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.
She doxxed herself? She truly is an idiot. Granted that info has been out there for over a year to anyone who cared enough to search for it. I found the fact that no campaign had been waged against her as a sign that either we really are better than her, or that she’s just a nobody no one cares to go after, given she’s not popular among the MGTOWs or other areas of the manosphere.
You are all so sure about the hatefulness of all those MRAs etc. pp. 😉 Did you ever consider, that there is nobody more self-righteous than a person without any doubt.
Probably not.
Sn0rkmaiden, I’m not doxing her, she’s using her real name publicly now. She used it on her gofundme:
https://www.gofundme.com/y377w4pc
That’s why I used it.
She actually tried to post a comment in this thread under her real name. Something to the effect of “delicious feminist tears.”
Whoops ninjaed like five times.
I should add that I understand why folks would be angry if I HAD doxed her.
for a few brief moments i was hoping this documentary dealio would highlight the obvious: that it’s completely possible to engage in activism regarding the issues affecting men *without* being a digusting, monstrous piece of shit. perhaps i was being entirely too naive.
i remember reading miss jaye’s account of her experiences in bringing up men’s rights issues and watching people grow immediately angry and hostile. that particular bit caught my attention, because i’ve witnessed that personally and sometimes wondered why it happens. your typical mra scumbag would likely tell you it’s because they’re a douche and a cunt and a shithead and they hate men and want them to die. while i don’t doubt that it’s possible they’re just assholes, regardless of what cause they cloak themselves with, i imagine that the reality of the situation is typically much less black-and-white.
actually listening to the person who is upset helps considerably: if they’re just a bully who feels as if only their cause matters, they will out themselves immediately. you can find examples of that every time someone like paul elam opens their wretched, subhuman mouth, which ties directly into another probable cause for someone raising their hackles at you during this exchange: the mra “movement” as a whole, along with its many different branches and affiliated communities, has managed to single-handedly poison the discourse so badly that even mentioning men’s rights is often seen as either a complete joke or an outright act of hostility due to the people most commonly spewing the associated abuse that’s become the trademark means of expressing their vile hatred of women.
it’s these very people, included as centerpieces in this documentary, who often cause others to have that heated reaction whenever you mention issues negatively affecting men in today’s world and i wonder if cassie jaye ever even managed to understand that. her most vocal backers certainly have zero self-awareness of that fact.
Back to the OP, I hope for Cassie Jaye’s sake it is a glowing love letter to AVFM. If she’s taken their money and goes on to say anything critical of them in her film they will crucify her.
Remember how smug they were when they though the GQ article would be favorable? And Sharret didn’t ask for any money first.
@David,
I understand now about JB, though I’m astonished she’s opted to do that at this stage. Maybe she’s writing another book?
“because fuck feminists!”
Wishfull thinking.
Oy vey, that Milo article is some ham-fisted shilling. Almost every comment about the film industry and docs is glaringly wrong-headed, which isn’t surprising since he’s most interested in setting her up as a anti-feminist truth teller shunned by all because of her threatening beliefs.
She isn’t saying angel investors want creative control, she saying investors (understandably) didn’t want to give money to a film giving the MRM more respectability than it deserves. And I’d of thought Milo would support rich people doing whatever they want with their money.
I honestly don’t have the time to pick apart this article but so I’ll just point out that it has Dean Esmay making claims about “the indie documentary distribution chain” while having no quotes from anyone in the film world who actually know what they’re talking about.
—–
The clip on Kickstarter has too many clips of MRAs blowing hot air for my tastes.
Paul Elem: “The red pill is about looking at these issues in a honest way even when it’s uncomfortable.” That particular line is both banal and false, and unfortunately there’s plenty more where that came from.
—–
She features herself way way too much, even claiming this film is as much about her “personal journey making this film” as it is about “meeting men’s right activists and prominent feminists”. There are exceptions, but “personal journeys” in docs not about the filmmakers own life is usually a sign of poor film-making or thin subject matter.
As Basil Tsoikas, an influential festival programmer, points out:
http://whatnottodoc.com/2010/09/27/dear-documentary-filmmakers-director-as-subject/
Putting aside the question whether it’s even possible to make a truly objective documentary, I don’t how Jaye can crow about “letting the audience make their own opinion” when the film include her on-camera reactions to interviewees and ‘video diaries’ in which see discusses her overall feelings about MRM and feminism. Partisan talking heads in documentaries already draws the film from a natural feeling cinema verite style, but a documentary can offer different perspectives by allowing disparate subjects to speak without any commentary from the filmmaker. Any chance of capturing multiple perspectives will be disappear when Jaye is seen on screen editorializing and drawing her own conclusions during her “personal journey”.
So, what about the menz?
Why does feminism need to devote its energy to men? Despite the fact that patriarchy can hurt men who don’t live up its ideals, it still as a whole privileges men. Women are asked to take a back seat in every other social justice movement. Male workers come first, black men come before black women, cis gay male voices are the most heard in the LGBTQ rights movement etc.
Now men want to take feminism from women too?
What you’re saying here is that feminism needs to be validated by focusing on men and can only be taken seriously if a male ally adds a contribution to the discussion. That’s some bullshit.
