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.
It was a critique of your grasp Yor, not your “views” or “position” on physics. Copy paste your Master’s of those physics views and positions by all means. It could not be less interesting than your other schtick.
Condensed Yor:
I’d love to hear your “position” on physics.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/popcorn_yes.gif
@Yor
TL;DR: You came to us, walk the talk or remain an incompetent gesticulating with text.
That a lot of words for someone too afraid to show specific examples of bias. And afraid to show what the problem with is with radical feminism.
Aparently you do fear pointing out examples and explaining what you believe, the only thing that serves to elevate your words from impressions to experiences. I don’t care about what you feel about this site. I care about specific things you have you have seen that are biased in an irrational way. You are clearly biased too, all that remains is to see which bias better matches reality.
But by all means, remain weak and incompetent. The value of your insults drains when it becomes apparent that you are all type and no exposition.
As for how biased tends to get used socially, claims of being unbiased are considered to be positive. Especially by the media. Yet our decision processes are influenced by something, because bias can be reasonable or unreasonable. There is no way to assess Yor’s claims about our bias without the examples they had in mind when making thier first comment. All they seem to want to do is to be a dog pissing on fences.
Radical feminism has existed for decades. It is the source of countless books and papers that you could read and learn from. There are also abundant resources you could consult that explain some of the differences between the various schools of feminist thought, including radical feminism. These range from dense academic textbooks to accessible overviews you can find on the internet. There is no shortage of ways you could find out what radical feminism actually means.
So, when you come in here using the words “radical feminism” to mean ” “any feminism I particularly dislike,” I know you haven’t even taken the 5 minutes to look up the terms you’re using on Wikipedia. You’re speaking from a position of total, deliberate ignorance. It’s impossible to take you seriously.
That has all the sophistication of that old playground song about floating down the Delaware while chewing dirty underwear.
http://static.wowcher.co.uk/images/deal/515260/132386.jpg
It appears that Santa exists after all. I asked for a troll who relies on bad physics for his arguments, and he delivered.
Tell me about physics, Yor. I would love to hear you talk to me about physics. You doubtless have some deep insights into physics that I’ve missed entirely.
Let’s start with stellar physics, if you like. What’s your favourite fully convective K-class dwarf star?
http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/001/885/d5c.gif
sigh
Andrew, Yor. Im’a keep this nice and simple, ’cause a) two words ain’t polite when one will do, we’re all people with lives, and b) it ain’t complicated.
First Part: Points of Contention
We understand that men do suffer injustices in society based on their gender. We discussed this, in this very thread, a few pages back. Andrew was nominally there for it. Feminism acknowledges these things.
Where we differ from you is in the explanation of the cause. We claim that these and other issues are caused by Patriarchy – a deeply-embedded power structure within society which affects everyone within it. To support this position, there are literal libraries full of meticulous research, cross-referenced and cited.
You claim that these issues are caused by Feminism, which you further claim has extended beyond its original purposes into trying to claim dominance of and superiority over men. To support this position, you have subreddits, blog posts and youtube videos.
I’ll jump right to the end on this one. Your support is bad. The “supporting evidence” you claim is a huge pile of confirmation bias and selection bias. It can be rejected without deep examination for the simple fact that in any piece of work, one must begin by examining the existing theories. We call this “doing your homework” in the biz. You people refuse to examine alternate theories, declaring your position invalid from the very outset.
This leads me to part two.
Second Part: Why We Don’t Give You The Fucking Time Of Day
As I said above, we actually agree that men are unjustly treated in society, our argument is on why this happens. You guys come in here and bring up these points, and are treated to mockery and animated gifs, and conclude from this that we aren’t interested in actually helping men. This isn’t true, but we certainly aren’t interested in helping men anywhere near you. We need to loudly reject your position – you force us to do this.
Because you refuse to acknowledge any examinations of those injustices beyond your own, you end up doing what sexist men have been doing since time immemorial. In your pursuit of your goals, you happily steamroll the rights, goals, dreams and struggles of other people. Even though your goals are just, you will remain unaware of the injustices you will cause as you pursue them, because you refuse to look for them.
