By David Futrelle
So Cassie Jaye‘s execrable “Men’s Rights” documentary The Red Pill has been causing a bit of a stir in Australia. Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a lengthy puff piece on Jaye and her film.
You’d think Jaye would be overjoyed, but no: she’s kicking up a shine over some of the exceedingly mild criticisms that somehow found their way into the otherwise utterly credulous piece.
Specifically, she’s upset that writer Greg Callaghan suggested at one point that “viewers were owed a more balanced back-story” on A Voice for Men’s notorious founder Paul Elam. “You don’t have to dig very deeply,” Callagham noted,
to learn that the now 60-year-old Elam once created a website called RegisterHer, which encouraged men to name and shame women who supposedly made false rape allegations.
This is such weak sauce that I’m not even sure if it even qualifies as criticism. Elam did indeed, with the help of his former best buddy John Hembling, set up a site called Register-Her that was intended to “name and shame” not only alleged false accusers but also assorted other women Elam and other AVFMers had taken a dislike to, including:
Actress Katherine Heigl, who was put on the site after making a humorous public service announcement for the site Funny or Die promoting the spaying and neutering of pets. Register-Her charges her with “endors[ing] male targeted sexual mutilation.”
Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, who was put on the site for several newspaper columns that the site misrepresents in an attempt to show that she is guilty of “an ongoing pattern of anti-male bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex.”
A number of young women who attended a protest against Men’s Rights icon Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto. Register-Her used Twitter Tweets from some of the women, clearly intended as jokes, as evidence of genocidal intentions towards men.
And “name and shame” is perhaps the mildest possible way to describe what the site was intended to do. Indeed, when the site first launched, a giggly Elam explained on the A Voice for Men internet radio show that:
If Mary Jane Rottencrotch out there wants to say that her husband beat her just for the sake of gaining leverage in a divorce he will now have a resource where he can come and post your name, your picture, your work telephone number, your address, perhaps even your route you take to get to work, if you bother to have a job.
While Register-Her never made good on its initial promise to post this sort of personal information about its targets, the site was clearly a major part of Elam’s oft-stated goal to “fuck their shit up” — with “they” meaning pretty much anyone Elam dislikes. Indeed, he once warned a critic of the site that:
I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. …
[Y]ou fucking moron. Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut and pretend AVfM and register-her.com does not exist for as long as you can. Because, as you can see right now, anything you say or do will be thrown back in your face like holy water on a vampire.
We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity. …
You are SO fucked.
Jaye’s response to Callaghan ‘s sort-of-criticism? Well, she may not have mentioned Register-Her in her two-hour documentary, but she did leave some footage about it on the cutting room floor!
No, seriously, that’s her response.
Just because you assume something doesn't make it true. I have the raw footage from 2013 when I ask Paul Elam about "RegisterHer" @TheAge pic.twitter.com/nzWgEovJuj
— Cassie Jaye (@Cassie_Jaye) July 28, 2017
RegisterHer is a part of the 98% of footage not included in the final film. Greg is insinuating I didn't ask enough questions, but I DID ask
— Cassie Jaye (@Cassie_Jaye) July 29, 2017
Luckily for us, she’s put the “raw footage” of her discussion with Elam about Register-Her on YouTube. Apparently she thinks it makes her look good — here she is, asking Elam the tough questions! — but she could not be more wrong. In fact, it reveals her to be an utterly credulous interviewer happy to accept Elam’s dishonest spin about his site as a truthful account of “what ‘RegisterHer’ is about.”
Incase anyone is wondering what "RegisterHer" was about: https://t.co/pewAClNjJC
— Cassie Jaye (@Cassie_Jaye) July 29, 2017
If you watch the clip — and I strongly recommend that you do, however infuriating it might be — you will see not only that that Elam’s description of his site is utter bullshit, but also that the highly accommodating Jaye challenges precisely zero of Elam’s assertions, responding to his utterly misleading and at times simply false account of the site by declaring “this all seems completely reasonable.”
That’s apparently her idea of a followup “question.”
If you want a true picture of what Register-Her was really about, check out my post on it here, which goes into more detail than I have in this post. (I borrowed some of this post from my earlier post, but there’s a lot more there I didn’t include here.)
She really expects people to both sit through her poorly made MRA commercial and watch the hours of garbage that didn’t even make it into the poorly made commercial on Youtube?
