UPDATE 10/25/16: If you’ve come here after reading about a petition to cancel screenings of The Red Pill, I ask you to NOT sign any such petitions. It’s just free publicity for them. Read more of my thoughts on the matter here.
Dear Cassie Jaye,
Congratulations. You surpassed your Kickstarter fundraising goal yesterday, more than two weeks before the Kickstarter campaign was scheduled to come to a close. You’ve funded the postproduction work on your long-delayed documentary on Men’s Rights activists, and then some.
But I’m not sure that the person I should be congratulating is you. Last night Paul Elam of A Voice for Men – the central subject of your film – was doing his own victory lap online. And no wonder, because he seems to be the real victor here.
In a post on his site that managed to be giddy and vindictive at once, he offered his congratulations to you, then, well, to himself. “Even though the victory goes to Ms. Jaye,” he wrote, in an awkward attempt at modesty, “I have the need to offer up some thanks.”
And then he spelled out why he thinks your “victory” is really a victory for him.
For the past six years AVFM has had mud kicked in its face by a corrupt, left-wing media. Bottom feeders like Adam Serwer, Jeff Sharlet and Mariah Blake have performed endless unscrupulous acts, directly lying to their readers in order to attack AVFM, this movement and me personally.
Their work was not just to harm me, or to damage a website but to make sure if they could that the message we carry never found its way to the larger public. Their intent was and is to paint an indelible stain on all of us so hideous that we would never be taken seriously by enough people to matter.
They have failed, and I can now predict that they have failed miserably.
In other words, Paul Elam thinks he and his friends in what he ludicrously calls the “Men’s Human Rights Movement” have bought and paid for a feature-length advertisement for them.
And it’s not hard to see why Elam – and the other manospherians who’ve rallied around your film in recent days — think this. After all, they are the ones who have rescued your film from oblivion by pouring tens of thousands of dollars into your Kickstarter.
And all it took for you to unleash this torrent of money was an interview with one of the sleaziest figures in right-wing journalism, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.
In the interview, posted on Monday, you complained that “I won’t be getting support from feminists. They want a hit piece and I won’t do that.”
There was more than a little bit of irony in the fact that you were saying this to a man infamous for his many hit pieces on so-called “Social Justice Warriors.”
You also complained about an intern on your film who, you said, “had a lot of crying attacks and emotional experiences. She claimed everything I was showing her was triggering her.”
A young feminist “triggered” and crying. This is red meat to the Breitbart crowd, and I have to assume you knew this when you told Milo this story.
To an outside observer like me, this shameful pandering looks a lot like a Hail Mary play on your part. Having failed to convince most potential funders of the film that you would present anything close to an accurate picture of the Men’s Rights movement, you told Breitbart what its readers – and the broader manosphere – wanted to hear.
And it worked. Men’s Rights activists, self-professed “Red Pillers” and other assorted antifeminists rallied around your film, and the money started flowing.
On Reddit, the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit “stickied” an appeal to donate to your Kickstarter to the top of their front page, urging MRAs to open their wallets in order to show skeptics that “we can take part in some actual activism and not just post stuff in here.”
Even the regulars in the violently misogynistic Red Pill subreddit agreed to help bankroll your film.
And it wasn’t just Men’s Rights and “Red Pill” Redditors who organized support for your film. One right-wing Red Pill blogger, notorious for his harassment of ideological enemies, pledged to match donations up to $10,000, describing your documentary as “the Movie SJWs Do Not Want You to See.”
Meanwhile, on her blog, AVFM’s “social media director” Andrea Hardie (an internet bully better known under her pseudonyms Janet Bloomfield and “Judgy Bitch”) not only rallied her readers around your Kickstarter but also set up a gofundme of her own, raising money in hopes that it would buy Breitbart’s Yiannopoulos a producer credit in your film. (I hope that is out of the question, even if she raises more than the paltry amount she’s raised for this purpose so far.)
And then there was Elam himself, on Twitter, calling on his followers to, in his words, “Help fund #RedPillMovie because fuck feminists!”
