A theater chain in Melbourne has cancelled screenings of Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill in response to a petition on Change.org. Good news for feminists? No. Bad news.
As someone who’s writing critically about Men’s Rights activists for years, including many of those who appear in the film, I ask you to NOT support efforts to get the film removed from theaters.
Yes, the film (which I haven’t seen) looks to be a whitewash of some of the most noxious people in the world.
But if you’re interested in fighting against MRAs and all that they stand for, attempts to get The Red Pill removed from theaters don’t help.
I’m against this sort of thing on principle. But it’s also a very bad move practically. These sorts of campaigns give the film free publicity. They allow Cassie Jaye and her supporters to play the part of free-speech martyrs — especially ironic given the ongoing efforts of MRAs and fellow travelers in the alt right to silence women and feminists through harassment.
It’s exactly what they want.
So please don’t start petitions against The Red Pill, don’t sign petitions against The Red Pill; don’t support petitions against The Red Pill.
Let it sink into the obscurity it deserves on its own.
EDIT: As I said in the comments, this is such a boon to MRAs I would not be shocked in the slightest to discover that it was an MRA publicity stunt.
I won’t boycott those screenings…you have my solemn word with Katie as my witness!
“Please don’t
trybother to get screenings of The Red Pill cancelled”Fixed that for you, free of charge 😉
Agree with you on this, David F. I won’t be seeing the film, but I certainly won’t be supporting efforts to have it banned, either – for a few different reasons, most of which you list above. It’s not the best approach in my view.
ETA:
@Skiriki, nice one 😛
I don’t sign Change petitions anyway…
And no, lurker trolls, this ain’t censorship or a violation on anyone’s rights
Yeah, I wasn’t bothered enough to even try to get it pulled.
Let them run their little puff piece. The world will see through their bullshit soon enough, should they care enough to look.
We’ve got nothing to fear from more exposure for the MRM. They’ll do a grand job showing who they really are to the world.
I’m honestly surprised a chain of theaters was going to be showing it in the first place. Shrug.
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.
Hi all, I am a white, middle aged male. Wow I feel like I should follow that statement with an apology! But I shall resist that Pavlovian urge and forge on. I would love one of you to say you do not support the following: affirmative action, marriage equality, Hillary Clinton, a woman’s right to abortion, man made climate change. No takers? Didn’t think so. My point? That you are all just cookie cutter, group think, holier than thou sheep whose opinions are not worth the screens they are typed on. To throw the baby out with the very dirty bath water and refuse to acknowledge a modern trend towards man hating is ignorant or wilfully bad. Some feminists have gone way past wanting equality to seeking revenge. An example of Animal Farm but in sexual politics. Don’t indulge! Love men and seek true equality rather than the punishment of men and the subjugation of boys. Thank you!
@Rosie I was going to say the exact same thing! It smells fishy, because the only people talking about it are mra’s and their gross ilk. I can’t imagine many people having heard about it and also what is the point of banning it if only a handful of theaters are showing it?
Rosie, yeah, I would not be shocked in the slightest to discover that this was an MRA publicity stunt
Now I am sure some women and men who identify as feminists signed it. But who started it? I don’t think it was a feminist.
As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin once said “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.”
You do realize that the owner of this blog is a white middle aged male, right?
Do you even know what Pavlovian conditioning is? How does it apply to social justice issues? I’m dying to know. Really.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/931/046/725.gif
Can you explain how anything on your list that I bolded there is man hatred? Affirmative action isn’t man hating. Men of color exist. You know that, right? Marriage equality isn’t man hating. Queer men exist. Hillary Clinton? What policy has she proposed that is misandric? Is it just the existence of a female soon to be president that bothers you? Thought so. How is abortion man hating? If it weren’t for abortion, there’d be a whole lot more men paying child support. Climate change is the only one you got right. It hurts people of all genders. I don’t support it at all. I take it you agree that we should something about it?
Examples?
So adorbs.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwlgm0TKgF1qaxlki.gif
@Craig
http://66.media.tumblr.com/043f0b2ec4dda4a14c320c9d07888df7/tumblr_milgqoI60k1s5p5xno1_500.gif
Craig, no woman likes to get copypasta. Be original, or GTFO.
Your passive aggressiveness isn’t fucking cute, nor is it appreciated. Shove off.
I don’t support man-made climate change, because I’m a firm believer that we need to protect the environment, and it’s one of my personal beliefs that we need to do more for Gaia than we currently are, and stop polluting her and pillaging her resources for corporate gain.
