I recently had the opportunity to view a private screening
of Cassie Jaye’s controversial new feature documentary “The Red Pill”.
As it opens Cassie asks her audience if they have ever been
through something after which they felt they weren’t quite sure what had just
happened, but just knew it had been an important experience to go through.
This was an apt precursor for me as I watched “The Red
Pill”. It is an uncomfortable experience. I found myself squirming in my seat,
at times wanting to stand up defiantly and plead my case, at times smouldering
in shame for the statistics and stories I had so sure-footedly dismissed.
Screenings of “The
Red Pill” have been met with hostile resistance in the digital hemisphere here
in Australia. I first came to know of Cassie’s film and the Men’s Rights
Movement on Triple J’s Hack program (as you do). It raised an interesting
debate and I was immediately intrigued. A Melbourne screening at Palace Cinemas
was shut down after a change.org petition garnered more than 2000 signatures in
opposition to the documentary and the culture of “rape apology” and “hatred
toward women” it allegedly espoused.
Coming from South Africa where rape culture is a very real
thing and has been fuelled by cultural spiritual leaders in various degrees, I was
more than eager to watch this documentary.
Upon watching the film, I was quite baffled as to how its
critics had drawn from its contents charges of such against the Men’s Rights
Movement and the film. This is a lingering question for me. Let me be quite
clear, I have not delved into the websites that spurred Cassie Jaye into her
journey “down the rabbit hole.” It’s likely that I will find some grounds for
these accusations therein, but in the film itself I can assign no such ill.
What “The Red Pill” did for
me was shine a light on the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) and the issues Men’s
Rights Activists (MRA) are raising. It
is a debate I believe is critical for us to engage in. Make no mistake, it’s an
uncomfortable one.
Are men and boys in crisis? Do they need our help?
And does The Red Pill help?
I went into the screening armed with pen and paper, determined to
call out and highlight the woman-hating, counter-equity ideology these MRA’s were
apparently propagating, instead I found myself deeply challenged, humbled and
inspired.
One response to the MRM is that it is a backlash against feminism
by white men who are starting to feel displaced because women are now sharing
space with them. I have no comment on that but thought I’d leave that there with
you to chew on.
The film succeeds in bringing to your attention a number of issues
you may not have spent much time pondering before. That boys and men are most
prone to video game addiction, pornography addiction, are less likely to go see
a doctor or get health insurance, make up the vast majority of inmates in
prison, high-school drop-outs, have the highest rates of suicide, mental health
and homelessness.
As a journalist in Australia I was confronted by the staggering
statistic, released in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Causes of Death
report in September last year, that suicide was the leading cause of death
among people 15-44 years of age and the second leading cause of death among
those aged between 45 and 54.
Over a five year
period from 2011 to 2015, the average number of suicide deaths per year was
2,687.
In 2015, preliminary data showed a total of 3,027 deaths by suicide of which 2,292
were males and 735 were women. Consistently over the past 10 years, the number of suicide deaths in Australia was approximately three times higher in males than females.
In 2015 75.6% of people who died by suicide were male
Why aren’t we talking about this? Why aren’t we
enraged? Why aren’t we driven to action to protect our boys and men from falling into the pit?
Let me regale you with a personal story. In 2016, as the editor for The Logan
Reporter I interviewed a gentleman during suicide prevention month. He had
tried to kill himself after being made redundant.
He told me how, in the face of not being able to provide for his family
he had measured his worth against that of the financial security his insurance
would pay out to his family and chose to take his life.
Let that sink in.
Fortunately for Justin his attempt was thwarted. He told me how transformational
the words of his wife had been upon regaining consciousness in the hospital
bed; “I would rather be broke and struggling and have you with us than not.”
These
words changed the course of Justin’s life and he now dedicates his time and
life to getting other men to see the same. But how on earth did Justin believe
the wealth he could provide his family in death could ever replace him?
That was the uneasy question that trailed me as walked away from the
interview. And I’m not proud to admit that my automatic mental response was
that he had looked for an easy way out of the problems he was facing. The
possibility that he saw himself as disposable, replaceable by a cheque, due to a patriarchal society that treats men as expendable did not even cross my mind.
Men’s Rights Activists in "The Red Pill" are asking us to consider the
possibility that throughout history boys have been taught to be disposable – as
soldiers, warriors, fire-fighters and ultimately as dads. That their worth is
tied to their work and traditional gendered role of providers.
Do we value female life more than we
do male life?
I for one have never questioned
the culture of “Women and Children first”. This position is accepted and
validated in popular culture without question.
