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.
@EJ,
I can think of somewhere that seventh head could go….
Re: cartoon
If truth is your sword and fabulousness is your shield, the cartoon is not very accurate. Milo doesn’t even own a sword, he just goes around trying to bang people with his shield.
Also, how does “gaytriarchy” figure into this? Crank political cartoonists apparently think it should make enough sense if you just label everything in the cartoon.
Arctic Ape:
I bet the shield isn’t even his…
I can’t quite figure out WTF a “Gaytriarchy” is supposed to even be. Do they mean “The secret gay Illuminati” (my best guess, given the tin foil eye)? Even if we ignore the fact that gay people have only been considered legally human in the US for four bloody months, -archy kinda means “Overtly in charge.” Secret is the opposite of overt.
… Actually, thinking about it, that applies to “The secret gynocracy” too. A -cracy, by definition, cannot be secret.
You owe me a new cup of decaf and keyboard.
I assumed that that was a girl-hydra. You know, since SJWness is all about the wimminz.
The only thing that’s reasonable about the MRM is their top line argument that men and boys have rights which should be upheld. Because, you know, they’re human so of course they should. They occasionally have some valid arguments here and there that are based on facts and evidence. And, of course the cause should be dealt with separately from the bad people who sometimes espouse them (but do nothing about the problem).
However, it seems to me that the main problems that MRA complain about are problems of working class and poor men (barring the suicide one – but I don’t know, maybe that one too). . Instead of blaming women – their default position – they should be looking to blame (mostly) other men.
And maybe, instead of looking to blame in general, they should be looking to solve. But there you have it.
I mean, I get it, a big chunk of my family – though not all – are exactly the kind of men who have been treated as largely disposable by society. And as hard as their lives have been, they would have been treated the same or worse pre-feminism. And those that have got out have had opportunities that maybe some of their sisters wouldn’t have.
It’s funny that the cartoon Milo is slaying a Hydra with a “safe spaces” head. After all, one of the top manosphere whines is that women are getting their icky cooties in male safe spaces like gaming, comic books, atheism, and all of STEM.
Omg, you guys are part of a freaky religion. keep patting yourselves on the back and bury your heads in the sand. lalalala is all you want people to hear.
truth hurts doesn’t it
pretty sure this is rope-a-dope and this person just the MRM/GG jerks to fund a doc ultimately taking them down.
I assume if she found the decent MRMs she found the ones who at one point decent people that got sucked in to the MRM philosophy and don’t realize how badly they are being snowed. Either that or shes playing the super long con, and plans on pulling the wool out at the very last minute and exposing the awful people in the MRM community at the very end. Thatd actually be kinda funny.
It’s not going to be anything like The Sarkeesian Effect, this will be a real documentary made by a professional crew rather than a ramshackle Youtube response video made by incompetent knuckleheads. Despite Iris’s fannish hope, it might never hit Netflix. Jaye’s last films aren’t on it and neither are doc films more popular or better reviewed than hers. There are a hell of a lot of docs out there.
Unlike The Sakeesian Effect, this film could end up on Netflix and be seen elsewhere, but sorry MRA conspiracy theorists including Milo, I’m not particularly concerned or aggravated by that. I just don’t want to see this film. I was put off by the pandering to Milo article and the blah teaser trailer in which MRAs wilder claims aren’t challenged, but it’s the potentially disastrous narcissistic video journals that makes this a movie I’m not particularly interested in seeing and definitely not paying to see.
Curse you, blockquote monster, curse you straight back to hell.
It’s not going to be anything like The Sarkeesian Effect, this will be a real documentary made by a professional crew rather than a ramshackle Youtube response video made by incompetent knuckleheads. Despite Iris’s fannish hope, it might never hit Netflix. Jaye’s last films aren’t on it and neither are doc films more popular or better reviewed than hers. There are a hell of a lot of docs out there.
Unlike The Sakeesian Effect, this film could end up on Netflix and be seen elsewhere, but sorry MRA conspiracy theorists including Milo, I’m not particularly concerned or aggravated by that. I just don’t want to see this film. I was put off by the pandering to Milo article and the blah teaser trailer in which MRAs wilder claims aren’t challenged, but it’s the potentially disastrous narcissistic video journals that makes this a movie I’m not particularly interested in seeing and definitely not paying to see.
