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.
I still need to know why these men want to make people to do their political work. It’s lazy as shit, especially since feminism as a political movement is responsable for so much of what they want feminists to just give them.
I have no respect for thieves and parasites.
Hm. I think I’m done talking to Shapman directly.
Shapman is teaching his children that hitting people is okay in some circumstances, but if you aren’t careful in who you’re punchin’, you might get punched back, and then you’ll deserve it.
It’s just one little off-the-cuff remark. Just a single correlation. It’s so out of step with what everyone else I know teaches, though. You avoid fights, avoid physical violence, and you never hit first.
I think I better understand why he wasn’t awarded custody now, though. If that’s the sort of thing that falls out of his brain while he’s looking for points to defend his position, I can see how he may have built up some bad parental habits.
Yeah, I’m done talking to him directly. His problems run very deep, and I don’t feel like being a dartboard for his misplaced aggression.
I think my trolldar must be improving. The first I saw of Shapman was his post last page with the “boys/mens” typo and I read it and immediately side-eyed him.
Thank you all for your sympathies and truthfully, i don’t want sympathies from this trolls. Really they just prove what i thought – that most men like them don’t care about if men have been sexually assalt.
So thank you also trolls, for proving me correctly. You don’t care about sexual assalt of men, you just want to not help women.
@corny chips and Alan
I didn’t think about taking notes. Thank you. Actually my life is much better now. I am not sailing with that captain any more. Generally i have very less problems now with people. Sometimes when bad things happen on a ship you feel closer with other crew – they can be very good to you in a hard times. So when they betray you….It’s fucking shit.
@sjild
Actually your situation does sound little bit like mine. I feel very alone sometimes too. Because i behave little bit different from other ‘macho’ men it feels like i am outside from others.
Unfortunately, everyone, the weird poorly-linking comments are going to be with this thread until the end of time. They accrue over time, so every time someone posts by email instead of through the web form it misaligns the post-to-page alignment by one. It doesn’t reset. Our resident trolls are more behaved on that point now, so we’re just gonna have to live with weird orphaned comments and strange page linking in here.
I’m okay with keeping this thread open, though. It’s like a troll zoo! They can prowl around in here, flinging poo and turning the thread to a shambles all they like instead of ambling all over the rest of the website. If I don’t want to interact with them I can just ignore it for awhile. Organized!
Scildfreja,
He says he does have equal custody. I’m not sure if he went for sole custody and didn’t get it though. He’s mad that he has to pay child support anyway. He’s just claiming that feminists are stopping fathers from getting custody for some reason.
Admittedly, I’m not all that knowledgeable about the Canadian system but in my state, a father who asks for partial custody is not going to be denied it unless he’s extremely unfit. I suspect it’s the same way there. So shock of all shocks, he is probably being very dishonest by trying to make it sound like there is an epidemic of loving fathers being entirely shut of their children’s lives.
Well, what a long strange read it’s been.
@ Valentine
All the hugs and a big Gollum picture. It’s appalling that you’ve had to go through that.
I think you are handling it entirely naturally. There’s not just an actual assault, but all the stuff around it: how we’re meant to feel it’s our fault (which, of course, it never, never is); the culture of the place in which this happened.
I think your analysis of our trolls is spot on.
I’d go a step further, and say that it comes across as if they not only don’t care one tiny toss for men, and want to not help women, there’s also a big helping of justifying the unjustifiable.
Cheers to you and all the very best.
This was my ship – well one of them:
http://media.socastsrm.com/wordpress/wp-content/blogs.dir/98/files/2015/08/Syncrude-oil-Sands.jpg
This was my ocean:
http://i.cbc.ca/1.3599162.1496372551!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/alberta-oilsands-aerial-view.jpg
(That’s a boreal forest, by the way. With a man-made desert carved into of it)
I still get the shakes from my time there. I used to be much more cheerful. The place just broke me. I didn’t have any single traumatic event like you did, so my heart really goes out to you on that. But I do think that the environment was mostly the same. That volumetric machismo, that wide-shouldered swagger, doing deliberate harm because it’s expected of you to bulldoze anyone you’re capable of breaking. And to never, ever show any hint of emotion beyond sarcasm or anger or a strange frenetic sort of mutant-happiness.