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/658700057311506432
Accepting money from these people would seem to be a pretty clear violation of the principles you set forth in your own Kickstarter video, in which you declared that
in order to keep this film non-partisan, and respectfully show all sides to this debate, we won’t accept funding from organizations that inevitably have biased agendas.
Instead, you have chosen to take money from people who see your film as a chance to say “fuck you” to feminists. You have chosen to take money from the actual subjects of your film.
You are making a film about Men’s Rights Activists, funded to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by Men’s Rights Activists. You are making a film about A Voice for Men funded in part by A Voice for Men.
Does that not trouble you at all? It should. In your interview with Breitbart, you noted that “films that support one side and act as propaganda do better than those that try to have an honest look.”
You said this, presumably, to set yourself apart from such propagandists. Now you seem to have cast your lot in with them.
Which I suppose makes sense, since the clips of your film that you’ve posted online so far look a lot more like propaganda than they do like any sort of honest look at the Men’s Rights movement,
I felt uneasy about your project from the start, concerned that you had been pulled in by the soothing but misleading rhetoric that MRAs spout when they are trying to sound more respectable than they really are, rather than on what MRAs actually say and do when the cameras are off of them.
But I knew you had a good reputation as a filmmaker, and heard good things from several feminists who knew you better than I did. So I held my tongue and tried my best to give you the benefit of the doubt, even when you posted clips from your film that portrayed AVFMers as heroic underdogs rather than the misogynists and malicious harassers that they really are.
When I wrote you a little over a week ago with some of my concerns, you assured me in the phone call that followed that the clips you had posted were only part of the story, that you were well aware that the MRAs you had interviewed were on their best behavior when talking to you, and that the real story of the Men’s Rights movement is far less rosy-hued. Against my better judgement, I continued to hold on to some kind of hope that you would live up to your reputation in the end.
And now, frankly, I feel like I’ve been played.
Unfortunately, it looks like you have been played too, much more spectacularly than I have. I suspect you are doing far more damage to your reputation than you even know.
One thing I have learned in five years of watching, and writing about, and dealing with, the Men’s Rights movement, is that if Paul Elam is happy about something, that thing is almost certainly terrible.
I suspect, sadly, that you will ultimately learn this lesson yourself, the hard way.
PS: In our phone conversation, you suggested that if you were able to fund your film, you might be able to finally film the interview with me that we originally had planned to do, but which fell through due to financial and other practical obstacles during the original filming of The Red Pill. At this point, I am sorry to say, that is completely out of the question.
Read the whole paper. Not just what supports your argument.
But it’s in the best interest of the kids to leave them with a potential abuser while the courts conduct a lengthy investigation that could months or even years?
This would have the effect of making it near impossible for an abuse victim with kids to leave their abuser because they would be forced to choose between their own safety and their children’s safety. Since MRA types hate no fault divorce, I suspect this is the true goal. Making it hard for women to leave abusive partners. If that has the side effect of making it hard for men to leave abusive partners too, c’est la vie! There’s a reason the MRM is so often referred to as the abuser’s lobby.
Andrew used partisan rhetoric attack!
It’s not very effective.
Begone, Legion, you silly tedious fucking liar.
@ Handsome, you are a jackass. My kids on the other hand are two well-adjusted children who know their father will always be there for them and loves them more than anything.
@ Weirwood,
not what I said (again). There has to be a some process which will address allegations while not putting the accused in the poor house to defend an allegation which may ultimately turn out to be false. can there be some middle ground on this discussion? Apparently not in your world.
Finally, someone who acknowledges me for my true self. I feel affirmed.
I’d hope so, but, like, still, where’s the proof that women are advised to lie in court about abuse? Literally everything you’ve posted has been about how to go about and punish people who do lie, not that they are advised.
I hope your kids don’t inherit/learn your lack of arguing and critical thinking skills, good lord, man, either give the proof or admit you’re talking out of your ass.