Third wave feminism is a rejection of that. It is a refusal to bulldoze the rights and dreams of one group for the benefit of another. It ain’t perfect, for sure, but it’s self-critical and open to critique – real critique, not the uninformed and selfish whining you seem to consider critique to be.
We aren’t going to work with you to solve these problems until we can be sure you aren’t going to grind anyone into the mud as you try to solve them. You haven’t inspired a whole lotta hope in me on that one. You want to have an actual discussion about these things with us? Do your fucking homework.
Until then, you get gifs and a thumbed nose
http://static.fjcdn.com/gifs/Dancing+thru+is+it+just+me+or+does+this+work_d5f6ae_5025462.gif
The portrayal of men as emotionally maladjusted and domestically incompetent is not an indictment of men as you seem to think. It’s an excuse offered for why men shouldn’t be expected to help out around the house and with the kids. Feminists think that men are perfectly capable of doing their share of the domestic work and equally capable of helping to raise their own children. Men who take care of their children are not “babysitting” them, they are parenting them, and that’s a feminist message.
You’re not making the argument you seem to want to make.
@BronyMyLittlePony I asked about radfem, it was not a position that I was too bothered about. You can froth at the mouth all you want, that was not my discussion point (mentioned it in first comment, I don’t really care after that), which was the authors “stifle all debate / discussion” end comment rejecting all discussion with Cassie Jaye simply because Cassie Jaye dared to talk to someone they don’t like, and also how all of this echo chamber, insult anyone that doesn’t share your view nonsense is so petty this makes you all look childish i.e. you pretend to have the moral high ground. You do not. Neither do the MRA’s, but you come across like children. A point I think upheld by the kafkatrolling, and silly little childish GIF’s and ludicrous hate-filled gibbering. “weak and incompetent”. awww, BronyMyLittlePony, that’s so fun! You are like a little fluffy bunny rabbit, bouncing about there hurling little bunny turdlets at people, so nice! 🙂
@DoucheOfPatriarchy “It was a critique of your grasp Yor, not your “views” or “position” on physics. Copy paste your Master’s”. hahaha, My grasp of Physics. Like, wow. Seriously, my “grasp” utterly eclipses your understanding of Physics. Remember the site rules. “Vagsplaining is not allowed or talking to anyone about their lived experiences” as it says. uh huh. You keep digging that hole chipmunk.
@krappo My “position” on Physics is that I’m educated in it to a very respectable level (didn’t do a PhD like my brother, but made the choice to go out and get a job and money!!). It’s “my lived experience” remember (so again vagspalining is against site rules). You wouldn’t be able to understand the level of Maths and Physics that I did so talking to you about Physics would be pointless (unless you also studied Physics, in which case, cool, let’s go for a beer and talk about it, and if not, I don’t give a toss!). PatriarchyDouche said she was critiquing my grasp of Physics, which is nonsensical and stupid of her to say as my grasp of Physics already eclipses any possible understanding she could have, so what I said was consistent. Discussing Dirac’s equation (enjoying the idea of you googling it right now lol) or Maxwell’s equations or Feynman diagrams or black hole formation or any aspects of modern Physics would be utterly pointless. It’s ok though, I’m sure you have skills; honestly, don’t feel bad, I’m sure you are an expert in your “field” 🙂
@EJ can you point to any “bad Physics” that I stated? oops, yep, I didn’t post any Physics, good or bad, so that just sounds like you are smoking crack or something, or just a really bad troll attempt though, kind of pitiable …
@SillyFreyaDumass sorry, I didn’t even bother to read that, don’t feel too bad, I got as far as “Andrew, Yor. Im’a keep this nice and simple, ’cause a) two words ain’t polite when one will do, we’re all people with lives, and b) it ain’t complicated.” and just thought, “crikey, I just can’t be bothered reading this crap, it looks very long and dull”, so I skipped it. Sorry about that. I looked at your crappy GIF though, it just makes you look like a boring and pointless person. Sorry.
Annnnd … Yor backs out of EJ’s challenge.
Generally I just assume any adult person knows how to do their own chores, and I’m not sure how your defensive screed above contributes to the discussion.
