I woke up this morning to more than a dozen friends linking to this post on Tumblr by Casey Malone. To sum up, Reddit poster Ken Hoinsky has written “a popular step-by-step guide for getting good with women”, and is looking for funds to publish it in physical form. The Tumblr post from Casey Malone draws attention to Hoinsky’s offensive tactics for ‘getting awesome with women’, and is pleading with as many folks as she can reach to report the project to Kickstarter brass and implore them to take it down, or to halt the funding now that it’s over.

I’ve been trying to figure out my feelings on this, and where I’ve landed is pretty much this:

I strongly disapprove of the supposed content of the book (several of the Reddit pages have already been taken down, and what’s left doesn’t appear as harsh or forceful as described in Casey’s original post) and am personally offended by the entire ‘pick-up artist’/’sex-is-a-game-and-women-are-the-opposing-team’ mentality. The author is pretty clearly of the ‘Better to ask for forgiveness than permission’ variety of sexual predator, and his advice will make any social interaction a dicey proposition for any woman his disciples choose to target.

Edit: Some friends have pointed me to web-archives of some of the removed content, and yeah, it’s as bad as Casey says it is.

However, I’m not sure that I completely agree that it should be Kickstarter’s responsibility to make the decision whether the book gets funded. Encouraging folks to ask KS to bring the hammer down on this project is tantamount to asking Kickstarter to take on the role of publisher and editor, and placing the responsibility for this project squarely on their shoulders.

Kickstarter’s role in the funding of art projects and enabling creative expression is, in my opinion, too important to jeopardize by also placing them in the role of moral judge advocate. Once KS is forced into that role, they will have no option but to begin rejecting or accepting projects based on estimated offensiveness. To a degree they already act as a gateway – there is a brief approval process in place when creating a project, and not everything gets through (the criteria for approval can be found here, by the way). Adding another layer of in-depth content-based review will only make the process take longer and the costs will assuredly be passed on to the individual running the project. This has the potential of killing a number of projects before they even really get a chance to prove themselves and find their audience, which is really what Kickstarter is supposed to be all about.

Projects like this book (and this card game) will continue to pop up on Kickstarter, but thankfully at the moment they are still the extreme minority. Most of the projects on the site are fun, positive, creative, and not at all morally objectionable or offensive in any way. Some of those may be in questionable taste, and threaten to offend various groups of folks, but hasn’t that always been a hallmark of artistic pursuits throughout history? Unless we want Kickstarter to become our moral compass I suggest we back off of them and let them do what they do best – help creators find the funds to fulfill their creative visions.