@Andrew
She chooses to be paid half of what the rest of her field makes? I somehow doubt that. Or are you saying that because she works part time she’s earning less? See, that’s not the same as being paid half as much. If you’re paid $10/hr when your colleagues are paid $20/hr, you’re being paid half as much. If you’re working 20 hrs per week instead of 40, but you make the same $20/hr you’re earning an equal wage. No wonder MRAs don’t understand why the wage gap is a problem.
Anyway, I don’t know your ex-wife’s situation. I don’t know anything other than your claim that she works part time so she can manage the kids’ schedules. It sounds to me like you’re taking one example she’s given of the childcare she does and making it out to be the only thing while ignoring everything else she does for the kids. Tell ne, if it’s so wonderful to only work 20 hours a week so that you can watch the kids the rest of the time, why aren’t you doing that yourself?
Add me to the voices calling for Andrew’s removal.
On an altogether unrelated note, I’ve been pondering singular gender-neutral pronouns lately. “They” is obnoxious, because we then have “They are” to refer to a single person, and “They is”, though it agree in number, is even more obnoxious.
I shall make another post on the subject, because my edit window is quickly closing.
What’s the middle ground, Andrew? You seem to be obsessed with issue, I’d think you have at least some idea of how you’d like to see the accused party get a fair shake while still ensuring the children stay safe.
Or is this another thing you think feminists should do for you?
@ Jack (as in you know…, I assume)
Asking someone to back up their own claims is exclusionary?
And 2% false accusation rate? That’s pretty low. Too low to treat the other 98% who are genuinely abuse victims as liars.
@ Kupo, Does anyone on this site know how to read?
I said she chooses to “earn” less. She has an opportunity to take on more hours/clients but why would she? That would mean a reduction in support under Canadian Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines.
again, you missed what I said earlier. She does nothing more in terms of childcare than myself. Zero, zilch, nada. I manage the same schedules when I have the kids that she does (as pointed out earlier I actually manage ALL of my son’s hockey which routinely (am I allowed to use that word?) falls on her access days).
again, she does no more than me in terms of childcare. Would I just work 20 hours and take money from someone else who works more if I knew that if I worked more that money from the other party would be reduced? Nope. I have a little more pride than that. she can work more and chooses not to and cries “childcare responsibilities” to avoid earning more. I work hard (two jobs), manage parental responsibilities on my access days (and sometimes on my ex’s days) and I am told to keep working or risk having income “imputed” upon me for wanting to have a life outside of work and my parental duties.
@Andrew
Okay, dude, let me say this as plainly as possible so that there is no miscommunication because you lack the ability to think critically. I’m putting it in a bullet point format because on top of not having critical thinking skills, you also lack critical reading skills, so this should be very easy for you to understand.
One) I am not saying people don’t lie in the courtroom.
Two) I am not saying people don’t lie to get custody of their kids.
Three) I am not saying people don’t lie about abuse to get custody of their kids.
Four) I am not disagreeing that it’s awful that people lie about abuse in the courtroom to get custody of their kids.
Five) But what you’re saying is that women are advise to lie to get custody of their kids.
Six) What you’re giving proof to women being advised to lie to get custody of their kids isn’t proof that women are advised to lie to get custody of their kids.
Seven) What you’re linking to isn’t backing up anything of that assertion.
Eight) In fact, it’s showing the opposite of what you’re saying.
Nine) The link you show are about dealing with people who lied and charging them with mischief, misdemeanors, libel, et cetera.
Ten) It does not advise people to do lie about abuse.
Eleven) In fact, it seems to be not telling anything to the defendant or prosecutor or their clients.
Twelve) This seems to be not advise on anything but legal law about libel and such and what punishment people get for lying involving custody court cases.
Thirteen) So the links you provided have nothing to do with women being advised about lying in court cases.
Fourteen) In fact, it seems it’s only tentatively connected.
Fifteen) The only way it’s related to women lying in court cases is that it shows that some do it and some are punished for it.
Sixteen) But your reasoning is that this link, somehow, provide advice for women to lie.
Seventeen) It doesn’t.
Eighteen) So, are we going to get a link that shows that women are advised to lie?
Nineteen) No.
Twenty) Because that’s against the law and people are punished for that, women, men or otherwise.
