The essay by Noelle Perdue has some blind spots but she was struck by one of their kink practices:
The wider network of Effectively Altruistic, Bay Area AI tech brotherhood has been covered on and off- in varying degrees of concern- for their seemingly wide community interest in kink, BDSM and “Consensual Non-Consent,” aka rape play. I experienced this myself, sitting in a circle of self-identified rationalists as they explained to me the pleasures of “red means no” parties; full-contact “rape orgies” where participants are encouraged to fight back.
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(Being forced to have sex is) a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.
Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson mostly want a woman to produce and raise babies. Gwern does not seem to post much about sexuality. Kelsey Piper probably keeps that to Tumblr and Project Lawful although she is queer and polyamorous. Caroline Ellison was into submission to men and being in a hierarchical harem. Duncan Sabien didn't mention BDSM fantasies in his post about what he was like in bed. Yudkowsky is into dominance, sadism, and horny Japanese pop culture. Michael Vassar is into much younger women and at least one person says he advocates sex between adults and girls as young as 12 (but not that he commits such acts). Brent Dill liked master/slave relationships with much younger women which are a kind of consensual non-consent. Polyamory is big in this subculture. I don't know much about Burning Man culture. But I can't recall anyone in Bay Area rationalism and EA expressing interest in rape parties until Aella showed up. So is this like Yudkowsky spreading AI doomerism, and Alexander spreading neoreaction?
There is a difference between old school SoCal kink, where you spend a lot of time making fursuits and paddles and occasionally use them with someone fetching, and Aella's version where you rent a house or a field and go to town on each other. Kink culture stresses skill and technical proficiency whereas Aella likes to feel helpless in the power of big strong men. The Rationalists don't like the protective measures which kinksters have learned from experience, like limiting or banning substance use, safewords, and joining a national or international kink community so you can get a second opinion about that proposition on FetLife. (Yudkowsky has posted "of course I use safewords, but what if I didn't?" and I have seen a claim that the rape parties involve games like drugs roulette). Many of them are hostile to mainstream ideas of informed consent, preferring a Libertarian approach where if you sign a contract what happens after is your responsibility.
Edit to mention Vassar
Some thoughts.
Paschal Beverly Randolph is a curious character.
Emily Nagoski writes that she still meets undergraduates who think partners should have simultaneous orgasm like Randolph recommends.
Napoleon Hill's 1937 Think and Grow Rich has a chapter on channeling your sexual energy.
Someone called Mitch Horowitz spoke about sex magic at Hereticon, an event where Aella spoke about her kink events. Aella is definitely woo-curious.
Your take on sex magic reminds me of the Taoist version (I think the Indian version is more about joyfully breaking taboos- I don't know if Aella knows she is following the Left-Hand Path of Vamachara or if she is a natural like REH's Salome).
I find that the ways American kinksters talk about sexuality are a mixed bag, but kink practices seem good harm reduction. The one Bay Area kinkster I talked to had never heard of the Rationalists until I asked. I think any reasonably experienced Bay Area kinkster who heard the story would advise a young person to avoid our friends.
I would not underestimate how much one person with money and extroversion can influence Bay Area rationalist culture just by organizing events. Most Rats seem too scared of the outside world to go to a munch or a dance club where they might meet people with sawdust on their clothes and people who work in warehouses, and people who have punched a Nazi. If the sex parties in your community are rape-themed, a lot of men will decide they are interested in rape play (maybe obtaining some Viagra and some drugs that reduce inhibitions). So I think Aella organizes these events because she likes to be ravaged and because it lets her manipulate and corrupt people. TvTropes tells me that Project Lawful has a theme of the evil nation using BDSM to corrupt the Dominant hero.
Good thoughts. Satanists also talk about LHP and it comes up in other contexts too, like Lila.
So, on Taoist vs. tantric vs. Buddhist perspectives, I would point out that Satanic sex magick (in slight contrast to Randolph's work, fascinating link, thanks) doesn't do yin and yang or separate-but-equal. Instead they borrow from some Classics, particularly Stoics and Epicureans, and are almost entirely focused on optimizing the man's experience. They say that orgasms are gendered; male orgasms are a moment of blank emptiness and female orgasms are a prolonged wave of giving. Also, men are fallen and inferior, while women are born with an innate connection to nature and magick, somewhat like today's tradwife meme that only women can produce babies. Sex magick is therefore about finding ways to empower men by channeling magickal energy from women to men. They do make a sort of symmetry with fluids, since they imagine that men always give fluids to women; life energy goes in one direction and sex energy goes in the other direction.
To be fair, Satanists of all stripes generally support equal rights for women, and that includes the magisters. They'll say that Satan represents self-control, self-authority, self-agency, self-autonomy, etc. They think women should have the choice of whether to be auxiliary vessels who serve as magical sex conduits for a wizard with main-character syndrome. (Typing that sentence, I ponder: is occult Satanism an isekai?)
Putting this together, I'm now imagining the ideal Satanic interpretation of one of Aella's parties as a sex ritual rooted in temptation. The superior man is supposed to sit on the couch, motionless, at peace with himself, not desiring. The superior woman, presumably the hostess herself, is supposed to tease and taunt him, putting herself into precarity, not denying. From that perspective, Aella's making the mistake of over-privileging the fundamental male urge, or as we might put it in colloquial English, "encouraging rape."
I think that some 1980s and 1990s fantasy like The Mists of Avalon and a sprawling unfinished series has the "women are magical, men are not" trope. The author of Mists covered up for a pederast. I did not know this idea also comes up in Satanism.
Some forms of sex magic have the idea that men need a female ritual partner to be complete, which echos Scott Aaronson's idea that he needs a woman to bear his babies to be complete and in a just world he would be the chief rabbi and the peasants and craft workers would give him their prettiest daughter.
Someone called Lennox posted some thoughts on "ideological drift" or Of Marx and Moloch where he seems to say that his time in Effective Altruism was channelling his frustration that he had not pair-bonded yet. Even though he sees many problems with EA, like the gigantic probabilistic models with incredible numbers of assumptions layered on assumptions which can only ever approve of a limited range of interventions, he still seems to think their approach is right.
Someone shared a list of incidents at these parties with me but I don't have the link handy and I would be uncomfortable posting it anyways. Right now we have the stories by people close to Aella that they are responsible and fun, and the Buddhist poster who says there are drugs and unclear boundaries. I would not recommend that anyone explore risky things with our friends.
Edit, was the sprawling series Wheel of Time?