caseymalone: Hey everyone, If you’re here, it’s probably because of this post I wrote about the Kickstarter “Above The Game.” “Above The Game” was successfully funded this morning, raising 800% of its target goal. Unfortunately, the product it’s funding, I think, was pretty repugnant.  Basically styled as a book on “how to meet women,” what the content really did was tell men how to exploit some the awful systemic pressures we put on women, to take an overly aggressive role, and never take no for an answer in order to get sex. Some of the excerpts were pretty disgusting, even in their proper context - context the original author removed when I had linked to it - and it forwards a rape culture, no matter what its proponents might tell you. Even the section which the author, Ken Hoinsky, stresses the importance of obtaining consent ends with the phrase, “wait a few minutes and try again.” So, yeah.  I was upset because this is a really grotesque, upsetting thing being funded on a platform I am bonkers for. So I posted that thing calling for people on the internet to speak to Kickstarter and ask asked for it to be taken down, and holy crap when I woke up and my post was everywhere. Currently at around 7K notes, my second most popular post has 8 Notes, and is a man in a Food Court wearing a Batman t-shirt, seen below: So all day people have been reaching out to me for comments and questions and telling me to link this thing or that thing and do I have screenshots and telling me I’m overreacting and giving me some degree of either praise or harassment.  One of the groups of that reached out to me was, in fact, Kickstarter.  I e-mailed them earlier in the day, expecting fully for that e-mail to hit some poor community manager who had no idea this was what they were waking up to, and for a simple thanks for your input we’ll look into it or to not hear anything back at all. Instead they got back to me. And after a long day of “one second, we’re still discussing this,” they sent me a statement, the relevant bits I’ve pasted here -  This morning, material that a project creator posted on Reddit earlier this year was brought to our and the public’s attention just hours before the project’s deadline. Some of this material is abhorrent and inconsistent with our values as people and as an organization. Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project. As stewards of Kickstarter we sometimes have to make difficult decisions. We followed the discussion around the web today very closely. It led to a lot of internal discussion and will lead to a further review of our policies. So, yeah.  This is a huge bummer, it’s a bummer that they allowed this project to be funded, and it’s especially a bummer in light of this statement. Because the statement, “Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.” is intensely problematic when you look at the guideline I’ve posted above. Because given what the author said, and given that this material was advertised as part of the final product - the author’s Kickstarter was to provide a published and expanded version of the material on Reddit - and they find it “abhorrent and inconsistent with your values as people and as an organization,” how is this not offensive? And then, how does it not violate that guideline? I suspect that, had the material on Reddit been part of the initial Kickstarter pitch and video, it never would have even been approved. While the material on Reddit ostensibly was what was being Kickstarted, it is admittedly unreasonable to expect for whoever vets these projects to read what amounts to a manuscript for every book that wants a Kickstarter. It’s not feasible for them to approve all content that could POTENTIALLY flow through this channel - to say nothing of books that are unwritten. So we can’t expect Kickstarter to be proactive on everything except from every piece of writing that might appear in something funded through their site.  But we all pointed it out to them, at which point, they chose to allow it to be funded.  Hoinsky - knowingly or unknowingly - found a loophole in Kickstarter’s guidelines. By hosting the truly offensive material outside of his pitch, people were unaware that it existed until it was too late, and it was too complicated an issue for a multi-million dollar business to do anything about. And I am completely disappointed, because while Kickstarter is a huge company concerned about maintaining policies and setting precedent, I am just a dude concerned about someone getting $16k for creating a manual on how to sexually assault women and concerned about, jeeze, I don’t know, the nobility of crowd funding?  