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.
Oh, and Andrew, if you really want to open eyes to the issues you find important, it might help to comment in more current threads and it might help to not open with a hostile comment. MRAs have a nasty little habit of acting assholish and when that isn’t met with a warm reception, coming to the conclusion that feminists are mean and hate men.
Wow, when are we feminists going to open our eyes and see that what we’ve been saying for half a century is actually true?
@ Woody, use those reading skills. If you do the math from my earlier post you will see I insisted that custody be split right down the middle. My son is with me 4 days and my daughter 3 (that adds up to 7 out of a possible 14 if you are having trouble with the math). From that we can do some simple algebra x +7 = 14. Solving for x gives us 7 meaning effectively my ex has the kids 3.5 days and I have them 3.5 days. And yes, I pay $1200 and yes she is seeking $1800. Why is it so hard to believe? If you want to say that is an incredibly high number I would agree. If you want to call me a liar well “you be wrong ma’am”. But keep telling yourself that.
Wait… $1200 a month!? That’s ~$7 an hour! Wat? And $1800 is ~$10.50/hr! How much do you fuckin make!? Don’t actually answer that, but holy shit!
@John
All of them. Of particular note are Mrs Chad Skyboomrooster (Put Down Artist and linguist extraordinaire) and That_Susan (Andrea Hardie fan who whined about us to the opposition). Also, Gert finally got banned, so that was fun. Things got… weird for a bit
Aww, Dandy Andy critical reading skills are so shit they didn’t know I called them a dolt, not WWTH. I hope your kids learn better from their mother.
Anyway, anyone else here love Killer Croc? He’s one of my favorite Batman villains. Heard Suicide Squad didn’t do him justice at all, unfortunately. They seemed to have made him into a “generic thug” stereotype and cut out his back story. :/ He’s a crime boss with a skin condition, a misanthrope with a wish to be normal and a love of French literature. I don’t think any of that is in Suicide Squad. Anyone see it?
@Axe
Fun fact: Skyboomrooster and Gert were the same guy.
@Axe
Actually, he already told us he makes $80k per year. If he gets paid biweekly, $1800 would be a significant portion of one paycheck and 27% of his salary. If he evenly splits childcare (assuming that this also means he buys his children a large portion of the things they need, like clothing and so on, when they are with him and pays half of school fees and those hockey and synch costs, and so on), this does seem potentially unfair to me. But then, he doesn’t care if I repeatedly express sympathy toward his claim. I’m just a toxic hag he’d hate to spend more than 2 minutes with. And of course, that attitude is what undermines his credibility.
As a parent who lives with my children, I know that at least 27% of my salary goes toward supporting them. So if he’s not buying them those things, then it changes what that whole splitting childcare thing means considerably.
Yawn. From reading the ramblings of MGTOWs, it’s pretty obvious that an overwhelming majority of them are fabricating back stories in an attempt to justify their misogyny. Their stories are so over the top, counter-factual and literally unbelievable. MGTOW overlap with 4chan’s self-described “kissless virgins” is probably near total. And for the record, I think most of the woe is me 4chan stories are made up too. Most MGTOWs come across as hyperdramatic teenagers or 20-somethings who got dumped once or got hung up on an unanswered high school crush and turned their frustration into hatred of women. On some level, they know they just hate women because they want to hate. That’s why, when challenged, they always go straight to a ridiculous sob story about some evil woman who ruined their life.
@ Belladonna, the deeper you dig the more shit you get covered with. Yes, I pay ALL of my son’s hockey (to the tune of about $7K per year). My wife claims that she is paying over $6K for my daughter’s synchro despite the fact registration fees are less than $3K (I have asked for an accounting of the other $3K. Crickets). I suspect she is padding those costs by claiming mileage (which I don’t and pay far more based on schedule comparisons of the two children).
I also pay more most in- school costs such as field trips, pizza lunches, charity drives, etc. Why? Because they are with me most school days (my son, all but Friday and my daughter all but Thursday and Friday).
You say “potentially unfair”. You are only part right it is just unfair and I am not the only parent who believes this. We are supported by politicians and media but there is no change in site because the issue of reforming Family Court and especially support guidelines is a political hot potato.
Andrew,
Your said you have the kids Wednesday through Sunday. At no point have you corrected me. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday is 5 days. I’m not the one failing math here.
