So you may have heard about that Kickstarter that raised $16,000 for a loathsome Reddit PUA’s “handbook on how to bully women who don’t like you into sex, while preserving your claims to believe you had consent should you need to tell the police,” as Amanda Marcotte aptly described it in her post on it yesterday. Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg also has some thoughts on it.
I don’t really have anything to add.
There’s a petition up demanding that Kickstarter simply refuse to fund what is essentially a how-to guide to sexual assault. Last I checked, it had gotten nearly 60,000 signatures.
EDITED TO ADD: Casey Malone, who wrote the blog post that brought this awful project to the attention of people outside of the sleazier corners of Reddit, wrote Kickstarter about it and got a response suggesting that Kickstarter, while planning to go ahead and fund the project, will be reexamining its policies as a result of the controversy. Malone posted some further thoughts.
EDITED AGAIN: Kickstarter has offered an apology. You can find it here. But I’m just going to repost the whole thing:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
- The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.
- Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.
These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.
Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.
Where does this leave us?
First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.
Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.
Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.
Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.
We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.
That is an apology. Some people could learn a thing or two from this.
Ha ha, just too slow!
Blast! Blockquote monster got
meDavid.You mean, other than “Walk up to the woman you like and talk to her like she’s a human being”?
Your otherwise quite sensible statement (that information tends to stay)
Is somewhat marred by a bar you’ve set in the way
While you can never unknow things (discounting blunt force)
Relationships are not a mousetrap (you knew this, of course)
Your frame the situation in a manner most ill
And offer a comparison kind of shrill
That was a weak rhyme, wasn’t it? But still!
Feminists don’t need to come up with standard procedure
you can introduce and use when you want to say something that’ll
meet her
consistent requirements for some interaction.
What? How is that our job? The human race has managed quite nicely so far
And ten thousand years from now, amidst flickering the light of a flickering star
PEOPLE WILL STILL BONE
Sorry, that broke my flow.
It’s just… It’s a false dichotomy, it’ll never transpire that things will be
exactly like everyone would want them to remain, see
Feminists aren’t naturally opposed to the “notion” of “Game”
You’ll find more fucking attempts at genuine sexual discourse in feminists circles than anywhere else
so your pretense is moot
You’re just stuck a simple human root
People like ease and power, and if I can give you a book to devour
that’ll teach you the tricks of the feminine mind in five to ten points, arranged in line
you’ll buy it and like it and tell everyone else not to care!
The day you can ban “SIX MINUTE ABS!” programmes, I’ll start to care.
but ease and convenience doesn’t correlate to a mandate to dictate some state of mutual pleasure and by no measure is it my job to tell someone how to sate your raging libidious yearning for a mate.
I’d just like them to do it with no less rape.
Wow, that’s absolutely disgusting.
Obsidian, you don’t seem to know the difference between activists and dating gurus. There are plenty of people out there who have feminist dating advice for men: Captain Awkward, Dr. Nerdlove, Dan Savage,… Just three names off the top of my head who give dating and sex advice for both men and women that is respectful to women.
“I’d just like them to do it with less to no rape.”
The “to” is important. No less rape is bad. Less rape s good. No rape is great.
Why exactly are Amanda Marcotte and Lindy West required to provide men with pickup guides?
Because it’s women’s job to take care of men. I shouldn’t need to tell you this, David, since I am you. 😉
After all, it’s women’s fault they won’t sleep with men. It’s not fair they get to say no!
/sarcasm
That apology is kind of interesting, as KS has fielded a few sexual violence-based controversies recently. There was a rape-themed card game that was pulled (though not before it received a disturbingly large number of backers). Within the last few weeks, there was a minor controversy over a sex-themed RPG book with some questionable content – that one wasn’t pulled, probably because the content was a bit more ambiguous. But there’s nothing ambiguous about this – it’s a guide that advises men to do something that would be a crime in every state in the country.
Really, I’m surprised that it took them this long to rethink their guidelines. How many scumbags do you have to deal with before you realize that codifying these things might be a good idea?
So. Much. Laughage.
That’s not a mixed metaphor, that shit’s blended.