So I understand that this was probably not an easy decision for Kickstarter to come to in a short periord of time (I discovered the content 10 hours before the Kickstarter ended, 6 hours of which were sleeping time for reasonable people). And to me, the result we ended up with was not the moral one. Here are kind of my final thoughts on this -  1. Don’t let anyone fool you, This Book Is A Rape Manual I heard a lot of people telling me that I was taking some of those quotes out of context or that “JEEZE when he said take your dick out she was already making out with you!” Well, fuck you. Because acquaintence rape is a real thing. Because a girl kissing you or letting you do SOMETHING does not mean you get to do ANYTHING. And by creating a book whose leitmotif (YEAH FUCK YOU PRETENSION I WENT TO FILM SCHOOL FOR A FEW MONTHS) is “be aggressive, and do what you want because women like that,” you are telling people to rape. Not everyone who’s going to read the book is going to be a rapist, but I promise you - someone who read this book will rape someone. And they might not even know they did it, because you told them the woman wanted it that way, you human nightmare. The whole thing is a boiling cauldron of rape culture, and you are not going to convince me otherwise any more than you could convince me the sun has been replaced by a bran muffin. 2. People are way more amazing than awful.  I got tons and tons of e-mails and tweets and Tumblr messages of support and all the reblogs and all of this shit basically saying that women should not be treated this way and people who say otherwise are assholes. And saying good on me for speaking out. And that felt great, to know that the internet - which I find is most often represented by shit like Penny-Arcade and Reddit - is not as bad as I thought. Also, please consider that the VAST MAJORITY of “Thank you for saying this” messages I got were from women the next time you think that maybe this shit isn’t real. 3. This is probably in HUGE PART because I am a man. All of my photos are pictures of me, and I have a awful (just awful) beard and am clearly not a woman. I think this curbed the abuse I got from the internet EXPONENTIALLY. A few of the awesome women in my life IMMEDIATELY messaged me about blowback this morning, because they had ALREADY RECEIVED HARASSMENT JUST FROM RETWEETING ME, where at that point in the day I had received NONE. They asked me first thing if I was being harassed because that is what the world does to them if they talk about this stuff, and this awful book furthers that attitude. The worst harassment I got - and one nice message, to be fair - was clearly because I have a gender neutral name and they thought I was a woman.  4. I still love Kickstarter, and will keep using it. They made a really bad call. Straight up, this was a bad call to allow this to be funded. But it’s undeniable that they had not a lot of time to make that call in, and a weird confluences of loopholes in their policies. Big companies move very slowly, and they had to act fast, so you know. They made a bad call. That does not mean it’s a bad platform, or they’re bad people - in fact, they seem pretty upset about the whole thing, and I hope that they re-examine some of the policies that led to that call now that they have more than a few hours to breathe. I still think crowdfunding in general is the internet’s way of fighting back against the monopolies on entertainment, and Kickstarter specifically is a pretty special tool. My friends have followed dreams because of this, they’ve made games and prank apps and children’s books and burnt giant guitars. It’s awesome. And I find it inevitable that I’ll launch one of my own one day. I hope that more projects like this being funded doesn’t cause that inevitability to fall away.  This project is funded, but make your voice heard by signing this petition someone started over at Do Something - http://www.dosomething.org/petition/kickstarter - Hopefully they’ll know that if projects like this that forward a culture of violence against women or any oppressed group continue to be funded, we’ll stop just stop using it. And as I’ve made clear, I would like to continue using it! Finally… 5. Fuck Not Saying Something I am super burnt out on everything in my life being about rape. I’m a video game designer - so I have to deal with people like Penny-Arcade, or the people that harass the outstanding Anita Sarkeesian. I’m a stand-up comic - so I have to deal with the endless hordes of angry white dudes telling me it okay for them to talk about how funny it is for them to be raping a girl on stage, and how if I say otherwise then I am censoring them. And I love the internet - and here we are. I am sick. and tired. of rape.  But I probably have no capacity to even understand how sick and tired women are of it.  I have an amazing friend who I go to whenever I’m totally lost of this stuff and once I said, “I just am so frustrated with talking about this shit, I am going to just NOT THINK ABOUT IT FOR A WHILE.” and he replied, “Okay, but just so you know, being able to not think about it for a while is the definition of privilege.” Oops. I don’t want to deal with this shit. I have a ton of amazing women in my life - the funniest comedians I know are women, the strongest writers I know are women - and I don’t want them to have to deal with this shit. But I guess the only want for people to not have to deal with it anymore is by dealing with it as loudly as I can and hoping you guys signal boost some more. So that hopefully people like fucking Ken Hoinsky and his nightmare kingdom of sub-Reddits will shut the fuck up.  And then, finally, when no one has to deal with these morons being the dominant voice in the culture, we can all stop talking about rape. 
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caseymalone:

