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.
@WWTH
When feeemales falsely accuse the men in their lives of abuse, it’s a society wide conspiratorial injustice. When Andy accuses the entirety of the legal profession of defrauding fathers of their children by deliberately and regularly encouraging those accusations, he’s speaking truth to power… Or something
@ woody, again I will stick by my claim that people such as you are part of the problem and definitely not part of the solution. You worship at the altar of statistics and say that children who are let down by the system are a statistical anomaly. I have news for you. My children (and others let down by the system) are not “statistical anomalies” they are real people. and for the record I have said throughout that this is not a gender issue and that reform is meant to be in the best interests of the children and that sometimes the lack of reform has led to fathers being treated unfairly but I also recognize mothers are treated unfairly with sometimes fatal results. read the article below
https://lawdiva.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/judges-decision-results-in-tragedy/
If I do present anything that clearly illustrates that Shared Parenting legislation is not the “norm” and is in the best interests of children you dispute which is obvious. Again, see the article below.
https://lawdiva.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/guest-post-fatherless-in-north-america/
You keep saying that I provide “no evidence” to support my claim of “false accusations” yet I have presented papers from the Canadian government which deal with the issue. Articles from family lawyers who say this is an issue. Yet, still you worship at the altar of statistics. again, I doubt very much that anyone (lawyer or parent) is raising their hand and saying “yes, count me as one of those who have used this tactic to eliminate an ex-spouse from the custody arena”. your insinuation seems to be this does not happen. If it happens once, ten times or thousands of times it is WRONG!! Denying parental rights is right next to courts not acting in the best interests of children. Are we in agreement on this point? If not, we will agree to disagree.
(I have statistical and logical points to make in this thread but I don’t think anyone is gonna like them :S)
Facts are misandry!
I never said that. I said you haven’t presented evidence that there’s a systemic bias against men.
Children are let down by the system. Like how about unpaid child support and how that hurts kids?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deadbeats-across-canada-owe-more-than-3-7b-in-support-1.2782955
Didn’t you say that you and your ex share physical custody? It also sounds like they don’t live in poverty and get to do the extracurricular activities they enjoy. So, how is the court hurting your kids again?
Bullshit. You’ve claimed again and again that they system is against men.
They said 4 out of 200 cases were false allegations if I remember correctly.
It’s not in the best interest of children to leave them with abusive parents because of the very small percentage of abuse allegations are false.
It’s not in the best interest of children for the non custodial parent to not have to pay support.
I thought family law attorneys were routinely telling their clients to lie in order to deprive fathers of custody. Now they’re a source you trust? Make up your mind.
We’ve said about a million times that we’re not claiming nobody ever lies or does other shady things in contentious custody cases. But the vast majority of divorces do not result in knock down drag out custody battles.
Nobody has said parents should be denied rights or that it’s good for kids to separate them from a loving parent. We are saying that you have not demonstrated that the court system is conspiring to deny parental rights to fathers. There’s a big fucking difference. Learn to read for comprehension or I’m going to have to go back to calling you a dolt.
Oh, hell. I’ll do it anyway.
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1h4598j6X1qchd2v.gif
Andrew, I am so glad to see that you are recanting your former position that false accusations of abuse by women and their lawyers are standard practice in Canadian custody disputes.
Its great that after a week of googling unsuccessfully for evidence and finding none, you are now willing to concede that you misrepresented your former opinion as an indisputible truth, and are backpedaling to “I think this happens sometimes”. Good for you! A much more reasonable position.
If you had started with it, you might have had that civil discussion involving “both” (apologies, non-binary peeps, for using Andrew’s word) genders, which you keep claiming you crave.
Particularly if you had not begun and continued your so called discussion by dismissing the replies of people with female avatars or feminine names as “not worth listening to” and “covering themselves with shit”‘, while obsequiously trying to misrepresent your behavior when talking to people who identify themselves as male
@ Axe
Did I ever once accuse “the entirety of the legal profession”? That would be like someone saying that because I believe fabricating evidence by police in a criminal case is an issue that I am painting all police officers with the same brush. Do you see why your statement based on mine is a giant leap? Now let me ask you this, do you believe the tactic we are discussing has not been used in a custody battle be one parent to gain an advantage over the other? If you say no we can end this discussion right now.
You didn’t accuse the entirety of the legal profession, Andrew.
You accused the entirety of the government of Canada.
From your first post here,
The reason I’m loathe to talk actual facts and statistics with you is that I know you’d refuse to move an iota from your position, and would grapple on any of my own movement, or even discernment of detail, as a sign of fault. From the discussion above, I have no reason to believe you’re a faithful arguer.
No I don’t but I do not treat people who are falsely accused like they are the Big Foot of the legal system. I sympathize with anyone regardless of gender, age or ethnic background who has been a victim of abuse. However, it appears as though you have little sympathy for others who have been wrongfully accused (and in some cases convicted) of a crime. Ever wonder how it feels to be wrongfully accused or convicted of a crime? For an extreme example search David Milgaard for a more recent story search Mattress Girl or Duke Lacrosse. You be the judge if false accusations and wrongful convictions are not an issue in society and that it is not a leap IMO that this does not happen in family court.
