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.
http://wwddtydty.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/irony_meter.jpg
Who are the ones falling into a faint and calling for the smelling salts because it’s too sarcastic and aggressive here?
I know it isn’t me or any of the regulars here.
Please, trolls, stop trying to pretend you can speak French.
1) It doesn’t make you sound any smarter. In truth, it makes you sound like a douche.
2) That ain’t even proper French, which makes you sound like even more of a douche.
I just got up and have more important shit to wear my patience thin on.
My Mum is a French citizen, lives outside Montauban, I spend more time on French sites than English??? So you have me puzzled.
Oh my. The point just flew right over your head, didn’t it.
@ shapman
No; you haven’t demonstrated the point.
You’ve just made, as you yourself admit, an “assertion” (your own word). You haven’t however shown any evidence for that assertion. Quite the contrary in fact. You’ve avoided answering any of the questions about what actually happened. We can draw an inference from that.
It appears then that you were permitted to give evidence that you were the primary caregiver; and also allowed to challenge your wife’s evidence that you weren’t; but the judge didn’t believe you.
Now, you can try to rationalise that result with unsupported allegations of bias, but you’ve shown no evidence here that was the case.
Indeed, as your position seems to have shifted from saying you were primary caregiver to just that you were a caregiver, then it appears the judge was quite correct not to believe you, because you yourself now admit that wasn’t true.
@ Jerry:
Tone trolling – attacking the other’s tone instead of their argument. When done by a provileged person against an oppressed one, it’s usually to set up an unreasonable standard for the latter, where they either repress any sign of (legitimate) anger at the injustices they face; or be instantly dismissed because “unreasonable”.
See the above: showing even mild discomfort towards any kind of discrimination, problematic behaviour or stereotype is painted as not only being “offended by everything”, but WANTING to be offended by everything.
Painting speaking up against relatively mild oppression as overreacting. Moreover: claiming that speaking up against relatively mild oppression means that you don’t care about heavier oppression, even when the topic of the discussion is the former and the latter would be off-topic.
Transphobia. Painting trans people’s request for people to use their own pronouns as an unreasonable demand, despite the fact that you’d almost certainly not bat an eye when a cis person does it.Implying that misgendering is 100% without blame.
Implying erroneously that trans and non-binary pronouns are only recently “made up”, instead of non-binary genders and trans people having existed for literally millennia pre-Christ.
Mixing up marxists, feminists and SJWs as all the same and all equally bad, without any evidence of their homogeneity nor badness.
Use of the meaningless derogatory twrm “SJW”.
Claiming that none of the issues listed are bad, in any way or form.
Claiming erroneously that men don’t assume to know better than women in any argument, including those where the woman is a certified expert. Claiming erroneously that men don’t tend to unfairly interrupt and dominate conversations while ignoring women.
Claiming erroneously that there aren’t men who occupy way too much space, and get offended when called out.
Claiming erroneously that men in a ertain business didn’t decide to jack up air conditioning instead of dressing more lightly, like the women in said business did.
Claiming that microaggressions are 100% harmless. Failure to understand that the issue with microaggressions is not their individual effect, but the combined effect of having to deal with dozens of them every singlr day.
Objectively false statement. Women – including in the West – face more violence from men than the reverse; more harassment; are kicked out from “male” fields; any field that becomes female-dominated loses prestige and wage because seen as “easier”; and more.
Moreover: completely fails to consider that men make up the vast majority of people in power positions. A group cannot systematically oppress anyone – and thus acquire systematic privilege – if they don’t have overwhelming access to that society’s power.
Strawman. Misrepresenting “We, as women, are oppressed on the basis of our gender” as “We, as women, are the most oppressed ever”.
Armchair diagnosing. Ableism (use of mental illness, real or perceived, as an insult).
Statement without any evidence.
“Dear Muslima” – implying that you aren’t allowed to fix or.talk about your problems because someone somewhere “has it worse than you”.
Assertion without evidence and directly against existing evidence of the contrary: both David Lisak’s study and S.K. McWhorter’s show that serial rapists tend to use alcohol because there is a bigger chance that the rape victim will be dismissed as a liar.
Ignoring that the police has a track record of being ineffective with fighting date rape.
Assertion without evidence.
Probable attempt to poison the well – falsely painting your opponent as a liar in other occasions to “prove” that theybeing are lying this time too.
And all of that without any sarcasm. Just like John wants.