And what are the buzzwords you speak of?
Is there a fallacy name for this? I’ve noticed a lot of people, rather than showing why someone’s argument is wrong using sensible counterpoints or evidence will claim an argument is wrong because a new or jargony word or phrase is used.
Looking at her work, it’s possible that she’s cynically milking the subjects of her film for cash. I wonder what she told the Christians in her Daddy I Do documentary? Were they surprised and shocked to realise that they’d let her into their life, only to see themselves portrayed in an unflattering light in her documentary?
Did they fund her too??
I bet her final Red Pill film will be scrupulously fair, but the overall effect will be anti-MRM. Along the way, Jaye might well expose some of the excesses of contemporary college feminism e.g. the easy targets of trigger warnings and teary students etc. It will look fair and balanced.
And if she’s asked about the funding? I bet she says it’s not her responsibility to police who funds her kickstarter campaign.
I honestly believe that her final film will be an expose of the MRM. But the production will have been funded in an ethically and morally bankrupt way.
@WWTH:
I think it falls under Argument From Personal Incredulity: “I don’t understand the language that’s being used here, so it must be wrong.”
I admit that several years ago when I started reading the once plentiful PUA/MRA/MGTOW blogs and those of the ‘opposition’, I allowed myself to indulge in the comfortable and insulated mentality of white female privilege. I acknowledged the many benefits I reaped from the struggles of many great women that came before, and left it at that. However, faced with the mounting evidence that just because the target hasn’t been me doesn’t mean it can’t, amongst other things, my perspective has totally changed. Avoiding even the slightest hint of criticism about a group that makes finding things to be offended by or angry about one of their main priorities if not their first priority is an impossible task. Every corner of the manosphere has invested significant energy into holding on to the pieces that remain from the times where men (white) had all the power and privilege, did what they wanted to who they wanted.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
In this case, taking Evil’s money and making them a propaganda film in return s the ‘nothing’ being done.
No matter how positive a film maker is toward the MRM, a film about this hate-mongering movement will repulse the average viewer.
Despite that, I hope that Cassandra Jaye — for the sake of everyone who works on this film — returns the money and walks away from this project.
*is not ‘s’.
@Kat The average viewer, yes, but potential red pill recruits and those already R’pilled?
She started making the film using money from feminists. Then she personally interviewed MRAs and started changing her mind about them based on what they said. So she lost the feminist money sources. Now she is going to finish it with money from the manosphere. That’s a pretty neat trick.
I definitely want to see it. And it would probably be better with David Futrelle in it. But I can understand why he and other feminists would insist on a guarantee of ideological purity before granting an interview. Tactically, it is probably the safe decision.
No, Paulie (and other AVFMonsters), you did that yourself. No one had to have an “intent”, other than letting your own words and actions speak for themselves. No one needs to kick you in the mouth, because your own gigantic foot is already in there constantly.
@Iris:
There’s not much that I agree with Dr Dawkins about*, but he once said a very wise thing: Never engage in public debate with ideologues. It won’t convince them because you can’t convince them, and all you end up doing is legitimising their viewpoint by seeming to take it seriously.
The correct response to MRAs is not to debate them or go on documentaries to respond to their talking points. The correct response is to mock them, long and hard, and make everyone aware of how utterly, constantly, endlessly ridiculous they are.
Therefore, when it gets announced that someone is making a documentary that may as well be entitled “The Elam Effect: Inside the World of Men’s Rights Activists”, the correct response is not to give interviews, but to start making jokes about skulls and bathrobes, because that’s all the dignity that the subject matter deserves.
– – – – –
*That’s probably untrue. We’re both white male atheist scientists who live in England. We probably have a lot in common, just not the things that we get excited about online.
Oh sure, she’s just gonna literally pull your sperm out of her own ass to get preggers. You’re right, there IS nothing you can do about that. But there is plenty you can NOT do. And it all starts with not unzipping your pants.
(I’m sorry, I just hadda.)
For her sake, I hope her movie is a love letter to the manosphere. We all know what will happen if that is not the case, and I wish harassment on no one. Look what they did to Sarkeesian when she never even used their money, imagine the case of having their money used to show a film that accurately represents them, which I feel they will not agree with or like.
She is already at a point where she cannot refuse their money, that will definitely lead to harassment. My suggestion to her is if her movie is at all negative to the mra or redpill, for her own safety and well being, she needs to scrap that and try to portray the manosphere in a totally positive way.
@davidnewton
My first thought was that Paul Elam was shocked — or was at least pretending to be shocked — that the camera caught him exposing himself!
Great minds think alike?
EJ,
Yes, it does appear that Cassie Jaye’s crime was taking MRAs seriously. When she was planning on a hit piece as you describe, she had support from feminists. But when she wanted to take them seriously?
Not allowed.
Ugh, this wanker is going to spread from thread to thread?
Iris Scanner, to be fair, anything that looks at MRA’s honestly and seriously will still look like a hit piece because MRAs are ridiculous shit bags
So when a factual documentary was proposed about the MRA it was considered a hit-piece by MRA. That tells me all I need to know about MRAs.