@David
You might want to edit out the links to Andrew’s dopey-ass whine-blog from his username; it’s full of personal information about his kids.
Oh, boy are you not helping your case with that one.
Another reason I’m hesitant to talk with you.
Above this comment, peppered amongst yours, are repeated statements supporting people who are wrongly accused, regardless of gender. WWTH has been the soul of patience, repeating it again and again – agreeing that men are treated terribly in this system. It’s a foundation of feminist theory that men are hurt in this system, too!
But you don’t read that. You twist these statements into statements attacking men. The Drive to Defend is a central drive within the human psyche, and it’s what has brought you here. Not a quest for truth, but just a desire to attack people for things they don’t even believe. We’re the Appropriate Target.
If you want a civil discussion, with give and take, you need to start paying attention to everything being said to you, not just the interpretation that favours your position.
Wow. From what little I skimmed of it, it really is. Not cool.
For how much mras claim women and in particular feminist women are just as much a threat to men as men are to women, they sure seem willing to share personal information about themselves and their families with the enemy.
If I were ever going to comment on an MRA site, about the last thing I would was have a link to personal information in my username because with the harassment every feminist woman who writes under her real name gets and the whole Register Her debacle, that would be dangerous.
@ Scildfreja, with all due respect civility is not part of the vocabulary (you not included) of some of the posters on this thread. I have been called a dolt, an asshole and too many other names to even mention. I have had a poster express sympathy for my daughter because I am her father (that was way below the belt). I have been called a misogynist on multiple occasions. I have been told that my posts led one poster to conclude that I have an abusive personality (again, way beyond anything which would be considered reasonable dialogue) . Yet, in the defending of the sisterhood vein I discussed earlier not one person called out any of the people who made these accusations or hurled these insults. Civil? Yeah, right.
@WWTH
I suppose they figure that, for all their squawking otherwise, feminists don’t dox or harass and therefore aren’t threats. Which is true, but discounts other MRA trolls, which absolutely are threats (especially to young girls, given that most MRAs are paedophiles).
@Al Andalus
Bruh, what discussion? I wasn’t even talking to you. But sure, go on and end it. I guess…
However, while I’m at it:
You might wanna keep your goalposts stationary. Your original assertion was that family lawyers “ROUTINELY” encourage their clients to make false accusations of abuse. “Routinely” means ‘in the manner of a regular, standard course of action or procedure’. Routine is synonymous with standard. Legal standards are set by the relevant Bar Associations and by statute. But even in colloquial usage a professional standard is something widely, if not ubiquitously, practiced. 4/200 does not rise to the level of “routine”
Of course, give been told basically this multiple times by multiple commenters, so feel free to continue on the path of ignoring it. It’s become something of a… routine with you
I’ve had wonderful, very civil arguments with everyone that you’re currently butting heads against. They’re very capable of it. They’re not showing it to you because you came in here,
called us out for not having a single article about the problems men face (I doubt you actually looked very hard),
accused us of playing a “zero sum game” when we aren’t playing a game at all, and when all of our positions are for the betterment of the lives of everyone,
accused us of believing that “only women can experience sexism” (indicating that you don’t know what the word sexism means and also completely misreading what feminists actually believe about sexism),
and then called us stupid by suggesting that we’d change our minds “if only we knew”.
You set the tone from your first post. I tried to correct your errors and teat you nicely, but you doubled down with anecdotes for evidence and anger for reason.
So no, you don’t get to lay the blame for your treatment at our feet. You came in here looking for a fight, and you got one. Wyrd bið ful aræd.
Yet we didn’t call you any insults equivalent to the ones common in the MRM. No gendered slurs, no homophobic slurs, no transphobic slurs. Nobody called you a mangina either.
Anyway, if you think men are not the privileged gender, you are a dolt. Patriarchy can hurt men, particularly men who don’t live up to the patriarchal ideal, but it’s still patriarchy. You still enjoy a whole hell of a lot of male privilege. You got the reception you did because you’re one of a long, long line of men who march onto feminist/feminist oriented sites to demand we pay attention to men and their problems even though the rest of the world centers the male perspective above ours. Lots of us are sick of it.
Feminists actually bend over backwards to prove we don’t hate men and to acknowledge that patriarchy can hurt men. We actually do it too much in my opinion. Why do I think we should do it less? Not just because as I said, the rest of the world already centers men, but because no matter how much we talk about men and their issues, it is never enough for you people. It will never be enough for you until feminists agree to stop talking about women’s issues altogether.
So yeah, you got a cranky reception from many of us. You know what you didn’t get though? A deluge of slurs, rape threats and death threats the way women like Anita Sarkeesian, Lindy West, Jessica Valenti and other feminists do. Fuck your little pity party about how mean feminists are.