I know you’ve got to be pretty dumb to cheerlead for the Abuser’s Lobby, but dammit lady, c’mon.
Today’s Pedantry Corner: the article is from The Age (Melbourne), not the Sydney Morning Herald.
But yeah the coverage here … at least they can’t claim they’re being silenced.
Ah, who am I kidding?
My husband wants me to watch The Red Pill on Netflix ’cause he thinks it will be funny and doesn’t understand why I don’t want to. This kind of thing is why. How dare Cassie Jaye show this kind of blatant favoritism and then present herself as neutral and objective?
Elam is such a boring has-been these days. Isn’t he ever gonna pull some stunt to try and transition from MRA to alt-righter and regain the attention he once had, like Janet Bloomfield has done a few times? Isn’t he going to write a piece of obvious clickbait, titled something like “10 reasons why it’s okay to use violence against anti-Trump protestors” or “White, male and proud of it; SJWs can suck my d*ck!” or something similarly transparently desperate? C’mon dude, you used to be such a source of entertainment!
“Why is it necessary to publish this information?” would have been a fairly obvious question to ask.
Elam always makes this wild “I dare you to disagree with me so I can murder you face” when he is lying.
Jaye said she was being stalked by a men’s rights activist, I wonder who it was…
Isn’t he ALWAYS making that face, dikdik?
Lame Paul is a piece of shit. Always has been, always will be. Period.
Oof. Long-time reader, first time poster! (Been reading backlogged posts, didn’t wanna commit necromancy on any old threads. :3) I was wondering which new post would lead me to start talking. This one. Ugh.
Sadly, I was temporarily won over by this documentary a month and a half ago. I am entirely too credulous, because I am too nice. Sadly, my knowledge of Paul Elam was overly cursory at the time. A few days and much random YouTubing later, I figured it out. I’m still pretty disappointed in myself; I guess I just so desperately wanted to feel like I understood “the other side” that I let myself be convinced it wasn’t atrociously one-sided, for a few days too long.
She’s pretty artful at dodging mea culpas, isn’t she?
P.S. I also found out Paul Elam lives in my city. So. …Bummer.
It’s because he’s always lying, Brian.
Lumin8, welcome! Glad you did your own research.
Mish, the article ran in the Sydney Morning Herald too, that’s the version I saw. Aren’t all the big papers there run by the same company?
Another Jaye thread. I await the trolluge
Cassie Jaye: Isn’t she the filmmaker who won the Cannes award? No, not that Cannes award — another Cannes award, one the filmmaker pays to win. She’s got that award listed on her resume.
As Cassie Jaye herself kindly pointed out to us last year, Cannes is a city.
Good to know.
@Kat, AotFGE: If that’s a thing we can do now, I’m pleased to inform the commentariat that I am the proud owner of an Emmy (Rossum Award for Terrible Singing in a Joel Schumacher Film).
Yeaaaaah! Phantom of the Opera burn!
But seriously, that kind of intellectual dishonesty is so gross. :/
Cassie Jaye has earned her fanbase.
Is it just me, or is there a recent trend of White Feminists™ “taking the red pill” and going to go hang out with them because they’ll give them positive attention (and money)?
I mean, Cassie was one of the first, but then we got that Laci Green shit going on too.
If I’m going to watch youtube there are so many better things to watch be it short subjects from an actress friend of mine (that are put out there to promote interest in other stuff), to horror trailers, to speeches and news from people I actually care about hearing from.
I don’t think we have a Reddit thread going, but here’s a dude who got a woman pregnant, somehow got her to keep the baby (she wanted an abortion), and now wants to know if he can legally force her to have custody. (He has sole legal and physical custody.)
Please tell me the publication that ran the puff piece on Jaye and her movie is a Rupert Murdoch rag. Anything else is just too depressing.
And just in case any troll wants to come in here and defend Cassie Jaye as not collaborating with misogynists, I’ll just preemptively put it out there that AVFM had Thomas Ball in their “activism” section for quite some time. Ball lost custody of his toddler daughter because he hit her in the face hard enough to cause bleeding and then instead of attending the anger management counseling sessions required to regain partial custody, he decided to self immolate in front of the courthouse instead.
Another one Jaye has buddied up with is Matt Forney. A racist who is opposed to age of consent laws. Under his old pen name In malafide, he argued that domestic violence is necessary and good.
