I’m sorry to be late weighing in so late on the Kickstarter seduction guide imbroglio, especially since so many of you asked us to tackle it. I won’t make excuses (I’ve been buuuuuusy, we do this for freeeeeee, my kids had liiiiiiiiice). Since it’s an essential part of the SorryWatch mission to applaud good apologies and not just mock bad ones, we really need to single out the Kickstarter apology for a round of applause.

Be forewarned of two things: 1) This post has NSFW language. 2.) There’s some context at the end, which doesn’t detract from Kickstarter’s apology, but does offer a dash of nuance to the general Interwebbian Pile-On Tendency Toward Knee-Jerk Outrage. (Which is the title of my next book, by the way. I’m funding it on Kickstarter.)

So: As you probably know, Kickstarter is a site wherein people — sometimes people who are not even celebrities! — ask for money to fund projects near and dear to their hearts. One such non-celebrity, a would-be Rico Suave frequent Redditor named Ken Hoinsky, asked for $2,000 to self-publish a how-to book called Above the Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome With Women.

Many, many nerds have published seduction guides. This one was doing well in raising funds when a comedian/blogger named Casey Malone stumbled on the project, found some shudder-inducing quotes from it on Reddit, and blogged in gobsmacked horror. Some choice snippets Malone found on Reddit:

To quote Rob Judge, “Personal space is for pussies.” I already told you that the most successful seducers are those who can’t keep their hands off of women. Well you’re not gonna be able to do that if you aren’t in close!

(Translation: Be a Gropey McGroperson, because the ladies love it!) (SorryWatch addendum: If you use the phrase “off of,” you have no business writing a book.)

All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women. They aggressively escalated physically with every woman they were flirting with. They began touching them immediately, kept great body language and eye contact, and were shameless in their physicality. Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That’s hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically.

(Translation: Keep on gropin’, Gropey! Wimmins do not know their own minds.)

Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.

(And then you can be that little prep school vontz Rolo on Mad Men, and do not get me started on how troubling it was for me to see so many middle-aged people on The Well defending this kid’s behavior as totes normal, Sally overreacted, etc.)

Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.

(Jezebel commenter Heather Simon’s reaction: “When a guy has to put my hand on his dick for him, I always just assume that it’s because it was too small for me to find on my own and I need the extra help.” Keep that in mind, Seduction Artistes!)

So that was depressing. But Kickstarter’s apology is not, and it’s worth quoting in full. If you’ve read it elsewhere because I am so late in tackling it (liiiiiiiiiiiiice), please feel free just to skip to the analysis.

Io didn’t really MEAN no. And who wouldn’t want to be turned into a beautiful heifer?

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.

Thank you,

Kickstarter

Why is this a good apology? 1) The title of the page is “We were wrong.” That is also the URL for the page. Not “We apologize if anyone was offended.” 2) Remember, the horrifying quotes Malone dug up were from Reddit, not from the Kickstarter proposal. But Kickstarter points out that they were not initially privy to this info without excessive “WE ARE BLAMELESS” whinging. 3) Kickstarter is taking concrete steps to be sure this kind of incident doesn’t occur again. (Since content glorifying violence against women was already prohibited, establishing greater specificity about what constitutes violence against women — which yes, includes ignoring “no means no” and exerting sexual pressure — was needed, and Kickstarter provided it by saying it will ban all seduction guides, which is kind of a Thor-like hammer, but given that Kickstarter does not have the staff to do giant wads of background research on every potential project, is a start, and I’m so sorry about the length of this sentence, I am dehydrated and also liiiiiiiiiiice.) 4) Kickstarter made concrete reparations by donating $25K, which is far more than 5% of the project’s funding, which is its usual cut, to RAINN, an anti-sexual-abuse charity. 5) If you do a little digging, you find that RAINN gets good marks from Charity Navigator, which adds further legitimacy to the donation. Kickstarter clearly did some work here, rather than saying “we’re making a donation to charity” which, I mean, shut up with your vagueness, everyone who says that. 5) Kickstarter does not try to hide and glide over its idiocy — the apology offers links to the taken-down bad stuff.  While there was some criticism of Kickstarter for not taking down the funding request the moment Malone pointed it out — which would have meant it didn’t get funding–I understand wanting to figure out what to do internally and not go off half-cocked (as it were); having two hours to make a decision isn’t much, even if you should not have put yourself in the position of having to make the decision in the first place. (This is the POST OF TOO-LONG SENTENCES. Forgive me.)

All this said, our smart Facebook pal Lizzie Skurnick pointed out that Kickstarter’s demi-excuse for not acting immediately has some…issues. Kickstarter’s words: “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.” Lizzie’s take: “What’s interesting to me is that these explanations can be applied to any upending that benefits the status quo, including gay marriage, giving women the right to vote, and ending segregation:  GET ON THE STICK NIMRODS.” Valid point.

And it is a bummer that the project exceeded its initial $2K goals by, oh, EIGHT HUNDRED PERCENT. (At last glance, it had raised $16,369. Feel free to correct my math. ‘Cause math is hard, and I understand women learn it through osmosis, by having their hands placed on dicks.) The very fact that this project was funded up the wazoo should tell us why the war on sexism is not won.

And now, the teensy bit of nuance. Only a teensy bit! The web site The Awl posted a strange, rabidly partisan interview with Hoinsky today, dismissing Malone as a “comedian” (ooh, de-legitimizing sarcasm quotes!) and calling Hoinsky’s book “extremely harmless…as all books are.” (All? Oh, Mein Kampf, u so cute with ur widdle genocide-advocating!)  The interview does make a point (reiterated in Hoinsky’s own statement of clarification on pastebin.com) that I find worth noting: There was unreported context to the “grab her hand and put it on your dick” comment. In the book, this scenario is set in a chapter about how to proceed once consensual sexual activity has begun. So Hoinsky is not advocating forced dick-grabbing in line at Starbucks; he’s talking about how to act when you’re fooling around with a girl who wants to fool around with you.

HOWEVER (and it is a BIG HOWEVER): I’m not in the least convinced that all men read women’s signals about when to stop correctly. As we’ve seen a gazillion times in history, men have all too often had different interpretations of “consensual” than women. (Hoinsky’s use, and continued defense, of the phrase, “If a woman isn’t comfortable, take a break and try again later” is evidence of that.)

Even in this very softball [sic] interview, Hoinsky defends the notion of “forc[ing] her to rebuff your advances,” (though in the Awl interview he says, “I regret the wording I used”), and uses the terms “feminists” and “PC” in a cartoonish and villainizing manner. He still seems to favor a faulty equation: Seduction = Pressure + Manipulation x Need to Push Women Who Do Not Want to Have Sex with You into Having Sex with You.

Hoinsky says  “I apologize for some of the language in the book,” (SorryWatch does not find this an expansive enough apology) and “I have been in touch with Do Something and some leading anti-rape and anti-abuse organizations to rewrite the problematic advice under their guidance and advice.” That’s good, and maybe he’ll learn something, in which case, yay. But I am not hopeful, given the next phrase: “I am starting a public dialogue on the intersection of men’s dating advice & feminist issues.” Uh, there has long been a dialogue on these issues, my friend; you’re just starting to participate. And dialogue starts with listening, not announcing that you’re setting the terms of a conversation that has long been ongoing.

The upshot: Kickstarter, I’d love to know a bit more about how projects get funded and whether you’ll do more due diligence in the future. Nevertheless, your apology gets an A-. Hoinsky, stop talking and start listening (oh, and listen to women besides Awl interviewer Maria Bustillos, who emphatically does not speak for all of us). Your apology gets a D+.