“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
Seconding Dreamer. Thanks, David, for telling the truth in the face of these lies. The fact that the lies are transparent and stupid doesn’t mean that they’re not ugly and aggressive.
Stay strong.
” I just ventured over to that forum to check that out and got introduced to a new word: “polyfidelity””
– Still lost in Roosh V forum. Haven’t found anything about Cassie Jaye but found a weird video “Episode 1: The reddit cuck discovers /pol/”
Good lord.
I just feel dirty when Dave does attack pieces like the one on Jaye. There was no reason whatsoever to go after her the way he did. The movie will either be an obvious one-sided film in which case any idiot watching it will know she lacks credibility or it will be an honest probe into the MRA world that will shed some light on what drives these nuts to come to the draconian beliefs they have.
Every time Dave has posted an article with this back-and-forth kind of bickering, it has made me want to read his blog less and less. If I want to see poop-flinging, I’ll go check out a chimpanzee exhibit at the local zoo, know what I mean?
PLEASE, Dave, as one David writing to another, I know you must be having “I can’t even” experiences *daily* with the kind of Nazi-sympathizing psychos you deal with doing what you do, but I think you need to keep in mind that if you stare into the darkness long enough, some of that darkness gets lodged in your own heart and becomes a source of bitterness and darkness in your own life. There are times when I have to just say “You know what? Screw the MRA world today. They could secede from the union and found their own wife-beating nationstate and I wouldn’t read the article about it for 24 hours until I can cool off.” And I’m just reading this stuff (and hailtothegynocracy and a few other blogs).
My fear for you is this: you’re in danger of stooping to their level. I see that you’ve started employing some of their own tactics in taking cheap shots at low-hanging fruit. Don’t. You’re better than that, dude. At the end of your life, you’ve got to be able to live with what you do and have some pride, you know? So yes, keep doing what you do: track and mock the misogyny, but don’t stoop to personal hit pieces, even if what you’re saying is 100% accurate, because that kind of thing lacks tact and class, and you’re an otherwise tactful, classy dude.
Please don’t become the Alex Jones of feminism. We need fewer Alex Joneses in the world, not more. :
@DS I think David’s soul is going to be fine. He does this explicitly to mock them, to make slightly lighter of the darkness, so the rest of us don’t have to poison our souls with it. Nothing about anything he’s written on Jaye has been an attack piece. Some might view it as that, since sometimes the truth is not fun to hear, especially since she spent time trying to legitimize her award. Yes, real award; from a defunct festival that scammed on the real Cannes festival.
@David F Where do you get all this chicken? Are you using your donation money to get chicken?! Share the chicken, man, share the chicken if you love us!
Also, do chimps fling poop? I thought that primarily a monkey thing? And, no chimps and monkeys really are not closely related; primate branch off from monkeys, then become humans, bonobos, chimps, and gorillas (are orangutans primates or monkeys?).
DS,
Wow. That is some epic concern trolling.
This story is really bringing them out of the woodwork.
The apes are all tailless and include the lesser apes (gibbons) as well as the great apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans).
“do chimps fling poop?”
Here, let me google that for you:
Researches find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence
http://phys.org/news/2011-11-poop-throwing-chimps-intelligence.html
@Fruitloopsie
You have inspired me to meme.
@DS, gotta agree with @weirwoodtreehugger. We’ve got a lot of measured, calm people who are concerned about not inflaming, or overstepping the bounds of civil discourse. What we need is more people willing to publicly call those who promote hatred and bigotry out on their BS in a manner that doesn’t feed their own inflated perceptions of their own importance.
@sbel Thanks! I’d have googled it myself, but having more than two windows open on my computer tends to make it do wonky things. My computer is old; and this is one tab, Shakesville is the other and I wasn’t closing it to do poop research, because I really didn’t want to give the troll that much time. Hoping someone knew off the top of their head.
@GardenGallivant Also thanks! I thought orangutan were primates, was pretty sure, but see above. Did not know that about gibbons. But, if you want to know things about chimp, bonobo, and gorilla mating and testes, I can help you out! Note: not an expert, just have some weird interests!
@raysa,
Kale may have meant that they don’t support transphobia, that they’re not transphobic. So they think that transphobic insults from trolls shouldn’t bother them.
DS, like the other posters so far, I disagree with you. It’s not an attack to point out that an award is a scam. Cassie Jaye’s Cannes (Independent!) Film Festival award is dopey and misleading. (And yes, thank you, I know that Cannes is a city.) When she shows it off, it calls her integrity into question. David’s discussion of this award shed light on the film maker and her motivation.
