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.
@ Croq
Yes sorry Cardinal Pell is the only one I know, and both the Catholic church and the people who ran the orphanages for the British kids in the 50’s can burn in hell.
I am not Australian, Just temporarily in this intellectual backwater. I have an interest in Norse place names. can translate old Norman/latin/French…Grew up in Kent, Toulouse and Salzburg
To Sverige Kvinna. You cant blame me for thinking you were Swedish with that name. Very sorry.
I am not trolling I stand behind what I say and believe debate is vital for the raising of the collective conscience.
Not sure why someone who opposes child abuse would be part of/defend a movement that tends to argue that it’s natural for adult men to have sex with girls who are just starting puberty, therefore age of consent laws are misandry
“Slaying” doesn’t truly describe it. What I’ve observed is that a troll blundering into this place is more or less like a mouse wandering into a room full of cats. Most are toyed with for a while, and only then eventually squished by David’s LART. 🙂
The name in question looks somewhat Swedish … also somewhat Norse, and Icelandic, and Old English, and like the last common ancestor of all four. The most you could infer reliably, I suspect, is that its (and possibly also her) heritage intersects with the northwestern corner of Europe c. 1000CE.
ETA: How the hell did this end up inserted above one of the ones it’s quoting?
@Alan
Wonder how much time has been sunk into both sides Cassie trolls in various threads since Oct 2015. The opportunity cost is staggering
@Jez
Not for thinking it’s Swedish. Perfectly honest mistake. You do lose points for tryna be clever and fucking up a fairly basic translation. And even more points for, after having it pointed out to you and accepting said nym is not Swedish, still calling her by a Swedish nym which is still not any sorta translation of Scildfreja. You also lose points for being a tedious troll generally. So…
Who the fuck you lying to?
pretty broad brush you have there Woody. Maybe I can use it to paint the side of my house!
He replied using the email link which still works to reply directly under a post even though David has it disabled on the site. This causes a bug where the post becomes orphaned because it’s now on a different page from its parent, causing it to forever float to the bottom of the page.
@ Jerry, you are wasting your time here. I had some of the “intellectuals” on here tell me that they felt “sorry” for my daughter that she had me as a father and that my comments led them believe that I might be a “serial abuser”. These individuals don’t want an open dialogue on gender issues unless it begins and ends with everyone understanding that the patriarchy is right up there with the law of gravity in terms of its irrefutable nature. In other words, even if men do suffer from gender discrimination in areas such as medical funding for male diseases, funding for male domestic abuse victims or the gross imbalance that still exists in family and criminal court it is the fault of the patriarchal system.
The troll is addressing Scildfreja as ‘Swedish woman’.
@Jerry, No harm, no foul.
Though your inability to correct yourself is troubling, especially combined with your eagerness to continue. Im’a focus on this for a bit, because it’s more of a neutral topic but still very demonstrative of the issue.
My name is not Sverige Kvinna. I am not Swedish, as I said before – not that I wouldn’t like to be! But I’m not. It’s not even what my name translates to. It’s Scildfreja, a portmanteau meaning shield woman or shieldmaiden. Unnyðnes means “freedom from anger.” It’s Anglo Saxon, pre-Norman English.
You addressed me first as “Sverige Frau”, a melange of modern Swedish and German, instead of using my name. (You’ve also been using your own spin on other peoples’ names, but that’s another kettle of fish.) You didn’t know what my name meant, assumed it was Swedish, and decided that was a better way to address me than my own name. Why?
Then, after I explained that the proper Swedish of your word would be Sköldkvinna, but that I’m not Swedish and that’s not my name, you call me… Sverige kvinna.
You continue to refuse to just use my name as it is displayed on your screen, as if practically immune to correction, even when the evidence is literally in front of your face. You are driven to present your own context instead of receiving information and updating.
If you can’t give me the respect of using my damn name, what possible reason do I have of thinking you’d be swayed by any arguments I might make in a debate?
Please do try again. You can start by addressing the fact that the study you’re referring to when you say “women have more control over money than men (and spend it on frivolous things)” doesn’t say at all what you think it does, as referenced in my last post to you.
They call me hell.
They call me Stacy.
They call me her.
They call me Jane.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my – name.
They call me quiet.
But I’m a riot.
Mary, Jo, Lisa,
Always the same.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my – name.
(are you callin’ me darlin?)
(are you callin’ me bird?”)
They call me hell.
They call me Stacy.
They call me her.
They call me Jane.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my – name.
They call me quiet.
But I’m a riot.
Mary, Jo, Lisa,
Always the same.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my name.
That’s not my – name.
Happy 1000 everyone! Here’s to 1000 more?
