The Anita Sarkeesian Business Model

One of the brilliant — if frauds can be so described — things about the dot-com biz in its earliest days was just how you could get away with almost limitless grift if you had the moxie, sociopathic nature, and right connections to pitch a fabrication that ended with "on the Internet". Pets.com, eToys.com, Go.com —all it seemingly took was the majikal suffix, and you were golden. I find myself getting the same sense about Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" business model, which appears to be an incremental improvement over the infamous Underpants Gnomes in that it has a middle step:

1. Hold the right opinions, ideally with a built-in and vociferous enemy eager to engage
2. Possibly make video
3. Launch Kickstarter = profit!

That is to say, she is just the modern (if more singular) version of what a think tank does, save for the scope of fundraising. Inevitably, this model would naturally expand to other entrepreneurially-minded individuals, and so we arrive at Femsplain, which for a time was a staff pick on Kickstarter, a featured position on their front page. They somehow plan on "chang[ing] the way women are perceived", which I presume means they will emit more clouds of the same women's studies gas that causes tenure in academia, and chronic unemployment elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, they appear not to have found the kind of troglodytes opposite that makes Sarkeesian's gig so rewarding. Whoever Amber Gordon is, she really needs to give serious thought to finding the right enemies first.