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I've gotten into some light twitter drama around Vibecamp, specifically whether it's appropriate to have a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent at an event where children are allowed, and even encouraged, to be brought by parents. Here's the full text of my tweet:
I've had this argument with the rat/post-rat scene before, and it always baffles me how strong the resistance is. I've had people directly say that no, having nudity and a sex tent LOWERS risks!
I've had multiple people saying that my evidence/argument are weak and burning man does it, so it's totally fine.
I'm genuinely trying to have reasonable discussions with people, but I just don't get this sort of thing. The inferential gap here is so large it's hard to fathom how to begin to bridge it. People arguing that it's actually good and healthy to have kids around nude adults they or their parents don't know seem extremely alien to me. Some of these people even have kids, apparently!
Either way, I love the rat/post-rat/EA/tpot scene, I've met many wonderful and awesome people there. Compared to the average normie they're generally intelligent, earnest, kind, and overall fun to hang with. But these sorts of fundamental moral disagreements are why I stopped running a local EA group, and why I just can't identify too strongly with the scene as a whole. I genuinely wish people in these groups had a more traditional sense of morality, a better understanding of boundaries, and generally just cared about Chesterton's fence and second order effects. I hope that these issues don't completely derail the movement (even more, after the FTX poly harem scandal) but I'm not holding my breath. It really is a shame.
Here in old Europe, nude beaches have been a thing since at least 1960, I guess. My understanding is that this is very much non-sexual nudity, generally (probably due to the sand creating friction). I do not think it is especially traumatizing for kids to see naked adults in a context where it is treated as normal.
Presumably, you mean that kids are encouraged at vibecamp, not in the sex tent specifically. I think kids should be definitely shielded from viewing sex at least until they actively start to search for it -- even more if it is strangers fucking who might be into all sorts of kinks.
I also think that it is probably a good idea to keep sex parties and everything else well separate. Bringing your kids even to the anteroom of a sex party -- where the adults are still clothed but the context is already that they will fuck each other -- would seem highly inappropriate.
That being said, I think that it is inevitable that people will hook up at vibecamp. Some will hook up with more than one partner, some even at the same time. There is a difference between the sex being the main attraction and one of the optional sideshows, though. I have been to music festivals which included fetish parties, and it did not end up setting the theme of the overall festival.
Nor is it the only part of vibecamp which may not be kid-friendly. Presumably, Doomers will attend -- as they should. An eight-year-old overhearing a discussion at breakfast where two smart people agree that it is likely that AI will kill all humans within five years will very likely be more affected than one who observed (from his hotel room, or tent or whatever, while he/she should have been long asleep) a few naked people making out during a midnight nude pool party before disappearing in the sex tent. The solution would be not to take out your sex organs or child-inapproriate beliefs where kids can see you. (There might be more child-inappropriate topics apart from sex and doom, perhaps drugs, or horror movies, discussion of wars and so on.)
Strikes me that there's a certain cultural gestalt to the consideration too? Nude beaches are A Thing, knowingly nonsexual, from certain kinds of cultures.
One knows that Vibecamp largely pulls from, ah, very different kind of culture. Aella has attended in the past but not this year afaict. There is insufficient cultural gestalt to mix the kind of things they're mixing.
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