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.
@Rhuu
Also people who would only consider treating marginalized people like human beings if those marginalized people kiss their asses all the time aren’t friends. If you can’t support every member of a community, even the ones who were “mean” to you or who you personally dislike, you don’t support that community.
@Viscaria: Fair weather allies are awful, I totally agree.
@John: Come to the page to reply. Like the rest of us! This has been said before, in this thread.
Read the comments policy please. Misogynists aren’t “nutty” they are assholes.
Name a non-misogynist manosphere figure. No one has been able to do it yet, but since you’re oh-so full of integrity, surely you are able to discern which MRAs or red pillers are misogynist and which ones merely concerned with men’s issues.
Yes Cassie has defended the nasty fanatics. Paul Elam and Matt Forney. Paul Elam is responsible for declaring “bash a violent bitch month” He attempted to start a site called Register Her which had the goal of doxxing women he doesn’t like. He said that if he were on a jury in a rape trial that he would vote not guilty no matter what. Even if he knew the defendant was guilty. He said some women are not just asking to be raped, they are begging for it.
Matt Forney is a racist who said that domestic violence is sometimes necessary because otherwise women will act no better than chimps.
You are free to search the site under the Elam or Forney tags. What I mentioned is just the tip of the iceberg. People on this site know the manosphere figures very well. If you hope to sell them as not misogynistic, you will fail miserably. If you plead ignorance, you will show that you had no business defending this film in the first place.
I’m pretty sure we went over this when you and Jerry first made your appearances in this thread. What a shock that you didn’t actually read or engage with it.
So I’ll say it again.
You are defending these people.
Own it.
You are not going to ever claim any kind of progressive cred as long as you continue to defend these people.
There’s something about the way he explains the US civil rights movement and the global gay rights movement(s) that is just… It’s like he knows that there are women here, because gender is a subject of the blog, but he thinks all of us must be white and straight and cis because those are just defaults for him. “Hey, fellow ~~~normal people~~~, let me tell you all about teh gays and how they did things!”
Some thoughts about the confrontations from yesterday and today.
I think that a strategy I employ can be called “the inconvenient question”. Right now I’m thinking about how I sense vulnerability.
Earlier in the thread I did a thing where I mocked their opinions about misogyny by tiptoeing around the definition and ending with the letter M. That’s an application of the childhood “I’m not touching you” game. Invasion of social space. I often find games at the heart of social conflict behavior.
My favorite is the person who said they were confused started attaching an ablist slur I my mental abilities, followed by asking if anyone else thought they saw the replacement for a quote. I noted that they needed help, and believe they were calling for help.
I am going to keep on the Bernie question out of a vain hope that John will actually defend a position he takes. He has taken so many in the course of this journey that he should write a sex guide. (No please. Don’t though.)
So, lets take you to Nov 2016. Lets put you In Florida cause I know Florida. These are your 5 options.
Hillary Clinton- Democrat
Donald Trump- Republican
Jill Stein- Green
Gary Johnson- Libertarian
Or write In.
Which do you chose and do you understand the full implications of which of those choices you made under the US political system which is surprisingly different from any European system.
@Viscaria the Cheese Hog
Don’t forget UK as another default of his. “What do you mean not every country’s government is like the UK’s?”
I thought you objected to the portrayal of men in violent movies? How can you critique popular culture if you don’t engage with it?
Oh, and they aren’t slashers. The first couple were more psychological horror. Far less gory than people think they were. The later entries were the horror subgenre known as “torture porn” although I kind of hate that term.
Here are a couple of MLK quotes
Name calling was not King’s style, but held radical views, was not shy about them, did not care if he offended white people and did not condemn anger from marginalized people.
Also, a popular chant in the US at least is
Has a better ring to it than “please, good straight man, acknowledge my humanity. If it’s not too much trouble. Sorry to bother you!”
That would require John to read and engage with people like an adult, when he is clearly not one.
@Scildfrega
What you have sent me will let me, reconfigure? That feels right. It’s a social normalization thing. This TS thing has an structure. I think I get a “read access” advantage in terms of human behavior, but that is balanced by a “write access” advantage in my feeling of other people.
When it comes to feeling I am in the high end of the intensity range. A 7-10, and/or a -7–10. I want to call it higher average autonomic intensity, valence in journal articles. From there I am working on unpacking good summaries of how to think of kinds of emotions.
Thank you. This is a process and examples. That took some work. I will try to appreciate it better this time.
I have a bunch of mental heuristics that I use that remind me of parts of what you typed, I’ve gotten some by osmosis and culture, this will help me clean out the chaos. Is that something you might find intetesting? For example I try to think of everything as being a category contains a diversity.
Also that “write access” advantage is shared by all of you since I feel you project information. Now I have to wonder if that forgetting was instinctual.
I’m getting pretty tired of new Jaye fanbois searching frantically for articles on her after seeing The Red Pill and necroing two year old posts written before that movie was even made.
Especially since their adoration seems to go only as far as them being pleased that a pretty young white woman is telling them what they want to hear. That it’s so hard to be a man these days.
