Filmmaker Cassie Jaye seems to have developed a weird affinity for bigots.
First, she cozied up to some of the most hateful figures in the Men’s Rights movement during the filming of her documentary The Red Pill.
Then, when her funding for the film ran out, she happily accepted financial assistance not only from the actual subjects of the film but also from a motley assortment of far-right ideologues — among them a notorious quasi-journalist who was famously tossed off of Twitter after his fans barraged Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist abuse, and a delusional Trump superfan who literally believes he gave Hillary Clinton the flu with his mind. (After a big donation to Jaye, he got himself an associate producer credit on her film.)
Now she’s trying her best to drum up interest in her film, which has barely drawn any notice at all outside the overlapping spheres of alt-right lady haters and MRAs since it premiered at a New York theater earlier this month.
While The Red Pill got a glowing, if rambling, “review” from new pal/volunteer fundraiser Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and a somewhat less-enthusiastic thumbs-up from Cathy Young at the right-wing internet tabloid Heat Street, the two real film reviewers who’ve bothered to give it a look have panned it.
Katie Walsh at the Los Angeles Times took issue with the film’s “uncritical, lopsided” argument, complaining that Jaye “twists herself in knots to justify the movement’s misogynist rhetoric.” The Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl dismissed Jaye as an inept “propagandist” and warned potential viewers that, as the headline to his piece put it, “You Can’t Unsee ‘The Red Pill,’ the Documentary About a Filmmaker Who Learns to Love MRAs.” (His review of what he described as an “agonizing” film caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the MRA crowd.)
With little hope of attracting positive attention from film critics, and apparently desperate for any publicity she could get, Jaye agreed to appear on the podcast of an internet-famous bigot who has been described by one critic, not without reason, as “THE MOST WARPED USELESS PEICE OF SH*T THAT I HAVE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE TO ENCOUNTER [on the] INTERNET OR ELSEWHERE.”
I am talking, of course, about the rape-excusing, abuse-encouraging, lady-hating, gay-baiting white supremacist Matt Forney — he’s the one on the left in the photo below.
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/787198238575120384
She didn’t just give Forney a couple of minutes of her time; she sat down with him for roughly three-quarters of an hour for his podcast “This Alt-Right Life.” It’s a singularly unedifying discussion. At one point she mentions that she used to get into arguments with her boyfriend every month about nothing, something she now jokingly blames not on PMS but on her (former) feminism.
Badump-tsssh!
She also expressed sympathy when Forney mentioned that he himself had been the victim of a “false” rape accusation. (Imagine that, the author of a blog post titled “Why Girls Rarely Mean No When They Say No” being accused of rape!)
Not that long ago, Jaye was by all appearances a staunch opponent of pretty much everything Forney and his alt-right pals stand for.
In 2012, she released a documentary titled “The Right to Love,” which, according to its description on IMDb, is the portrait of a “Californian married gay couple and their two adopted children,” fighting against the forces of “discrimination, ignorance and hate” who would deny them their right to marry and raise children.
Now she’s appearing on the podcast of a guy who is a virtual embodiment of this ignorance and hate.
It’s not as if evidence of Forney’s despicable views is hard to find, and not just in the WHTM archives. The name of his podcast contains the phrase “alt-right.” In the list of “popular posts” highlighted in the sidebar of his blog one finds such lovely titles as “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem” and “Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved.” (Neither title is meant ironically.)
And then there is the endless stream of racist, misogynist and homophobic abuse that is his Twitter account. Some highlights from the last several days:
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790064680907792386
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790364983171354625
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790367816360857601
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790050589598162944
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/789976518596362240
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/789633067791122432
That last tweet — a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of murdering people by throwing them from helicopters — is technically a death threat, aimed at a National Review writer who has gotten many such threats from Forney’s colleagues in the alt-right, including photoshopped images of his 7-year-old daughter being gassed in a Nazi death camp.
Are these really the sorts of people Jaye wants to align herself with?
In his “review” of The Red Pill, Milo claimed, without evidence, that a virtual army of feminists was “scrambling to stop Cassie Jaye” and her film. In fact, feminists have mostly ignored The Red Pill. And the person who has done the most to damage Jaye’s credibility is, well, Jaye herself.
Fun fact to add to Paradoxy’s comment. The person involved in impersonating that charitable organization, intercepting funds for womens’ shelters?
Erin Fucking Pizzey.
