Quickies: “The Red Pill”

     Documentarian Cassie Jaye has been struggling to fund a movie exploring the men’s rights movement and the Sturm und Drang that surrounds it. Quoth Milo Yiannopoulos:

     There is a documentary film on gender currently running a Kickstarter campaign that feminism would prefer never sees the light of day. You may be imagining some amateur film made by buffoons bumbling their way through a hit piece on feminism, but you’d be well off the mark. The film is The Red Pill, by self-professed feminist Cassie Jaye.

     Jaye has some heavy-duty credentials: she won the 2010 “best documentary” award at the Cannes film festival with her film Daddy I Do and sympathetically covered gay marriage in a second well-received documentary, The Right to Love: An American Family.

     Jaye describes her latest project, The Red Pill, as “a fly-on-the-wall film about men’s rights activists.” But, she says, at some point during filming the process morphed into her journey through ideologies opposing feminism. What makes the film unique is that it will document her “chipping away at long held beliefs, as my worldview changed within the first month,” a process captured, she says, through video diaries which will be included in the film....

     The underlying suggestion in all of this, of course, is that she has come to sympathise with the men’s movement and jettisoned a lot of received feminist wisdom.

     As a result, Jaye has seen her funding dry up. One observer told Breitbart that grants and funding have been withdrawn and institutional support revoked.

     Yiannopoulos’s article ends with a link to Miss Jaye’s KickStarter campaign.

     This sounded worthy at first. I was moved to contribute...and I might do so yet. But I have a question: Will there be any coverage of the hard data about inter-gender abuse, or is it all going to be for-and-against interviews?

     I have no doubt the interviews will be interesting. I have no doubt the movie itself will inspire “dialogue.” But I doubt whether an interesting movie that sparks “dialogue” would be worth all that much. “Dialogue” about inter-gender abuse has an unpleasant tendency to become shrill and accusatory. If The Red Pill is not heavy with verifiable facts about the rates of various abusive practices, most emphatically including women’s misuse of the law, the police, and the courts to harm men, it will reduce to “he said / she said” claims and accusations entirely without value.

     Miss Jaye has an appealing way about her. I’m impressed by her credentials and have little doubt of her sincerity. But I can’t quite convince myself that The Red Pill will contribute positively to the rectification of current abuses – and I am personally of the opinion that a heavy majority of those abuses are perpetrated by women and against men.

     UPDATE: I decided to donate to the project. Eventually I'll receive a DVD of the finished documentary. We shall see.