(please no)
Thank you all, my ducks! I’ve been called many things, but never Swedish! Frankly, I really like the sound of Sköldkvinna. Maybe I’ll make a change at some point. Scildfreja’s more genealogically appropriate for me, though. Should really find the Breton translation, too. Ah well.
1,009 is the highest ever score by a batsman in an officially sanctioned cricket match.
http://www.a2zupdate.com/imageupload/NewsBig/8907472687502.jpg
Dang, have I been missing something epic? Looks like I got reading to do!
As a fun little addenda, far as I know “sverige kvinna” isn’t even right. That’s “Sweden woman.” The name he wants is “svenska kvinna.” So that’s fun. I’m not Swedish and don’t know the language, that’s just what the googs tells me!
My translation comes up “Sweden female”, which to me, is even more eyeroll-worthy, but then, I’m using Google Translate, so.
You’re obviously not, as you still insist on calling her that.
@Shapman
Jerry came in here making unsubstantiated claims that he later admitted to making up. That’s not an “open dialog on gender issues”. That’s trolling.
Regardless, several commenters responded to Jerry’s comments and refuted some of his claims (see Scildfreja’s comment on the previous page which links to an actual study). Jerry’s response was to make more unsubstantiated claims, while purposefully getting people’s names wrong. Jerry is trolling, but commenters here are still refuting his claims with evidence. It certainly seems like the regular WHTM commenters are more interested in an open discussion of the issues than Jerry is.
Yes. Yes, it is. This has been discussed many times both here at on other feminist websites. Here’s an example:
If you ask Google,you can find many, many, many more.
@Shapman, I recall that discussion! I certainly didn’t wish you or your daughters poorly, nor do I now.
If you’d like to contest the deeply-rooted and systemic problems which the blanket term “The Patriarchy” represents, I suggest doing some honest reading on what the term means first. Your blithe dismissal of the thought it might be involved suggests, more than anything, that you haven’t a clue about what it is or how it operates.
“Patriarchy” isn’t a specific, limited structure. It’s like the word “Biosphere.” It influences everything in its scope. There are other actors – racism, classism, etc – but patriarchy is a grand shibboleth stretching out across the entire landscape.
Hit the books and then come on back. If you’re interested in doing more than complaining, that is.
If you’re the person who whined about paying child support for several pages under the name “Andrew” I remember why people were suspicious that you might be abusive. It is because you claimed that women routinely lie about being abused and the courts collude with them. You then said that if a father is accused of child abuse, the child should be left with him until the allegations are proven just in case the accusation is false. This is something that would put children in major danger in the cases when the allegations would be true.
Abuse apologia and lack of empathy for victims of abuse caused people to think that you might just be abusive yourself. It’s perfectly rational to pay attention to giant red flags like this.
There’s evidence for patriarchy and lots of it. There is absolutely no evidence of gynocracy and society wide misandry. This is why the feminist and MRA positions do not need to be given equal weight. You made the claim that family courts are biased against men. It was up to you to prove it. You didn’t. All you did was complain about your ex wife.
Your other claims were already discussed to death, so no need to go over them again right now. I’ll deal with the bolded one only.
Medical research, both on humans and on animals tends to be exclusively performed on males. Women died from heart attacks for ages because nobody bothered to notice that the symptoms are different for women than they are for men. In the US, until the ACA women were charged extra for their insurance and many policies don’t cover birth control even though they do cover boner pills. Doctors are also less likely to take female patients seriously when they describe symptoms because women are still seen as hysterical. Then there’s all the women who die during a miscarriage because of doctors being unwilling to perform an abortion. There is a male birth control pill and it can’t get approved because it comes with the exact same side effects female BC has. Because apparently male bodies are more valuable and male suffering more serious.
How are you seriously going to claim that men are the ones discriminated against in medicine?
@Scildfrega
Set theory is a little creepy (I’m doing some basic familiarization on.Wikipedia). Some of it reminds me of how I experience non-literal language. Specifically the overlapping sets. Maybe what I need is an outlet for some of the more sensitive and difficult to deal with parts of Tourette’s Syndrome? I really do want some general impressions about what I’m trying to do. But while I’m functional, I’m not where I want to be and it makes things expressively complicated. I learned some things that show show me what the problem looks like, but I’m stuck and need some outside impressions as a general need. Do you think anyone would mind? I’m willing to make it interesting when it comes to the journals. In a strange twist of psychology I’m not really bothered by being open about it, but this stuff did get called demon possession in centuries past. I feel like I need to ask permission, which is creepy when you think about that contract thing.
You are right about venting. It’s not a solution, it’s practice. You have to express your feelings more deliberately and constructively. You just reinforce habits otherwise. There is a modification of CBT specific to TS that essentially works like tic replacement. There is an actual social pattern generator constantly going off in my perception (of a set of generators thay include physical) that feel like a pooling of electricity when I lie still. Insults in other people, basic sensitivity to other symbolic communication in my life experience. Those mental tics are just how I’ve chosen to bind that sensation.