@Sinkable
No my douchebaggery stands unquestioned
I just fail to see its connection to my French grammar
I had just posted on 2 French youtubes and before that a quebecois site which gets very confusing if I don’t think in English all day. Va avec means ‘go with’ (the flow) and douche is the French word for shower. Douche bag is a device American prostitutes would wash their bits out with. Which I believe you are referring to. If you want the answer to the question of the meaning of life consult Monty Pythons.
Don’t look now, folks, but I think the troll is tryna splain French to me. And demonstrating a bit more of his ignorance of it with every sentence, too.
I think the snowflakes should stop being so sensitive. Tone is information. To be unable to pick content from tone is a weakness.
It’s possibly related to that inability to properly cite what one is characterizing, and that inability to support the assertions that one makes about women.
I also detect a lack of knowledge about humor and it’s relationship to social conflict. Too fucking bad. I’ve long accepted that it’s part of changing an unbalanced society, as well as undermining the humor used by bigots of all stripes. The dominant culture wants to control tone and humor for reasons they often don’t understand themselves. In a way this emotional overload is useful, I don’t give a fuck for the feelings of the ones speaking in assertions, characterizations and slogans.
Did…did he just anglosplain French to John?
And Tizio, your post was spot on.
Citation needed, although you’re likely just making this up, because I can’t find any evidence online of a special Queensland police unit created to address drink spiking, much less any admission that the problem has magically gone away. In recent years Queensland has toughened their laws and mounted an awareness campaign, but absolutely no one connected with the police is saying that drink spiking is a made-up issue. Police departments don’t devote resources to imaginary problems.
Perhaps you’re referring to the National Project on Drink Spiking, which found 3000-4000 incidents across Australia during a one-year period (2002-2003).
The study also found that:
*3000-4000 is likely to be very much on the low side, as drink spiking is underreported due to social stigma and lack of awareness. Less than 15% of sexual assault drink spiking incidents get reported to police, and around 20-25% of non-sexual assault drink spiking cases.
*Drink spiking is very difficult to prove, unless the victim witnesses the drink being adulterated. Some drugs leave the body in a matter of hours. Alcohol is the most common substance used to spike drinks. If the victim was already drinking, it’s impossible to separate out what was voluntarily consumed from what was added.
*Sexual assault is a common motive, but so is robbery and “pranking”. Pranking is dangerous because the victim may unknowingly drive while intoxicated, and injure themselves or a third party. This isn’t just a “feminist” issue.
*Drink spiking is increasing in frequency (10-fold since the late 1990s).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you need to back up your assertions with facts, otherwise they’re just opinions pulled out of your digestive tract. Reals before feels, bro.
I always love how, for certain dudes, it’s much less effort to complain all over the internet and change their entire gender identity than to simply not grope women sitting alone in middle seats. That’s just out of the question!
@kupo
To be fair, I did lay the bait. It just never gets old.
@ Alan, your reading skills are right up there with Woody’s. I never said I was the primary caregiver. In a shared custody arrangement there are TWO primary caregivers. My point (again) was that the judge made an assumption with both the mother and father in front of her that the mother had custody. Clearly this learned individual did not even take the time to review disclosure from BOTH parties or she would have learned that she was presiding over a SHARED custody arrangement. My lawyer was sharp enough to see the gender bias exhibited by the judge. What comes after that (submissions, disclosure, cross examination) is moot. The judge tipped her hat on how she views these situations right out of the gate. If you don’t see an issue with that you disagree with me and my lawyer.
I can further expand on why these supposed non-issues are legit.
Having a dude speak condescendingly to you about something you know as much or more than him once in a while seems more like a minor irritation than oppression. However, it happens to quite a lot of women and on a regular basis. This indicates that it’s commonplace for men not to take women seriously, not to listen to what we say and not to believe we are competent. This has more serious implications. It means women have a harder time getting a promotion if her bosses are men. It means female political candidates have a harder time winning elections. It means doctors are less likely to take the self reports of female patients. It means in a he said – she said rape or abuse case the he said part will be given more weight. In other words, mansplaining is a symptom of a bigger issue.
Manspreading is actually talked about more by anti-feminists than feminists. Seriously. You all are obsessed with this topic that was brought up in passing. But considering that harassers use a made up need to take up as much space as possible as a cover to touch women on public transportation, I’m unwilling to dismiss it as a nothing issue.
