Notes on Feeling Like a Failure at Slutcon

An analysis of if a Pervert can be a Slut, and relatedly, what's wrong with me

This past weekend I attended Slutcon- Aella’s weekend-long event dedicated to the improvement of sexual dynamics and approach. It was open to everyone, but its ties to the Bay Area’s rationalist community meant that the attendee makeup was mostly analytical, tech-adjacent men all wanting to learn how to better talk to girls, and fuck them properly if that worked out well enough. One of the workshops was titled “How to be Attractive to Autistic Women.” A noble cause by any assessment.

I was hired to lecture on “porn physics,” a concept I’ve been toying with for a while based on this Wikipedia article. Half porn media literacy, half geek reference, it felt like a good fit for the event (and it was- the lecture itself went over very well).

In advance of the weekend they also gave me the option to be a Flirtgirl if I wanted to- a volunteer position offered to women and women-adjacent where attendees could flirt with you. You, in turn, had the option to give them very honest feedback on what worked and what didn’t, as part of their training. Part of me, admittedly, had a fantasy of meeting and hitting it off with some smart and financially stable San Franciscan. Who knows, maybe I would find a spouse on the “marriage bounty” whiteboard. I am single, broke, and an optimist!

Arriving on very little sleep, my optimism faded a little when I met the other Flirtgirls, beautiful women who were so excited about their role they pushed back on fluid exchange being disallowed in the contact-encouraged “kino room.” The room was quite genuinely buzzing with horny energy, spurred on by these men who at that point hadn’t even arrived yet.

Sitting in the back, I felt a little bit alien. I’ll admit that my relationship to sex is fairly complicated. I think most women’s relationship with sex- most people’s relationship to sex, as was evidenced by this conference- is complicated- but in this environment my limitations and discomforts seemed particularly obvious, positioned next to men and women so freely touching and giggling and… Flirting, as was the point.

Later that evening I pushed myself to go to a workshop on “leading through dance,” a gentle partnered dance lesson themed around not acting weird when you touch someone.

Reader… I was weird.

I have a hard time with casual touch even in the most normal of circumstances- the last time I got a professional manicure I had to leave with my nails bare and my tail between my legs because I embarrassingly started to cry, overwhelmed at a stranger touching my hands so intimately.

And this was not a normal circumstance at all, this was something more like an adult middle school dance with extremely high emotional stakes.

My nervous system started emitting a feedback noise like a dropped microphone. I was totally unable to look at any of the men I cycled through dancing with, let alone relax my body enough to sway. Everyone was kind and patient, as they were all weekend, but it was undeniably sobering to be the most socially uncomfortable bitch at the Socially Uncomfortable Bitch Conference. Later that night, I cried in my bunk like I was twelve years old, just discovering the limits of Calgon marshmallow body mist’s power to mask my social failures.

Let me explain what I think my Deal is. I mean now, as an adult woman- everyone is pathetic when they’re twelve, that’s our God-given right. But now I wear Aesop perfumes and I have social graces, or so I thought when I showed up to Slutcon.

Most of my work is public speaking- giving lectures on obscenity law, arguing against the AI porn takeover, mapping out pizza delivery economics, that sort of thing. I go pretty much wherever someone will fly me- having reasons to go somewhere I might not otherwise is one of the elements I enjoy most about my career. This has resulted in me travelling near-full time since December 2024, so almost a full year now.

A lifestyle of full-time travel means a lot of alone time- something I’m already inclined towards. I’m lucky enough to enjoy my own company, and I feel most at home in my internal world. I don’t think of myself as socially anxious necessarily; I’m confident and, for the most part, successful in making friends. But in this extremely social environment (we were all staying together in one large house/event venue and the vibe was very “summer camp”), I regressed into a version of myself I hadn’t seen in years; eating meals alone, hunched over a book but barely reading it, distracted by a furious internal dialogue analyzing my simultaneous desire to and fear of join/ing the people talking and laughing just feet away. It was clear that without my realizing it, this inclination towards the comfort and safety of my own company had metastasized into something unyielding and sharp when pushed against.

So too have my sexual inclinations fused over the course of the year, after being given enough room to plant strange roots without the stopgaps of partnership or influence. I have always been most comfortable in voyeurism- I like pornography (obviously), I watch from the corner at the sex club, and I’ve been told I have a staring problem. Inspired by this, and a somewhat recent reintroduction to heterosexual attraction, most of my sexual experiences this year have been watching men jerk off. Sometimes when telling friends about a hookup or date I’ve had to clarify several times that no, I myself am not jerking off- for the most part, I’m fully clothed. In these situations, some men like it when I’m mean to them, and some of them like it when I’m complimentary or instructional. I’m fine offering them this- but I don’t really care; I just like to watch.

(This isn’t necessarily an invitation to send me dick pics- I’m not offended by them which I think seems to be the main motivation for sending, so it takes the wind out of the sails).