Congrats, you’re an average dad, I guess? Good job for meeting minimal standards?
Oh, here’s my contribution, on the same level: I admit, I don’t know how to clean an oven properly.
Lol! K. I’ll keep it down to single sentence paragraphs, then, if that’s your tolerance for listening-to-other-people.
Andrew’s the reasonable one of the two of you, anyways; that one was more directed at him than you.
Also, you’re a Master of Physics, but have no tolerance for reading a couple of boring paragraphs? Lol!
“I don’t read things that are dull, even if they’re relevant to the topic at hand,” said no-grad-student-ever.
Master of Physics from the University of Google, no doubt.
Nah, Google has too much of a liberal bias. InfoWars and Penn & Teller.
Not only can I do that but, as of just now, I also know how to override the locking mechanism on an Indesit washing machine.
It would have been nice to have sussed that before snapping off the actual door handle, but I’m hoping it’s enough to earn me a cool nickname like Yor did for everyone else.
Yor sounds a bit like Effort Chicken Man.
Okay, the name change is taking forever to get out of moderation so I’m changing it back for a bit.
Speak for yourself. Individual men can be harmed by patriarchy if they do not conform to masculine gender roles but patriarchy still benefits men far more than it harms them. That’s why it’s patriarchy.
It sucks that people give a side eye to stay at dads and all, but like POM was saying, the bumbling dad trope still benefits men because it gives them permission to dump all the domestic drudgery on women even when they work full time outside of the house too.
Men are not oppressed because of their gender. At all. They are privileged because of it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise to appease a couple of trolls who think we’re man haters and will continue to think that no matter how nice and reasonable we are with them.
Not really. You and Belldonna tried to be nice to him and he still said we all had cold hearts. He completely ignored that you’re bending over backwards to listen to him. He’s here because he’s an anti-feminist. He’s an anti-feminist because he’s a misogynist. He’s a misogynist because he’s an asshole. Not because feminists aren’t nice enough to him.
I know being nice to trolls is your thing, and that’s cool. But not of all us believe that men and women suffer equally under patriarchy. In fact, that’s a claim that pisses me the fuck off when men make the claim because they do it to derail from women ever working on our own issues. They do it because they actually want a patriarchy and will do anything they can to roll back feminism and make everything all about them. If a man comes to me and tell me that he, as an individual is struggling with masculine gender norms in our culture he’ll get empathy for me. If a man comes in here whining about how men are discriminated against and feminism is bad because he don’t make men the center of the universe, he can go step on hundreds of Legos.
Andrew and Yor.
Do not interpret my post as evidence that you’ve stirred the pot and turned us against each other. I’m having a minor disagreement with some of the implications of Scildfreja’s post but she’s still a million times better than either of you. So fuck off.
@WWTH,
I really don’t have any argument with what you’re saying there! I certainly don’t believe that men and women suffer equally under patriarchy, far from it. It’s called Patriarchy for a reason after all. Thank you for clarifying and pointing out things I should have!
Delurking now because I actually know almost all these things!
Dirac’s Equation (also known as Dirac’s Formula): a modification to e=mc2 that states that the energy of a particle depends on its momentum and spin as well as its mass. It was used to predict the positron well before the positron was actually discovered through experiments, which was a first for theoretical physics.
Maxwell’s equations: these are not nearly as high-level as the other topic you have name-dropped. They unify electricity and magnetism into, well, electromagnetism, show that electromagnetism moves in waves, and provide a way to measure its speed, force, etc. Maxwell discovered that light moves in waves as well, and laid the groundwork for people creating radio waves, x-rays, all that jazz.
Feynman Diagrams: a way to model particle-particle interactions on the smallest scale. I do not know as much about these as I do about the other two, but I’m sure that other people here can expand on this if they choose to.
Black hole formation: something something rips in space-time something something we still don’t really know that much about them.
So, yeah. Of all the things that gets me to delurk, it was empty bravado about physics.
tl;dr: I’m new here and I have picked up enough physics knowledge from reading on my own to rival the “I have a PhD” troll that’s buzzing around. Hi everyone!