Twenty One) In fact, I’m pretty sure people would get fired over such advice.
Twenty Two) Ergo you are lying.
Twenty Three) Unless you are going to provide proof that women are advised to lie about abuse in court cases, not that they sometimes do because that’s different, you’re lying.
Twenty Four) I’m going to state that again in three parts so you’ll understand.
Twenty Five) Just because some women do lie in court…
Twenty Six) …doesn’t mean they are advised to lie…
Twenty Seven) …because people go to jail for lying in court about abuse.
Twenty Eight) Unless you provide proof that women are ADVISED to lie, rather than SOME lie, rather than showing how peopel are PUNISHED FOR LYING, you have no proof and thus are lying.
Twenty Nine) Have I made myself clear? Because I can’t get any clearer.
Thirty) I hope you aren’t your own lawyer because you’re really bad at this.
What does this mean, Andrew?
And yeah, we know how to read. You contradict what you say, you condescending asshole. And yeah, I feel perfectly justified in calling you that, because when one asks for clarification of your extraordinarily vague and shitty writing, that’s what you morph into.
If people ask you to clarify something, it means your words are unclear. Knock off the patronizing attitude.
Jack: *applause*
In the hope of a pleasant diversion from Andrew, I posted upthread about singular gender-neutral pronouns and how “they” is obnoxious for the purpose. If I had invented English, I would just use “it”, but “it” has long since been established as dehumanizing.
I propose “e”, formed from stripping “h” and “sh” off “he” and “she”. “e”s declension is similar to “they”: “em” for the objective case and “eir” for the possessive. As in:
Give it to em, e knows what e’s talking about.
If anyone has any better ideas, please let me know them.
As someone’s pronouns are they/them, I don’t find them obnoxious at all. I find people who find them obnoxious obnoxious because those people and everyone else who knows English uses the singular they in conversation all the time.
Like, when do you ever hear people say he or she in conversation when talking about a person who they don’t know the gender of? Did you notice how I used “they” and “them” this entire time I’ve been talking about Andrew? Or in this post? It’s almost as if it didn’t phase you because it’s normal English.
Also, they is already singular. Literally anyone who states otherwise is doing just be to an ass to people.
@Laugher
A coupla things
1)prescriptivism has a terrible track record
2)’you are’ is singular, why not ‘they are’?
3)’e’ is already a pronunciation of ‘he’ in certain accents/dialects
4)how is ‘eir’ pronounced? Like, ‘air’? Cos that’s weird
5)zie, hir, etc already work just as well or better than ‘e’
6)if it ain’t broke… Tho if someone could deal with themself/ves, I’d be eternally grateful
ETA: what @Jack said 🙂
Points taken, @Axe and @Jack. I should know better than prescriptivism; that’s literally one of the first things I was told in my linguistics class.
Let this tiny affair be a lesson to Andrew, and to anyone who berates politicians for “flip-flopping” without qualification; I can recognize when I’m wrong. That is a virtue.
http://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/201438/rs_560x415-140408154504-1024.baby-elephant-grass.ls.4814.jpg
Jack, my admiration for you is as unto the cuteness of this elephant.
@Andrew
You know, the funny thing is that if you came here with a different tone, not accusing me of not giving a shit about men, I would probably be sympathetic about your personal story. I still don’t have both sides, but if it happens to actually be remotely like you painted it, it sounds kind of shitty.
I happen to agree that custody arrangements in divorce often “favor” women. That “favor” is a double-edged sword, though. I think it really does sometimes disadvantage men who really, really care about their children and want to continue being involved in their lives. I think there is probably even some truth to what you say that it leads men to be more likely to give up instead of fight for responsibility. It also may disadvantage men dealing with shitty women (and no one here denies the existence of shitty women) who believe men should support them and who want to take men for all they are worth.
On the other hand, this very same system advantages men who want to walk away and just write a check. It still, ultimately, places the major responsibility for childcare and nurturance primarily on women.
