PERSONAL space is "for pussies". "Don't ask for permission" when you pick a girl up and place her on your lap: "be dominant". Oh, and grab her hand and place it right on your privates.

These are the tips lifted from Above The Game: A Guide To Getting Awesome With Women - a forthcoming self-help guide to "dating" written by Reddit user Ken Hoinsky.

Or as some have labelled it, "a self-help guide to sexually assaulting women", a "rape manual" and a "boiling cauldron of rape culture". A grubfest.

Mr Hoinsky's attempt to raise $16,000 to get the manual published has sparked a huge backlash after excerpts of the book were published on social media website Reddit.

"All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women," Mr Hoinsky writes.

"Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That's hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically."

Two sides of the internet have now gone to war over the book.

Many Reddit users have pitched money in to the fundraising cause. Meanwhile a petition posted on the US website DoSomething.org demanded Kickstarter take the fundraising down. "Disgusting doesn't even begin to describe it," it said.

Kickstarter said even though it found some of the material in the book "abhorrent", it was against its terms of service to take down a fundraising pitch.

Mr Hoinsky, however, might be the one laughing. He reached his fundraising goal for the book and is rolling around in more publicity than he could ever have dreamt of.