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.
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Can you tell about that statistic thing you think no one will like? I’d like to read something actually intelligent (i.e. nothing of what my buddy, my pal, The Dolt Dandy Andy as posted) in this thread, please. Also it’s interesting.
Is it about how flawed they are? Because I knew that. I mean you poll a small group and think it’s proportional to large group thing and junk like that is kinda, like, convenient but flawed, at the least.
Andrew, edit the link to your blog out of your username if you want to keep posting here.
@ Punkleass Jack
clearly you are having trouble comprehending (not surprised). My kids are with my ex on Thursday (or did you miss that because your head was up your (punkle)ass?
Andrew’s worse at making fun of our usernames than most five-year-olds. Pathetic.
@Scildfreja
Then you are well aware the things that I am pointing out are true (unfair tax laws; UCCB; no ESP legislation; lengthy/indefinite spousal support terms) in Canada. You can argue that these items (and others I have not pointed out) don’t constitute a systemic bias in family court in Canada and I can argue otherwise (again, I am not on an island on my position – as I will admit that you are not on a similar island either – in this discussion). as the saying goes “and never the twain shall meet”.
Bless you. I love it. I might change it to that.
You know, I got “Punkle Stan” from someone trying to make fun of my love for Grunkle Stan–specifically assuming I’m attracted to him. Not that I blame the guy, Grunkle Stan is amazing. It didn’t work, that dude’s mocking. I mean, it’s kinda funny people think “punk” is an insult? As if it’s the 60s? Bastich, please, I know I’m a punkass and I’m proud. You think pointing that out is gonna be an insult, I mean, where the fuck you from? Suck in some sort of Cold War bunker all your life?
You think I care enough about you to remember what you say or enough to even look back at what you said? Cute, cupcake.
The only reason I even still engaged with you past my first few posts is because I like making fun of fuckheads, and I like making them mad because it’s funny. You asshole gonna spread your shit all over the site, might as well have fun with it; not that you seem to mind because you keep coming back. Better watch it, people gonna think you’re just into public humiliation at this point. Did you know that’s part of the appeal of cuckolding? Fun fact.
Andrew don’t you have
A few kid to look after?
They deserve your time.
Oh dear.
Right, well. First thing, Andrew, if you chime in with anything even remotely approaching the reply I expect to see, I’ll tear a bloody strip out of your position up one side and down the other.
Second, I’m still working on this, and haven’t come to a complete conclusion or anything approaching concrete, even, so counter-arguments are very welcome. I’m a data scientist, not a doctor of gender studies, so I’m very aware that I have large gaps in what I know and biases in what I do know.
(Third, I’m on my tablet, so this will be shorter than I would like)
It looks like there is systemic bias against men in regards to child care. Further, that bias is expected by feminist theory. The bias is structurally identical to the bias resulting in the wage gap.
1) The vast majority of Andrew’s links were garbage. One of them wasn’t. It provided evidence from this paper:
Pulkingham, J. (1994) ‘Private Troubles, Private Solutions: Poverty Among Divorced Women and the Politics of Support Enforcement and Child Custody Determination’, Canadian journal of law and society, 9(2), pp. 73–97. doi: 10.1017/S0829320100003665.
I still haven’t gotten access to it, but it’s a well-acclaimed journal and I have no reason to believe the author has a specific bias. Further, the paper suggests that the bias is due to traditional values. I’ve got nothing to contradict the conclusion. This leads to the second point.
2) As far as I understand feminism, we should expect to see a societal bias against men taking on traditionally female roles. That suggests a bias against men taking on full child custody, and suggests that a bias against men as parents should exist in a patriarchal society. That’s woman’s work, after all. It’s an outcome of the male=active member of society, female=confined to the household power dynamic.
3) The bias is structurally identical to the wage gap problem. Have I ever explained that here? I’ll assume no.
The wage gap is due to sexism. The largest MRA argument against it is that there are a large number of contributing factors to the wage gap which aren’t sexism – career choice, education choices, decisions to have children, etc. is what they usually cite.
So, imagine a graph – a mind map, if you like – with the central bubble being “Wage Gap”, and all of the things influencing the wage gap as bubbles, connected to the central one with arrows. The arrows point in, indicating that the wage gap is influenced by the thing. One of those bubbles is Sexism, the others are all, well, others. And there are many others. So goes the argument – and it’s a correct argument.
It is, however, incomplete. There are supposed to be arrows pointing from every node to every other node, almost. It’s a gloriously messy spaghettigraph, with the Sexism node pointing at – influencing – almost every node on the graph. This is what the influencing factors of the wage gap really look like, and it’s why we can confidently say that sexism is the root cause of that differential.