EDIT: Hee hee, wwth, all is forgiven 😉
FYI this is why you are being called a concern troll. This is textbook concern trolling. “I’m trying to control your behavior and shame you into doing what I want because I’m just CONCERNED that you’re making yourself unlikable and/or ineffective by acting like an autonomous person” is the very definition of concern trolling. So you are a concern troll. Stop doing it if you want to not be called one.
@Scildfreja: Gods above, I almost forgot about that.
She helped AVFM impersonate White Ribbon, and the funds from those donations went right into Elam’s pocket.
But yeah, she’s so demonized you guis! People are just mean to her for no reason!
Let’s not forget that right around the time that Pizzey and AVFM was ramping up to steal money from women’s shelters, their Leader and Head Limburger Paul Elam was declaring to the world that MRA “activism” would not include men’s shelters or education, but would consist solely of “internet activism”. A.k.a. shouting at women.
Pizzey’s a feminist, you say?
To be fair to Susan, I don’t think they called her a feminist, just made the (demonstrably untrue) claim that she’s being “demonized” solely because her views of domestic violence towards women aren’t “mainstream”.
Pizzey also said it doesn’t count as abuse unless you fear for your life. Since female on male abuse is far less likely to result in serious injury or death than male on female abuse, it’s not clear why MRAs would hold Pizzey up as an example of how you do anti-abuse advocacy right. Unless of course, MRAs don’t actually care about male victims and only use them as an excuse to spew misogyny and try to get help for female victims cut, and make it legal and acceptable to abuse women.
Assuming the father is known, the only way this gets bypassed is if the father fails to establish legal paternity, fails to respond to a notice of adoption proceedings or is found to be abusive or unfit in some way i.e. it’s his own fucking fault. If the father shows the fuck up, establishes paternity and isn’t abusive, his consent is required.
If the mother doesn’t know who the father is or chooses not to tell the court, nothing is being asked of him anyway so there’s no need for him to forfeit any rights or responsibilities. If the court finds out by some other means, the father is notified and then has the opportunity to respond and establish legal custody and grant or deny his consent to the adoption.
Unilaterally deciding to give up a child is not a right that women have except under very specific circumstances i.e. the father is either unfit or unwilling or isn’t even being asked to contribute.
TL;DR men have exactly the same right as women to decide not to be a parent to an already born child.
Oh come the fuck on
As Brony pointed out, that is a parental, not a reproductive, issue. Also “parenthood” and “being financially responsible for your offspring” are different things. It’s not actually all that difficult to opt out of the former, particularly as a man.
For the record I believe we would all be better off if childcare expenses were all covered through pooled tax revenues. If that were the case, no one would have to support their own kids if they’d rather just fuck off. That’s not what MRAs want, though. They just want to be able to sign all of their responsibilities off to the other parent at will. Under the current system, it is the child who suffers if one parent refuses to contribute financially to their well-being. That’s not okay.
This is true almost nowhere. Generally the only ways you won’t get some form of visitation are a) you don’t want it, or b) there is proof that you have abused your kids. The courts are only concerned with what’s best for the child, and they almost always rule that contact with both parents is in a child’s best interest.
Oh, also, Erin Pizzey is not a demon. She is an asshole, though.
@That_Susan
I don’t, really know what to say to a response like that. Oh wait I do, I feel like I’m being coddled, ignored and just saw a person handwave the racism expressed by a minority by saying that she’s restricting the youth’s free speech to say racist things to people like me and her. And then you just used that for a few paragraphs of humblebragging.
@Ooglyboggles (and anyone who agrees with them that I’ve not been efficient enough today in responding to every single comment directed at me): “C’mon Susan the list is piling up, start finding a way to reply to everyone’s posts about you and your arguments. Going one at a time is not very efficient.”
LOL, I’ll just have to explain that I’m not in a position to make blogging a full-time job. I normally participate in online discussions during breaks in my working day. I work from home and on a break, am generally able to open up a page in another window. But for some reason, I can’t get into this blog till I’ve shut down the pages I keep open for work, though I can read the comments through my personal email and I took some time on my breaks to compile my first long post of today in a Word document, which I copied and pasted after I was able to log in to this site after work.
I’ll have to call it a day for now — but I will take a moment to modify my phrase about men’s “right” not to be demonized. That was a poor choice of words, as I agree with another poster here that criticism certainly is a human right. So maybe without using the word “right,” I’ll just say that I believe that we, as human beings, *should* give ALL human beings the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, in response to one poster, it’s awful if people demonize a woman (and I’ll add — or a man), who doesn’t feel ready to raise the child that they’ve created. Yes, condoms are a great thing and when properly used, they greatly, greatly minimize the risk of pregnancy. However, pregnancy does sometimes occur even when precautions have been taken. All I’m saying is that both man and woman should be able to decide whether they’re opting in, or opting out, of assuming the rights and responsibilities of parenthood.