@Andrew,
At work right now so can’t really peel all this apart. However, the reference for the amount paid in child support payment is here:
http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/fl-lf/child-enfant/2003_4/index.html
Note, women on average pay less. It’s pretty closely in line with the amount less that women earn, so it all fits together well.
As for this:
That’s really the tragedy here. As I’ve said a few times, it’s a basic and central statement in feminist theory that society hurts both men and women. We don’t deny that it hurts men, and the topic we’re talking about is a real outcome of that hurt.
MRA’s and their fellow travellers, though, see any feminist stating a feminist position that isn’t about men, though, and then they assume that feminists don’t care about men. We do, we really do. Honest, Andrew. We’re just sick of men’s issues always taking the forefront.
Andrew, sounds like your ex is a difficult case :\ My relative’s ex is the same – she pays the huge bulk of their expenses. She could sue him to get spousal support and higher child support, but doesn’t, because of how much it’d hurt the kids to have them go through that fight. She’s contacted him about it, but the reply is like you said. Crickets.
Single-parenting is tough. No feminist will doubt that, man or woman. Can we stop arguing with one another perhaps, and maybe start addressing the real issues?
I remember the Skyboomrooster and Gert events yeah. What, they’re the same person ?
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tim-and-eric-mind-blown.gif
OK, I know nothing about sports costs, but almost $600 a month for children’s hockey!? This whole thread has me incredulous…
Hockey is suuuuper expensive. That amount of money’s in line, really. I’m willing to bet that his ex doesn’t actually want to put the kids through hockey, and is using that as an excuse to not pay for it.
Andrew, have you assembled all of this information and taken it to the court, to ask for a reassessment of child support payments? They aren’t perfect, you know. That sort of thing can and does happen when it’s appropriate.
(I say this, realizing that I only have half of the picture here, and that your ex has another half of the picture, and that the court must assemble both sides to come to a conclusion.)
@Andrew
You didn’t cover me with any shit. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I was actually giving you the benefit of the doubt that you shared those costs, as well. I said “potentially” because you hadn’t talked about that piece of it much, so I didn’t know for sure. But keep believing that, no matter how many times I say your situation sounds unfair, I must not mean it. I couldn’t possibly really believe that there are some women in the world who take advantage of men.
Of course, the more you attack me for believing you, the more inclined I am to think your ex may not be one of those women and may have a very credible side of the story, too.
Regardless, you never answered my earlier question. What are you looking for? It’s clearly not any iota of agreement or sympathy or support. It seems to just be that you think we are awful because we’ve chosen to spend a lot of energy on causes that try to prevent harm to women instead of focusing all our time and energy trying to fix this thing that disadvantages men. Because heaven forfend there be an area in the world where men are actually at a disadvantage. So your idea seems to be that maybe if we fix that one remaining injustice for men, so men don’t have to be disadvantaged anywhere at all, you guys just maybe could be bothered to consider our insignificant little issues.
The argument that equal shared responsibility should be the “default” arrangement unless there are clear reasons why it should not be seems solid. I’d probably vote for it unless it seemed like it contained really vague language that could be highly problematic in some situations. But I’m not going to go out and campaign and work for it myself. I’m busy fighting for issues that resonate more with me. If that makes you furious, then I guess you’ll have to be furious.
How odd. The post I was replying to seems to have jumped down the page.
@John
Yeah, they melted down in pretty similar ways…
@Scildfreja
I’m not even doubting the story. It’s just hockey don’t make no sense. Even with the exchange rate
@Bella
He’s just mad to be mad. He wants to win, which means you, we, hafta lose. You hafta agree with him. But not cos you’re a reasonable person or that it’s something you’ve subscribed to forever. No, you hafta agree with him cos you’re a toxic hag, and he’s shown you the light. That’s what it seems like anyway
And the slide down thing happens sometimes. We figure it has to do with direct replies. He’ll keep sliding until there’s a new page of comments
@ Axe
With all due respect you should have ended your thought at “I know nothing about sports costs”. Read the article in the link below which provides a conservative estimate on the cost of rep hockey in Toronto from 2014. That number continues to climb. You can continue to be “incredulous” if you want.
http://globalnews.ca/news/1273434/breaking-down-the-high-cost-of-playing-hockey-in-toronto/
@ Sildfreja
already done but the judge took a table from my ex and her counsel which moves to have my income imputed to $100K for support purposes as the starting point. I also provided a detailed table of my typical week which showed that after work and parenting responsibilities I was left with 7 hours of “free time”. That seemed to get no attention at all from the court. The judge also ignored the fact that my ex used a our joint line of credit for child and personal expenses for 18 months following the split.