So, that’s the wage gap. The same structural argument supports the idea that men suffer an unjust bias in family court, for the same reasons. On it’s surface, the bias appears to be one tiny factor out of many which influence court decisions. The more I dig into the other factors, though, the more it feels like “traditional family roles” is influencing all of those other factors – pointing to other nodes on the graph.
I don’t know the volume or force of that influence, and I don’t have the experience to say whether it’s got a dominating influence or not. But it does feel like a natural statement of feminist theory, and I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable about otherwise.
(Note for Andrew: please notice that I’ve said that these are feminist positions. You came in here saying that it’s all the womz fault. Feminism’s interested in attacking the very heart of this problem, and your accusations against us are both misinformed and counter-productive.)
So, yeah! Like I said, I don’t think anyone’s gonna like that too much. It’s been itching in my head for awhile now, though, so I guess I gotta say it. Normal caveats apply: I’m certainly wrong about something in there, I’m possibly wrong about the whole damn thing, I’m a terrible judge of accuracy. Etc, etc.
… Jack, did you just call Andrew a cuck?
:O
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
That…actually isn’t a surprise and doesn’t shock me.
However, isn’t there a phenomenon of men entering traditionally feminine fields and still getting better pay and shit? For instance, men nurses still get paid more than women nurses even though there’s way more women nurses and many women nurses have been in the game longer than their male counterparts.
And, also, back in the 60s, women were actually the majority of people in computer programming. It was considered “women’s work”, it didn’t pay well, it was looked down on. With the rise of the mythical “geek” and “nerd” (white wimpy dudes who act *gasp* feminine) archetype in the 80s, programming began to be seen as legitimate. More men went into programming and started to make it hostile towards women thus making it a male-dominated field. Soon programmers got better pay and their job is seen as legitimate and lucrative because it is, as soon as men got into it.
(Tangent, Margaret Hamilton got the Presidential Medal of Freedom recently. You know, the women who helped program the on-board flight system for the 1969 Apollo moon mission almost fifty years ago? Yaaay!)
There’s also the fact that men get praised more often for being single fathers while many single mothers are still looked down on. PLUS men don’t have to do much to be “good dads”–push a kid on a swing and they’re “good dads”–while women have to do more beyond what’s considered basic motherhood stuff to be considered “good moms”.
So, like, the social bias against men in more “feminine” roles isn’t…that bad still.
(Unless I misread everything you wrote, which may have happened. I tend to misread things so yeah if I read that wrong, please tell me.)
I implied they enjoy public humiliation which is related to cuckolding. I figured they wouldn’t like it. So, yeah, I guess?
@Scildfreja
http://i.imgur.com/K4VlOhH.gif
I woulda thought that was obvious and uncontroversial. Summat similar appears with primary school teachers. Women are assumed nurturing, men are assumed predators and/or girly. I’m not sure why I shouldn’t like this. I dunno, maybe I’m missing something?
Well, I mean, they either like it or they wouldn’t. I don’t care either way. I like humiliating people. Power trip and stuff. Not really sexual but it feels good.
But, I don’t see cuckolding as a bad thing, as long as it’s done consensual and the like. If anything, I see the appeal. Honestly, the fact that the manosphere calls people “cucks” just shows how fragile they feel about their own masculinity and even sexuality.
“Oh, noooo, my whole MANHOOD IS THREATENED because someone is SLEEPING WITH MY PARTNER! I am EMASCULATED!”
Pffffffff. Losers.
@Axe
Same here, man, same here.
Yup, all those things are true, @Jack! My worry was mostly about bringing nuance into a conversation where one participant is arguing in bad faith, or at least with an utter inability to read the deeper trends beyond his own sphere. This said, some of the points against him have been “Show us the proof of systemic bias,” whereas we should be accepting that bias – it’s expected by feminism. So, I was worried about stepping on toes, and worried that I was missing something about feminism in general.
“Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” applies here in spades, unfortunately. Hope you’re reading that, Andrew. You’re the reason we can’t have a discussion with “both sides”; you’re unwilling to move.
(More on that point, when you talk about “both sides”, you can’t be referring to either gender. There is a discussion ongoing about the bias men face, featuring the participation of men and women. It’s happening right here, with feminists and allies. MRA’s aren’t invited to the table because their first move is to flip it over and demand cookies.)
I’m all emotional for some reason! I’ma go have some tea and some’a them cookies, that sounds nice.
Yeah, that’s why I’m not having a conversation with Andy because it’s pointless. Mocking is more fun than banging your head against a wall.