Titanic remains one of the biggest box office successes of the 21st
century. A hefty portion of the film is spent on getting women and children off
the sinking ship. As viewers we don’t question this bias, in fact when the
character who plays Kate Winslet’s fiancé pushes his way onto a life raft, we
recoil in horror and despise him for his weakness, lack of chivalry, lack of
compassion and selfishness at choosing a seat for himself instead of giving it
to, a woman or a child.
What message are we drumming into our boys’ minds here? That
it is selfish for them to value their own life ahead of the lives of women and
children? Has this notion of disposability created an oppressive environment
for boys and men? Is it time for us to sit down and open our ears and our
hearts to what our boys have to say. I believe it is.
"The Red Pill" and MRAs are asking us to look at these
uncomfortable truths. Did our mothers and grandmothers not ask for the
same when they marched through the streets demanding equality and the right to
be heard?
Feminism vs Men's Rights?
Why are so-called feminists and women’s rights supporters
trying to silence this film and ultimately our men’s voices? I have my own
theories, but until I give adequate airtime to the women and men who oppose the
movement and the film I will not jump to uneducated conclusions.
It is a pity that feminism and men’s rights have pitched
themselves in opposing camps. Aren’t both groups trying to achieve the same
thing? The right to have their gender-specific issues and inequalities heard
and amended by society.
Is the issue today truly about advantage or is it actually
about fostering dialogue about the issues men experience in a patriarchal world
and just as importantly, the issues women continue to face in a patriarchal
world? The feminist debate is sadly, a long way from being reconciled. Issues
of pay-gaps and workplace inequality are still rife in Australia. In fact, I
believe a pitiful effort is actually being made to address the enormous
disparity that exists for career men and women when they become parents.
Just before Christmas I had a conversation with a man I have
a lot of respect for. He said that if he were an employer he would rather hire
a man over a woman, because of the “risk of becoming pregnant and having
children” that women carried. I was appalled, because as a professional and a
mother, I have had to watch my male colleagues overtake me on the ladder of
success, while I took on the responsibility of raising my babies until they
were ready to be placed in day-care so that I could return to my career.
So make no mistake, the scales are not tipped in our favour
and having worked in a newsroom that resembled a boys’ club, where hard and
investigative news was seen as the domain of men, while the female
journalists were assigned the fluff pieces, we still have a very long way to go before
we’re truly on an even playing field in the workplace.
The work by feminists in continuing
to advocate for these rights is still critical to achieving gender equity
That doesn’t mean the issues MRA’s are raising aren’t valid
and should be dismissed.
The film says the MRM and feminist movement disagree on men in power and
invented rules at the expense of women in a patriarchal society.
It asks us to consider if patriarchy is the result of
traditional gender roles and if what we call patriarchy is a system created through
men giving in to the gender role expected of them - men as providers and protectors,
women as homemakers and mothers.
I think the film makes a solid point here. It
certainly appears that the honouring of traditional gender roles gives rise
to a variety of inequalities between men and women.
The complex territory of reproductive rights
MRA’s argue that women are granted ultimate control of their
pregnancies. It’s her body and it’s her right to determine the fate of her
pregnancy right? I know that is how I’ve always seen it.
But the film, in
giving airtime to the MRM’s assertion that this is actually an example of the
inequalities that exist between men and women when it comes to reproductive
rights, asks us to really explore our culturally accepted positions on the
rights and place of mothers and of fathers in present-day society.
This was probably the most uncomfortable part of the film
for me and my immediate response was that Cassie Jaye was giving a very
unbalanced report into reproductive rights. But then I asked myself why I
needed to be presented with issues of false paternity, inequalities in the
family court system and pregnancy entrapment (if I can call it that) within a
broader, balanced scope, weighed up against the evils committed by men against
women through forced pregnancies/abortions, pregnancy rejection and abandonment.
Would it have made the stories of women tricking their
partners into pregnancy, lying to their partners about their children’s true
paternity, and refusal to let their ex-partners visit their own children easier
to confront?
But Cassie Jaye isn’t tackling the complex world of reproductive
rights with The Red Pill, she is shedding light on the specific issues being
voiced by MRAs.
My overwhelming instinct was to stand up and point out to my
fellow audience members that not all women are like that, and it is an inaccurate
representation of women.
And my mind raced to formulate an argument with which I
could challenge the assertions that somehow men are on the losing end when it
comes to reproductive rights. But an interesting thing happened. As I whipped
through the filing cabinets of my own life experience I made a startling
discovery that once again challenged me to re-examine my beliefs.
I saw my friend, whose husband had dropped out of university
to accept his paternal responsibilities after an ex-girlfriend rang him up to
tell him she was pregnant with his baby. This turned out to be a lie. The child
was not his and the woman knew it. But his life was altered irrevocably by
leaving university and raising a child, only to learn many years later that the
child was not his.
