The Red Pill – The Movie About Men’s Lives that Gender Warriors Didn’t Want You to See

The Red Pill is a new documentary that activists have prevented being shown in Australian cinemas. Writer, commentator and blogger Bettina Arndt argues that activists are right to be concerned since the movie poses a real threat to the feminist movement by exposing the appalling tactics used by these gender warriors to shut down public debate over serious issues affecting men and boys. The well-known young filmmaker Cassie Jaye has renounced her feminism after making this movie about what’s happening to men today. Bettina Arndt addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 31 January 2017

THE RED PILL – THE MOVIE ABOUT MEN’S LIVES THAT GENDER WARRIORS DIDN’T WANT YOU TO SEE.

BETTINA ARNDT

When I started my whole career back in the 1970s my goal was all about helping women. Funnily enough I was working in a university vacation as Hertz rent-a-car girl, complete with perky hat and very short mini skirt, when I read The Female Eunuch and discovered the Women’s Movement. I became passionate about improving women’s lives and that’s one reason I became involved in sex therapy. We were just emerging from an era when sex was very much a taboo subject and this seemed like a very good place to start to help women get more of a kick out of their sex lives.

I had an amazing early career as one of Australia’s first sex therapists working mainly in the media and quickly became the person everyone talked to about sex. Not just women, of course. Everywhere I went men started to talk to me about these intimate issues – often at the most inconvenient moments – and I learnt a lot about what sex is like from the other side of the fence.

I remember once talking to a group of men about the trouble women had saying “no” to sex – that’s not a problem that afflicts women today, of course. Most women today feel absolutely entitled to shut up shop if we’re not interested. But back then many women saw sex as part of the wifely duty and felt they couldn’t say “no” to their husbands. Anyway, I asked this large audience of men whether they’d ever had trouble saying “no”. One young man got up and said, “If I ever said ‘no’, my penis would beat me to death!” It was a very revealing insight into the sexual urgency that afflicts young men.

I learnt a lot – not just about sex but about many aspects of men’s lives. These were the heady days when the Women’s Movement was absolutely capturing the cultural dialogue and it quickly became apparent that although there was much to celebrate in the new choices opening up for women – new rights, new opportunities – many aspects of men’s lives were becoming more difficult. And no one wanted to know.

Family law was a case in point. I started writing back in the early 1980s about how many children were losing contact with their fathers after family breakup and received a letter from a retiring Family Court judge who agreed with what I had been saying, commenting: “We’ve made a huge mistake. We gave too much power to the custodial parent and often that power is being misused.” He granted me a long interview about how the Family Court had erred in allowing mothers, usually the custodial parents, absolute licence to shut the fathers out of their children’s lives, ignore contact orders, use false allegations of violence or sexual abuse to manipulate the system and move anywhere they liked with their children.

I spent nearly 20 years writing about family law and was appointed to government committees to try to reform what was then an appallingly anti-male court system. Huge problems still remain – despite the best efforts of John Howard who was the only PM I have known to show any real interest in social issues. He was really concerned about the fact that the Family Law system was held in such disrepute and introduced important reforms, many of which were wound back as soon as Labor came into power.

But Family Law was only one of a great many issues that captured my attention over these years. I wrote about boy’s education – the alarming problem of our increasingly feminised education system failing to engage young men. The lies being told about men and domestic work. The complexities of the wage gap. Men’s suicide rates. There were so many fascinating problems receiving very little public attention but it was quite a battle to be allowed to write or talk about them.

That was often the attraction for me. Like a moth to the flame, I’ve always been drawn to the issues we aren’t allowed to talk about – like sex back in the 1960s – and, more recently, the numerous examples of men and boys not being treated fairly. It’s fascinating that I have often been accused of being an apologist for men – as if they were the enemy, rather like being an apologist for ISIS. The simple truth is when it comes to men’s rights very few people are interested.

That that brings me to The Red Pill – a truly fascinating story. “The Red Pill: The movie about men that feminists didn’t want you to see.”  That was the provocative headline that ran in The Telegraph in the UK over a year ago, 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.

Clearly this documentary has the feminists very worried – with good reason. The filmmaker Cassie Jaye’s previous movies on gay marriage and abstinence education had won multiple awards. But then she decided to interview leaders of the Men’s Rights Movement 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. Ultimately crowd funding enabled the project to go ahead.

The title The Red Pill refers to a scene in The Matrix, when the main character takes the red pill to expose “the truth” which challenges his closely-held beliefs. Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill reveals a world where societal debate 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 many men.

Last year, the movie was released and Australia became the only country in the world where feminists have managed to stop it being shown. The first Australian screening was to have taken place in October at one of Melbourne’s Palace Cinema venues. Self-described “gender warriors” enlisted 2,000 supporters 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 within a few days 11,000 had signed petitions protesting the ban.

Now what’s important about this banning is the fact that none of the protestors had seen the movie – they were simply responding to misleading, inaccurate information promoted in the change.com petition alleging the documentary contained misogynist, violent messages about women.

Another planned viewing in Melbourne on Boxing Day went ahead despite attempts by protestors to damage the business reputation of the cinema owner, the Ultima Function Centre, by flooding their website with poor revues. The owner saw the movie, decided it was nonsense that it was “supporting misogynist propaganda” and hired extra security to enable the screening to proceed. It was warmly received by the packed audience.

