the-red-pill

The Red Pill

The Red Pill saga says so much about how we are allowing tiny minority groups to take over this country. It’s understandable that crazy extreme feminists would be nervous of a documentary which shows how unwilling they are to engage in proper debate about issues affecting men. But it is shocking that a small petition was enough to bully one of our leading cinema chains, Palace Cinemas, into cancelling the first screening of the movie in Australia.

I wrote about all in the Weekend Australian recently (October 29-30) and will include the story below for those who missed it. Now they are trying to ban the young filmmaker, Cassie Jaye, from coming to this country.

Cassie is due in Brisbane in June next year to speak at an International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI) – along with a bunch of international and local speakers, including myself. Watch this space for more information.  Cassie will be interviewed on Andrew Bolt’s programme on Sky News, on Tuesday, Nov 15.  The interview keeps being delayed due to the US election results but it will happen!

The organizers of the Melbourne viewing found a new venue – crowdfunding easily raised the required funds and the first screening was a great success. More will follow not only in Melbourne but other cities. See details of the Sydney event planned for December. I’ll publish details of other future showings here.

It’s all been a fascinating exercise exposing the viciousness and stupidity of these women. The material on the original petition included total lies about the men’s rights movement but it is amazing how willing people are to believe everything they read on social media campaigns.

What’s frightening is how easily people in authority cave in to their demands. But it is heartening to see such a major fightback from many men and women sick of this type of madness.

Here’s my story:

The Red Pill: The movie about men that feminists didn’t want you to see.”  This was the provocative headline that ran in The Telegraph in the UK last November, a teaser for a documentary made by a leading feminist filmmaker who planned to take on men’s rights activists but was won over and crossed to the dark side to take up their cause.

Despite a ferocious campaign to stop the movie being made it’s finally been released and the Australian screening was due next week in Melbourne.  However the gender warriors have struck again, using a change.com petition to persuade Palace Cinemas to cancel the cinema booking. Palace took the decision having been told the movie would offend many in their core audience but by yesterday over 11,000 had signed petitions protesting the ban.

Clearly this documentary has the feminists very worried – with good reason. Cassie Jaye is an articulate, 29 year old blonde whose previous movies on gay marriage and abstinence education won multiple awards. But then she decided to interview leaders of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) for a documentary she was planning about rape culture on American campuses. As a committed feminist Jaye expected to be unimpressed by these renowned hate-filled misogynists but to her surprise she was exposed to a whole range of issues she came to see as unfairly stacked against men and boys.

As news of this very public conversion started to leak out, Jaye came under attack. She was smeared, told she  was committing “career suicide” and saw her funding dry up to the point where it looked as if the movie would never be made. Prominent feminists she’d planned to interview refused to participate, none of the “human rights” funding she’d hoped to attract proved available for a documentary looking at men’s rights.

Then a Kickstarter fund raised a staggering $211,260, ensuring the movie’s cinematic release. Over the past month American audiences have had their first screenings and hopefully Australian audiences will eventually get to see what the fuss is all about.

The title The Red Pill refers to a scene in The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves’ character takes the red pill to expose ‘the truth’ which challenges his closely-held beliefs. Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill reveals a world where the cultural dialogue is dominated by feminists still complaining that men have all the power yet the ‘truth,’ in most Western Countries, is that many of our laws, attitudes and social conventions make life tough for men.

Her fly-on-the-wall technique includes interviews with MRM leaders like Paul Elam and feminists who oppose the movement, graphics and animations revealing facts about family law and child custody, male suicide rates and the not-so-privileged side of traditional manhood, such as the 90 per cent of workplace fatalities that are male. There’s a powerful interview with Erin Pizzey, who is no longer allowed near the UK women’s refuge she started back in the 1970s, the first in the world. Pizzey ran afoul of the sisterhood by campaigning to expose the truth about women’s equal role in domestic violence.

Jaye shows feminist protesters shutting down a talk at a Toronto campus by men’s activist Warren Farrell, screeching at a young man who tried to attend and berating him as “fucking scum,” and on another occasion setting off a fire alarm causing a building to be evacuated where a men’s rights lecture was to have been held.

There’s discussion of men’s lack of reproductive rights which includes a clip from a television chat show where the audience cheers when a woman whose husband is resisting a second child announces she’s considering going off birth control and not telling him.

Reaction to the movie has so far been mixed, with the flamboyant anti-feminist Milo Yiannopoulos describing the The Red Pill as “a powerful film on a complicated, important, yet woefully unaddressed issue.” Yiannapolos applauds Jaye for “having the intestinal fortitude to not only tackle this subject, but to do so fairly.”

Predictably the movie has been panned by left-wing The Village Voice which called Jaye an “MRA-bankrolled propagandist” and the Los Angeles Times whose reviewer claimed she failed to understand “patriarchal systems.” Stephen Marche in The Guardian admits that “men do sometimes suffer mistreatment from the courts or from the women in their lives” but suggests the film fails to demonstrate any kind of systemic cause. “Instead, the author of men’s troubles here is always that vague bugaboo feminism, which we’re told is designed to silence its opponents,” sniffs Marche.

That’s pretty ironic considering this “vague bugaboo feminism” persists in trying to silence Cassie Jaye’s attempts to tell this story. As she points out in her movie, the issues she examines came as a revelation not only to her but also to many others exposed to the material she put together. That damned bugaboo carries a lot of clout.