The regulars here already know all this probably, so I’m not hunting down the links to this stuff yet. But Cassie Jaye posts tend to attract a lot of trolls, so I’m just going to bring it up now and if need be, I can track down the receipts if concern trolls do show up.
@PaganReader – Oh gods above, I read that a while ago.
Luckily, Reddit had a moment of decency and tore him a new asshole and told him that he couldn’t force this woman to be his baby slave and his SO.
It’s a horrific read, but it’s a damn good example of how a lot of men think they can ensnare women via getting them pregnant. Luckily, this guy got his shit handed to him.
I’ve seen absolutely no examples of any MRA group that operates as a legitimately organized and operated civil rights organization. The ones I’ve looked at only have maybe one or two full-time employees, there’s only a very superficial semblance of professionalism on their Web sites that’s easy to see through, and they’re not posting anything like detailed quarterly financial reports. As far as I know, they’re being run out of someone’s apartment on GoDaddy or something.
It’s a bit similar to telling the difference between a degree mill and a legitimate online college. A big red flag is that the school doesn’t have student services like subscriptions to academic article databases paid for with a portion of your fees (the worse of the scam schools would rather pocket your money and spend the minimum on something that looks like courses).
@Paradoxical Intention:
Some of the specifics for the recent ‘recanters’ could just be political; people with more conservative viewpoints in other ways latching on to this as the misogyny gets more outspoken on that side of things. Along with just the general human tendency to prefer simple and obvious answers, even when they’re wrong.
There’s probably some parallelism with the anti-vaxx movement, which only exists in its current form because there have been enough intervening generations that a lot of the more vocal people these days simply never had any actual experience of how bad the ‘good’ old days really were.
Of course, none of that excuses people like Phyllis Schlafly, who do remember and are actively trying to pull up the ladder behind them so only rich, white women can enjoy the benefits.
@P.I.:
One of the more egregious things about Green’s case is that, along with assuming no feminists have ever engaged in a civil discussion with anti-feminists (despite the fact it’s been happening for years), she dismissed Kevin Logan – who’s defended against grotesque attacks of her person – at the behest of Shoe0nhead…based on a comment he made about her years ago and which he apologized for, that she also accepted. Laci Green, of course, was too gullible and just accepted that without any doubts.
It shows that, no matter how much you do engage with them or how civil you may be towards them, they simply won’t register it and go back to this mode of unwarranted self-victimization. They seek validation and, even when strongly disagreeing with them in the most obvious way, being “civil” only seems to enable them further than prompt them to reexamine their viewpoints. Yet, if you were to be less polite and more blunt, they’ll use that as ammunition against you and make themselves out to be the victims.
It’s such a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t situation…
BTW, her interaction with Miles Ian Chong on transgender individuals in the military on Twitter was utterly heinous. She argued they shouldn’t be banned from service, Chong said they should ’cause reasons, Green rightfully claims they aren’t valid reasons to keep an entire group from military service, Chong continues to be transphobic – but it all ends with this schmaltzy “let’s agree to disagree” bullshit.
One person is arguing that a group of people should be treated as people, the other one is arguing the opposite. There shouldn’t be any “agreeing to disagree.” The very idea such a discussion should be “balanced” and “civil” is atrocious – fuck that spineless bullshit…
Sorry WWTH, SMH and The Age are not Murdoch publications – they’re Fairfax.
Fairfax’s main claim to fame nowadays is that they’re still standing, however bloody and beaten, despite the relentlessly rising tide of murdoch-owns-everything.
I actually have a picture with Laci Green from one time she spoke at my university. I wanted so badly to see her because I’d learned a lot from her work.
I’m not deleting the picture. The past happened, and I won’t deny that.
Truth is, it doesn’t matter if she was always a transphobic jackhole or if she’s just allowed herself to become that by degrees. It doesn’t change that she’s using her platform in a way that empowers literal nazis. In a way that harms me and people like me.
It’s an American mentality. The “I got mine, now you can get fucked” thing. I’ve got my equal treatment, more or less, now you trans women, and lesbians, and women of color can all go to hell.
The only reason to consider Laci Green and Cassie Jaye lower priority opponents is that they’re unlikely to personally do the murdering. They’ll just prevent us from stopping the murderers.