Coming from where you are, maybe you don’t see that. But for every anecdote like yours, I can cite you one of a single mother and her children living desperately, while the father lives in relative comfort and whines about having to pay his child support. Tell me how that is showing concern or loving your children.
And I’m trying to extend an olive branch here. Please look back over your own posts and tell me where you are showing a single iota of concern for anything that may affect or disadvantage women. Then explain to me how your argument isn’t just “Feminists are evil because they care about women’s issues instead of just focusing solely on men’s issues.” Why do you think men’s issues always have to take precedence, no matter how much women have been or are hurt?
I care deeply about men. I have a son. I love him very much. I worry about him just as much as I worry about my daughter. I’m hoping you care just as much about your daughter as you do your son.
Since we’re trading anecdotes, let me tell you my own divorce story. I left my husband. Although we settled in mediation, rather than court, I knew that I was in a bad place in terms of my mental health and my finances, so my husband and I had joint legal custody of our children, but I knew he was the healthier parent and allowed him to take on the role of primary custodial parent. I’m both proud of my decision and also not proud to have not lived with my children daily because of my issues. I live with guilt every day, but I still think I made the right decision for my children’s wellbeing.
One thing I am really proud of is that my husband was feeling a lot of bitterness toward me, and he was starting to share it with my children (who were 5 and 3, at the time). I called him up and said I understood his feelings, but there was no way I was going to let him hurt my children with them. They needed to be able to love both of their parents without guilt. To his credit, he listened to me on that one. And my children have had two loving parents as a result who didn’t put one another down or guilt their kids for loving their parents. I firmly believe that the hardest part of divorce for a child’s psyche is when their parents hate one another and share that hatred with their children.
Maybe my story is more about what happens when two reasonable adults with children divorce than anything else. And if only one is reasonable, you maybe have to do the best you can. But, honestly, you say you have a daughter. It’s patriarchy that encourages women to “take them for all you can get” or “rely on men for everything.” I’m not unsympathetic to all the issues MRAs bring up. It’s just that they focus on the areas where men are disadvantaged and basically say we should ignore women’s issues. In other words, business as usual.
So tell me, what do you want to say to your daughter? Do you want to say to her that women have no real issues and she should sacrifice her self-interest to men’s issues?
I truly believe you could have friends here if you actually wanted to. Feminists focus more on women’s issues because of the staggering statistical differences, not because we aren’t remotely sympathetic to men’s issues. Did you hear the people who said they’d gladly support centers for male victims of domestic violence? We aren’t lying. I’d invite you to take a good, hard look at the actual changes MRAs are working toward. The actual changes they support that truly help your situation. Think of how, maybe, they aren’t actually doing much other than saying how evil feminists are. Think about how they may affect both your son and your daughter. I invite you to ask us for sympathy with a different tone that says you really, truly believe in supporting both men and women toward actual equality and see what your reception is like.
It may not be as nice as you’d like, still, because you seem to be coming from a place of “men are so much more victimized than you whiny women.” But if you can possibly work toward not believing that (since it’s so untrue), you may find that we really, truly can sympathize with men. *sigh* Try it for your daughter.
Let me solve this for you Andrew. I’m a woman. I just got divorced. I have three minor children. No one advised me to lie about anything or even to try to get full custody.
My ex is delighted by the outcome of the divorce. He didn’t even bother to get a lawyer.
The judge was a woman too. (Oh my!)
I’ve known many women to get divorced and not one of them was ever advised to lie to attempt to get custody. Not one.
So, you can rest easy. That isn’t a thing.
Anything else I can help you with? Need istructions on how to find your ass with both hands?
I’m unsure how to process this so like
At one time, the philosophy in Canada was that we should avoid needlessly disrupting children’s lives by not removing from their homes unless and until it was clearly shown to be necessary. This means that children in dangerous situations were left in those situations until an investigation could be carried out. Eventually it was decided that the risk to these children was untenable, and all credible allegations should be acted on immediately, with the investigation to occur after the child was removed from potential danger. In essence, CPS felt that the harm caused by taking some children out of safe homes for a short period of time was less than the harm caused by leaving many children in dangerous homes.