Sexist air condition shows that men are considered the default in offices. It’s not just temperature either. Office furniture is designed with male bodies in mind. Again, it’s a symptom of a bigger issue. The issue being that the workplace belongs to men and women are just interlopers there.
You dudes that are upset about child support and alimony should take workplace sexism a lot more seriously. If women had as much power and money as men, you wouldn’t have to pay as much child support or alimony after a divorce. Just saying.
Shapman,
Alan is an attorney. He reads just fine. He basically does it for a living. I’m far less exalted, but I do have a college degree and have loved reading since childhood. I can also read just fine. Maybe the issue here is either with your communication skills or your conclusions themselves.
Your anecdote about the judge for your case sounds like she didn’t read all the available information and made an assumption due to lack of information. Since mothers are more likely to be primary caretakers – and it’s by definition impossible to have two primary caretakers BTW – than fathers, a conclusion was jumped to. It also sounds like your attorney set her straight so there was ultimately no harm done.
You haven’t demonstrated that there was an anti-male bias. It’s one possible motive. Another possible motive is laziness. Yet another possible explanation is burnout from having too many cases. Maybe she just wasn’t feeling well that day. Since we only have your side of the story to go on, another possible explanation is that you are exaggerating or fabricating information. This is why anecdotes aren’t terribly useful. There’s nothing wrong with discussing personal experiences in informal conversation. But if you’re trying to prove a systemic bias against men in family courts, one anecdote that is actually sort of weak is not going to do the trick.
Since there was a little confusion I thought that I would elaborate. I literally meant communists. They were people from a communist country that wanted to talk economics on the serious discussion board that I would eventually moderate. Three regulars that can be compared to conservitive American MRA types and also posted as Rainbow Dash were part of the board culture at the time one was “Dash Mercury”, this was my first one.
They were flat out saying that all communists were murderers by definition and making things unpleasant with no actual discussion. Assertions and insults, repeatedly, and with the intent to exhaust and bully out of the social space. I promptly made thus kind of poster my hobby. All one has to do to trigger a conflict is mention the word feminism in a positive way and you trigger a social dominance reaction. I promptly dominated every person like that on the board.
For a time I felt negative about all Rainbow Dash posters. That had consequences that I was able to identify because I was also part of a left leaning feminist social commentator cimmunity. We were having fights with people that were outraged that people were complaining about harassment, rape, racism and other bigotries. So while I can say that I sensed and dealt with bigotry in myself, compared to what society should be focusing on it does not sound all that impressive. “Easy model suppose. It was a very strange time.
Hey Nasty, go ahead and call for me to be banned. Am I setting off a trigger warning because you don’t agree with what I am saying? Maybe we can find a safe space for you where you can hide from the world and opinions which may offend you?
Dude, do you realise we’re regular readers of a blog literally dedicated to “opinions which may offend [us]” ?
Now think, what does that make you ?
Pahahaha, and now he’s mocking safe spaces when he was just complaining about how this website wasn’t a safe space for him and people like him.
Seriously, why do reactionaries always act so indignant when they’re rightfully mocked?
What a self-aggrandizing asshole.
@ Woody, in a shared custody situation by definition and by law there are TWO primary caregivers. What do you think that despite the fact a child resides with one parent half the time that the other parent is still the primary caregiver at that time? I am listed as the primary caregiver when the children are with me and my ex is when they are with her (that makes TWO primary care givers if you are counting). And by the way just because Alan is a lawyer does not make him better at comprehending (yes I have a university degree and a college diploma but what does that mean?). My brother is a lawyer and he has little regard for family lawyers and the system in Canada for the most part.
You have now lowered yourself to excusing the bias of the judge with a litany of possible excuses. Both parties disclosure clearly indicated that we are in a shared custody situation. The judge only needed to read the first part of each disclosure to ascertain this.
Again, my lawyer seemed to think this was an issue and said this was not the first time she has encountered such gender bias against fathers in family court (there it is not just about me. Are you happy?).
@dslucia, “rightfully mocked”? Who makes that determination? I think you are a douche but that is after all only my opinion. See the difference?
@Shaman
We had a clandestine meeting and came to a consensus.
Awwwww, looks Shapman, the person who came in here with aggressive criticisms they can’t or won’t support is reduced to the base human verson of dogs pissing on fences.
And this blog is not even a safe zone, explicitly.