Going into slutcon, one of my main known-unknowns was… I’d heard many times that the standard path to hooking up or dating starts with two people bantering for an hour or two at a party, lacing in increasingly-unsubtle hints of interest. And even in my own imagination, I was completely unable to make up a plausible-sounding conversation which would have that effect. Certainly it had never played out that way for me, nor had I personally witnessed it play out for anyone else.

So at slutcon itself, I volunteered for a session in which a few guys would be paired up with women and flirt on stage, with the session moderator giving live feedback and pointers. I was hoping I would finally be able to figure out how the heck a conversation ever leads to sex^[1].

Within five minutes, the session moderator declared that I was already sufficiently witty that he had nothing to teach me, and he went fishing for a new volunteer who would be more instructively inept. I kid you not: I was booted from a flirting workshop for being too good at flirting, despite being completely unable to even imagine any plausible way for a banterous conversation to lead to hooking up. This certainly did not leave me less confused.

I left slutcon still unable to picture how banterous conversation leads to sex, increasingly skeptical that it does at all (or maybe that it works ridiculously inefficiently but most people have no better options), and increasingly confused that so many people seem so thoroughly convinced that it does.

What I did learn at slutcon was a lot more skill and confidence at physical escalation. I was already a pretty good dancer and leaned on that heavily, so this clearly isn’t the typical case, but multiple times now the path between “Want to dance?” and outright sex has involved less than five total minutes of talking, most of which is logistics. She’s very turned on by the dancing, there’s just not much reason for flirtatious talk to be involved at all. The one spot where flirtatious talk is useful is in spelling out exactly what I want to do to her, right before inviting her someplace more private. Whatever’s going on with the whole (banterous conversation) -> (sex/dating) process, I seem to be sidestepping it entirely, and whatever path I’m taking seems rather dramatically more efficient.^[2]

… yet I still want to understand what the heck I’m sidestepping. What is going on with this whole banter -> sex thing?

Part Of A Model

One probably-relevant model-chunk which already makes sense was recently well articulated in The Status Game. Briefly, “the status game” of sex and seduction is roughly:

• For males, coaxing females into sex grants status. The stingier the females are sexually, the more status the sex grants, because sex with a more celibate woman shows the guy overcame a greater challenge.
• For females, getting males to put lots of effort into seduction grants status. The more effort the males put in, the more status the woman gains, because the men's effort is a costly signal of the woman’s appeal.

To be clear, this game sucks and I am quite happy to sidestep it. (One piece of anonymized feedback I got from slutcon was “I wanted to sleep with John but he didn’t pursue hard enough”, to which I say “lol sounds like you’ll just have to go fuck yourself”. I was surrounded by self-proclaimed sluts, why on earth would I waste such an opportunity on someone who’s going to make my life pointlessly difficult?)

The equilibrium here involves men pouring huge amounts of effort and resources into pursuit, women holding out for huge amounts of effort and resources expended in their pursuit, and people generally not having very much sex. And that indeed matches my impression of most short term mating markets: the ratio of (men’s effort in) to (sex out) seems crazy high for most hookups in most environments, it is just not worth it, unless a guy is really into this particular status game as a game in its own right (and doesn’t actually care that much about the sex per se).

But it does seem like this particular game is the standard.

So one hypothesis I’m tracking is that the whole banter -> sex process is standard for people who play the status game. And when people tell me that the banter -> sex process “works”, they mean that if you spend hundreds of hours flirting at house parties, you might get laid a handful of times. In other words, relative to my current standards, it basically just does not work.

Another piece of supporting evidence for this model: slutcon included a panel of guys with body counts over 100. While I didn’t attend that one, the main takeaway I heard from others is that every single one of those guys was very good at some touch-heavy activity like partner dance or massage, and that activity was pretty central to their sexual success.

… but even assuming that model is correct, it still doesn’t fully explain my observations. Why banterous conversation specifically, at parties specifically, as opposed to some other form of courtship? Why is that particular ineffective method the standard, rather than some other ineffective method?

An Alternative Submodel

An obvious theme in many womens' sexuality is that consent is anti-sexy^[3]. Indeed, that's an understatement: even giving a hint that she actually wants the experience seems to be a major turn off for an awful lot of women. This creates an obvious conundrum for guys who want to distinguish that case from women who are in fact not interested.

I'm not going into detail on that model here, because its implications for flirtation are similar to the status game for current purposes. But I do want to note that a very different underlying model gives rise to somewhat similar conclusions, and this is another hypothesis I'm tracking.

Another Part Of A Model

You know what’s notoriously effective for hookups? Alcohol. Also, less notorious but pretty similar in effect, sleep deprivation. Getting drunk and staying up very late at a party are definitely not good for the quality of sex, but they are very much the standard, because they get people to drop their inhibitions. In particular, alcohol and sleep deprivation get people to pay less attention to the status game.

So another hypothesis I’m tracking is that the whole banter -> sex pipeline is not really about the banter at all. It’s just that people who are getting drunk and staying up late at a party tend to be banterous, and those having fun banterous conversations at parties are much more likely to grab another drink and stay up later. On this model, the game is not actually about the conversation per se; the main point of the conversation is just to kill time, wait for the booze and the sleepiness to do their job for everyone involved.

Notably, this model does predict a lot more of the specifics of the “standard” path: the banter, the parties. It also generalizes well to bars and clubs. It explains a lot of my apparent confusion: I don’t drink and am relatively careful to get plenty of sleep, so I am almost never in those sorts of environments. This model also matches common wisdom about the rarity of sober hookups.

… yet people still tell me that the banter pipeline applies even in the absence of booze. The booze/sleepiness model nails down enough predictions that I’m pretty skeptical of the people telling me something else is central, but I do still find it plausible that I’m missing substantial noncentral pieces.

So what am I still missing?

1. ^{^}

   … or dating, but this being slutcon the focus was obviously on sex, and this post will mostly focus on sex.

2. ^{^}

   Also, about half of my sexual/romantic partners have been women who very unambiguously approached me, e.g. explicitly asked me out, without me making any particular effort to court them beforehand. That’s another way to sidestep whatever the standard process is, and I definitely endorse it strongly.

3. ^{^}

   ... though anxiety is also anti-sexy, and more explicit consent usually reduces anxiety a lot. This leads to a lot of confusion amongst people who are not separately tracking "absence of anti-sexy things" and "presence of sexy things".