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.
@ pecunium
I’m glad I just skimmed, because that’s even worse. X|
Fade: It’s Bog-Standard PUA, and pretty run of the mill MRA, so it’s not that bad (sort of), unless you compare it to decent human beings, with any sense of ethics, or a moral compass.
I use to love Savage and his advice. He’s certainly broaden my world-view in term of kink and mono/polygamy and generally what kind of relationship you can have with a person, and all the ‘GGG’ stuff. Thanks a lot for that.
Then I stopped reading, because I felt I wasn’t gaining anything anymore reading him – each question he received I could almost predict his answer -. So I left.
Took a step back.
Heard some critic, founded that some were old, some were unfounded or at least a bit unfair, some were true buuuuuuut he’s such a nice guy. Then it kept pilling on.
So yeah. I how him quite a bit but he’s a douchebag who’s almost incapable of self-doubt.
It’s like finding out that the person who taught you how to read has a membership card (hat?) of the KKK. Thanks for everything but bye, I’ve got to get as far away from you asap.
RE: Yellaine
There, there. From the ages of eight to fourteen, our wee singlet soul was owned by Piers Anthony, so you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.
I initially assumed that the “color of her panties” thing was a joke…
RE: CassandraSays
Ah, if only it were. If only it were…
Seriously, I am ashamed of how much that guy influenced our writing style. Tried reading one of his books this month and my GOD, was it tedious. My husband kept wailing, clutching his head, and going, “EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK IS STUPID.”
It says something when your plot only works if you don’t question or scrutinize it.
That GGG thing … what I’ve seen of it squicks me out, like you’re doing something wrong if you have boundaries that include saying “No thanks, I do not want to do X” rather than trying X first. Hope I’m misunderstanding, but the very name is creepy, for me. YMMV of course.
@LBT me too! I loved A Spell for Chameleon and all the Xanthe books (although I was in high school when I discovered them). I followed him into other series until his Authors Notes at the end of each book got to be longer than the book itself. What a pompous ass he is.
RE: Unimaginative
For me, it’s the rape and pedopologism that really skeeves me out now. I was quite surprised to find reading that book that I found it tedious as well; I’d forgotten that. (And it was a stand-alone book, so it couldn’t have been that he was sick of the series.)
Hmm, I don’t remember noticing that, but high school was a long time ago, and I was young and ridiculously naive. I did get skeeved out over something, though. Toward the end of my relationship with his books, there seemed to be more and more stuff that was just, um, icky.
Kittehserf, the kindest explanation is that you have to give it at least a thought, especially if that’s something you’ve never considered before.
But sadly, there is a strong pattern of saying that the partner with the strongest libido, the most kinks, the more desire to open the relationship, etc is in the ‘right’ while the ‘vanillest’ (I’m making words as I go) should try the most to accommodate his partner or end the relationship. It’s not told in so many words but it is visible.
RE: Unimaginative
Oh, it got worse, but I assure you, it was there in Spell for Chameleon.
(Trigger warning for rape apologism, in the most blatant, awful way.)
Oh, fuck, that’s disgusting. >_<
LBT, that’s so horrible. I read most of the Xanthe books when I was a teen, too, though I don’t think I read Spell for Chameleon, and dropped the series after Man from Mundania. (Only got into it because of Night Mare – horse hero!) Reading that makes me very glad I tossed them all when we moved house. 🙁
Yellaine – yes, that’s the impression I get. His abuse of that poor woman who’d been raped and was being triggered by her husband is the extreme example of “person who doesn’t want to do X is always wrong”. What a piece of shit he is.
RE: Unimaginative
Yyyyyyup. And it was alllll downhill from there.
Those Piers Anthony books! I also had a fling with them in highschool, but I got so squicked out by them that I had to stop reading them.
RE: Kittehserf
His abuse of that poor woman who’d been raped and was being triggered by her husband is the extreme example of “person who doesn’t want to do X is always wrong”. What a piece of shit he is.
Yeah, see, that shit is personal for me. Back when me and hubby first started dating, I had rape issues out the wazoo. Navigating around it was like trying to have a picnic in a minefield.
It’s awful, but back then, I couldn’t really consent, because I had no understanding of what it meant to want something, plus even the things I DID want often became emotional horror shows afterward, so it was just one huge conflicted, miserable mess. I was NOT GGG at the time. I challenge anyone to be, under such circumstances. I was just trying to figure out the difference between “DO NOT WANT” and “WANT, but will be deeply triggered afterward,” and all the other shades of awful.
I felt that in such a condition, it was unfair for anyone to be with me. It took me a long time to understand what my husband saw in me, and why he was willing to be monogamous.
So yeah. I don’t have a lot of patience with that kind of advice.
Yellaine: But sadly, there is a strong pattern of saying that the partner with the strongest libido, the most kinks, the more desire to open the relationship, etc is in the ‘right’ while the ‘vanillest’ (I’m making words as I go) should try the most to accommodate his partner or end the relationship. It’s not told in so many words but it is visible.
I’ve always had the opposite belief. If one knows one is an outlier, and one knows what one’s partner likes/doesn’t like, and chooses to enter the relationship, one does it with the understanding of contraints.
Otherwise you are asking the partner to abandon boundaries.
ALL the hugs if you want them, LBT. That is … I haven’t words. 🙁
Pecunium – that’s exactly what I was thinking a moment ago (while scrabbling on the floor looking for my pen, heh).
It’s okay. It’s a dark chapter of my life, now thankfully closed. It’s something I still wake up grinning about. Sex can JUST be sex now! Something fun and enjoyable!
Though it’s sad that it took me over twenty years to reach the point that apparently most folks are at the whole time.
I didn’t expect this…apparently the author of this book is now working with anti-rape organizations in order to fix the problematic advice in it. Here’s a Salon article about it: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/24/pickup_artist_ken_hoinsky_apologizes_for_promoting_sexual_assault/
OMG, have the misters heard about this yet? Hoinsky has now gone full white knight/mangina. CODE PUCE, CODE PUCE. [red lights flash, klaxons sound, steam is released from the air vents]
Ok, I have some updates for you guys and hooooly shit.
So thanks to this execrable apologist ‘interview’ of Ken Hoinsky, I ran into a link…
… that is basically a timestamped rundown of Ken Hoinsky raping a Japanese woman. Trigger Warnings abound. This shit is unfuckingbelievable. Thread here.
this chucklefuck is acting like he’s ‘learned’. He has not.