The Red Pill (2016)

Cassie Jaye: Self

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Quotes 

• Cassie Jaye : I was a quiet kid preferring to observe from afar. My mom put me in theater class when I was eight years old to break me out of my shell and I loved it so much that I decided to move to Hollywood when I was 18 years old to become an actress. What I wasn't prepared for was to pigeon-holed as "The Blonde Who Always Died". Granted, I had a good scream, but the characters I played weren't alone in feeling objectified. I was commonly harassed on the streets, hit on by married producers, told by photographers to come back when I lost 15 pounds and got a boob job, and a plethora of other uncomfortable experiences, all while still being a teenager. I started to realize my role in the world was a little too similar to the roles I was auditioning for and it was not how I saw myself or the person I wanted to be, so I quit acting and bought a video camera to tell the stories I wanted to tell and now I've been making documentary films since 2007 when I was 21 years old.

• [first lines] 

  Cassie Jaye : Have you ever been through something and you don't know what just happened, but you know it was important to go through? This is that journey for me.

• Cassie Jaye : I learned about other sectors of the online manosphere, like MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way, and a forum on Reddit called 'The Red Pill', which is separate from the Men's Rights community and they do not see eye to eye. I'm told an easy way to remember the difference is that while MRAs want to change the system, Reddit's 'The Red Pill' want to take advantage of the system, and MGTOW want to leave the system.

• Cassie Jaye : You may be wondering why I'm sitting in a car with notorious men's right activist Paul Elam. That's a valid question, and to answer it, I need to start at the beginning - the beginning of how I became a feminist.

• Cassie Jaye : Where do the men's movement and feminism disagree?

  Warren Farrell : Only on the fundamental belief that the women's movement says, "men are the oppressors, that we are involved in a patriarchal world in which men invented the rules to benefit men at the expense of women."

  Cassie Jaye : But don't we live in a patriarchy; when most of the world's nations still have never had a female leader, and less than five percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women?

  Marc Angelucci : You have to look at this in a larger perspective. Patriarchy is the result of gender roles, not the vice versa.

• Cassie Jaye : But the feminists I've met have an entirely different take on domestic violence.

  Katherine Spillar : On the whole issue of domestic violence. That's just another word really, it's a clean-up word about wife-beating, because that's really what it is - or dating violence. And it's not girls that are beating up on boys, it's boys that are beating up on girls and using violence to intimidate and to control.

• Cassie Jaye : When I decided to make a film on the men's rights movement, I never anticipated questioning my feminist views, but the more MRAs I met, the more I felt compelled to remind myself why I was a feminist.

• Cassie Jaye : Whenever I hear the MRAs point of view about how difficult it is for them, I immediately go to: well what about us, what is it like for us? I get on the defensive and want to make sure that women's struggles are also heard. I don't know if that's necessary because the MRAs are saying that the feminist perspective is the mainstream perspective, but even when I hear their issues, I still want to speak up for the women, because I feel like... I don't know why I feel like talking about one gender's issues now neglects the other, and I guess that's what MRAs have been dealing with is always hearing about women's issues and feeling like their issues are neglected, but whenever I hear them talk about men's issues I want to stand up for women and say this is what we're dealing with, an equal opposite.

• [last lines] 

  Cassie Jaye : I don't know where I'm headed, but I know what I left behind. I no longer call myself a feminist.

• Cassie Jaye : In the United States there are over two-thousand domestic violence shelters. All of them serve female victims, and nearly all of them turn away male victims. In fact, as of 2016, there's only a single domestic violence shelter for men. My initial reaction was that there needed to be thousands more women's shelters because that many more women are being battered, but as it turns out: one in three women and one in four men will be victims of physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Sure, there's a slight majority of female victims, but how can that excuse denying men help? Couldn't this be considered gender discrimination? Think of it this way, roughly 78% of suicides are men. If suicide prevention services only served men, wouldn't we see the gender discrimination immediately? If there are over two-thousand women's shelters that turn away men and only one shelter for men, obviously the resources don't match the need.

• Cassie Jaye : I then discovered that Paul Elam's famous 'Bash A Violent Bitch' article was written in response to this article by Jezebel called "Have you Ever Beat Up A Boyfriend, Cause, Uh, We Have." The article cited a study that revealed 70% of non-reciprocated violence was perpetuated by women. The author then went on to say that she conducted an informal survey at the office and the gist of her findings was that many women had physically assaulted their man, and it was interpreted as either being funny or he was asking for it. I couldn't help but see the hypocrisy in a major feminist website making light of abusing men and MRAs stinging back only to have the media paint them as the abusers.

• Cassie Jaye : Why do you think that the men's rights movement is at odds with feminism? What has created that clash, that war between each other?

  Paul Elam : Well, one, feminism has spent the last 50 years demonizing men, which is sort of one of the problem. Feminist scholars have characterized men as inherently violent, inherently bad, inherently predatory, inherently oppressive. They have postulated that masculinity is a disease.

  Dean Esmay : Feminists aren't the only problem, the problems didn't start with feminism, so when I start criticizing feminism, I want you to know... you're just part of the problem, they're just part of the problem. You calling men oppressors and women oppressed, demonizes men and I believe diminishes women at the same time. It's a way of telling men to shut up, it's a way of telling men that their experiences don't matter. You tell a man that he is privileged, therefore, anything he's gone through or anything that he has to say doesn't matter. His lived experiences don't matter because he's privileged.

• Cassie Jaye : A lot of MRAs say feminism doesn't fight for the rights of men, what would you say to that?

  Chanty Binx : Cry me a river. Really, because feminism is a movement about the discrepancies when it comes to women's equality, because we're still not there yet. So don't even start with the whole "you don't think about the men's issue." Well, start your own goddamn movement, which they have, but maybe make it a little more about legitimate issues, like custody and alimony and things that you think are unequal, which all stem from patriarchy. Not from "oh my god, feminists are trying to take away our kids." No dipshit, that's not what we're trying to do. We're not trying to do that. I mean if they look at the root causes of why, for example, women get custody more often then men do, women are supposed to be the "mothers", they're supposed to be the "natural born caregivers", so "obviously duh, you has a vagina so obviously you're gonna be able to take care of the kiddies." That's really what it is, it all stems from sexism against women.