Hey everyone,

If you’re here, it’s probably because of this post I wrote about the Kickstarter “Above The Game.” “Above The Game” was successfully funded this morning, raising 800% of its target goal. Unfortunately, the product it’s funding, I think, was pretty repugnant. 

Basically styled as a book on “how to meet women,” what the content really did was tell men how to exploit some the awful systemic pressures we put on women, to take an overly aggressive role, and never take no for an answer in order to get sex. Some of the excerpts were pretty disgusting, even in their proper context - context the original author removed when I had linked to it - and it forwards a rape culture, no matter what its proponents might tell you. Even the section which the author, Ken Hoinsky, stresses the importance of obtaining consent ends with the phrase, “wait a few minutes and try again.”

So, yeah. 

I was upset because this is a really grotesque, upsetting thing being funded on a platform I am bonkers for. So I posted that thing calling for people on the internet to speak to Kickstarter and ask asked for it to be taken down, and holy crap when I woke up and my post was everywhere. Currently at around 7K notes, my second most popular post has 8 Notes, and is a man in a Food Court wearing a Batman t-shirt, seen below:

So all day people have been reaching out to me for comments and questions and telling me to link this thing or that thing and do I have screenshots and telling me I’m overreacting and giving me some degree of either praise or harassment. 

One of the groups of that reached out to me was, in fact, Kickstarter. 

I e-mailed them earlier in the day, expecting fully for that e-mail to hit some poor community manager who had no idea this was what they were waking up to, and for a simple thanks for your input we’ll look into it or to not hear anything back at all. Instead they got back to me. And after a long day of “one second, we’re still discussing this,” they sent me a statement, the relevant bits I’ve pasted here - 

This morning, material that a project creator posted on Reddit earlier this year was brought to our and the public’s attention just hours before the project’s deadline. Some of this material is abhorrent and inconsistent with our values as people and as an organization. Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.


As stewards of Kickstarter we sometimes have to make difficult decisions. We followed the discussion around the web today very closely. It led to a lot of internal discussion and will lead to a further review of our policies.

So, yeah. 

This is a huge bummer, it’s a bummer that they allowed this project to be funded, and it’s especially a bummer in light of this statement. Because the statement, “Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.” is intensely problematic when you look at the guideline I’ve posted above. Because given what the author said, and given that this material was advertised as part of the final product - the author’s Kickstarter was to provide a published and expanded version of the material on Reddit - and they find it “abhorrent and inconsistent with your values as people and as an organization,” how is this not offensive? And then, how does it not violate that guideline?

I suspect that, had the material on Reddit been part of the initial Kickstarter pitch and video, it never would have even been approved. While the material on Reddit ostensibly was what was being Kickstarted, it is admittedly unreasonable to expect for whoever vets these projects to read what amounts to a manuscript for every book that wants a Kickstarter. It’s not feasible for them to approve all content that could POTENTIALLY flow through this channel - to say nothing of books that are unwritten. So we can’t expect Kickstarter to be proactive on everything except from every piece of writing that might appear in something funded through their site. 

But we all pointed it out to them, at which point, they chose to allow it to be funded. 

Hoinsky - knowingly or unknowingly - found a loophole in Kickstarter’s guidelines. By hosting the truly offensive material outside of his pitch, people were unaware that it existed until it was too late, and it was too complicated an issue for a multi-million dollar business to do anything about. And I am completely disappointed, because while Kickstarter is a huge company concerned about maintaining policies and setting precedent, I am just a dude concerned about someone getting $16k for creating a manual on how to sexually assault women and concerned about, jeeze, I don’t know, the nobility of crowd funding? 

So I understand that this was probably not an easy decision for Kickstarter to come to in a short periord of time (I discovered the content 10 hours before the Kickstarter ended, 6 hours of which were sleeping time for reasonable people). And to me, the result we ended up with was not the moral one. 

