“Red Pill” director Cassie Jaye has responded to what she calls my “slanderous claims” about her. You can find her video on the subject, and a transcript of it, on her Kickstarter page. (The posts that offended her can be found here, here and here.) It would be quite an effective takedown of me, if what she wrote were actually true.
I was going to write out a detailed response but instead let me give you the tl;dr version as it played out on Twitter last night:
After her video went up, a small squad of her supporters headed here to share their lovely opinions with me. Their comments went straight into the trash, but, what the heck, I thought I’d fish out a couple of them to share with you all now.
I guess these are the heroes of truth and objectivity who are funding her documentary.
EDITED TO ADD:
But wait! There’s more! Jaye’s fans on Twitter also have some things to say.(Mildly NSFW.)
The attacks on me by @Cassie_Jaye 's fans on Twitter are reaching new heights of sophistication. pic.twitter.com/0lMglv0lz3
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) November 4, 2015
And here's another @Cassie_Jaye fan resorting to Argumentum ad David is Fattum. pic.twitter.com/WJhWhDzpMs
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) November 4, 2015
Also, misogyny isn’t just defined as what someone feels they are, deep in their hearts. As a society, we have progressed just enough that people know that being a misogynist or a racist is bad. But it hasn’t progressed enough for these problems to actually go away. So you get people saying and doing misogynistic things and then getting offended when people call them misogynistic. Because they know they’re people and good people can’t be misogynists.
A claim that someone is a bigot is not proven or disproven based on how they self identify,rather on what their words and actions are. For fuck’s sake. Even the KKK claims not to be racist now.
Tim, you are doing nothing but posting teal dear after teal dear to avoid answering these simple questions.
Who is a non-misogynist MRA figure? Name just one.
Is AVFM a misogynist site? Simple answer. Yes or no.
Can you answer these questions succinctly. Without droning on about they write about issues sometimes? If you can’t or won’t, nobody will take you seriously.
What evidence? This is your assertion so it’s up to you to provide the evidence of this. And again, no, just saying things doesn’t count as actual activism.
Good gravy, is Tim still going on and on about this.
Speaking of demagoguery:
“I would agree that Cassie Jaye is being attacked primarily because she is departing from the preferred narrative about MRAs — that “who they really are” is a bunch of despicable, worthless, hateful garbage people whose concerns should never be listened to by anyone.”
“It simply isn’t considered possible that MRAs could be more than idiotic brutes with absolutely nothing of value to say. Everyone already knows that’s all they are and nothing more.”
“Cassie Jaye says that she only began changing her perspective about MRAs (going from seeing them as monsters to seeing them as complex people with legitimate concerns) after she sat down with several of them in person and talked to them at length. Which is something that David Futrelle and the commenters here simply have not done.”
You do see how projecting this over the top inflammatory language on us is mischaracterizing us as a group. You should tone that down if you dislike over the top rhetoric so much.
Here’s the problem, AVFM isn’t a good resource for anyone interested in any of the issues they supposedly tackle. For instance, last year I found that their “prison rape” section in their “facts” page consisted entirely of a gross misreading of one New York Review of Books article and some made-up statistics wrongly credited to the UN.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/02/22/5-arguments-least-likely-to-convince-a-young-woman-that-a-voice-for-men-isnt-a-misogynistic-hate-site/comment-page-2/#comment-428896
You can link to their shitty little articles all day, they do no real activism and often know nothing about issues beyond their cherry picked gotcha statistics. For instance, their disinterest in male homelessness is palpable. Even when they do seem to have a genuine interest in an issue, they do a bad job with their message and precede to do nothing else other then complain about feminism and harass feminists. It’s not like AVFM is hiding their experts, since they shill for the only (sort of) one they have, Erin Pizzey, all the time.
I don’t take these guys seriously because they don’t deserve be taken seriously. I’ll change my tune when they do something substantive but as of now all I see is self-aggrandizement.
Oh, I made “a hyperbolic claim with a straight face”, did I, Timmeh? No, I quoted these guys (and what they all keep saying, and doing, ad nauseam), VERBATIM.
BTW, you still haven’t mentioned exactly what their “issues and ideology” are. Come on, you boring-ass, whiny, long-winded and idiotic troll, ante the fuck up, already.
I know you’re barely literate, but sheesh. Read the rest of what’s on this blog before you make hyperbolic claims of your own. With a contorted face. (Which is contorted to match your “logic”, natch.)
Here’s a group that is actually trying to do something to help men – by destigmatizing men seeking help for mental health issues.
http://bringchange2mind.org/programs/psas/
Notice how no MRAs are involved. I haven’t even seen them signal boosting it.
I’ve also noticed no objection to this campaign for feminists. Because we don’t actually object to men getting together to try and solve men’s issues. We object to MRAs because they and do misogynistic things and complain that feminists aren’t spending all their time on men’s issues while doing fuck all about them themselves.
From feminists, I mean.
@Tim
Actually Tim we spent quite a bit of time trying to understand why the MRAs act the way they do… Just like SFHC, I came here specifically because I was sick and tired of every single comment section filled with anti-feminist douchecannoes and their nonsense, and engaging with them was an exercise in futility when they would all drown me out through their collective nonsense.
Part of why I am a commentator is because there is a level of respect and courtesy that exists on this blog seems to be extremely hard to find anywhere else on the internet. Every single time an MRA, PUA or Gator comes in here to mansplain their worldview, there is always someone here to provide a point-by-point rebuttal. Try to pin us as ‘not that different from MRAs’ all you want, David Futrelle doesn’t ban people for disagreeing; Paul Elam does.