Hey Woody, I feel like I am in a game of twister seeing how often you have twisted what I said.
I will only address a couple of items
I never said it was. Nor is it in the best interest of the child to have protracted custody battles where one parent is denied access throughout the process in the name of the “status quo”. The starting point should be shared custody (despite what you say there is clear evidenec to suggest it is not) and then it will become imperative that one parent or the other present evidence that the court should move off that starting point to where one parent has less access because it is in the best interest of the child.
whatever! Why is the Canadian government afraid to legislate equal access as the “norm” (your word not mine) in custody disputes through Equal Shared Parenting legislation (this would streamline the process, reduce conflict between the parties and put an end to expensive litigation. Refer to Australia where they have adopted ESP and have seen a dramatic decline in custody cases going to court with over 70% being settled by the parties with no legal involvement)? Why does the new UCCB in Canada automatically go to the “woman of the house” regardless if she is the biological parent or not? Why does the CRA disqualify anyone paying child support from claiming a child as an eligible dependent (yes, this is not gender specific but over 90% of those paying child support in Canada are men so I think that should raise a flag)? Why are as many as 20 states looking at adopting ESP as the recognize that current systems are not in the best interests of the children and often are not friendly to fathers seeking shared custody or even just increased access?
Not systemic? Bullshit!!
Mandrew, it’s time to shut the fuck up and go away now. You’re boring and pointless.
I’m just going to pick one of these, to avoid a Gish Gallop, in order to prove a point.
You’re right – the fact that men pay 90% of child support payments in Canada is noteworthy.
Where you fail is what follows after that.
Your conclusion to “why are men paying 90% of child support” is “Because men are subjected to systemic bias in parenting rights.” (If you want to reword that, that’s fine. You left it implicit).
This is an unfounded assumption. There are hundreds of co-factors influencing the 90% result. One of them is, certainly, an unconscious bias viewing men as being less legitimate parents. You can thank the patriarchy for that one.
Know what else influences the 90% outcome? The fact that women earn less than men, for one. Women are considered less employable, less responsible, less capable; they’re less welcome in the workplace outside of specific and subordinate roles; they experience harassment and abuse which reduces their ability to work further. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Know what else influences the 90% outcome? History. Politics. Survey bias. Classification errors.
Your factor is one amongst hundreds, and you’re claiming it’s the thing that we need to pay attention to. It’s a thing that we need to pay attention to, sure, but if you want to claim it’s dominant, I’m gonna have to see some math. A PSA study would be acceptable. Even ANOVA or other variance test would be fine. Something other than anecdotes, please.
That’s a slice of the bias you’re displaying – one of the leaps of logic. You jump from a reasonable and interesting statistic – one that’s worthy of discussion from the position of equal and shared parenting! – and use it as a bludgeon to hammer on your point. That’s not how science works, that’s not how stats works, and that’s not how the real world works.
I could slice apart the rest of your points equally, but a) I don’t have all day, and b) you’re going to ignore it anyways. You can consider this one a freebie.
No it is not. My reference was to an unfair tax law which disproportionately impacts men over women. I am making an assumption that I believe that if the numbers were reversed there would be far more political will to change a horribly unfair tax law. I have read it in many posts here that men are already “privileged” so if laws are unfair and may work against some men… who cares, right?
Correction accepted.
Doesn’t change the flaw in your original statement.
Your assumption of:
is largely correct, and is largely due to the “toxic masculinity” problem, in which that men who show emotions, claim fault, or claim unfairness are considered “unmanly” and minimized. All part of the Feminist platform.
(You do realize that your position largely coincides with feminist thought, right?)
Anyways, my previous critique still stands, because your new assumption is an addition to the argument and not a replacement for it. Unless you’re saying that all this time you’ve been arguing about tax law and not systemic bias?
(in other words, saying ‘it’s about tax law!’ is an evasion to try to discredit my statement, since your actual argument is that the tax law problem is caused by systemic bias.)
Again. Not interested in actually discussing this for realsies until you demonstrate an ability to budge that doesn’t involve evasion or goalpost-shifting.
No, I am saying the tax law in Canada and the rules governing the UCCB are just two examples which points to a systemic bias in Canada. I would be interested to see if something similar exists in the States. Again, I am more familiar with the Canadian system and I think it would be difficult not to support that there could be some systemic bias against fathers in the family court system in Canada. I am not versed enough on the US system to offer a real informed opinion (as I am sure many of the American posters on this thread are likewise not familiar enough with the Canadian system to comment in any depth. Probably why every time I bring up the sexist rules governing the UCCB that it has been almost universally ignored)
Thursday, again, a day they’re suppose to be taking care of the kids and yet they’re here.
And you wonder why we feel sorry for your children being related to you in anyway. Geesh.
Okay, so you agree that your comment is about systemic bias. So, my point that your evidence for systemic bias is flawed and is missing a great deal of the picture stands. Feel free to reply to the actual content of that argument if you like.
And I’m Canadian. Not working from an American viewpoint.