Here are kind of my final thoughts on this - 

1. Don’t let anyone fool you, This Book Is A Rape Manual

I heard a lot of people telling me that I was taking some of those quotes out of context or that “JEEZE when he said take your dick out she was already making out with you!” Well, fuck you. Because acquaintence rape is a real thing. Because a girl kissing you or letting you do SOMETHING does not mean you get to do ANYTHING. And by creating a book whose leitmotif (YEAH FUCK YOU PRETENSION I WENT TO FILM SCHOOL FOR A FEW MONTHS) is “be aggressive, and do what you want because women like that,” you are telling people to rape. Not everyone who’s going to read the book is going to be a rapist, but I promise you - someone who read this book will rape someone. And they might not even know they did it, because you told them the woman wanted it that way, you human nightmare. The whole thing is a boiling cauldron of rape culture, and you are not going to convince me otherwise any more than you could convince me the sun has been replaced by a bran muffin.


2. People are way more amazing than awful. 

I got tons and tons of e-mails and tweets and Tumblr messages of support and all the reblogs and all of this shit basically saying that women should not be treated this way and people who say otherwise are assholes. And saying good on me for speaking out. And that felt great, to know that the internet - which I find is most often represented by shit like Penny-Arcade and Reddit - is not as bad as I thought. Also, please consider that the VAST MAJORITY of “Thank you for saying this” messages I got were from women the next time you think that maybe this shit isn’t real.

3. This is probably in HUGE PART because I am a man.

All of my photos are pictures of me, and I have a awful (just awful) beard and am clearly not a woman. I think this curbed the abuse I got from the internet EXPONENTIALLY. A few of the awesome women in my life IMMEDIATELY messaged me about blowback this morning, because they had ALREADY RECEIVED HARASSMENT JUST FROM RETWEETING ME, where at that point in the day I had received NONE. They asked me first thing if I was being harassed because that is what the world does to them if they talk about this stuff, and this awful book furthers that attitude. The worst harassment I got - and one nice message, to be fair - was clearly because I have a gender neutral name and they thought I was a woman. 

4. I still love Kickstarter, and will keep using it.

They made a really bad call. Straight up, this was a bad call to allow this to be funded. But it’s undeniable that they had not a lot of time to make that call in, and a weird confluences of loopholes in their policies. Big companies move very slowly, and they had to act fast, so you know. They made a bad call. That does not mean it’s a bad platform, or they’re bad people - in fact, they seem pretty upset about the whole thing, and I hope that they re-examine some of the policies that led to that call now that they have more than a few hours to breathe.

I still think crowdfunding in general is the internet’s way of fighting back against the monopolies on entertainment, and Kickstarter specifically is a pretty special tool. My friends have followed dreams because of this, they’ve made games and prank apps and children’s books and burnt giant guitars. It’s awesome. And I find it inevitable that I’ll launch one of my own one day. I hope that more projects like this being funded doesn’t cause that inevitability to fall away. 

This project is funded, but make your voice heard by signing this petition someone started over at Do Something - http://www.dosomething.org/petition/kickstarter - Hopefully they’ll know that if projects like this that forward a culture of violence against women or any oppressed group continue to be funded, we’ll stop just stop using it. And as I’ve made clear, I would like to continue using it!

Finally…

5. Fuck Not Saying Something

I am super burnt out on everything in my life being about rape. I’m a video game designer - so I have to deal with people like Penny-Arcade, or the people that harass the outstanding Anita Sarkeesian. I’m a stand-up comic - so I have to deal with the endless hordes of angry white dudes telling me it okay for them to talk about how funny it is for them to be raping a girl on stage, and how if I say otherwise then I am censoring them. And I love the internet - and here we are. I am sick. and tired. of rape. 

But I probably have no capacity to even understand how sick and tired women are of it. 

I have an amazing friend who I go to whenever I’m totally lost of this stuff and once I said, “I just am so frustrated with talking about this shit, I am going to just NOT THINK ABOUT IT FOR A WHILE.” and he replied, “Okay, but just so you know, being able to not think about it for a while is the definition of privilege.” Oops.

