Further Notes on Rape Culture in AI Social Circles

On the Red Means No rape-roleplay party and how it relates to AI/safetyist culture.

This post is a continuation of my previous work on rape culture in Silicon Valley / AI circles. Content warning for consensual non-consent / rape-roleplay.

Since publication, several readers have raised concerns about my decision to identify certain individuals by name.

After reflecting on those concerns, I believe some of them are valid. The core arguments and experiences described in this piece do not depend on those identities, so I have chosen to anonymize references to individuals where I do not believe naming them is necessary to the reader’s understanding of the article.

This change does not alter the substance of the piece, but reflects my view that the article can stand on its own without those names.

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The last installment of my thoughts on rape culture in Silicon Valley focused on past events within Rationalist/adjacent circles; now I’d like to talk about something closer to the present.

Red Means No (RMN) is a consensual non-consensual (CNC) / rape-roleplay party that has circulated within rationalist, AI/Safety, and broader Bay Area tech circles.

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Getting into the details:

The official site is here, and gives a good summary of the event itself. For those un-initiated into the worlds of BDSM, Kink, and consensual non-consensual sex, here’s the rundown:

Consensual non-consent (CNC) is a category of role-play involving negotiated scenarios that simulate coercion, resistance, or non-consensual sex.

It’s a sexual interaction where one partner acts as if they do not want to have sex, but has actually given consent to her partner in the scenario. Many CNC scenarios are, in plain language, forms of rape role-play.

There are many ways to negotiate consent beforehand, including safe words to differentiate actually revoking consent from engaging in resistance. At RMN, the safe word is ‘red’, hence the title of the event.

Many sex parties prohibit CNC play entirely because it can be difficult for observers to distinguish role-played resistance from genuine consent violations / sexual assault.

The RMN manual is fairly extensive for a kink event and outlines the predator/prey relationship and the use or wristbands, dossiers and badges in addition to the event safe word of ‘red’ for communicating consent. According to the manual, attending as ‘prey’ carries obligatory consent to groping / non-genital touching.

The STI policy is also fairly extensive and covers both more traditional sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) as well as oral and genital herpes.

The RMN incident log was last updated in April of 2026. It records a participant receiving a concussion after being dropped while being carried, and an incident of ‘stealthing’.

RMN handled this by giving assistance to victims up to and including legal help / funding, which is pretty great by kink standards.

Stealthing means consent is given to intercourse with a condom, and one partner instead engages in unprotected intercourse, hoping their partner won’t be able to tell the difference.

How stealthing is legally viewed varies by jurisdiction. Most commonly, it is treated as a form of sexual assault or sexual battery. In Canada, courts have recognized that stealthing can impair consent and constitute sexual assault. In parts of the UK, stealthing has led to rape convictions where consent was conditional on condom use.

At the other end of the spectrum, some jurisdictions provide only civil remedies. Others have been reluctant to treat condom deception as negating consent, reasoning that consent to intercourse was given, even if consent to the specific circumstances was not.

Outside complaints about RMN have also been included in the incident log. It references a series of tweets by researcher Sonia Joseph in 2024 regarding group-house culture, CNC parties, and drug use in the AI industry. The RMN organizers appear to interpret those tweets as referring to RMN.

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Now that the just the facts are out of the way, I can get into some of my personal experiences and thoughts on how RMN factors into the wider scene and rape culture.

I was sexually assaulted at Vibecamp 1 in 2022, and was advanced on by a male in the darkened corner of a music venue at Vibecamp 2 in 2023. I brought the latter up at the post-Vibecamp 2 decompression event.

A RMN attendee, who is now part of the Vibecamp organizing team, disclosed what I said in that circle about what happened to me to a celebrity within those circles without specifically identifying me as an individual. That celebrity was not at the circle, and I view this as a fairly severe violation of privacy, regardless of whether my name was used or not. That was my story, and I did not give consent to have it repeated elsewhere.

They later on went to make some Twitter content, some of which has since been deleted, about women’s obligations to men who approach them. That women who get upset are ‘outsourcing their agency’, may be performing distress to signal attractiveness, and suggesting that a woman has to have some arbitrary amount of status to reject a man.

I wrote about my Vibecamp experiences later that year. In one of those posts, I talked about feeling fear in that corner of Vibecamp 2 and trying to recall self-defense techniques from an episode of Spike TV’s Surviving Disaster.

A prominent Rationalist host of multiple podcasts published an essay called Trauma Junkie.

I believe the essay portrays women who publicly discuss traumatic experiences as a threat to community cohesion. It argues for considering those threats as equivalent to rapists, and isolating them accordingly:

For the protection of everyone else they must be isolated, just like the violent psychotic or compulsive rapist must be isolated.

Also, based on this passage:

They’re rarely more happy than when they are recounting the brief awkward conversation that had them more scared than they’ve ever been, trying desperately to recall defensive techniques against a violent knife attack which could totally happen any second, I swear.

I suspect that post is about what I had to say about my experiences at Vibecamp, and serves to function as some sort of call for my exclusion from that community.

When I found it, I was shocked and disgusted. Members of the Effective Altruism forum had similar responses during commentary on what happened to Frances Lorenz at the Center for Effective Altruism.

I don’t know what to feel now, knowing that one of the author’s leisure activities is rape-roleplay. Doing that, and then going on to write something that I read as saying that women who come forward should be treated like rapists, is bizarre and disturbing.

There are other stories of people with unfavourable interactions with Red Means No that aren’t mine to tell. I want to err on the side of extreme caution in protecting the people involved, and will leave it up to them if they want to speak about their experiences.

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I believe RMN reflects and reinforces attitudes that already exist within parts of the AI scene. On how men see women and their bodies. That it reinforces entitlement, which is a central pillar of rape culture.

In Part 1, I discussed the anonymous Rationalist quoted in a TIME article describing deeply troubling attitudes toward women. A recent LessWrong discussion has alleged that the individual in question was Michael Vassar, a longtime Rationalist figure associated with Leverage Research:

The same LessWrong discussion also included claims that some attendees view RMN as a networking opportunity within the AI ecosystem, and that a significant fraction of women attending are not primarily interested in CNC itself.

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Some might bristle when you refer to things like Susan Fowler being told her sexual harasser was too important to discipline as rape culture.

If the term feels exaggerated, consider the events described above.

• Coming forward in group confidence, having that confidence broken, and used for manosphere Twitter content.

• A prominent Rationalist who engages in rape role-play writing essays that I read as advocating for women who come forward about traumatic experiences to be socially isolated like rapists.

The vibes are absolutely rancid. Both Vibecamp and Red Means No have played the ‘we’re just event hosts’ card when difficult situations arise.

During conversations with Washington Post journalists reporting on the AI scene, I was told that other women had described problems but were unwilling to attach their names to them.

I’m using my real name here, but I still share that fear. What some individuals and groups in this scene feel empowered to do when they think they enjoy social power over a woman scares the fuck out of me.

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I want to leave you with one thing.

Based on my experiences, it's my belief that events such as Vibecamp, LessOnline, and Red Means No are not merely events but parts of a larger social network and the implications for you may be far greater than just ‘going to an event’.

I believe you are entering a highly interconnected social network with invisible connections and unwritten rules. Actions that seem ordinary or reasonable to outsiders can have social consequences that are difficult to anticipate.

If something happens to you, I implore you to seek help from people completely disconnected from these communities, both socially and professionally. There are too many women, including myself, that have to deal with the consequences of things that should never have happened within them.

In my case, I think I would have avoided a lot of pain had I taken that advice.