I don’t care about “the struggle, the journey and the transformation the filmmaker went through” when she interviewed and filmed MRAs for 100 hours of footage. That’s not a personal journey, that’s something every documentarian does when making a feature length film. I called doing your job. This isn’t a personal story like Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachery or Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, no one outside of anti-feminists are going to care about her personal musings over Paul Elam interviews. I’m guessing Laura Poitras went through a hell of a lot more making Citizenfour yet she doesn’t blather on screen about it. The fact that she’s showing the interview footage in chronological order suggests that the video diaries function as the main narrative of the film. These video diaries just seem like a crap narrative crutch and it’s makes me think that her footage of MRAs is not particularly engaging on it’s own.
That could change, teasers of unfinished docs aren’t the best way to judge a film. There should be some reviews to go by. She’s planning to four wall it NY and LA, meaning they’ll rent theaters, and if she’s smart she’ll hire a PR person specifically to get it reviewed more widely then her last film. We’ll see.
MRAs are having a grand time casting this Kickstarter funding drive as some hard fought skirmish in their grueling cultural war with the feminists and SJW foes in their head. I guess this is a nice change of pace from yelling at strangers in comment sections, but it still reveals their movement’s complete lack of substance. There will be no backlash or counter action against this Kickstarter campaign because only complete idiots with too much time on their hands and too little critical thinking in their head react like that, hence Gamergate.
So is Milo’s questionable dye job heroic because he writes for Breitbart or is it because it’s boring, unlike the hydra’s much more fun collection of hair styles.
One of the heads has no name on it, just the dreaded multicolored hair dye.
I still can’t take my eyes off that photo of Elam, which is a sentence I’d hoped would never leave my lips. But… he is peeing on the carpet there, right? He’s in a feminist’s home, she’s stepped out for a second, and he’s peeing on the carpet and thinking she won’t notice till he’s gone?
@jupitaur
It says “Pearl Clutchers” in white which was a bad and unreadable choice. He probably didn’t have time to color it or something.
This will not end well for Elam, just like his latest campaign to stalk and harass doctors and rabbis and Muslims who circumcize infants. He’s attacking men with resources now, not young female college student feminists. I’m no intactivist but I understand to make change you don’t go the murder Planned Parenthood doctors route, you use education and so on. His new register-him.com site where he doxes physicians is going to end in some doctors being murdered just like happened with the Planned Partenthood doctors.
Nothing works out for Elam, because he’s a vicious propagandist with no personal charm. He better not go after this fimmaker. A lot of feminists are fed up with this harasser.
All their “points” have been dealt with and debunked. Repeatedly. And here, they’ve been laughed and pointed at, just as I am laughing and pointing at you right now. How’s THAT for a “mindphuk”?
Well, you would know, wouldn’t you? The truth is against MRAs, all the time.
And if pointing and laughing at you dimwits and stooges makes me a freaky religionist, I got just one thing to say:
LALALALALALA.
Why are the MRM-crowd so hard up for victim points? The language they use is always so dramatic when referring to reactions from feminists. “Censorship” when someone has an opposing point of view to share, “shunned” when someone finds your actions biased and “MRAs are humans too :(” when pointed out that the things they say are hateful. It’s like a Honeybadger wearing that target logo so a feminist knows where to shoot her. Yes, those feminist shooting rampages are a real risk eh? I hope you got insurance for that.
Sit down and take a breath. I get panic attacks too but after a breather I realise my brain probably won’t explode all over the other people in the room with me.
“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.””
This is because for many of these people morality is relative. It only matters who is doing what to whom, not whether the action itself is bad, although they’ll say it is (*when in context of others doing it*). They also believe this is how it works in mainstream society – only it’s their “enemies” who are allowed to do whatever purely on the basis of identity.
@Rabid Rabbit
I do believe you’re right.
And she’s juuust now stepped back in and sees what he’s doing.
The feminist in question — she’s his mom, right? The woman who forced him to take his antidiarrhea medication when he was 13?
…Poor guy, his mean mom made him take that icky medicine, she just refused to let him and his sharting go on and be great!
*Seeing as she was probably the one who cleaned the bathroom and did the laundry…don’t blame her for demanding he take that anti-diarrhea medicine as a condition of continuing to live under her roof, but if mom was so horrible why didn’t he just go live with his dad?
A lot of people will watch this movie and they will think again. And there is nothing you can do about it. I am delighted to see that you are in agony about it. Delighted.
I think you left some words out, buddy.
“A lot of people will watch this movie and they will think they’ve gotten into the hallucinogenic mushrooms again. And there is nothing you can do to convince them not to claw their eyes out about it. I am delighted! I refuse to see that you are laughing so hard you’re in agony about it. Delighted to be banned from here shortly, m.”
There, all better.