I saw another friend, whose wife had an affair and birthed a
child conceived by the other man. The upheaval, when years later my friend
would discover the truth.
Another friend who has been robbed of the opportunity to be
a father and raise his only child after the child’s mother disappeared with their
8-month-old baby, whereabouts unknown.
A very dear friend who did the unthinkable of kidnapping his
own daughter after the family courts granted custody to the mother and she refused him visitation rights. I will never forget the sheer desperation
to see his daughter, who is the apple of his eye. He returned her to her mother
and has never seen her again. It has been years.
I have two other friends who are haunted by the abortions their
ex-girlfriends had, without discussing the pregnancy and the options with them
first. Her body, her right.
Where are the support networks for these men? What are their
rights in these circumstances? Why is this happening? Why aren’t we having these
conversations?
Violence against men
My tenure at The Logan Reporter was dominated by stories of domestic violence. It is an issue that is a near-permanent news item in publications throughout the country.
Marches against domestic violence are commonplace and in October 2015 I covered a campaign wherein community members were asked to pledge "never to commit, excuse, or remain silent about violence against women or families" - #theloganpledge.
As I write this, one of the finest journalists I have ever
had the privilege of working with has, on her Facebook profile picture, the
words “I say no to violence against women and girls”.
In "The Red Pill" a MRA asks why the media paints only women as the victims of domestic violence.
"Because they are dumbass," my inner voice piped up.
But Cassie Jaye then goes on to make a staggering revelation that not only shuts up my inner voice but sends me back to the filing cabinets where I encounter a deeply challenging picture.
Citing statistics from the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (USA), Cassie Jaye says one in three women and one in four men in the United States will be victims of domestic violence.
This is not the case in Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Personal Safety Survey, which was last conducted in 2012, one in six women and one in 20 men have been victims of domestic violence since the age of 15.
The film asks us to question if there is gender symmetry
when it comes to domestic violence, and if domestic violence is actually a violence
issue instead of a gender issue.
Sifting through my personal collection of life experience it
suddenly dawned on me that among the close friendships I have had, I have only
known one woman who has been a victim of domestic violence but when it comes to
the men in my life I have three close friends who have been victims of violence
within their intimate relationships.
My own shame
I am deeply ashamed to admit that I have been guilty myself.
One night, many years ago, overcome by the acid burn of betrayal and a violent
feeling of being violated I shoved my boyfriend away from me. When he
approached me with apology and regret I started hitting his chest with the
palms of my hands over and over again.
Of even deeper shame is that it was actually only after watching
Cassie Jaye’s film that the grievous crime I had committed dawned fully on me.
We grow up seeing ladies deliver a smart slap to the cheeks of men who have done them
wrong on our TV screens. It’s acceptable right? But it is absolutely unacceptable
for a man to ever raise his hand to a woman.
This accepted norm saw one of the men in my life endure five
years of relentless physical assaults from his then-partner without ever
defending himself. Not once. And when he left the relationship there was no
shelter for him to go to, there was no state-subsidised counselling service he
could access, no support group he could join. As he explained to me, he just
had to man up and get on with it. He did so without ever fully acknowledging the
trauma he had endured, he never untangled the emotional scars and tended to
them with self-love, compassion and self-worth.
How often is this happening? How many men’s lives have been
affected like this? How many men out there are in need of healing? Has the
silence on these issues and severe lack of support structures for men created a
world wherein boys and men are most prone to video game addiction, pornography
addiction, are less likely to go see a doctor or get health insurance, make up
the vast majority of inmates in prison, high-school drop-outs, have the highest
rates of suicide, mental health and homelessness?
What is the solution?
In my own investigations into domestic violence as a reporter I
met a man, entirely by chance, who works with men in the combating of domestic
violence. I remember rushing home to tell my partner with feverish excitement everything
Adrian Hanks had told me about his work. For the first time someone had made
some sense, someone had a real solid strategy to take into the fight against
domestic violence.
Not the tokenistic pledges, marches, shock campaigns and
speeches that had permeated the so-called fight against domestic violence, but
a real, meat-and-bones strategy, and it was all about encouraging boys and men,
in a supportive and nurturing environment, to explore their attitudes,
feelings, beliefs and emotions. Adrian Hanks said self-realisation was where it all had to begin.
I do not know why a group of feminists are trying to silence
the film here in Australia. I do not understand the reasons for charges of “misogynist,
racist, gay and woman-hating” by those who oppose the MRM in the US.
But one thing I do know is that there is definitely, undoubtedly
a need for boys and men to talk to us about the male experience. They have a
right to be heard and we all have the responsibility to listen.
These things are uncomfortable but without a willingness to
look at these issues we stay in the dark and accept a status quo that serves
neither men nor women.
Ok guys, we’re listening.
