This is the passage that the Reddit user Ken Hoinsky pointed to last week, in response to accusations that his work—a guide to seducing women, which will soon be turned into a book—is misogynistic.
Hoinsky, who lives in Milford, Connecticut, and goes by the nom de Reddit TofuTofu, has been posting braggadocious advice on the art of picking up women for three years on the Reddit subforum /r/seduction, also known as Seddit. The online community is an after-burn of Neil Strauss’s “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists,” which was published in 2005. Strauss, a former music journalist for the New York Times, is most famous for popularizing “the neg,” a pickup maneuver in which a man at once compliments and insults a woman, supposedly putting the man in control. Strauss claims that, using these techniques, he scored even Britney Spears’s number.
As Hoinsky tells it, he was once “a supplicating loser with no idea what I was doing,” who, until he was twenty, had only had sex with one person. He claims to have had little luck with women until he picked up “The Game” and, he says, was liberated from the confines of monogamy. Taking quickly to Strauss’s advice and apothegms, Hoinsky writes in his Reddit roman à clef, “I started having sex with a lot of women—and, finally, some of them were even hot!”
The pupil eventually became the teacher: Hoinsky has “dedicated the last few years of my life to mastering the art of seduction,” and has now written what he believes will be “the definitive seduction guide of our time.” To honor and possibly surpass Strauss, Hoinsky launched a Kickstarter campaign in late May, asking for two thousand dollars to print an expanded tome of his posts as a book, “Above the Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women.”
In his nine-part series, Hoinsky patiently chronicles his art of seduction, from body language at the point of approach to action tips for flirtation. His suggestions include asking about parents’ relationships (go personal), bringing up Japanese pornography (shake up the expected), and preëmptively making plans (“Hot girls HATE when men require lots of back and forth”). “If you are feeling resistance,” he writes, you should “ALWAYS BE ESCALATING!” In section seven, he arrives at what escalation means—sex. Hoinsky begins with a touching nod to relativity: “Obviously everyone’s beliefs and situations are different, but I am writing this section with sex as the goal.” At that point of intensification, “From now on you must ASSUME that she is attracted to you and wants to be ravished.” He proceeds to advise, “Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick. Tell her to suck your dick. Be dominant.” And if she says she’s not comfortable, remember to tell her, “No problem.” Then “take a break and try again later.” Time is on your side, man.
Hoinsky had no trouble raising his two thousand dollars on Kickstarter. In fact, by June 19th, several hundred people had contributed a total of sixteen thousand three hundred and sixty-nine dollars. That day, the fund-raising deadline, a Massachusetts comedian and game developer named Casey Malone wrote a Tumblr post condemning Hoinsky’s project, and asked readers to help get the project taken down. But Kickstarter allowed it to reach fruition. The company explained to Maha Rafi Atal, a journalist for Forbes, that it had been alerted to Hoinsky’s “abhorrent” material, but said that “the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.”
Then, two days after the deadline, Kickstarter rethought its role. “We were wrong,” the damage-control team wrote. Kickstarter removed the project from view, but explained that it was too late to confiscate the funds. But it is now prohibiting seduction guides, or any “material [that] encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works,” and it is donating twenty-five thousand dollars to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, an anti-sexual-violence organization. In an interview with the Awl, on June 24th, Hoinsky, who appeared befuddled and humbled, agreed to “re-edit” his book. That same day, he issued an apology on YouTube and announced a partnership with groups that work to prevent sexual assault.
Kickstarter considers itself a creative platform: a supporter, in its words, of “creative works.” That phrase grants philosophical license to the peculiar, the obscene, and the objectionable. And the content that Hoinsky seeks to publish is not hate speech, or illegal. It is simply bad speech: the words are deplorable, with questionable, if not offensive, intent. So the removal of Hoinsky’s project from Kickstarter might initially seem like a violation of free speech. But the right to publish is quite different from the right to speak, particularly on a platform like the Web. It’s the difference between a fundamental right and a market proposition.
Kickstarter is only the most recent technology company to find itself forced to choose what kind of speech is allowed on its platform. Companies that traffic in the self-expression of their users, like Facebook and Twitter, have frequently been pushed to make difficult choices about the kinds of speech they tolerate, particularly as they have begun to rely on advertising for revenue (advertisers do not want to find their products next to offensive content). Few services promise absolute, unrestricted expression, though Twitter and Tumblr tend to be far more permissive than Facebook. All of the major services have all been pressured at one point in their history to remove some kind of content: Facebook tolerated “pro-rape” groups until an outcry forced their removal; Twitter pulled tweets containing an anti-Semitic hashtag following complaints from the Union of French Jewish Students; and Tumblr has banned blogs that promote eating disorders.
It isn’t Kickstarter’s responsibility to endorse every project that it posts, and it isn't Twitter’s responsibility to stand behind everything that’s tweeted. But their business models are built on the creations of others. Kickstarter skims money off of each successful project. What Kickstarter was made to realize, and what these other companies have already learned, is that when you profit from something, even if you don’t condone it, you’re complicit.
