The Men’s Rights Movement is a controversial political group, and I can only imagine as a young film maker forging a name through documenting complex and contentious issues, American director Cassie Jaye believed taking it as a subject would bring wider acclaim. Her previous efforts, Daddy I Do and The Right To Love, tackled sex education and gay marriage in the US respectively, and neither have performed well commercially or critically.
With The Red Pill, we see an apparent feminist entering a dialogue with a political movement that has long been wrought with misogyny and a liberal attitude towards facts. Concerned with issues as diverse as family law, compulsory military service, and circumcision, the MRM have called for an end of the feminizing of the world; explaining that the current feminist leaning structure of government is damaging boys and men.
The fact that the movement itself is split in two factions; one believing sexism affects men and women equally, and another that believes society is enforcing female privilege in open attempt to degrade men, defies all logical sense. Yes, you heard that right, either the world is currently structured in a way that both sexes face equal discrimination, or women are the bearers of institutional advantage and privilege. As I said, they are a controversial group.
Jaye‘s documentary seems to contain an pre-determined narrative; a young feminist speaking with damaged men comes around to their way of thinking. You can check out an extended trailer on the Kickstarter page, where the film received its funding; you should take a look if you want to see some extremely distorted opinions, after a spurious attack on feminism, the trailer actually uses the line “most of the discrimination is faced by men“.
After a struggle to find funding for the film, Jaye raised nearly double her Kickstarter goal thanks to an interview with conservative, right-wing website, and barely competent news-feed, Breitbart. The sudden attention and support the film received was surprising, with Breitbart never really forming a home for feminist voices beforehand – an article titled “Does Feminism Make Women Ugly” was published on the site earlier this year.
The truth behind this sudden Kickstarter success came from internet blogger and activist David Futrelle and his misogyny awareness site WeHuntedTheMammoth. In an open letter to Jaye, he uncovers a systematic attempt by openly misogynistic areas of the internet to draw funding for the film.
From the worse corners of Reddit, including the violently sexist Red Pill subreddit, to openly anti-feminist conservatives, men have rallied to the cry. In search of validation views on society that are, at best predominantly unfounded, at worst, damaging for the few institutional and legal systems struggling to protect vulnerable women; the men’s rights movement has funded a film about a young feminist abandoning reason and agreeing with their empty and borrowed (mainly from the women’s rights movement) rhetoric. I strongly recommend watching the extended trailer on Jaye‘s Kickstarter as it plays out as the worse kind of propaganda, but check out the teaser below:
#Peace.Love.Feminism