One time, as a birthday gift, a friend came on a Dunkin Donuts old-fashioned and I ate it. We never had sex, and that experience was the pinnacle of our erotic relationship.

Lacking a partner, I watch Instagram Reels of men eating Crumbl cookies, shoving them so deep enough into their mouths I can see it catch on the back of my throat. I imagine myself pushing it deeper still, and that works for me.

It is sort of because of this- and several other inclinations- that I’ve so enthusiastically adopted the term “pervert” this year. I even have an accessory to match: a“pervert” nameplate necklace, which I never take off.

When I first bought the necklace, maybe 5 years ago now, it functioned as sort of a “girlboss” style gesture of sexually liberated empowerment. Yeah, I’m a girl: and I like to fuck! Isn’t that crazy?! Isn’t that absolutely Joker-pilled?!!

There is certainly an element of perversion in the sexually liberated woman, in that it subverts the most traditional Puritan anti-sex expectations. But I would say at this point in my life, I was actually not a pervert, but I was a slut. I was easygoing with my sexual attentions; dating casually but with an interest in partnership. I was participating in hook-up culture and enjoying it. I was much more relaxed and social. I was slutty under almost every classical definition.

The slut is, after all, a fundamentally pro-social archetype. While the term has grown to be broad and welcoming (as Aella made sure to say explicitly, “anyone can be a slut”), the slut more traditionally represents someone who has had- or at least is perceived to have had- many sexual partners. She is assumed to be sexually open, available, “loose,” which even as an insult implies an undeniably complimentary relaxed quality. The slut enjoys sex, in the normal way that sex is enjoyable.

The pervert, in contrast, is antisocial. His desires are at odds with normative sex and sexuality, often divorced or abstracted from the mechanics of sex and/or hyperfocused in a way that alienates potential partners, if partnership is something the Pervert is interested in at all. Perversion is a curdling; a rancid inversion of something wholesome. The Pervert is sexually obsessed, yes, but impotent either through shame or rebuff.

The slut gives panties away, or shows off the lace in hopes of them peeled off her body. The pervert sneaks into her room at night and steals them.

The slut gives, the pervert takes.

Prosocial/antisocial.

Note: I’m using gendered language for style’s sake- I don’t think Perversion excludes women. In fact I think the most feminine thing a woman can do is believe she is fundamentally and insidiously Evil.

In my own self-assessment and understanding, I am now quite decidedly not a slut, but I am a pervert. In my mind’s eye, I look like something R. Crumb would draw, a snivelling freak staring slack-jawed at someone gorgeous with my misshapen cock in my hand.

I am obviously sex-obsessed; the existence of this publication is proof of that. But my boundaries are too rigid, my focuses too narrow, to (for the most part, though there have been exceptions) participate in sex as it’s generally defined or expected of me. On

Camille Sojit Pejcha

‘s Substack podcast, I declared myself “surprisingly not fuckable.” Multiple of my relationships have ended for reasons circling around my sexual desires being confusing and difficult to pin into a normal relationship dynamic- either through content, desires or schedule. I have spent truly countless hours- years, even, trying to Be Sexually Normal in whatever way feels “correct” in the moment (more straight, less straight, more kinky, less kinky, more horny, less horny).

I very much believe that if you want to make sexuality a puzzle, it will be one. Sex is very strange, and it’s worth giving ourselves grace when analyzing the peculiarities of what- on a granular level- “works” on a moment-to-moment (or decade-to-decade) basis. To me, the adoption of Pervert as a title in part represents a submission to this belief. In embracing Perversion I am free from normative expectations, preemptively rejecting them.

Interestingly, this is where I started to relax and align with Slutcon. This convention for the sexually repressed (and just curious, or committed to improvement) boasted many workshops, but most of them boiled down to: get out of your own head, and push your boundaries. Men were instructed to stomp their feet or shove each other to be embodied. They swapped nervous system regulating techniques. They were instructed to unclench their jaws.

Privately, I was taking notes. I love my own boundaries; they make me feel safe and still able to access eroticism on my own terms. I like embracing perversion, the control it offers my own sexual experience and also the way it cracks open what can be considered erotic.

But seduction takes risk, and the lower the risk, the lower the potential payout. If I don’t allow myself discomfort, if I eliminate risk completely and only entertain my specific predilections, how can I expect to experience the potential highs eroticism can deliver?

I don’t think I was a very good Flirtgirl, for the few hours I attempted it- I am still at my core, a pervert and not a slut. In many ways I resonated more with the participants than my fellow flirtees, something that became almost hamfisted when one man walked past me and I realized we wore the same cologne (Marrakech Intense). When a friend made a lightly mocking comment directed towards the men I bristled, taking personal offense.

I couldn’t have anticipated the complicated emotional difficulties I had at Slutcon, but in a sense that’s why I’m so glad I went- and why I remain supportive of its objective. I’m proud of myself for pushing my boundaries, for attempting the loosen the grip on the reigns or I guess in this case the belt on the trench coat. Maybe, potentially, there is even a future where my perversions can be slutty.