If the man opts out soon after learning of the pregnancy, this is information the woman can take into account while deciding what the best option is for herself and her child, should she decide to carry to term.
You lot are a pathetic bunch, every avatar a cat, all of you spouting silly nonsense and stupid rationalizations and conspiracy theories.
YOU ARE THE MAMMOTHS and your time is up.
Losers,
The reproductive rights whine always cracks me up. Do MRA men really want to
– Menstruate
– Have menstrual cramps
– Have PMS
– Have to buy tampons or other menstrual hygiene products
– Worry about becoming pregnant when they’re not ready/have pregnancy scares
– Be responsible for obtaining and taking hormonal birth control which entails taking on side effects and in some countries paying out of pocket
– Get pregnant and have symptoms such as weight gain, swollen extremities, nausea, vomiting, pimples, sore back and feet and whatever else I’m leaving out
– Get pregnant and being forced to completely alter your lifestyle. No drinking, no soft cheese, no raw fish, taking prenatal vitamins, going to constant doctor appointments
– Be visibly pregnant and have other people, including total strangers constantly judge and monitor your actions (such as your diet and exercise level)
– Go through many hours of painful labor including possibly an episiotomy or get a major surgery (C-section)
– Have your body permanently altered by childbirth (weight gain, incontinence)
– Breast feed/pump milk/look for places to breast feed without judgement while in public
– Die in childbirth
– Have a miscarriage
– Be taken to a Catholic hospital while miscarrying and die because they won’t give you a life saving abortion
– Get an abortion which includes paying a lot of money, going through a horde of protesters and dealing with the stigmatization
– Be constantly told your eggs will dry up if you don’t have kids young.
This isn’t even a comprehensive list of the shit cis women and other uterus havers deal with and this isn’t even going into the care of the children. Cis men really want all this? Right.
This is your ideal world? One where women are forced by poverty to terminate pregnancies they might otherwise have wanted? Well, good news for you I guess: that happens all the time already.
@ that susan
But oftentimes there is no doubt. People make their views very clear and other people express their condemnation of those views; and by extension the person espousing those views.
What you appear to be saying (and I don’t want to put words in your mouth so please correct me if I’m wrong) is that people should be entitled to hold and express views, no matter how horrendous or harmful those views might be considered, and everyone else must respect that and not express their own views on the subject or their opinion of the person concerned.
That in itself could be a double standard.
@Paradoxical Intention
I don’t know literally anything about any of the other women listed in the IMDB cast page for the movie, but the MRM’s current favorite “feminist” is in there – Erin Pizzey, who published a methodologically questionable study in the 1970’s that separated victims of abuse between the “violence-prone” (i.e., women who create and recreate violent relationships – not victim-blaming or psych-shaming at all, no ma’am) and the “genuinely battered”. She also claims that most abuse is reciprocal, which the MRM loves because it means they get to claim that men are unfairly held responsible for domestic violence when – by their matron saint’s own words! – most of those cases are mutual fights where the woman was just as violent as the man. No surprise, then, that she’s MRM’s token “feminist” friend, having gone so far as to run AMAs on the AVfM subreddit.
Yeah, this is pretty close to the world we live in right now. In Canada the government won’t pursue men who don’t pay child support, it’s up to the mother to arrange that. ‘Cause legal services are so cheap, any woman can pay that out of pocket to sue someone who may not have to pay anything in the end anyways.
(trace elements of sarcasm in the above statement)
Viscaria is on point, but I’d just add in that the woman in our oh-so-mythical and super-ideal situation often can’t get an abortion if she wanted, in most parts of the world really.
(moderate elements of sarcasm in the above statement)
Yeah guys, those assholes bombing women with death and rape threats on twitter are just misunderstood! Boys will be boys, you know. And only a few mass murderers have emerged from their ranks over the past year or two. That’s statistically insignificant! We should talk with hem instead, maybe we’ll learn something!
We should probably give Trump a pass, too, it’s just locker room talk.
(volumetric elements of sarcasm in the above statement)
Susan, if you’re still claiming to be a feminist – second wave feminist or whatever – you have no idea what patriarchy is or how it propagates. The worst excesses of patriarchy propagate by people who take advantage of societal instincts to give the benefit of the doubt.
I believe in kindness and compassion for everyone, too. Sometimes that kindness has to come with a hard edge of truth.