Katie forbid they actually do any research on the red pill culture or the MRM and find out what they actually say.
It’d be one thing if they were ignorant about what the manosphere is like, asked why there is an objection to this documentary and then listen to our responses. They’d rather charge in and accuse us of being soooooo meeeeaaaannnn!!!! It never even crosses their minds that David and the regulars here might have actual substantive reasons for our issues.
That, or they know perfectly well how hateful the manosphere is and just don’t mind.
Well, WWTH, John Devalle admits to not really reading the posts/replies very closely (if at all), so it mystifies me what he’s even doing here, still.
He’s tried to spam his FB/story, (fail) and he’s written his open letter, even after telling us that the email didn’t work (after his first post specifically said he’d written to David) so it’s obvious he’s just wasting our time.
He really should buy a journal. This shit is tedious.
If you have to explain a metaphor its probably not worth it but here goes anyway……Galileo represents the powerless individual coming to conclusions through his own observations (like the google guy)….The Catholic church represents the intolerant, powerful group ideology who accept things on faith and are prepared to torture and kill to support their position (representing the feminists who will censor, sack, publically humiliate and block employment of people who don’t except their paradigms). To the ideological group its all about power, they don’t care whats true, they just want to be right.
The work in Holland as stated supported the earlier rat work by Donner, Caltech et al. They section the human Hypothalamus for visual on SDN and count P and T cells. The science is very clear, its just no one wants to look at it.
Putain is the word I use when I face palm after reading one of you posts, usually abbreviated to Pute.
The woman with the same surname as me was sacked for being a general arsehole….the brief says her fellow female employees wanted her gone too. She was not sacked for a any particular statement but her general offensive comportment which meant no one wanted to work with her.
Alan, post at 5.54pm, can you show where you got that from please?
oh, look, jerry’s back…
Galileo was studying the stars
Google guy was being a shitty engineer who faked a degree.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
ha ha, in this land of prevalent right wing terrorism
where gays, trans, and poc are always under threat by right wing media machines
where just a few days ago the gop was voting to kill off millions of americans
you call us the terrorists and intolerant groups
F to the uck and Y to the ou.
Fake french….
@Jerry
The Google guy completely failed to take in account social pressures, hiring biases, the penalization of women who aggressively negotiate their salaries (while men who aggressively negotiate are advantaged), promoting biases, harassment, and the penalization of mothers (or women who are believed they will eventually become mothers, regardless of what hey actually want).
I already talked to you about that in my comment back on page 24. And if you want more resources, here they are.
And until feminists actually start burning people at the stake or threaten to, refrain from comparing them to the Spanish Inquisition. You waste of alcohol.
How is Google guy powerless? Jobs at Google are difficult to get. He mostly likely has an advanced degree and probably from a first or second tier (AKA expensive) school. Chances are high that in addition to being white and male, he comes from an upper or upper middle class family. That makes him very privileged.
Didn’t you say that white western women are some of the most privileged people in the world? Are you really going to say that and turn around and call a white western guy with a higher education and a prestigious job “powerless?” Come on, now.
Also, the word you’re searching for is ‘analogy.’ Not ‘metaphor.’ Not only is your science 101 lacking, your English 101 is too.
Maybe you don’t mind working with sexist and racist dudes. But his female and POC coworkers probably found his comportment offensive and didn’t want to work with him. How is it different?
Jerry, your metaphor was stupid, and had no bearing on current science practices.
It was another goalpost-moving deflection.
What is your purpose here? Because you’re getting really tedious, really quickly.
Hahahaha! I didn’t see that. I take back the part of my previous post where I guess that he went to a top school.
That said, why isn’t Google doing a better job at checking these things? Maybe I should just start telling people I have an Ivy League degree instead of one from a small liberal arts college.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-studies-linkedin-2017-8
Maybe I should try what he did.
“Yes Deloitte I graduated from BENTLEY UNIVERSITY at the top of my class. As you see I am very good at the numbering.”
And the Monster Raving Loonies have scored genuine political blows – most famously in a by-election in 1990 when they beat the Social Democratic Party candidate, and the SDP was dissolved shortly afterwards. It was already in serious decline, and party leader David Owen knew that they’d never survive the humiliation of that defeat. Not least because it wasn’t even close – the Monster Raving Loony party polled something like two and a half times as many votes as the SDP.
(I should perhaps clarify that the MRLP didn’t actually win – the candidate came a fairly distant sixth. But that was still better than seventh.)
@WWTH
About your post at 6.02pm. Matt Forney I’ve never heard of. Paul Ellam I know little of, I’ll look him up with Google. Most MRA’s on sites I’ve seen have a user name, as most do here. Warren Farrell is one I have some knowledge of, and from what I know he’s reasonable. But whatever some MRA’s are like I’m responsible for my actions, not theirs. Just as you aren’t responsible for the actions of feminists who have extreme views.
@John Devalle
says he doesn’t know of these people and their ideas
started in this thread to insist and continue to push mra right wing ideas