Slutcon was a weekend-long event where men could practice a wide variety of sexual/romantic bids at women who had signed up to receive those bids and give feedback. The all-female organizing team included a few of my friends, and I was excited to give feedback, so I volunteered.
Why was I excited to give feedback? My twenties were mildly slutty, and I took the initiative in the majority of those situations. I slept with around thirty people – three new partners a year, a rate that seems slow for someone who’s seriously trying or seriously open. When I initiated, I implicitly took responsibility for the goodness of the sex for both parties. I tended to be a little tense and analytical during these encounters, neither wanting to create awkwardness or betray myself by doing things I didn’t want to do.
Over the years, I experienced many almosts – where a man became so attractive in conversation that I internally debated asked him back to my room, but chose not to. When this happened, I felt inhibited from giving both feedback on what had made him so attractive to me, and feedback on what had made me draw back. I believe this information would have been incredibly valuable to most of them, but the social risks to me felt too great. I was pent up with the desire to tell, and Slutcon offered to scratch the itch.
I was also excited about Slutcon because I wanted the mythical-seeming experience I associated with the standard heterosexual script, which involves more wooing, body language, and ambiguity. I knew my usual methods could get me sex that was merely fine with near-strangers (although it often turned into great sex if we started dating). I wanted more of the sex I’ve occasionally glimpsed, which acts on instant chemistry and desire.
In the period where I asked out men regularly, there was usually a long period of thinking before I sent the message. The factors that caught my attention were cerebral. I’ve rarely asked anyone out on grounds of physical or sexual feeling. It’s their mind I like, and their kindness. My brain wants husbands, not sex partners. Sex is secondary – I simply assume that if their mind is right, the sex will follow, and be good. So I tend to be only mildly horny on my first few times with a new person. I’ve rarely done the thing where you want to fuck someone in the moment, get it out of your system immediately, and roll on glowing. I thought perhaps I would attain this at Slutcon, but ultimately did not.
I got close sometimes. A man came up to me and, smoothly but with a small undercurrent of shyness under the calm, said that he found me very beautiful. We made conversation. I liked his demeanor and his face seemed kind. I would have gone home with him that night if he’d asked. I could have asked, but I decided not to. I was here for new, interesting sex, not the sex I already knew how to have. Besides, I suspected the old approach simply might not work. For various reasons, my waterline of sexual pleasure has dropped in the past three years. More stimulation, seduction, and spontaneity seemed necessary to provide a sexual experience I was enthused about.
I danced closely with a man on the final night. He said he felt nervous he might get an erection. An outsider would not see one, given our closeness – only I would know. I told him that I had no issue with it, and enjoyed its firmness as we swayed in the open air of the courtyard. A mild heat caught in my body. I did not want sex with him, but I wanted to be sexual with him for that dance, and it felt good.
In total, I talked to five or so men where I enjoyed our conversation enough that I would have instantly agreed if they’d said, “May I be forward? Even though I like talking about this topic with you, I can’t stop thinking of sixty nining with you before I put you face down on the bed and pound you. Are you into either of those things – and do you want to do it now?”
That’s the closest I have for a cheat sheet for a man who wants sex with me: talk to me for fifteen minutes, demonstrating 80-99th percentile intelligence (the bar depends on his charisma and my mood) and some subset of empathy, principles, curiosity, agency. Then unveil desire with a bold suggestion that suggests he will do me the service of setting the agenda in bed. I’m not opposed to (co-)setting the agenda, but again, I was gunning for something new.
cheat sheet
As I write this, I’m amazed at how much more I could have gotten out of Slutcon if I’d given a talk on how to sleep with me in particular.
Before and during Slutcon, I thought of a few potential sessions I could run. I might like to co-host a romance fiction panel for the next one (if it happens) – romance fiction is a large and salient portion of the divide between male and female sexualities. The attitude of most men have about the porn that most turns me on is bafflement, even contempt. Gaining some understanding about the appeal of romance novels, including and especially the cringey ones, could be quite valuable for a man who is looking for female partners.
But the actual thing I could have done that would have caused more joyful sex to happen at Slutcon is if I gave a brief talk on how to sleep with me. An idea so horrifyingly egotistic that it never occurred to me… except I could have gotten other volunteers to join, and run an hour-long session with the other women who felt like publishing their cheat sheets to the whole conference.
