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.
@Jerry GODDAMIT JERRY! The wimmins said you couldn’t stay away, you said yeah I guess your right about that. You failed us. You proved them all right. This is on your head Jerry! Cancel the patriarchy. Its all over. Pack it all up boys we lost this one. Jerry said the menfolk had like 5 times the determination and they caved after a single day. You are the worst Jerry. The Undertale AND Rick and Morty Jerry’s combined aren’t worse then you. Way to go.
@Shapman It is very easy to make big macho man threats behind a computer about how scared we all are behind our computers. It’s ok. You scared us.
Much Spook!
Very Intimidate.
You do me a frighten!
More importantly however, at this moment women issues ARE human issues. Toxic masculinity and the patriarchy hurt us men too. Now it also happens to hurt women far disproportionately, but by working on these issues we secretly, selfishly help ourselves too. Also we get kind of act like decent human beings which is a plus. Try it sometime.
I am sure you are going to holler and moan about “WHERES THE LIBERUL TOLERANCE” since we seem to reject opinions without debate but here is the thing. There are times that is a necessity. If some guy with a knife came at you saying “You have no right to exist and I aim to remedy that” I am sure you would not answer with, “I disagree with you but let us have a robust debate and I am sure we will find a middle ground on our opinions.”
Some subjects are a zero sum game. To reference the very good article by Yonatan Zunger on the matter, tolerance is not a ethical mandate. ( https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376)
Neither is the right of an idea to be debated. It’s a peace treaty and I reserve the right to throw away any argument that diminishes my inherent worth of my person on the basis of the circumstances of my birth. There is no reasonable debate on questions of inherent worth of a person and no reasonable person would go looking for one.
The element of surprise can be very useful.
Actually researching your assertions is misandry! Don’t you understand? Gender issues are a two way street! It can never be questioned that for every female oppression there is an equal and opposite male oppression. That’s just science! That means everything men say should be automatically assumed to be true (unless a male feminist says it) and it’s really mean to suggest otherwise!
Hey Woody, I do know that there is an International Men’s Day. Am I supposed to point out that the author did not know this? Did I offend your sensibilities because I didn’t?
Hey, Shapman!
There’s a question you still haven’t answered. If you do answer it in good faith, I promise I won’t say anything sarcastic to you again.
Remember way back about 12 pages or so ago when you defended Jerry against our meanness.
Well, he said this
Now, your main men’s rights issue seems to be surrounding father’s rights. You expressed a desire to get rid of the stereotypes that childcare is a gendered thing. That women are good at it and men are bad.
None of us here disagree with that, by the way. Jerry, on the other hand, he does seem to hold the viewpoint that parenting is a woman’s job and that men aren’t as suited.
Why didn’t you object to this? You are under the impression that feminists are trying to prevent men from actively parenting. But the only one in this thread who holds the gendered stereotypes that you yourself said belong in the 1950’s is Jerry. Why did you defend him after he said such things? Why did you never object to this statement? What do you think of this statement?
You keep ignoring this question. Your continued refusal to address this is making you look like a hypocrite and a troll. Didn’t you want to claim the high ground? Here’s your chance. Here’s your opportunity to judge someone by their words and not their gender.
http://i.imgur.com/c8vQmD3.gif
[img: Wife and Miracle Max saying “It would take a miracle” from Princess Bride]
Gee, *crickets.*
How surprising.
Shapman, WWTH was quoting me, as you did.
Her reply was to me, Egoman.
Also, this wasn’t a criticism of you, but an illustration of how absurd some of the men’s rights pettiness is…but you certainly took offense anyway, didn’t you, you tender snowflake?
Lord, you’re a special kind of whiner. Grow the fuck up.
I’m still amazed that he tried the “lol safe spaces and trigger warnings!” gambit again when he was so thoroughly mocked last time for doing that while expecting to be shielded from sarcastic tones.
I mean, it’s ridiculous for a rape survivor or combat veteran with PTSD to want a content note for something that might trigger an episode but it’s completely reasonable to expect to be treated with sweetness and light when you march in here with a hostile tone?
Has the quality of trolls around here sunk so low that they don’t even remain consistent in their brand of assholishness?
Yep.
Budget cuts.
For fuck’s sake. I wasn’t going to join this conversation, but now I’m just too pissed off.
The “be more polite” thing is not only completely ineffective (as others have pointed out), using it is also a sign of an abusive mentality because it’s so arbitrary: when somebody hates your existence, there will never be a level of politeness you can get to to be “sufficiently polite” to them. Ever. By continuing to push the narrative that abusers would stop abusing if their victims just were “nicer” to them, you are putting the blame of abuse on the abused and burdening them with the insurmountable task of trying to justify their own existence to people who have not had to do exactly that, people who are used to being treated as full human beings by default, no matter how “polite” they can afford to be. It’s impossible, because no matter what the oppressors do and no matter how polite the oppressed are, you can always weasel out and say it wasn’t enough. You can justify exploitation, physical and psychological abuse, violence, rape and murder as long as you can find reasons why the abused generally don’t deserve their abuse, but this particular one still kinda sorta did. It’s the responsibility of the powerful to listen to the powerless, not the other way around. Politeness is at the very bottom of the list of things we should care about in these discussions.