However, I’m an intersectional feminist (which means I don’t like bigotry period), a registered Democrat (who supported Bernie before Hillary got the nomination, but agrees that she’s a far better candidate than Trumplestilskin will ever be), a pro-choicer who believes that women should have the right to do what they want to (or have to, in some cases) with their bodies, and I’m also queer in terms of gender and sexual orientation (girlflux and pansexual).
So, yeah, I support the rest of your little list. And if that makes you want to stay away from me, then by all means, please do hit that little red X at the top of your screen, please and thank you.
“You’re all sheep! Unlike me with my copy and pasted message with little to no punctuation or paragraph structure! If you were more like ME with all my woman-hating and minority-bashing, then you too could be on the path to individuality and enlightenment!”
You’re more than welcome to that opinion, Crag, but forgive me if I’m not wounded by what you, some rando on the internet, think of me and my liberal leanings. If you think you can wound me, or anyone else here, by calling us “sheep”, you really need to get some original material and not follow your group’s script.
Just because people are being more accepting of other people in all kinds of ways now (though begrudgingly), it doesn’t make you some sort of “rebel” to go against the flow. It just makes you an asshole.
How do you think men are being “hated” Cryig? Please, do regale us with your tales of how evil us feeeemales are because we won’t suck your dick on command or a woman asked you to leave her alone once after you tried to pick her up.
Come down off that cross, Criig. You silly boys always wanting to be so damn oppressed like it’s some sort of fun thing…
I do love men. There are lots of men I love in my life. However, I hate the system that not only hurts me for being feminine presenting, I hate the system that tries to force them into roles of toxic masculinity.
Which is something I doubt you understand with your little “Feminism bad! Masculinity good!” black and white worldview.
Of course, you could clarify how you feel men are being “punished” and boys are being “subjugated”, but I suppose that would be asking you to actually break your copypasta script, and I’m not sure you could handle that.
The original petitioner may be legitimate (there’s a DV worker and campaigner by that name), but it’s certainly the case that some people have signed it precisely to discredit “feminazis”; their comments are crystal clear on this.
*sigh*
If any of y’all are fans of WheezyWaiter: it’s Craigity Craig, Craig with a Wig *ding*
I wonder why these 5 things are the benchmark for group think. We disagree on plenty. Religion, philosophy, economics, science, entertainment, lotsa stuff. And that’s fine. That said, if you don’t support the right to an abortion, there ain’t much use for you here
Oh, and did you even read Animal Farm? Like, really read it? Cos I don’t think ya did.
Let the movie stand on it merits, if its crap people are free to say it, as its free to be shown
@Craig
I do not support man-made (aka anthropogenic) climate change.
If the USA had better climate regulations, it would never have happened.
Now that it has, we’ve got to be super diligent about fixing this issue.
Again, I vote NO on climate change.
@fred
It’s not free to be shown. Showing a movie costs a significant amount of money, and the theatres need to recoup that.
@David
I agree with you.
Why would I want to deprive the world of a look at the manosphere!
I vote no on climate change. I vote no on the manosphere. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want people to be informed about them. In fact, the more we all know about these particularly noxious, dangerous issues, the better.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy
I would agree with you if I saw it posted elsewhere…but I did not. I found out about the petition through MRA’s, not through feminists.
But you never know. A woman who identifies as a feminist could have started it. It’s just interesting that no feminists in Australia, like Clementine, retweeted it.
@Craig
Unless some of you are in favour of genocide, rainforest deforestation, totalitarianism, child sacrifice, cannibalism, serial murder, capital punishment or witch-burning you’re all a flock of group think feminazis! Ha, I’ve run rings around you man-logically! I’m far too clever for all of you ladies because I’m a white, middle-aged man!
Ooh, great insight there, Craig. People who like to hang out together, caring about similar things and having similar values? Who would have guessed?! I hope you’ve given the gears to all those posters on Star Wars forums who all care deeply about Star Wars. Buncha groupthinkers, I say!
You know, instead of triumphantly declaring that many of us have similar beliefs, as if that was somehow meaningful, you could try arguing the validity of those beliefs.
@Craig:
Misogynist MRA is surprised and indignant that rational people tend to agree about a small basic set of core principled positions.
Logic-deficient misogynist MRA with poor communication skills clumsily tries to adapt an idiom about a laughably cheap writing medium (i.e., pieces of paper) to a significantly more expensive writing medium (i.e., computer display hardware), and fails to realize that consequently his attempted put-down doesn’t work.