Hope I didn’t sound too harsh. I’m cranky for unrelated reasons (it snowed a lot) and that probably affects my posts!
Excuse me? Why on Earth would you assume that I can’t understand the level of Maths and Physics that you did? What the fuck makes you think you know my level of education on those subjects?
Edit: Notice how he doesn’t even fucking question that EJ is educated in Physics, yet he does question my knowledge without even knowing a single fucking thing about me? Gee, I wonder why.
Feeemaaales can’t understand math and physics. Everyone knows that!
@Yor
Let’s try this again. These are your words, do try to have the courage to own them from here on out or to rephrase what you mean. You came here in a social conflict posture, it is fair for us to do the same. As long as there is content with the conflict I can work with it. I’m assuming that your last comment was supposed to be what you are calling bias (in a negative sense) and bigotry (which is a bias defined by it’s irrationality).
Claim: this site is bigoted and biased.
Attached claim: it is biased because it is radical feminist.
“Is this a radical feminist site?” was offered as a potential answer to your question rephrased as “Why is this a bigoted and biased site?”
You are in fact asserting that you see:
1) Bias (which you phrase as a negative thing)
2) Bigotry
3) That radical feminism is biased and bigoted (see below).
You must be willing to quote specific things if anyone is to actually assess your asserted opinion. Fuck your emotional impressions, I want the substance.
I’ll strip out the meaningful bits from your last response.
If it will get you doing your work when it comes to your assertions I can drop that one. That still leaves the bias and bigotry that you claim to see (keeping in mind that bigotry is a form of bias).
I’m not seeing what you put in scare quotes. Post a quote coward.
An echo chamber as it is defined in that link is a social space that is a neutral at the species level. Eventually bad ideas need to go and one part of that is having social spaces that deliberately treat them differently. I think of it as “strategic social cohesion”. So while it is true that there is bias here, you have yet to demonstrate that it’s a problem. This is not about stifling speech, Cassie Jaye and the people they interviewed have free speech rights. This is about a social message about shitty people with shitty ideas. Shunning a natural part of what we are and all that remains is if the subject(s) of the shunning are worth it. Arguments have already been made there and you can go find them in the post and tell me what is wrong with them.
You use bias in your decision making as well. Something has to sway you in one direction or another when there are opposing claims or presentations of reality. If you want this to be more than a simple insult you will provide reasons for why our deliberate and chosen social bias is wrong.
You have not even tried to line your words up with a definition of bigotry.
Until substantiated claims of “bad bais” (to give it a name) bias and bigotry (irrational intolerance) are actually made by you insults are all you have.
I frankly don’t care how I come off to you. I care about what you can actually demonstrate.
@WWTH, not at all <3 I did a lot of hand-waving in my original post. It was sort of a strategic thing really – sympathizing in order to reduce opposition. Didn't expect it to be at all successful, but I'm trying to practice sympathy in the face of hostility. (I tell myself that I'm doing it because it's good to practice, but it's probably more to do with my tendencies of self-debasement.) I hand-waved over the things you took offense to, and you had every right to, because those things are very important! It isn't fair that men have to compete with one another to climb the social hierarchy; but it is less fair that women have to be the rungs of the ladder.
Please continue to critique me when I leave out something important! Thank you again.
@kupo,
‘Cuz yer a female, kupo, and they scientifically proved that ladies just can’t hack the maths, yanno.
Fun: I’ve very rarely met anyone who’s gone through the trials of a Masters or PhD who subsequently brags about their intelligence. It seems to happen to Engineers, Physicists and Chemists with the greatest frequency (apologies to those professions), likely because they’re the fields with the simplest slice of the world-pie to work with. They can be fooled into thinking that they have mastery of everything because they’ve grasped their relatively simple models. Engineers are especially prone to this for some reason. (329 year old engineers especially, which is weird)
Also fun: The same science they use to claim that wimmens are less capable than mans at mammoth-hunting and mathematics and whatnot are the exact same sciences that they decry as being full of bias and illegitimacy. The social sciences. Demographics and social psychology.
The mans, they are a tricky pickle!