Such an event also would have provided attendees with data on the sheer variety of ‘the ideal approach’.
The main danger of running such a thing would be causing greater hurt and disappointment if I rejected someone even after they followed my guidelines.
winning
Should I be surprised I didn’t get laid? I suppose not, because it wasn’t my primary goal. What was? Well, winning. To me, winning meant being flagged on the exit survey by the most number of people as having provided them with clear and useful feedback.
This is embarrassing to admit. But I have the most fun in social situations when I give myself a (prosocial!) win condition – that’s why I’m experimenting with running competitive socializing games) this year.
This is also embarrassing to admit because I don’t think I came close to winning. I didn’t talk to enough people. I spent a lot of time indoors, where people weren’t, because I was in thin clothing with lots of holes. When I did talk to men, I often had pleasant but non-flirtatious conversations. When we did flirt, I occasionally found myself slipping into dishonesty, flinching from sharing negative reactions that didn’t seem actionable or sufficiently clear.
A few times it was they who flinched from what I told them, if the thing were negative. The most common flinch was an immediate (and relatable) “I know”, as the guy tried to head off his own emotional reaction by forcing an internal reconciliation to the information I gave him. The worst flinch was “sorry”. But usually I thought the men at Slutcon responded to the information by taking it, not looking away, rocking a little bit from the impact, and staying in contact with me – and my respect and curiosity for them – as they rocked.
I hit the golden zone only 15-30% of the time: of feeling at least a little attraction, noticing something that made it go up or down, and telling him about it. A few of those times I discovered the lovely experience of my attraction growing when he stayed curious about its fluctuations, despite the discomfort of hearing about it directly.
dishonesty
I had one major failure to be honest.
I found myself thinking, “I don’t know what this guy is doing ‘wrong’. I know how it manifests, which is lack of interest in interacting more with him. But I can’t articulate anything helpful. And he’s so sweet!”
I covered up my discomfort with friendliness – THE CLASSIC DUMBASS FEMALE MOVE! – and when I couldn’t maintain it any longer, surprised him with a clumsy, too-abbreviated request to stop approaching me, when he thought we were at least buddies. When I said this, it was in a setting so badly chosen I’m too embarrassed to say where it was. (Not on stage or anything like that, but still really dumb.) I asked for a chance to apologize subsequently and ended up giving a long, heartfelt one, during which we cleared up misunderstandings on both sides. I felt extremely grateful for his openness in hearing me out.
kindness
And I had one major failure to be kind.
For reasons that were not very good, which were related to the unusual social rules of the session we were attending, I sat on my growing frustration and irritation with a guy’s behavior until I expressed it in a unsoftened, overly direct way. At first he blamed himself for the situation where someone disliked his presence, and then at some point he snapped the other direction and seemed to blame me. From a difficult conversation, which I felt I could handle, we spiraled into a genuine conflict, which I did not.
Throughout the weekend, when I felt bad, I was usually meta-okay about the badness. Surrounding the bad experience was a (sometimes thinned) layer of cheerful interest, saying, “I wonder what’s going to happen next” or “I wonder how you’re going to solve this thing that feels like a problem”.
80% into this conflict, the outer layer evaporated, and I felt just badness. My skin was hot and prickly, and I knew I had lost control. Not obviously so, externally – I was mostly frozen up, trying to think through my panic before taking the next action. Internally I was going, “Holy fuck, we’re having a fight? But not a good fight, the kind I’m used to? I have no idea how to navigate this.” I experienced a dissolution of goals and guidelines. I no longer knew where I was trying to navigate or how to get there. And most importantly, the outer layer was gone, which meant I was In Trouble.
Once I had processed the conflict with the session’s facilitator afterwards, I found this dissolution retrospectively thrilling (although the thrill coexisted with many regrets about the conflict). But as it was happening, I lost contact with the ground and was floating. I was no longer tuned properly to him or myself.
femininity
I came to femininity in my late twenties. Until then I neither felt like it was in reach, nor fun for me even if it were in reach. It came as in a pleasant surprise to learn I was wrong about both, but it took me a while to ramp onto it. When I first wore heels or lipstick in public, I felt tensed against some social attack that never materialized. It took a long time each time I tried something new to believe I didn’t look obviously wrong to other people.
