Rest assured, I got everyone’s emails and tweets yesterday about the “pick-up artist” on Kickstarter who was raising money for his handbook on how to bully women who don’t like you into sex while preserving your claims to believe you had consent should you need to tell the police. I was traveling, so the fact that the guy was scrubbing the actual “advice” that he was promising would be in his book off the internet, made following the story doubly hard, but Casey Malone saved all that stuff (here’s the cached version) and to that we are grateful. Here’s a sample:

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Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances….. Let your hands roam free. Squeeze her ass. Rub the side of her breasts. Rub your hands up and down her legs. Make her push your hand away as you get closer to her vagina. Fucking ravish her. Grab her hair on the back of her head, by the base of her neck, and pull it back aggressively….. Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick….

Remember: She’s not touching your cock because she wants to have sex with you! Booooorrriiing. She’s touching it because you made her and you’re bigger than her and you’ve already established that you’ll grab her hair and control her physically if she puts up resistance.

He did have some legalese to make sure that your defense in court is solid:

If at any point a girl wants you to stop, she will let you know. If she says “STOP,” or “GET AWAY FROM ME,” or shoves you away, you know she is not interested. It happens. Stop escalating immediately and say this line: “No problem. I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t comfortable with.” Memorize that line. It is your go-to when faced with resistance. Say it genuinely, without presumption. All master seducers are also masters at making women feel comfortable. You’ll be no different. If a woman isn’t comfortable, take a break and try again later.

“Officer, she kept moving away from me and saying that she wanted that ride home I promised her, but since she was too scared to shove a man who has already demonstrated he will not take no for an answer, I figured I had consent.” Sadly, this line may even work to avoid the rape charges, because it’s surprising how most people expect women to be polite and deferential, and then turn right around and expect them to morph into Wonder Woman fighting off assailants at the drop of a hat. Even though most women reasonably fear that shoving a guy who has strongly established his unwillingness to respect your boundaries will just give him pretext to hit you, hold you down, and just rape you the hard way.

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Here’s a post from Yes Means Yes explaining why it’s bullshit to claim that anything but a physical shove and shouting “no” counts as consent. Of, if you’d rather just watch a one minute video, let the characters from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” explain it to you:

I’ve seen a lot of people who are reacting to this with confusion, pointing out that even if a woman doesn’t feel raped after you’ve bullied and scared her into “consenting”—or at least not fighting you off—she is going to think you’re a massive asshole and won’t speak to you afterwards. Since Ken Hoinsky and PUAs like him generally portray themselves as poor schlubs who just want the girls to like them, it’s hard to fathom why they go around doing stuff that will actually make women fear them and hate them.

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Having watched the PUA community from afar for awhile now, I think I have an answer to that question: For a lot of them, especially the leaders, it’s actually not about getting women to like you. The “woe is me, I just want to be good with ladies” act, like the legalese about accepting a forcefully stated no, is mostly cover to create plausible deniability. A lot of the time, these guys have a bunch of poorly concealed anger at women right under the surface, and their behaviors are a way of punishing women for rejecting them. I mean, PUA boards are all about reinforcing and supporting each other’s misogynist claims that women are nothing but heartless “hypergamous” gold-diggers. Even the ones that aren’t overtly rapey often portray sex as getting one over on the women by exploiting their evil, black hearts that are only out for moneied “alphas”.

Don’t get me wrong: I think a lot of men are initially drawn to the PUA community because they’re looking for an answer to the question, “How do I get to be the kind of man women want to have sex with?” But by and large, PUA advice is about something else, a combination of justifying sex with women who don’t actually like you and convincing yourself that the reason women don’t like you is that there’s something wrong with the entire female gender, and not with you. Their boards have degraded to the point where a lot of PUAs just sit around bragging about how they sexually harassed women, making it clear that it’s far more about putting women in their place and not even remotely about actually making women like you. Smart men who actually like women eventually see through that shit and move along to advice columnists who actually want men to be better, like Dan Savage or Doctor Nerdlove. But for men who just want to sit around justifying their misogyny and ill treatment of women to each other, there’s the “pick-up artist” community.