It is the first day of the second annual SlutCon, in Berkeley, California. I’m at the Visioning and Erotic Frame session, and a skinny man dressed like a magician has just delivered a lecture on how to speak sexually dominantly. During the workshop that followed, a fellow participant—a straight man—looks deep into my eyes and asks me to fellate him. Both of us break into a smirk and make a joke, which means we have failed. But that’s what the coaching is for. I was the only male member of the press to attend an event that, while it was happening, became the center of a whirling social-media discourse, so I got to experience the programming largely as an actual attendee would. And the men who have shelled out between $2,100 and $20,000 for various tiers of tickets to SlutCon, most of whom worked in tech or engineering, are here to learn.
There are around 100 paying male ticket holders, and roughly 90 “flirt girls,” working either on a volunteer basis or for a few hundred dollars, many of whom attended a six-hour training the morning before things started. As I learned from the mandatory online quiz, attendees may not touch the flirt girls without asking, or request contact information. Green wristbands on the girls signify that they are open to being flirted with. Members of the press may not print anyone’s real names. Attendees and volunteers can opt to put a sticker on their badges that looks like a little wedding ring, signifying they are looking for a serious relationship. There were, in short, a lot of rules. And many of these men clearly need explicit rules. The language of high-functioning autism pervades the event, which, despite its attention-grabbing name, is really aimed at closing the widening gulf between the sexes, which shows up in well-reported declines in marriage, sex, and socializing offline.