This, however, is fucking hilarious. First of all, way to prove that you couldn’t find a single non-misogynist MRA. Second of all, do you seriously think that this proves anything about us?
“Hah! You can’t find a MRA who isn’t a misogynist, this clearly proves that you are just being too mean to them! That’s the only possible explanation”
Or, what a shock, the MRAs are just misogynistic and their entire movement is based on scapegoating women for their problems. As evidenced by… themselves, over and over again.
I mean, if you really think we are equivalent to MRAs, where’s the ‘notorious video’ showing a bunch of mamotheers getting drunk (off catnip) describing how they won’t fuck Paul Elam’s stinky penis?
I didn’t choose the Mammoth. The Mammoth chose me.
After several horrid, horrid interactions with MRAs telling me, in their own words, what their “ideology” was, of course.
I also found Manboobz/WHTM because of the childish and harmful behavior of MRAs. I saw other blogs link to Manboobz when discussing the topic of baby men harassing women and making excuses for rapists. I read Pharyngula sporadically, but I’ve become less interested in discussing religion and more interested in social justice related discussions and activism. I was never a regular commenter on any other blog before this one, but here I feel like I can both contribute to and learn from the comment section in a way that I did not experience with blogs about atheism and religion.
The key point there is I knew about MRAs and their toxic behavior before I knew about David Futrelle. The MRM had already failed at convincing me they were not misogynist manbabies.
Yep, my story’s pretty much the same, I discovered that the manosphere were misogynist assholes all on my own, and later found WHTM.
Man, I’ve been around here too long to remember how I got here! But I stayed because I felt like I could comment without worrying about idiots infesting the comments and everyone being afraid to say anything. Because yes, people insisting that the response to women committing domestic violence is to “fuck their shit up” are idiots, that’s not the appropriate response to fucking anything, and nobody here is going to try any “don’t call him an idiot, he might have valid reasons”. Which is, clearly, a problem to you, since I guess you think people should allowed to be fucking assholes unchallenged cause challenging them something something WON’T YOU TRY TO SEE THEIR POINT?!?111?!!?
EJ — perhaps once Tim is gone, or either confirms it’s him, or ignores me enough for me to say fuck it. As it stands I’d just be feeding MRA rhetoric if I’m wrong. Sorry.
And it sucks there’s no gender neutral aunt/uncle, so I’ll go for aunt I guess, it alliterates at least!
Hm, a gender neutral term for a niece/nephew is a ‘nibling’, so a gender neutral term for an aunt/uncle might be ‘aubling’?
@Catalpa
It’s “pibling” – parent’s sibling.
The first time I found AVFM was shortly after I discovered that I actually agreed with an awful lot of what feminists believe. I was raised in a very conservative home, and heard the term “feminazi” more than I heard the word “feminist”, so when I stumbled across a blog that blew my mind with how clear and reasonable it was, I was SHOCKED to discover that feminists wrote it. I learned about privilege and oppression, and omg this garbage is everywhere, and omg I KNEW there was a reason that catcalling made my skin crawl, etc. etc. etc.
In my brand-new-to-all-of-this state, I thought, “Well, if there are all these bad societal ideas about women, surely there must be some about men, too.” So I googled “men’s rights”, fully expecting to find insightful, reasonable authors talking about the way that society can hurt men.
I found AVFM.
It took me all of five minutes to become horrified enough to close the site and clamor for some brain bleach. On the feminist websites I was reading—which frequently used comedy and curse words to get their points across—I saw lots of criticism of patriarchy, while still being careful to not paint “men”, the actual male-identifying human beings, as villains. There was a widespread acknowledgement that most men are perfectly decent folks, that only some men are actively, purposefully dangerous/toxic, and that when decent men fail to check their privilege, that’s more because of the pervasive, nefarious nature of how privilege works, not because those men are Bad People(TM). I mean, it should tell you something that even after being freshly won over by feminism, I *still* didn’t think that men were evil, and I was actively interested in finding out what struggles men faced.
On the other hand, the front page of AVFM was full of misogynistic slurs, accusations against women as a whole, declarations of the moral and mental inferiority of women, and gross misrepresentation of feminism. There was no nuanced separation of “toxic femininity” from women as human beings. There was just wholesale name-calling and blaming. I even skimmed through several articles, thinking maybe I had just found the bad one at the top of the pile. Nope. It was depressingly consistent in its resentment of women.
I expected to find a counterpart movement to feminism. I instead found a hostile smear campaign that talked almost entirely about how bad women are and how justified it will be when men rise up and grind them into the dirt.
So yeah, I blundered into Elam & co. *literally years* before I ever heard of WHTM. WHTM has had zero impact on how toxic I think MRA’s are.
@Tim
You are really being hated here, eh? You are trying to tell them that they are too deep up their own asses to agree that any name you can say is not a misogynist, but they continue like a broken record repeating the same question time and time again.
Also, obviously the MRAs are making Christmas decorations out of female corpses, hanging them on trees, or something, if people here are willing to say that listening to the MRAs is as bad of an idea as listening to KKK. I’m willing to not listen the arguments that any group which hangs people has to say, so I better not leave my virgin ears hear anything from the MRAs. Feminism is the Absolute Truth, so no point in questioning it, amirite.