I’m glad you’re feeling better, more confident. Remember – you aren’t alone, you aren’t weak, you aren’t beaten. You’ve got a strength they only dream of having.
The suffering men inflict on other men and on themselves, in order to maintain the hierarchy of our bullshit western world standards is terrible. And the fields that were largely devoid of women were the worst. Feminism didn’t cause this. It’s the structure of our society. It’s patriarchy. Any troll that says I don’t understand the suffering men go through can go to hell.
@WWTH, I see! You’re right. Your memory for these things is so much better than mine.
I see no reason for my statement to not stand otherwise. What sort of a parent teaches their kids it’s okay to punch first, just be aware that some people might punch you back? Holy noodle.
Still done talking to him, for that reason alone.
EDIT: And yes, the default custody arrangement is joint, usually with one parent being the primary caregiver but both having equal custody. The person who isn’t the primary caregiver gives child support payments to the primary. That’s my recollection of it at least!
@Shapman:
Who here is saying that? No one here thinks that men are not marginalized ever at all in any area. Please provide quotes if you think someone here is saying that.
Please define what you mean by ‘reasonable dialogue’ without referencing tone, because people here have been kind enough to provide you with logical arguments and the data to back them up, even though they didn’t have to.
@ Scild, I had you pegged as someone who can actually engage in a proper dialogue. Guess I was wrong. You said I teach my kids that it is “okay to punch first” when I clearly said
You have checked your reading skills at the door I guess just like some of the others on here.
At least Woody pointed out that you were waaaay off target on my custody situation (by the way “joint” custody is not the same as “shared” custody. Men who have joint custody are often battling for shared custody and more then often they still lose in Canada anyway).
@Shapman
I wrote a whole other response and then deleted it and looked up some Aliens cosplay instead, because you’re doing my head in.
The shorter version of what I wrote earlier:
The people doing the violence to their partners: mostly men.
The people doing the violence to men (especially younger men): mostly other men.
I’ve written here before that I work in the UK education system , and with that in mind, given this is a public space, I can’t give you the many specific examples I’d like to – it wouldn’t be professional, appropriate, or, frankly, legal. I will say, however, that in over 1000 eases of violence towards my students by ADULTS (not other students; different ballgame) that I’ve had to work with in 8 years at my current school, two – that’s 2, or if you like, II – have involved any kind of physical abuse by an adult female. 2 out of more than 1000.
Please, sir, accept there is no equivalency. I’m sorry for your own problems, and I wish I could help. But it isn’t feminism, or some grand female conspiracy, that’s responsible for those problems.
@shapman
I was not going to engage you because you really have not contributed anything of substance to discuss, but I’ll take a moment because I have a little time.
You know if you don’t like an comment section, you are more than welcome to leave. I have to wonder why you continue to post when you obviously don’t like it here.
I find it also ironic that you continue to moaning about us not agreeing with you.
1. Basic grammar and punctuation are necessary for conversing in a written medium. Learn it-live it-love it.
2. Poor parenting skills are easy to spot by anyone. You don’t have to be an expert to know this. You shared this openly-Others just commented on it.
3. Man hater, huh? Not only have you not listened to what anyone has replied to you, you also made threats. Your rudeness was met with rudeness, imagine that.
You came in here, presented your opinion as fact without backing it up in any cogent way. The others don’t agree with you and you throw a fit. Some of the concepts commenters discuss here have withstood decades of academic scrutiny. Do you really understand what that means? It might help to read an actual book on the subject before saying it doesn’t exist, because it’s obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about and your behavior was in no way going to lead to a reasonable dialogue. As it stands, the fault is squarely on your shoulders this time.
Okay, I’m done.
Shapman, your communication skills are clearly lacking, because you quite plainly stated
And your tapdancing away from that after you were called out on it is noted. This is you, justifying your ugly views, and then blaming others for not reading for comprehension when you were called out on your encouraging violence among your own children, while trying to portray yourself that you as some beleaguered Dad whom the System(TM) is trying to fuck over.
All while trying to tone police us, while you feel entitled to be as big of a jerk as you want.
Shapman, I had you pegged as a smug, self-centered, condescending asshole from your first post, on. Nothing you have written since has disabused me of that notion.
@ scildfreja
I read up on this when Shapman first raised his original point.
Since 1 June 2011, if there’s a shared custody arrangement, then both parents can be primary care givers, thus entitled to receive child benefit. However in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the tax office presume that the female parent is PGC.