On the whole, we’re pretty polite people. Yes, we do mock others, but it’s because their views are hostile to segments of humanity. And because some of them are trying to make $$$ from this hatred.
I love it when people say, ‘You’re just arguing semantics,’ or, in this case, ‘hinging your argument on a semantic detail,’ proving only that they don’t know what semantics are. Semantics does not refer to lexical choice; semantics refers to meaning, which does, in fact, matter a great deal.
Jaye won an award in Cannes, not at Cannes. Within the film world (and the world in general), Cannes is understood to mean The Cannes Film Festival, not just a film festival put on by some random group in Cannes, France, using the name of city in its title. So, while the claim that she won ‘a Cannes film festival award’ is true, it is misleading because people understand that to mean an award given by the juries at The Cannes Film Festival/Festival de Cannes.
I agree that Futrelle’s reference to Jaye’s film festival award as fake or phony was factually incorrect, and I wish he had described it as it seems to be: An award from a pay-to-play festival of films that took place in Cannes that she has presented in a way that a film maker couldn’t help but know was misleading.
@Ace,
np. Sorry about the slight snarkiness. 😉
@Fruitloopsie, @AnAndreajPejicBlog
That is a kickass expression and a kickass meme. Thanks!
I have a similar one:
I’ve heard that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But I know that when I hear the term “estranged husband,” some people are dead.
@Virtually Out of Touch: “What feminist tradition do you come from?”
My introduction to feminist (actually, non christo-fascist) thought occurred my first Women’s Studies course as a Rutgers University undergrad back in 1983.
Even back then, feminism as I learned it, and learned to love it, was all about the intersectionality of oppression, though that wasn’t what we called it back in the Stone Age. It was about racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, body shaming, slut-shaming, ageism, ablism and all of the other other institutional discrimination out there being inextricably tied to the fight for women’s equality.
That was 30-some years ago, so this concept of intersectional feminism wasn’t something that was invented yesterday. I realize that different people come from different places (I was raised in a hyper-conservative fascist catholic setting, fed gawd’s sake), but it raises my hackles when I hear people assume that all feminists were clueless racists, etc. back in the day.
@sbel I live for the snarkiness of this blog, so that’s fine! I’m not one to usually comment on blogs, so I’m still learning to make myself as clear as I need to be. Actually not quite true, since I thought about writing ‘I should Google it, but not worth my time and effort, cause I’m busy melting cheese on chips so I can eat tonight’ because I was (I’m poor and it’s a delicious way to make five dollars into several meals) but didn’t. I’d wink back at you, but no idea how!
JFC, how any of those posts attack pieces?
I don’t agree with David calling the award fake in the headline because I think it’s a real award from a tiny and sketchy film festival. However, he offers ample proof of it’s sketchiness and he’s right that she should have corrected the many journalists who mistakenly thought she won the award at the real Cannes Film Festival.
I had sympathy for Jaye when David posted his open letter because it’s hard to turn down tens of thousands of dollars of finishing funds that you don’t have to pay back. She should be aware that receiving funding from the subjects of her film is inevitably going to lead to questions about conflict of interest.
For example, James Molls is an Oscar-winning documentarian who has taken an enormous amount of criticism because he used funding from agribusiness and agricultural trade organizations to make the movie Farmland. He claims he only took the money because he was promised complete creative control, but it was seen as agribusiness’ response to Food, Inc. and was described as propaganda and an infomercial in many reviews.
My sympathy has since waned as Jaye continues to aggressively pander to MRAs and freak out over reasonable criticism.
Ah, I see that the concern trolls have discovered this post. Stay strong David, you’re telling a difficult, disturbing story that needs to be told.
@Ace,
Yeah, I don’t comment on blogs that much either. 🙂
I got the winking face by using ;, -, ), without the commas and spaces. (If that doesn’t show up right I’ll try again.)
😉
You are checking the IPs on these concern trolls, right David? Their weird obsession with this topic is starting to seem a little suspicious to me.
I think you have some confusion of terms here. Monkeys ARE primates. Monkeys are NOT apes. Apes are a group of primates (scientifically, the superfamily Hominoidae) including gorillas, chimpanzees, gibbons, humans, and, yes, orangutans. Primates are an order: an order is a much broader category than superfamily or family.
Hope that cleared it up. 🙂
Casey J should be on an episode of Law and Order SVU. She obviously suffers from Stockholm Syndrome and the drama she ensues demonstrates that.