I applaud those who are still engaging them in good faith because they have waaay more patience for this crap than I do. Really, in awe.
Psst.
Off topic, but I’ll post it here too.
http://i1307.photobucket.com/albums/s598/Paradoxys3DS/IMG_01541_zpskclnm5ai.jpg
Scildfreja has a tiny Fluttershy waiting for her. If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to mail you a pony care package, you just need to email me. 😀
I remember! He originally said he had his kids Wed-Sun. Maybe he meant Sun-Wed or something like that, but he never corrected me and then when people started questioning the veracity of his claims about his life, he got all pissy.
Maybe we’re thinking of slightly different things here. I do know that women are more likely to be the primary custody holder. I know and expect there to be a cultural bias against men taking on the role of primary nurturer and obviously that’s something I oppose.
What I’m not seeing is evidence that when fathers fight for custody, they are denied it. I don’t know about Canada, but there was a study of MA family courts showing that fathers who fought for custody got it 70% of the time. Also, everything I’ve seen suggests it takes quite a lot for parents to lose rights to their children altogether. There are cases where the child exists because the father raped the mother and she got pregnant and the father still gets at least visitation. What Andrew and other MRAs who come here fail to do is show that courts systemically deny shared custody to fathers who go after that.
Also, Andrew himself has shared custody so I’m not sure why he’s claiming to be denied rights when by his own admission he has them.
He seems to be working from the assumption that the courts are rigged against men and I really doubt that. I don’t doubt that women tend to be the ones viewed as natural nurturers because that’s obvious feminism 101 stuff, but that’s not really what he’s arguing.
It also disturbs me that he seems to assume that all parents who are no longer together oppose each other. My parents are divorced and my mother joined us for Thanksgiving on my dad’s side of the family and we all had a perfectly nice time. Not all divorced couples hate each other!
He hasn’t even really said what his ex did that was so terrible other than not work full time meaning that he has to pay child support. He seems bitter against women for no real reason.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/57eca806b4b7968adb1fd84c71ee05a7/tumblr_ofthrmateq1uk5pr5o2_1280.png
Oh, so, you mean they ARE suppose to be watching the kids.
It’s almost as if they either can’t keep their story straight or they need to double check their writing or something.
Well, you see, they have to pay $7,000 a year for their son’s hockey stuff while their wife pays $6,000 for their daughter’s stuff but he doubts the ol’ ex-wife has to actually pay that much for lacrosse or whatever the fuck it was.
And wifey doesn’t work full time while they do. In fact, they work two jobs so they can make $80,000+ a year in Canadian. (You’d think they’d quit the lesser paying job if it sucks so much but apparently not.)
It’s so terrible wifey doesn’t work as much and doesn’t get paid as much so wife can watch the kids while they work full time in two jobs and still watches the kids.
shows how little you know about the Canadian system. Unlike some states which have made it so only the payor’s primary job can be used to determine support Canada allows the recipient to not only include a secondary income in the calculation but leaves it to the judge’s discretion to impute that income upon the payor should they quit or voluntarily reduce their income from that secondary job. So in my case my ex does not believe what my income from secondary job is, has no proof that it is what she claims and yet here we are with her trying to use an income number about $10,000 above what it really is to calculate support (she backed off from a claim that was $18,000 above).
Am I bitter at the system? Fuck yes. Given what I have told you wouldn’t you be?
Okay, seriously, I can’t even with Andrew.
You said:
Have you actually looked at the UCCB? I will assume not, because:
-source
So if you click on the link to get to the Canada child benefit portion of the site, you will see that the ENTIRE THING is written without specifying gender. Seriously, the whole thing. It says ‘you’ the whole time.
It also specifies the Primary Caregiver is the one who will receive the money. No, I don’t know how that will work in a divorce situation, when it is ostensibly split 50/50.
Here’s an article on Maclean’s talking about how this is indeed an issue.
But the main point of your argument, that this was automatically paid to the women, is wrong.
In the older program (the one you are referencing here) says:
-source
So yes, this was a problem. (thanks to patriarchy, of course, but w/e) It was fixed in the language of the new program. The divorce thing was not fixed. Perhaps you should talk about that, instead of this ‘money is only paid to the woman!!!’ thing you’re going on about?
Edited down at the bottom for this! Sigh, not quite what I was hoping to find….
In other news…
I am super happy to find out that there is a men’s shelter in Toronto, thank you for that link. I think it was kupo? Thank you!
I don’t think you’re breaking any feminism rules, Scildfreja.