@Oogly
In Susanland, vocal opposition to Erin Pizzey is a violation of her rights, but you being subject to racism is just part of the vigorous exchange of ideas. Right. Of course. I guess when she was talking about how MRAs are “not opposed” to people of colour having rights, she meant, like… some rights. Not, you know, too many.
@That_Susan
You need to do some explaining about what “opt out” looks like for the people providing sperm. No one gets to control another person’s body through physical or social force. Otherwise there is room in this for things that are just as bad as what the religious right does for reproductive rights.
I typically tell paranoid people that they need to be better judges of character or have serious talk early in a relationship.
Going back to Suzie’s child rape hypothetical (notice how subordinate the actual crime is to the money), ya know there is a way to stop that from happening (all of the 3 times it’s ever happened. Ever)? And, as it turns out, feminists are on the forefront of bringing about that change. Awesome, right? See, in our perfect world, survivors would be believed when they say they’ve been raped. So, neither waiting a year before reporting nor being male would be grounds to consider him a ‘bad victim’
Therefore, no wallet rape (or whatever MRAs are calling child support nowadays), no revictimization, all good! Maybe, while the woman in question serves her decades in prison, the baby can get adopted by a wonderful lesbian couple. No dad at all! I’m sure menzers won’t be clutching their pearls about the kid being raised as a mangina or anything. They’re not opposed to anyone’s rights, dontcha know?
Is it just me, or does this whole thing with palace cinemas sound like a publicity stunt? Not a lot of people were paying attention to this movie before and I think the mras were getting kinda miffed about it
Hey y’awl! Since this thread is now hyper expanding, I’ll toss in my “you young folk doing it wrong” tale… when I was 30-something, working at a factory, a couple of much younger workers had on some new ’80s Metal music, a co-worker and I were analyzing it with terms like “just pure noise…” and, at exactly the same moment, we BOTH said “damn, I sound just like my grandfather!” 0_o
The whole “opt-out” strategy is completely blind to the fact that parentage laws are rooted in misogynistic thinking: the child is the product of the mother but the property of the father, women are incapable of caring for a child on their own and hence require a man to provide financial support, women are too stupid to know who the real father of their child is, etc. MRM thinking, instead, has couched every single one of these in man-centered terminology – that men are required to take responsibility for children they didn’t want while women can abort, that men have to get jobs to take care of children but women can get away with not paying child support even if they’re the non-custodial parent, and that husbands are forced to accept parentage of their wife’s children even if the kids aren’t his. Intent, context, and the history of the laws is irrelevant to these human-shaped blocks of MRM talking points spouting “equality, not feminism”.
At least they’re marginally more honest about their misogyny than the people I’ve come to term “men’s wave feminists” – the ones who only subscribe to feminist theory when it benefits them as a man, and who think that they’re more qualified than any woman to spearhead feminist causes. I knew one of those personally – a guy who was all about the feminist empowerment of polyamory…because it meant he didn’t have to feel bad about cheating on his wife with another woman, because that other woman was in a poly marriage and he was “empowering” her decision. Of course, now that he’s married to that woman instead of the wife he cheated on, the poly aspect of their marriage has disappeared.
The red pill movie has been pulled from a theatre in Australia.
I am going to call shenanigans on a feminist creating the petition that had the movie removed.
I think this was started by a MRA for media attention purposes. And look at them all circle-jerking over it being banned on twitter.
It’s curious how both petitions got 1,000+ signatures within 12 hours w/o the first being organized by a known feminist. It was posted on twitter by an Annabel F with 52 followers and nobody retweeted it. And then a bunch of MRAs copied the petition and commented with ‘OMG FEMINAZI!’ posts.
I then tried to look for it on google, wondering if it was posted to a forum or blog, but I can’t seem to find anything that isn’t critiquing it.
I don’t know. Something feels weird about it.
WWTH:
Nah, we meninists just hold it in.
/s
Speaking specifically of this site, from what I’ve seen, people here are very willing to give each other some benefit, certainly with new posters. People here do speak their opinions, and do object to and offer corrections to posts they disagree with. But that idyll of a “benefit of the doubt” ends when the intentions of the person making the argument are no longer IN DOUBT.
This is troublesome. To me, it assumes on face, that both parents have equal responsibilities and equal burdens. After the child has been born, that’s closer to true, although for social reasons, the mother will still have a greater burden. During pregnancy, however, the burden is exponentially heavier on the woman. I don’t see a valid argument for the father unilaterally “opting out”
I might be missing something in this thread, tho, I’m pretty tired.