therapy for Social-romantic Anxiety.” His thesis, that anxiety comes from trying to control how others feel about you (opens in new tab), drew from a $22,000 "connecting with women” boot camp he’d attended last year. He credited it with curing his social anxiety, and now he was eager to share the lessons with others.
“This wasn’t manipulative. Everyone here drinks the ‘respect women juice’ pretty hard,” Aaron said. “They read the room way too often and are terrified of making women uncomfortable.” He wanted men to learn that while rejections “always sting, what hurts more is the hours guys spend ruminating about them.”
One attendee had grown frustrated by the overwhelming awkwardness he’d detected on the first day and took matters into his own hands. Nate, a Bay Area techie and one of Aella’s boyfriends, added two bonus sessions on reading body language to the schedule. “A lot of men [say to women], ‘Do you want to talk about Rome?’ and in their head they’re thinking ‘I’m flirting,’” he said. He wanted them to tune into nonverbal feedback.
Brandon, 31, a sales manager from the East Bay whose $2,100 ticket granted access to nude workshops, was there fresh from a breakup. With a “body count” of 80 sexual partners, he felt ahead of the curve, describing many attendees as “40-something virgins.”
For an event so focused on sex, he observed, the vibe at SlutCon was oddly wholesome. “They could easily go hate on women online, but instead they’re at a boot camp getting dressed down by women. Power to them,” he said.
Near the end of the weekend, the mood was post-coital, exhausted but content. In a quiet corner, Aella curled up on Nate’s lap. “I’m hoping that men get the ability to balance not being ashamed of their sexuality while also not making it a woman’s problem,” she said. “More bravery and self-acceptance.”
As for the flirt girls, Cassie had made out with “so many people” that hickies bloomed over her neck and chest. “It’s the most I’ve ever gotten flirted with!” she said, adding that she loved giving feedback on kissing. “The tongues have been a little pointier than I like — I like a soft pancake tongue.”
In the final reflection circles on Sunday evening, some men griped about their limited access to the flirt girls, with one noting that “The guys who needed the least help got the most time.” Others questioned whether these skills would translate into real life.
Nevertheless, for others, SlutCon was a clear success. Many planned to sign up for partner-dance or massage classes when they got home, a low-stakes way to practice talking to — and touching — women.
“It’s tough to find designed, deliberate ways to practice flirting,” said George, 32, an engineer from New York, who compared the conference to exposure therapy. “This is the perfect opportunity to practice, practice, practice.”
He learned to be present, notice his body, drop the stomach tension, relax. “I’ve asked five women if I can hit on them,” he said. He was delighted when they each said yes.