Not if the dream belongs to a woman of color or promotes a political ideology that conservatives oppose. Apparently, there’s something about crowdfunding liberal feminism that short-circuits people’s capitalist ideals.
Take Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter, which sought to fund her video series examining misogynistic tropes in video games. She asked for $6,000, and got $160,000 – by capitalist terms, a clear indication that her services were wanted. Sarkeesian didn’t solicit funding from companies, governments or academic institutions; her donations averaged $23 from each of nearly 7,000 backers. That’s 7,000 people who really wanted what she was selling, and were willing to spend their own hard-earned money to buy it.
And yet the response was livid. You probably already know what happened to Sarkeesian – she was swept up as part of a campaign of hate and targeted harassment against women (and, increasingly, men as well) who criticized any part of video game culture. But you might not remember that one of the earliest examples of this harassment was an online game called “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” – created by a gamer who thought the Kickstarter was little more than a scam. “She just wants to use the fact that she was born with a vagina to get free money and sympathy from everyone who crosses her path,” the game’s creator complained – “free money, ,as in money from willing and enthusiastic participants supporting product development.
Meanwhile, there are crowdfunding efforts that are morally indefensible but which hardly earn conservatives’ outrage (or earn unsnarky write-ups). A GoFundMe campaign for officer Darren Wilson, who shot Mike Brown in 2014, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of no product at all –
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