Kickstarter on Ken Hoinsky's Book: "We Were Wrong"

On Wednesday, we posted about one of the most misogynistic, offensive efforts in recent memory: a Kickstarter "seduction guide" by Ken Hoinsky predicated on using persistent force to get women to sleep with men. Sound pretty rape-y? Yeah, well, it did to the rest of the Internet, too. That's why more than 57,000 people took to a DoSomething.org petition to try to get Kickstarter to take down the project.

As we wrote in the post, Kickstarter was passed some pretty disturbing info about the project and its creator found on Reddit, but didn't act to remove the project from its site—and a lot of people were scratching their heads (you know, in that way in which you draw blood from your scalp because you're doing it out of anger and frustration and general rage blackoutness).

Today, in a blog post on their site, Kickstarter has issued the following statement: "We were wrong."

"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."

They go on to explain why they made the decision they did (the project was two hours from ending), and the position that they're in regarding the money for Hoinsky's project: Dude gets to keep it. "We missed the window," they write. That's the crappy news.

The upside: They're donating $25,000 to RAINN, which is pretty effing amazing. Additionally, they outline their general stances on offensive and misogynistic content on the site. They've done a nice job with their transparency in a less-than-ideal situation, though there's still a lot of debate to be had, which is blazing in the comments. The whole post is really worth reading, and I suggest you go ahead and do it now.

I doubt this'll be the last time something controversial happens at Kickstarter, but hopefully it'll be the last time something this outwardly dangerous does.