I have been advised by a family member in the legal profession to pay her off in a lump sum to get out from underneath this. Now that I have shown a willingness to do so my ex is asking for 50% more in a lump sum payment than she was willing to take two years ago. This after 19 months of me paying spousal support on top of child support. Figure that one out.
The system has allowed her to do this instead of making reforms to the Divorce Act and passing new progressive legislation which will cut greedy ex-spouses off at the knees so to speak. The only winners in the existing system are the lawyers and the biggest losers are the children.
Okay, you know, it’s actually kinda bothering you guys aren’t addressing this.
One) Don’t you think people admitting they lied in court may, I don’t know, get their kids taken away? Which is the opposite of what they want? And on top of that jail time? Dumbass. Not everyone just admits to crimes they’ve done. Plus, like, don’t you think both men AND women lie about that kind of shit? Because they do.
And two) Hate to be the one that information you but both women and men sexual assault and domestic vicitims under report. So, like, I don’t know why you’re making this into a gendered issue, blah blah, ironic echo I’m too lazy to go back and see the exact wording of because you’re a dumbass, asshole, lying dolt and won’t read this anyway.
http://67.media.tumblr.com/1213ae1c25d528bae40bdb3e44c1df74/tumblr_oaztx30p7C1v929foo5_500.gif
And I don’t understand why any of you are even being sympathetic to this butt nugget. They haven’t given two shits about the sympathy you’ve given them. They’re just being a fuck on the internet instead of doing their job or being a decent parent.
“Oh, sorry Timmy, Betty, I can’t play Star Wars with you right now, I gotta annoy all these feminist on this website because I have no life and have to spread my misery and toxicity to others.”
Jesus Christ go spend time with your kids and job instead of being an ass here.
IP,
Funny how that works, huh? These men who pay through the nose for child support while the women live in luxury and prevent caring dads from seeing thw kids are super common online. In the real world every mother I’ve met who is the primary or sole custodian of the kids is pretty broke. Almost all of them are hard working. I’ve known one single mom who fit the lazy and irresponsible stereotype but she lived off of a combination of welfare and her mother. None of the dads paid much if any support. Most of the fathers who aren’t with the mothers that I’ve known are satisfied with their arrangements or they complain about paying child support but don’t show much concern for the kid.
I’m not saying that there’s never a time when the MRA scenarios happen, but there’s never been any satisfactory evidence that it is systemic. And like you say, their stories are all a little too pat. Statistically, women’s standard of living goes down after a divorce while men’s go up and single mothers are one of the groups with the highest poverty rate.
I will give Andrew a smidgen of credit for not using the term divorce rape though.
Did Andrew miss me saying that I was Canadian about a zillion times, or..?
@Raggedy Andy (easy joke I know)
I don’t doubt it costs that much. It’s stupid it costs that much. How does it cost so much to play a sport? My mom spent maybe $1000USD for all of my extracurricular activities. For my entire childhood. $7000 in a single year is outrageous. There’s def some shittery going on. I was being sorta kinda sympathetic. Relax
@Viscaria
Andrew has missed anything and everything anyone here has said that doesn’t reinforce his world view.
And Axe and Jack are right. I don’t know why I’m showing him sympathy, either. He clearly doesn’t want it. To listen to it or accept it, he might have to consider, for a second, that we weren’t horrible. I’m pretty sure that’s why he mostly ignores me. The same way he completely ignores those sentiments in Scildfreja’s post.
@Jack
I ignored that because I couldn’t see how the article he linked had anything at all to do with his assertions and conclusions. I just couldn’t come up with any cogent ways to respond. 🙂
@wwth
I don’t think MRAs understand systemic. They also want us to ignore statistics like this, because we should look at these issues in a completely non-gendered way by only considering how the system hurts men. /s
In my defense*, I haven’t actually read any of his teal Megaloceroses. Life is short and MRAs are long-winded. =P
*”TL;DR” is technically a defense, right?