Shapman’s position (which I’m sure he’ll correct if I’ve misunderstood) is that he was in such an arrangement. However at the hearing to determine financial matters, the judge started with the same presumption until his lawyer explained the actual position.
So “Women are the default caregivers” is baked into the law in Canada. Shapman however insists there’s no such thing as harmful gender stereotypes.
ETA: Oh, probably ninja’d by everyone. One of the joys of living by the sea is you only get a phone signal if the wind’s blowing in the right direction so took about 10 minutes to post.
No, you’re right @Shapman, I regret posting what I did there. I lost your original context in the deluge of posts on this stupid thread. Mea culpa. (PeeVee’s point still stands, though.) You have shared custody, and you don’t teach your kids to hit first. (Not that I said you teach them to hit first, just that hitting people is sometimes okay.)
This said? I still find your position of “sometimes you just gotta punch someone” abhorrent, and I still don’t see any reason in continuing this “debate” (as if this were a debate). You’ve taken the actions of a sexist, patriarchal judge as a stand-in for feminism, and refuse to see correction when it’s given. You’ve ignored every time we’ve said that we agree that men have issues in society, and that they’re terrible, and that they should be dealt with. You’ve ignored everything we’ve said.
This isn’t a debate, and there’s no sense in continuing it. I’m still of the opinion that your refusal to engage with criticism is a self-defense mechanism, because that’s the most typical reason for it.
EDIT @Alan, that’s how I understand it, yes. My sister went through that rigamarole awhile ago. She was awarded primary caregiver, though given the differences in their circumstances there wasn’t any way it’d be otherwise.
@Shapman
What are you doing to combat the inequalities against men? Personally, I volunteered my time to help tutor a group of kids who are statistically at a disadvantage in the school system due to factors out of their control. That group of kids was close to a 50/50 split between girls and boys. That’s the gender equality thing we talked about. I also donate to ACLU, which defends the liberties of all genders.
You show no compassion for Valentine’s suffering, and completely ignore when I show you compassion for a man who was accused of abusing their child as a revenge tactic in a custody hearing (was that you? I tried to go back and find it but there have been over 15 pages of posts since you showed up, so it’s hard to find any in particular). You call me a man-hater for being a feminist, but I show compassion for men and actually get out there and do something to help them. What do you do?
Skjild,
Forgive me, but where you worked looks so cool! I would love that place. But maybe, you talking about isolation, not work. Which here is also same – I like my job, maybe even now I am good at it, but I have problem still with people. Actually now we have one female 3rd officer. I want to speak with her, to say if she needs some help, I can help. But I don’t want that I am weird. But if I see that this men here giving her problems, then I will help.
I agree 100%. Everything is for to see who has bigger dick. I don’t want to play that game. It is bullshit. I’m not afraid that they might think I’m little bit gay or something, I dont care. But it still makes problems. I can’t change my behavior, I don’t know how to be someone different. 4th engineer here said i am crazy. Actually that was not so bad. But Im tired of hearing about that.
@bluecat
this is also my problem. I feel guilty maybe because some other person have much worse experience than me – but because I try to ask for help and then they betray me, I feel very bad and confused. And also guilty. People don’t think about that. They just try to say, oh it wasnt THAT bad. Yeah maybe it wasn’t, maybe I didn”t get stab or killed, but I was alone for 3 months after with this people, all laughing at me behind my back and spread rumor.
Off-topic:
I am at work drinks. Of eighteen people, fifteen are white men and two are white women. Everyone is engaged in the most privileged, upper-middle-class academic banter you can imagine. This is bullshit. Someone save me.
@EJ
You know, I hate that work-related networking is always over drinks. And they look at me funny if I order something non-alcoholic. And even weirder that I don’t want to eat the appetizers (I’ve yet to meet bar food that doesn’t trigger an auto-immune response). And they always need an explanation. Why don’t they need to explain to me why they’re eating what they’re eating or drinking what they’re drinking? I feel like it’s alienating me from networking opportunities.
/rant
Oh noes, we’ve reached the negging point. Resorting to negs just shows how deep into the barrel you are, Shapman. You’re almost to the bottom! The only thing below you now is the gendered slur collection.