I requested mascara application from another woman at Slutcon, and ruined it a little by blinking too much. I re-applied on the lipstick I’d kept from my wedding an unreasonable number of times – it looked too dark unless I dabbed most of it off. So thinned at the beginning, the remaining layer abraded quickly under potato chips and water bottles.
My hesitation centered around how other women saw me. The women who most made me feel strange and hulking were the outgoing ones whose voices swooped like birds playing in a dimension I couldn’t access, whose faces moved all the time, who laughed with their whole torso. One touched me while draping herself across another person and I was too shy to cover her hand with mine, even though I very much wanted to. My goodness, she thinks I’m a woman. She’s extending homosocial friendliness to me. But if I try to meet it, she’ll sense some wrongness – maybe clumsiness or grasping. Must be careful…
These feelings are minor compared to what they used to be. But the air was dense with gender, and so the vestiges of these feelings hung around me too. The male presenters’ talks on how to deal with feeling creepy as a man hit home for me as well, albeit from long range.
baby
I mostly did not mention to the men that I was the mother of a six month old. It didn’t seem to fit the event’s vibe or my goals. Although I was able to spend a lot of time away because I had two coparents at home, her needs nonetheless dictated my availability and energy. On Saturday I didn’t see her all day, a first since she was born. When my partner brought her to me on Monday morning for the start of my shift, I rose out of my seat, smiling helplessly. As usual, she stared at me a full second, and then smiled widely back. I think my features take a while to resolve for a creature whose visual priors are still flexy.
Oh, the great weird game of the genital vortex, with its warm eddies and cold slaps, its riptides and peeling waves. How I love it! And its fruit!
feedback
What did I have to tell men, anyway?
Several times they gave me a compliment that implicitly put down other people or other women, and my guard snapped up real tight. I always explained I didn’t like this, as it was important to me. And the problem was easy to articulate – it was either that his low expectations were a negative update on his own social value, or that his negative evaluation of other women made me feel bad on behalf of myself as a woman, or on behalf of my friends who might fall into the disappointing category. (I have little issue with a man having such a negative evaluation, but if that evaluation is part of a compliment to me, it will ruin that compliment.)
One man asked me a question I had fielded multiple times already and could not bear to answer again. I requested he try a few other questions. When he asked one I felt happy to answer, I let my real enthusiasm flow through me: I sat up straight, smiled, answered, and also explained how much enthusiasm each question had elicited in me. A bad opener for me was “what’s the most interesting thing you’ve experienced at Slutcon so far?”, which required me to search through and rank memories I had not indexed by interestingness. A nice question was “what are you looking for at Slutcon, and how close have you gotten?”, which touched on topics already indexed and vibrant to me.
A man talked about his hesitancy about asking anyone if he could touch their breasts, a piece of homework every attendee had gotten from an organizer in the opening talk. He did so in enough detail that my brain said, “oh, this guy fucks? I didn’t know he was of the fuck-wanting class. I’m seeing him sexually now and oh boy do I like what I see.” I wanted him to touch my breasts so much that they almost tingled under my shirt. A few minutes later, after the moment had passed, I let him know how my body had responded to his discussing sex. Arguably both of us would have been better off had I said so in the moment, but I didn’t want to, and I don’t regret the not-wanting.
The day after having a long, good flirtation, two different people made multiple eye-contact-only bids throughout the the day. I told them I’d prefer one high-key, intentional bid instead. (I also flagged that this seemed idiosyncratic.) Personally, I feel slightly panicked if a man I recently had a great intimate conversation with says hello or makes eye contact, and then sort of waits around. I was often down to enter another conversation if they turned on the ignition, but had no desire or energy to do it myself. But it felt rude to move on after making eye contact, and so my instinct was to force friendliness and close all the distance myself. I fought this instinct, knowing that succumbing would kill my sex drive.
It feels 70% true that the less friendly I made myself be, the fewer and shallower the approaches I received, and the more open to becoming sexual I was. It was a tradeoff that ruled my experience at Slutcon.
I never once told a man I found him too forward, although I have heard of a few other women receiving approaches that would have made me say that. The most common thing I said boiled down to: I like your sexual desire. I like that you put it out there between us. I like that you cast aside the false security of emanating want at me, without putting the want out in the open out and risking a no.
And now that it’s out there, I can say yes, too.