I was surprised to see that this thread had grown so long! I’m going to subscribe to it, so I can know next time a necro troll arrives.
Edited to add: Ahh, look at that! That language still exists in the new program, drat it drat it drat it!
I am really disappointed. When it wasn’t on the ‘primary caregiver’ page, I was hoping that we had got rid of it.
It does say ‘usually’, so there should be wiggle room, but this isn’t a thing that should happen.
@ Woody
Careful tripping on your stats. I know in the UK these numbers are often used to illustrate how rosy the system is but when you dig deeper custody is defined as “access” and can be anything from supervised access to sole custody. Break down the numbers and you will still see fathers are on the short end. Not saying this is the case with your numbers but given the unusually high value I think it is safe to say this may be the case.
@ Punkleass
<
Really? You really want to go there? You are a fucking ass for even saying this.
@Andrew
Jack is an ass for stating the truth?
@ Kupo, the “truth” according to who? Yes, women, I know, all dads come home sit in their recliner and drink beer and ask “what’s for dinner?”. It may be a focus group of two but I am certainly not that dad and my best friend is a stay at home dad who manages the lion’s share of the child rearing duties. I know many other dads who feel that the media still perpetuates the myth of the “super mom” and on the other side that of the bumbling, incompetent father who needs the woman to show him how to do simple tasks like changing a diaper. You just don’t get it – the 1950s are over and dads are increasingly taking on their equal share of child rearing and household duties. If you are with a guy stuck in the 1950s than maybe that is your problem because there are plenty (the majority I would argue) who are not.
This has got to be my favorite MRA whine ever.
The bumbling incompetent sitcom dad/husband.
This is a trope that largely advantages men. The male character gets to be mediocre looking and useless at home and is still the main protagonist of the story, gets to have a wife who’s far hotter than him who does all the household chores and/or child rearing for him even though in many cases both have jobs outside the home, and everyone still loves the bumbling male character despite his many flaws. In the case of Everybody Loves Raymond, that’s even in the title!
The wife character on the other hand, gets to be seen as the nag and the killjoy for getting exasperated because she’s run herself ragged keeping her husband’s shit together.
There’s a reason that known comedic actors take the role of bumbling sitcom husband. The straight man or woman is just as hard if not harder for the actors to do but it’s thankless and goes without recognition. This is why known comedic actors who are women play characters that are a mess too. Lucy Ricardo was not exactly the perfect sitcom housewife typical in that era’s entertainment because why would Lucille Ball waste her comedic talents on playing a competent but nagging and no fun housewife? If you’re mad about sitcom dads, take it up with the male comedians who create these roles.
The trope that men can’t do domestic work very well gives men who want to get out of domestic work the perfect cover to so. Even as women have become more equal in breadwinning, they still do more domestic work. It’s great when men want to do more in that area, but most don’t and that’s supported by the culture at large. If you think this is an advantage for women, you’re a ridiculous person.
Thank you, @everyone; I was worried I was misinterpreting or missing something. Clearly just over-stressed!
@Andrew, for the love of …
No one here has said that all men are awful, or all men are sexist, or all fathers shun parental duties.
We have said that there is a societal bias towards men being considered inferior care-givers. That Men who undertake child care are praised for lesser actions compared to women, because it’s not expected of them.
Odin’s Eye, Andrew, it’s a natural extension of the point you so are so desperately trying to defend! You’ve spent pages of this old thread trying to convince us that there’s a systemic bias against fathers (which we fucking agree with, read above). A natural outcome of that point is that men who break that mold stand out!
If you can’t acknowledge that simple – straightforward – logical outcome from your own damn position, I’ll be 100% convinced that you don’t have a point at all. That this isn’t about a logical argument, or argument from reason. If you want a conversation, you have to understand the full implications of what you’re saying.
I’m gonna run out of italic text at this rate. Jees, man!
To expand on my last post, only in the weird parallel universe that MRAs inhabit is it a privilege to be expected to work the same hours as your husband for less pay and then be expected to do the bulk of the household chores and the vast majority of the emotional labor and manage the social schedule.
The supermom trope is not there to prop women up. It’s an ideal we’re presented with that is impossible to meet. Trying and failing to meet the supermom ideal is a source of great anxiety and stress for many women. The implication of “you can have it all” is that you’re a failure if you aren’t simultaneously a high powered career woman and June Cleaver. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for both.
It sucks that stay at home dads are still treated as something weird or unmanly. Although it’s sure not feminists who are doing so. That doesn’t mean that men have it as bad or worse than women when it comes to gendered expectations around household labor and the raising of children.