Human rights belong to every single human, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or lack thereof, sexuality, etc. That is not up for debate, otherwise we’ll find ourselves in a sea of amorality, with the lives of other human beings being discussed like they were pawns in a game of chess. We are not doing that. We are not turning discussions that concern the lives, rights and happiness of people into theoretical discussions for aristocratic-minded people who fancy themselves “above” the discussion, who see themselves as “objective” because they have no emotional stakes in the discussion.
And Shapman, coming in to clutch pearls about tone while making South Park level “TRIGGERED” jokes has got to be the height of hypocrisy today. Not to mention extremely pointless, since being upset doesn’t translate to being triggered. “Trigger” is a psychological term referring to an experience that causes a trauma survivor to involuntarily recall a traumatic memory. It was NOT dreamed up by the dreaded “tumblr feminists” MRAs are so upset by, it’s an actual term used by actual mental health professionals. If you compare being triggered (a.k.a. reliving a traumatic event inside your head) to just being angry or hurt, you’re purposefully discounting the experiences of PTSD survivors, ergo you’re a privileged asshole with zero empathy and you should take a long, hard look at yourself and your choices in life.
This blog should have such a feature that you can’t comment on a thread unless you’ve browsed ALL the existing pages. At least 15 minutes for each page, because nobody realistically reads faster than that.
Or David could just close undying threads.
Oh noes, some random on the Internet doesn’t think I’m reasonable! How ever shall I live after this?
Since this is what you think is “reasonable” discourse, I think I’ll stick with being unreasonable by your lights. Do you always resort to threats of violence when you’re unable to provide arguments and support for your ideas? You must find yourself issuing a lot of threats.
@Anarchist
In addition to everything you’ve said (all true) it’s a logical fallacy to address someone’s tone rather than the content of their words. And it’s additionally a signal that the more powerful person has a fragile ego. For a group of people who make themselves out to be the only truly rational thinkers in the world, white men prove themselves over and over to be thin-skinned pearl-clutchers who can’t logic their way out of a paper bag every time they whinge about someone’s tone and politeness instead of their message.
It was the Spanish Inquisition that first introduced “the presumption of innocence” into European jurisprudence.
(Not suggesting they were nice, just thought it’s an interesting bit of trivia)
O/T but maybe fits in with the history discussion. Just been chatting with a Scouse friend. He’s been fascinating me with how Liverpool had the first American consulate.
Liverpool also later had a Confederate embassy because the Confederate fleet operated out of Liverpool
http://www.csa-dixie.com/liverpool_dixie/newgif/ten1.gif
And the last surrender of the civil war took place at Liverpool town hall (the Shenandoah)
My quote:
Shapman’s reply:
My favourite part?
YOU
START
OMG
This thread was 32 pages long when you typed that. People have explained to the three trolls (I’m counting you) again and again why what they are saying is wrong, giving them evidence.
And guess what, assbutt? Treating someone as human is not an opinion. It is common fucking sense, and you should try it.
Also, thanks for proving this quote right yet again:
http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-men-are-afraid-that-women-will-laugh-at-them-women-are-afraid-that-men-will-kill-them-margaret-atwood-39-20-47.jpg
I mean, I went with ‘assbutt’. Then you decided you would attack me, IRL?
Seriously?
@ Woody, I agree that Jerry is a bit of an ass for making some of the comments he made. He is right that biologically only women can give birth. When it comes to raising children it can be either gender. He is an ass for saying women are better at changing diapers. I believe I had the trophy in my household when my kids were still in diapers. There is that good enough for you?
Now how about you? Are you going to continue defending the sisterhood at all costs?
This is just one example of one of your “friends” who hurl around insults rather than engage in reasonable dialogue.
Her quote from Margaret Atwood is laughable given the number of men who are murdered in Canada by their female spouses.
This was based on a 10-year span between 1989-1999 in Canada. Can’t imagine it has changed dramatically if at all.
when I look at the numbers in most cases they are presented as a percentage of all murders. Since men are killed at a much higher rate than women the percentage of men killed in domestic cases pales in comparison to women. However, when you look at the raw numbers it paints a different picture. Men are being killed (and indeed assaulted) by their female partners but the discussion revolves totally around the female victims. Why can’t the discussion on domestic violence be non gender specific? Given the numbers it should be.
