Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon
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?
- ^
… or dating, but this being slutcon the focus was obviously on sex, and this post will mostly focus on sex.
- ^
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.
- ^
… 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”.
Not really an experienced player of the relevant games, but I personally have turned down an obvious sex invitation with someone who I was otherwise interested in because too little conversation (and don’t regret this choice). I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with. I feel like a lot of the intrigue of an intimate encounter is conversational intimacy. I’ve never experienced the chat at party → sex pipeline, however. Only [chat online for multiple months]->sex.
Not sure how much this applies to you specifically, but my go-to hypothesis when someone says “I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with” is “yeah sure you’re not, I wonder what you’d say if you were already turned on by the person in question?”. Like, using Aella’s toy model of “ladybrain” and “hornybrain”, “I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with” is a very central example of something ladybrain says. And like most of the things ladybrain says, one could jump through the hoop… or one could just get hornybrain amped up enough that ladybrain gives up and calls it a night.
On my models, when someone is actually turned on, a lot of their supposed barriers have a tendency to suddenly become quite flexible.
No disagreement with the broad statements, but I note that your words do not particularly register the point that good conversation itself might be a turnon and lack thereof a turnoff? IE your post presents a puzzle: what’s with the banter → sex thing? I’m suggesting that many people might want to talk first as an inherent preference. Sure, there might be ways around that, but you weren’t asking for something with no loopholes, you were asking about the banter → sex thing.
I guess I should have directly asked: is the appeal of conversation before sex, for you, that it is a sexual turn on in its own right? Like, does good conversation with someone make you sexually aroused? Or is it something less direct than that, like e.g. you find it hard to be aroused by someone without first respecting them, or feeling curious about them, or something like that?
Seems to me like both.
This is illustrated well in this Seinfeld clip.
I think a large part of the mysterious seeming banter → sex transition is antinormative attitudes towards sex. For some large portion of people, the mate-seeking drive is tangled up with a desire for covertness, for which there is culturally specific[1] support.
“Romance” and “romanticism” seem to be fundamentally the (ideally mutual) intent to mate transgressively, “you and me against the world.” As I understand it, “romance” is specifically a modern Western[2] phenomenon explicitly opposed to formal statelike systems of accountability.
Trinley Goldenberg alludes to the function of banter:
But the important thing to understand is why people are seeking plausible deniability. Naturally the opposition to accountability is disinclined to give an honest account of itself, so people will tend to deflect from the central question onto tangential issues like the quality of banter, or vague pointers like “sexual tension.” But if your sexuality isn’t about being naughty and getting away with something, there’s little point in mimicking the otherwise extremely inefficient plausible-deniability rituals (such as the ones described in the OP) needed to build inexplicit, covert mutual knowledge of attraction. Dancing works better for you because it is a virtue signal.
See also:
On commitments to anti-normativity
Preference Inversion
Guilt, Shame, and Depravity
There may or may not also be direct evolutionary support for this in the form of “sneaky fucker” strategies
The “romance” as a literary genre began with Orlando Furioso, though it comes out of somewhat older traditions of troubadors and courtly love.
Fwiw while wit matters in flirting, I’ve found it’s much more about energy.
I don’t know if this abstract description will make sense to you, but ime the way that flirting leads to sex is by continually ramping up sexual tension by a sort of plausible deniability of sexual interest -
one way to do this is you’re talking about sexy things but not being overtly sexual with your energy, or having a sexual energy but it’s more teasing or talking about non sexy things
In any case, if both people are into it, and don’t let the tension escape through other outlets, the way to release it is sexual escalation. And as long as the escalation (E. G. Cuddling, kissing etc) is still less than the sexual energy calls for, the tension continues to build to sexual intimacy.
Banter declares interest and leads to mutual laughs. When you laugh it’s a good excuse to touch/make contact. Contact becomes more and more common, and the “excuses” for making contact become less and less. Eventually once you’re both comfortable making contact and are close together, there’s some lull in the conversation, and you fill this lull by leaning in and kissing them. Once you’re kissing you’re able to escalate physical contact until you eventually have sex.
Are you exclusively interested in flirtatious banter as a mechanism for initiating casual sex? Or are you interested in other purposes of banter, like finding a marriage partner?
The post is focused on (banter → sex) mainly because that’s the place where I most strongly feel I’m missing something, i.e. I am unable to picture how it would plausibly work. Banter as a general social skill, e.g. for making friends or just having fun conversations or breaking the ice with new people, is something I’m already quite comfortable with.
Indeed, much of the reason I was originally confused about the (banter → sex) pipeline was because I have had so much of that kind of conversation for so many years, and over all that time it did not particularly seem to lead to sex.
From experience, this correlates pretty well with being attuned to your partner, and being able to read subtle signals. And that’s sexy. I also suspect being able to read others in such a way makes escalation easier