I’m also not worried about trolls. I’m serious about that predatory instinct thing. I compulsively disassemble insults and arguments when I have mental downtime. They do not bother me, and I think white male privilege is involved. It seem consistent with what I read. I’m learning upsides. I tend to have issues with the fact my versuon of what is reported as an overload of negative empathy. I feel the negative social expressions of others more intensely than average. I don’t think it’s that simple though. I’m sure that I feel a set of positively felt impulses more strongly too. Is an AMA a thing that sounds appropriate and interesting?
I do use an atypical definition of troll though, so I don’t tend to contradict the use of the term very much. It’s more like “person who is the focus of a social conflict”. I mentally try to capture the people who inadvertently cause a conflict. For example the Communists that wanted to talk about economics. That one almost became a Rainbow Dash fan bigotry while I interacted at Ponychan, I think the cross pollination from 4chan had a slight Dash bias but I would foolish to dismiss the possibility of recollection bias.
Ah, Shapman, the poster previously known as Dandy Andy.
WWTH, yeah, same guy.
@dr.ej
When men suffer from sexism, then, they do so in much the same way women do. That is, they suffer not because women rule the world and are targeting men, nor because feminism has somehow triumphed and brainwashed all of our elected officials (most of them still men) into ideological misandry. Rather, men suffer because of the same gender role stereotypes that hurt and restrict women—though men, being of a different gender, fall afoul of those stereotypes in different ways…Men are supposed to be active and violent—so their claims to domestic rights are denigrated and violence directed against them is shrugged off as natural or non-notable.
That is a point I made, in a different way, in my first post here. But as I found out, to some here anyone who doesn’t subscribe to every detail of their orthodoxy is a woman hating bigot. I’m politically to the left, I loath Trump and his like, I’ve learnt from feminists over the years, and I think David would find me an acceptable advocate of men’s rights. I came here to talk, as I do on many forums, with others concerned about human rights. To anyone who believes in human rights, there’s no incomparability between those of men and women. But I’ve never encountered such aggression as here.
To those who refuse to engage sensibly with anyone whose views are outside the parameters they’ve erected around themselves, I’ll say this. If you want to change the world you have to persuade people. Talking amongst yourselves will achieve nothing.
I see your reading skills have not improved. I never whined about paying support. I presented that it is an injustice that one individual should pay approximately 40% of their take home salary in support (both child and spousal support) while maintaining shared (50/50) custody. You and your cronies railed against that number and tried to make it sound like I was not telling the truth but these are the facts (I can send you the court documents if you like?).
Point 2 which illustrates your reading skills have not improved. I don’t believe I ever said that. I believe what I said was that unfounded allegations should not be the foundation of any custody decision. Truth is that they are in some cases. I did present a link to a Canadian federal government paper addressing the subject of false allegations of abuse in family court. Despite the fact that you say false allegations do not seem to be an issue I still find many papers written by people in the mental health industry plus the one I provided from the Canadian government on this very issue. I guess they are writing about unicorns in your opinion?
Again, work on those reading skills Woody. Scour my posts and see anywhere where I either apologised for abusers and/or showed a “lack of empathy” for victims. Quite the opposite, I think that abusers are the lowest form of life. Slightly higher on the evolutionary chain are parents who deny a former partner their parental rights by making false allegations of abuse. Come to think of it, you never showed “empathy” for those parents who had their parental rights stolen by a spouse who made false allegations – you just denied that it ever happens. Convenient.
At the end of the day, I am wagering I have far more real world experience with the family court system than you (unless you want to present evidence to say that is not so). I have consulted with many lawyers who have defended both mothers and fathers and none of them denied that false allegations occur and in fact they admitted that they do while being careful of protecting their legal colleagues and not admitting that lawyers sometimes counsel their clients to do so (I can just imagine the legal poll now “have you ever counselled your client to fabricate an abusive situation to gain an upper hand in a custody battle”. Yep, I am sure lawyers would admit to that. This does not mean it does not happen. )
Key phrase “for ages”. Is that the case now? No. Does money allocated to breast cancer research almost double that of money earmarked for prostate cancer? Yes it does. This despite the fact that the mortality rate is fairly similar.
any empirical evidence to support this?
Woody, we will never agree on the topic of gender issues. I want an inclusive discussion you want one which is inclusive only if those on the other side buy into the “theory” of the patriarchy (I don’t).
I think me being categorised by you and your “friends” as a possible “serial abuser” and being told my daughter should feel “sorry” to have me (a loving, caring and supportive parent) as a dad seals the deal that we can’t have a reasonable dialogue.
Can I get an Amen (oh wait amen has the word “men” in it – trigger warning!)