@Shapman
Dead people cannot choose to report their murder or not. Are you speaking about domestic violence as a whole, or are you only speaking about intimate partner homicides? Because you’re not allowing other people to bring up domestic violence that does not lead to homicide, but you’re using that topic to back up your own points. You’re being intellectually dishonest.
again, most of you are denying the fact that some of the systemic (a word used way too often by the left by the way) discrimination is targeted at men. and if you do admit it you are saying it is men’s fault because of The Patriarchal system (which I do not believe in)
I may have posted this earlier from the Government of Canada website on the new Canada Child Benefit but it is a glaring example.
This has meant that even in cases where a non-biological female lives in the household the CCB goes to them (WTF!). And further the biological father needs a letter of permission from the non-biological female in the household to have this changed (WTF!).
Here is the link to the page and also to an article discussing the problems with the CCB.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/publications/t4114-canada-child-benefit-related-provincial-territorial-programs/canada-child-benefit.html#primaresp
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/the-problem-of-child-benefits-in-shared-custody/
I battled the CRA for two years on a similarly gender biased bit of tax law. I just won my challenge and upon posting it on my Facebook I had at least six male friends who were experiencing the exact same issue reach out to ask me how I did it (I took advantage of a loophole in the tax law). Now again, you will say this law is not discriminatory because it is not gender specific but given that men still pay support in over 90% of the cases I think we can make that conclusion (that said, I would still listen to the less than 10% of women on this issue unlike some on this forum as it relates to a myriad of issues)
@ Scil
Thanks for the apology (I think) for comments (which were wrong) and led you to “better understand why he was not awarded custody” (which is also wrong).
So if someone hits you and continues to hit you in a blind rage you are just going to sit there until the ass-kicking ends? One hopes they will never be in a situation like that but if one is having been taught “you NEVER hit anyone” is going to leave that person defenceless. Thanks, but I don’t want my children to be defenceless punching bags. Metaphorically (well maybe not so metaphorically) Chamberlain tried that “always use your words” approach with Hitler, how did that work out?
Well, yes I do refuse to see correction when its given if it revolves around a feminist dogma like the patrirachy. I just say the judge is “sexist” because she (and the Family Court system) has not adjusted her thinking to current times (at least in how it will apply to fathers).
@ Peewee Herman
Back it up snowflake. I never “encouraged” violence among my children. Telling your kids to stand up for themselves when threatened/assaulted physically is not “encouraging” violence in my world. It is just good parenting.
Again, in order what I tell my kids (both my son and daughter):
1/ never hit anyone
2/ words are always the best way to diffuse a situation
3/ IF you hit someone you should expect an opposite reaction of equal or greater force (sound familiar). Again, this does not mean it will happen but see point 1 and 2 if you want to avoid that response.
Note: I know you are all parenting experts and you will tell me that kids ALWAYS do what their parents tell them to do, right? That is why I should not need to tell them anything past Point 2, right (can you sense my sarcasm?)?
4/ IF someone strikes you defend yourself with a reasonable, measured and (yes sometimes) physical response.
There are a lot of other rules/tips I will impart upon my kids when they are older to not only diffuse a situation but to defend themselves when that is the only option. Given that I have experience in situations like this (oh, my word!! he is saying he has been in a fight as an adolescent, teenager or young man? he must be a monster and has the profile of an abusive person!!) I think I can impart some very real-life situation wisdom. Isn’t that what a parent should do?
I will also have separate talks with my son on how to respect women and unfortunately, one with my daughter on how to not put herself in a vulnerable/dangerous situation. You see, I believe in empowerment but if you empower your daughters without teaching them that some men (very few in fact) do not have the same respect for women that they should have then you are not doing your job as a parent. You call it victim blaming – I call it prevention.
If these “views” are “ugly” than guess what, I am sure there are many other reasonable parents who share these “ugly views” as well (I know many of these “ugly”- viewed parents personally and none beat their kids or spouses nor are they convicted felons. Oh, and guess what, some of them are mothers!)
I’m gonna need some quotes where anyone here in this comments section has denied that some of the systemic discrimination is targeted at men.
Let me rephrase
“most of you are denying the fact that some of the systemic (a word used way too often by the left by the way) discrimination is targeted at men without chalking it up to The Patriarchy (in other words it’s your gender’s fault you are being discriminated against).”
sorry, I should have included that.