As I said, it’s not a perfect system. The overwhelming whiteness of CPS has led to the racist targeting of First Nations families, often for the crime of being poor. So many children are taken from First Nations communities that some have called it a sort of second Sixties Scoop (see the “aftereffects” section). Disabled parents are sometimes targeted. As well, the system can be traumatic for children pulled from their homes. All of these issues, and probably plenty more that I don’t know the first thing about, should be looked into. But the solution is definitely not to step backwards into a time where abused children were left with their abusers until enough evidence was gathered. That’s not what’s best for kids.
Sorry to lecture, I just… ugh. I don’t want to be like “the system is flawless!” because that’s a total lie, but I also don’t want to give an opening for the Andrews of the world to spew their harmful misogynistic bullshit.
http://media.giphy.com/media/SriJPYsPgvpNm/giphy.gif
I was gonna be all reasonable and stuff, @Andrew. Had to go do some meetings and some writing, figured there might be a few posts following up on this, figured I’d give you some commiseration on your problem, and some advice on what you’ve misinterpreted. Then I came back and saw, well, all of that.
sigh.
Tell you what, Andrew. You’ve been relatively mild and eloquent here, and you seem to care for the truth to a degree – good on you. So I’ll give it a try.
You’ve got a rough story – I do not doubt for a moment that your personal story is true. It’s because I’ve heard similar before.
I have a friend in a very similar situation. His ex is terrible, and he fears for his son based on her influence over him. They never married, but when custody was decided it was split custody, even though she was unemployed and couldn’t hold down a job at all. He paid child support happily because he knew it meant his son would eat and have clothes, even though he knew she wasn’t working, instead was living off of the income of her new boyfriend (he lasted about six months). He finally had to take her to court due to her irresponsible behaviour when she ran off with their son to another city and refused him visitation rights, while still unemployed and being negligent in her role as parent. (Good End, though! He won full custody, and his son is now attending school regularly and making friends.)
I have a relative in another situation. She was married and had children with a man who was emotionally abusive – he would withdraw love and support if she didn’t do everything he wanted. They’ve been separated, she has custody with agreeable visitation rights for him. He pays child support, though he’s missed some of them (he’s decided to wait for his dream job and live on EI in the interim). He’s used the kids as a weapon against her, trying to guilt her into making them get back together. Makes me nauseous.
Why am I sharing this? There are lots of stories, each of them painful, and each one worthy of sympathy. Yours is one of them. But well, you know what they say, anecdotes aren’t the plural of data.
And yet they are. Each of these is a point on a graph, each one a bit in a bucket. Doing that sort of ethical calculus on the lives of people is horrible, but it’s the only tool we have to really understand what’s going on. We need to divorce ourselves from the visceral desire to strike out and stop these horrible injustices if we want to be able to understand what’s going on.
When we do this – when we see the lines drawn by these pixelated tears – the trend is the data shared by WWTH.
Your data still exists – it’s a constellation of unhappy points in the scatter plot – but it’s incomplete. Your cases are real, and are an injustice that needs to be addressed, but they’re only one constellation. You need to take in the whole sky.
Ignore the case studies and individual statements. If they are truly a systemic problem, their effects will be shown in the astrology of sorrow which is our statistics on divorce and child custody. At this point it is appropriate to look at these individual points for further details.
And note – It is a problem. It’s impossible for me, as a feminist, to say that women are expected by society to be mothers and homemakers without also implying that men are not afforded as much trust in raising children. This is a straightforward outcome of feminist theory, and I don’t think anyone here would object to the statement.
Most feminists aren’t addressing this issue specifically (though some are!) because there are a thousand and one issues and only limited time. We welcome allies who are interested in fighting the terrible, unfair outcomes men face for their gender in society, and we have men here who do just that. Provided that they are not also confounding those who fight the terrible, unfair outcomes women face for their gender in society.
That last bit’s the crux of it.
Respond in kind if you have the courage to face yourself.
But be warned if you wish to respond with a fight.
I’ve split the shields of many on this forum.
And I’ve been sharpening my axes.