@ shapman
I don’t want to be unnecessarily provocative but according to the Canadian statistics site, between 2003-2013 there were 960 domestic homicides and of those women were the victims in 747 cases. I don’t have the maths skills to work that out as a percentage.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14114/section02-eng.htm
@Shapman
It clearly doesn’t matter to you what the numbers actually say, you’re seeing only what you want to see. There’s no point debating about statistics with you, because you mis-interpret them every single time.
You showed us the raw numbers up there, showing that more women are killed by men in DV incidents, than the other way around. Overall death rates, while meaningful in their own way, have little use in deciding whether women get killed more frequently than men in DV.
Your own data shows you are wrong, but you won’t admit that.
@Alan
Going with your numbers, instead of Shapman’s cherry-picked ones, 77% of deaths in DV are women. Less than 1 in 4 deaths were men.
Anyway, this is yet another derail, because we weren’t talking about deaths due to DV. Sit back and watch the goal posts shift again. *sigh*
@Shapman
This is a good reason why I’m glad I learned not to cafe about tone and to just analyze it like everything else. You can’t or won’t see the difference. That “bit of an ass” displayed behavior relevant to YOUR views. WWTH does not share your views on tone. Why would they care about the example you tacked on?
The challenge had to do with if you were consistent in your views, your counter example includes nothing about WWTH and their actions that might be inconsistent with THEIR views. Why would your view of that quote matter? You are weak and you can’t even see it. This knee-jerk repulsion from tone makes you blind to the difference because you never stopped to think about it.
Also once again you need to cite what you are talking about so people know what you are going on about. What page is the Atwood quote on? I’m not going hunting for something you can’t make the effort to properly point at.
@Jerry
No shit. No one uses the abbreviated form as an interjection, so why are you explaining that ? Are you trying to say you’re actually calling one of us that while covering yourself with a dubious interjection ?
Because that’s definitely what it sounds like from my end, and I actually understand French.
If you’re gonna try to be insulting, do it directly.
Shapman
You haven’t given us a source or reference for this, so I can’t check it for myself. There’s one important thing you haven’t stated.
How many of those men who were killed were actually killed by women? A large number of family/domestic violence murders of men involve a man killing his (former) partner’s father, brother, grandfather or other male relative – or – her current partner or husband. There’s a smaller proportion of brothers killing each other or father-son-uncle-grandfather intra-family violence depending of the variety of circumstance a family might find themselves in. Men killed in “honour” killings are often killed by their male relatives (though you do need to check whether these particular crimes are excluded or otherwise identified from the dataset).
However, before you elaborate on the figures you’ve quoted, you really do need to check on whether male murder victim = female murderer because it most certainly isn’t true here in Australia nor in the UK. I doubt it is in Canada … unless you’re dealing with a dataset that has explicitly broken down into male-male, male-female, female-female, female-male combinations of victims and perpetrators. (If it is one of those, there are probably other important categories specified, like family relationships. Son & (step)father, ex-partner & new spouse, and so on. If they are there, they’re usually worth careful reading and even more careful thinking.)
I’m facepalming so hard at this.
Oh good. Andy, you didn’t answer in good faith. As evidenced by this
I don’t have to be nice to you!
Plus the whole “bit of an ass” thing is a pretty weak condemnation. If I or one of the other regulars here said something like that, you’d be apoplectic and you know it.
You just can’t acknowledge that the group most responsible for holding men back from embracing feminine coded things is other men. Particularly conservative/traditional ones. They’re the ones who go after men who aren’t sufficiently macho. It’s always so bizarre to me when the manosphere gets mad at feminism for the traditional gender roles that we’ve always been the ones to oppose.
If someone made a sweeping generalization about men that implied that they are naturally inferior, point it out, and I’m happy to refute. It must be a generalization to men and not a personal insult directed at you. Having contempt for you =/= having contempt for men.
Until you can do that, you are making nothing but a false equivalence.
As to homicide rates, here’s what I found with a quick Google
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2016001/article/14668-eng.htm
I
61 female murderers compared to 464 male.
More female victims than male and there was a small decrease for male victims.
Consistent with every other nation that I know of, although men are a lot more likely to be the victim of homicide that women, men make up the vast majority of murderers.
I’m not sure why you thought it would be a good idea to imply that women are just as murderous as men. I mean, there’s no point to that because no one here so much as implied that women never murder and no one even hinted at apologia for female on male violence. So you’re arguing against a strawman. But if you are going to argue with strawfeminists, at least try to do it accurately. All the stats I’ve ever seen suggest that while women are almost as likely to commit milder violent acts, the severe injuries and deaths are mostly male abuser – female victim.
Oh, ann the US, 96% of IPV homicides have female victims. Three women a day are killed by their partner. So, fuck you for implying that concern for female abuse victims is some sort of mean misandric act of “defending the sisterhood.”
http://www.apa.org/topics/violence/partner.aspx