One receives spams every day, but it is rare to have one that so eloquently and politely attempts to dissuade one from believing it is a fraud, and that even starts with my accurate first name. This is genuine message that appears to be fake due to its incredible earnestness:

Greeting my dear Glenn,

How are you today? I hope you are fine. I want to assure that this transaction is real and that I am man of integrity. I can never contemplate or think of cheating you because as a christain we are taught to be our brother’s keeper and I do carry out my duty with the fear of God. I am married with kids and I will not do anything that will tarnish my family's image. I work so hard in order to better the lives of my family and people around me and this necessitated

I wrote a rather long item for BoingBoing about a Kickstarter campaign for a "seduction" guide that caused a lot of fuss in its final hours. The Kickstarter campaign itself sounded tame and somewhat lame. But the linked content that the project creator planned to turn into a book was full of a jumbled bunch of advice about how men can pick up women that mixed reasonable relationship guidelines with what is essentially sexual assault.

The pick-up artist (PUA) community is largely socially awkward men who think there's a "secret" they're missing, when they simply cannot understand normal social interactions. The community reinforces the notion that women are objects and that tricks and techniques allow the practitioners to obtain the desired result: sex. It's pitiful and laughable, except for the notion that men should continuously physically escalating until a woman verbally or physically resists.

That's assault, not consent. Read more