Come on, David, you know that one: Obsidian wants them to, and because reality should bend itself to his will, so should Amanda Marcotte and Lindy West. Don’t you know any logic? It goes something like this:
Socrates is a mortal.
Cats are mortal.
Therefore, Socrates is a cat.
After all this time studying Paul Elam and other luminaries like him, you still don’t know that????? I really despair of you.
@Howard bannister
Thank you for that update. I’m glad to hear that viscaria and leftwingfox are ok too. It is pretty scary, I’ve never
David: Because in the Obsidituse One’s mind, women, and especially feminists, are supposed to do all the work for the menfolk.
Seen flooding like this before
“You haven’t told us how to make you fuck us, so it’s YOUR FAULT that we’re going to have to trick you into fucking us.”
Listen to yourself dude
I have a problem with Dan Savage in that he’s said that sexual relationships REQUIRE oral sex, if xie doesn’t want to do oral with you, you should dump hir.
And lots of people don’t like oral.
I don’t read Savage regularly, if he’s apologized or taken it back I’d appreciate it if someone could link me up.
Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter, for instance, could have ended up a casualty if some overzealous employee (or KS managers, feeling the heat from all the online dudebros raging) had the power to just decide to retroactively ban projects that don’t go against the site’s policies.
I don’t think this applies. The ToS for Kickstarter make it plain that had he put his excerpts on Kickstarter, it would have been a dead deal; because they advocated harming another; which is prohibited.
•is unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libelous, deceptive, fraudulent, tortious, obscene, offensive, profane, or invasive of another’s privacy;
The people who are most heated about it (including some who loathe the project being discussed) are looking at it as a “free speech” issue. What I see is a “Rules Lawyer” in action. “I didn’t say it here, so the ToS Rules about harming people don’t apply”.
That’s a recipe for disaster.
I don’t like Savage at all for a host of reasons, and I think his “GGG (good, giving, game)” philosophy has done more harm than good with a certain set of overly entitled dudes.
I spent a lot of Weds agitating about this (lots of twittering, letter writing, etc.).
I’m mixed. I see what they did (and didn’t do). I see why they came to the decision they did. I also see they scrubbed comments from their Facebook page.
The thing is, unless they make a dramatic change in their policies, this will continue to happen. It’s also being made plain that if you game the rules, the rules will be slavishly adhered to, and you can be an asshole with (profitable) impunity.
On the flip side, it has put a lot more people in the position of seeing what PUA is about. The Readercon incident with Rene Walling is an interesting case of PUA techniques being practiced; by someone who is (so far as I can tell from speaking with people who know him fairly well) not conversant with it as a discipline. Either he has been studying on the sly (which I don’t really think is the case) or the memes are so well diffused into the larger society that he can run some pretty serious game just from social cues as to what he can get away with.
Shit like this just perpetuates the idea that assaulting women is “getting to know them”.
Claiming that feminists have not come up with an adequate replacement for the “seduction community” is like claiming modern medicine hasn’t come up with an adequate replacement for cancer patients to going to some quack that pretends to do psychic surgery on your ass.
Bullshit.
This book isn’t about meeting women, it’s about Game, and Game isn’t about meeting women. It’s about bending them to a man’s will and fucking them; whether they like it or not.
That’s not “how to meet women” that’s how to assault them (and if someone triues that, I hope she decides to see if wringing that dick like a washcloth is a good means of dissuasion).
When you add “Rape Game” and all the other shit the PUA communinity is fond of (who was the Guru who ended up in jail for shooting a women who said no?) and this is plainly about dudes who are pissed women get to turn them down.
So this guy says, “don’t let them say no; put them on you lap, and your dick in their hand”.
You say, “It’s about a better way to meet women; one “feminism” hasn’t managed to figure out, and you’re upset that people find, “make her say NO! (repeatedly) before you back it down a notch and start over” to be morally offensive?
The reason people don’t like “Game” is that it treats people as objects. The reason you pretend Game is about, “meeting women” is that you want to pretend the MRM isn’t about denying humanity to anyone who isn’t Male (and it’s best if those men are White).
@Falconer: Dan Savage is far from perfect. He has said many problematic things, none of which he’s ever really apologized for (although he’s improved on many subjects). But his advice is still infinitely better than the crap PUAs spout out.