I don’t want to deal with this shit. I have a ton of amazing women in my life - the funniest comedians I know are women, the strongest writers I know are women - and I don’t want them to have to deal with this shit. But I guess the only want for people to not have to deal with it anymore is by dealing with it as loudly as I can and hoping you guys signal boost some more. So that hopefully people like fucking Ken Hoinsky and his nightmare kingdom of sub-Reddits will shut the fuck up. 

And then, finally, when no one has to deal with these morons being the dominant voice in the culture, we can all stop talking about rape. 

leonmcgann:

guy fucks his xbox

ALERT: Naked man in socks.

(via 0rdi)

Source: toocooltobehipster

eschergirls: soursundaes submitted: How to genderbend, according to Resident Evil Official Art: Option A: Remove ShirtObtion B: Remove Pants Done. The man is the Resident Evil character HUNK, the woman is the female gendered swapped HUNK, so this is the same character but apparently when she becomes a woman, she loses her pants. -_o So you’re walking into zombie-infested territory where a bite or scratch might doom you to be a zombie, but you don’t wear pants.  That makes sense.  It’s like she was on a beach somewhere when duty called and she hurriedly put on her equipment, jacket, boots, then was like “oh crap!  I forgot to put on my pants!” but it was too late and she had to move out.
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eschergirls:

soursundaes submitted:

How to genderbend, according to Resident Evil Official Art:

Option A: Remove Shirt
Obtion B: Remove Pants

Done.

The man is the Resident Evil character HUNK, the woman is the female gendered swapped HUNK, so this is the same character but apparently when she becomes a woman, she loses her pants. -_o

So you’re walking into zombie-infested territory where a bite or scratch might doom you to be a zombie, but you don’t wear pants.  That makes sense.  It’s like she was on a beach somewhere when duty called and she hurriedly put on her equipment, jacket, boots, then was like “oh crap!  I forgot to put on my pants!” but it was too late and she had to move out.

At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : NPR

dresdencodak:

eschergirls:

With theaters — particularly larger theaters — chock full of men’s stories, where did the women go?

An interesting piece on NPR about this writer noting that the vast majority of movies out right now are about men or ensembles of men with women in a supporting role.

I also thought this was of note:

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.

Part of the problem with the “they’re just doing what sells” argument is the assumption that comics/movie/gaming industries are all made of purely objective beings of energy and thought rather than human beings who come with their own biases, and who can also tend to prefer the safe status quo that are affected by those biases.  If a Catwoman or Elektra flops, it’s chalked up to people not wanting to watch movies with women in them, but if a Jonah Hex or Green Lantern do poorly, that’s not assumed to be the fault of those movies having male leads.  As the piece says for men, a movie failing can be seen as the cost of doing business, rather than an indictment of the movie having a lead of a certain gender.  If the “common knowledge” in Hollywood is that movies with women don’t sell, it can lead to confirmation bias, where ones that do are flukes (or not about having a female lead), and ones that don’t are proof that people don’t want to see women in lead roles (and not about the promotion of the movie, or the writing, or the acting, or etc).

Anyway, I wanted to share this because I thought some people might find it of interest. :)

A couple years ago I was in talks to option a Dresden Codak film, and was politely told that “female leads are a hard sell,” and asked how married I was to the fact that my protagonist is a woman. Suffice it to say, I ended up not wanting to make a Dresden Codak film.

What bugs me about “women don’t sell” is that not only is demonstrably not true, even if it were true, that’s not a valid excuse! If filmmakers discovered that the best selling movie concept was just 90 minutes of a puppy being beaten, I’d hope they’d at least give a pause.

Once again, women are subjected to a double-standard. If a male-led film fails, it’s because the film is bad. If a female-led film fails, it’s because “women don’t sell.”

In short, screw you, Hollywood, my lady-hero comic is successful, and it’s hardly the only one!

We could have had a Dresden Codak movie. But someone didn’t like women. Holy shit.

Source: eschergirls