What’s really alarming about this whole business is that these cinema owners have actually received death threats. “I really hope someone shoots up that event — dead MRA’s (Men’s Rights Activists) — cool!” read one tweet. This has meant subsequent screenings have required hiring extra security – organisers of a recent showing in Brisbane had ticket holders meet in one place and then taken to a hidden location to ensure no further problems.

It would all be pretty funny if it wasn’t such a serious assault on personal freedom and the right of citizens in our supposedly democratic country to decide what they should be allowed to see. Here are these ill-informed self-appointed moral guardians taking it upon themselves to protect us from material they believe to be damaging to women.

But the reality is the real risk to women from The Red Pill is the reputation of feminist extremists whom Cassie Jaye films behaving like vile harridans as they shut down any attempt at proper discussion of issues affecting boys and men. Jaye’s movie shows feminist protesters interfering with 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 nothing in this movie that promotes violence against women nor misogynist attitudes. Material circulating about the contents of the movie misleadingly includes quotes from some of the large male websites, like A Voice for Men, which do include some derogatory stuff about women, just as some of our well known feminists like Catherine Deveny and Clementine Ford write vile material about men. But there’s actually none of this in Cassie Jaye’s film.

What we witness are simply Jaye’s interviews with men’s rights leaders as well as feminists, academics and commentators, interspersed with 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.

One revealing example is a 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.

But perhaps most telling of all are the personal comments from Jaye herself as she confronts her own prejudices about what she is hearing. She concludes she no longer feels comfortable calling herself a feminist, given the unwillingness of women to allow civilised debate on these important issues.

Reaction to the movie has so far been mixed. Predictably the movie has been panned by left-wing The Village Voice which called Jaye a “propagandist” for men’s rights groups 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.

And nowhere is that more obvious than the question of domestic violence – another issue highlighted in Cassie Jaye’s movie. She includes 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.

Erin Pizzey is now world famous for her strenuous campaign arguing that domestic violence is not a gender issue. “I always knew women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men,” she wrote, describing her childhood experience with a mother who beat her with the cord from an iron. She points out that many of the women in her refuge were violent, dangerous to their children and others around them. Pizzey’s honesty has attracted constant attacks – she was forced to flee her native England with her children after protests, threats, and violence culminated in the shooting of her family dog.

Since that time Pizzey has been trying to counter what she now calls “40 years of lies”, the constant misinformation which fail to acknowledge women’s role in family violence. Pizzey presents an interesting argument about how, in the 1970s, the Women’s Movement used domestic violence to boost their waning support. “The feminists seized upon domestic violence as the cause they needed to attract more money and supporters at a time when the first flush of enthusiasm for their movement was starting to wane. Domestic violence was perfect for them — the just cause that no one dared challenge. It led to a worldwide million-dollar industry, a huge cash cow supporting legions of bureaucrats and policy makers.”

Funnily enough, back in the 1970s, Pizzey was invited to Australia to visit our newly established women’s refuges. On the way to Australia, she travelled to New Zealand where she spoke out about her changing views. News travelled fast. By the time Pizzey was set to leave for the Australian leg of the trip she was persona non grata with the feminists running our refuges. Her visit to this country was cancelled.

I’ve spent much of the last year researching the vast body of literature now available on domestic violence and it’s truly shocking how thoroughly this issue is being misrepresented.

Last year I wrote about Eva Solberg, a Swedish politician, a feminist who holds an important post as chair of the Moderate Women’s Party who was presented with her government’s latest strategy for combating domestic violence. Like similar reports across the world, this strategy assumes the only way to tackle domestic violence is through teaching misogynist men (and boys) to behave themselves.

The Swedish politician spat the dummy. Writing on the news site Nyheter24, Eva Solberg took issue with her government’s “tired gendered analysis” which argues that eradicating sexism is the solution to the problem of domestic violence. She explained her reasoning: “We know through extensive practice and experience that attempts to solve the issue through this kind of analysis have failed. And they failed precisely because violence is not and never has been a gender issue.”

Solberg challenged the government report’s assumption that there is a guilty sex and an innocent one. “Thanks to extensive research in the field, both at the national and international level, we now know with great certainty that this breakdown by sex is simply not true.”

Solberg made reference to the world’s largest research database on intimate partner violence, the 2010 Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, (PASK) which summarised over 1700 scientific papers on the topic. She concluded that her government’s report was based on misinformation about family violence and that, contrary to the report’s one-sided view of men as the only perpetrators, many children are experiencing a very different reality: “We must recognise the fact that domestic violence, in at least half of its occurrence, is carried out by female perpetrators.”

One of the key patterns that emerged from the PASK, explained Solberg, is that violence in the family is an inherited generational problem and children learn from watching the violence of both their parents. “To know this and then continue to ignore the damage done to the children who are today subjected to violence is a huge social betrayal,” Solberg concluded. “The road to a solution for this social problem is hardly to stubbornly continue to feed the patient with more of the same medicine that has already been tried for decades.”

There’s a certain irony that this happened in Sweden, the utopia for gender equality which is the last place you’d expect misogyny to be blamed for a major social evil. But despite being world-leaders in gender equality (as shown by the 2014 World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index) the Nordic women experience the worst physical or sexual violence in the EU. Given this inconvenient truth it seems quite extraordinary that for decades the gendered analysis of domestic violence has retained its grip on Sweden – as it has in Western countries around the world, including Australia.

No one would deny that it was a great achievement to have men’s violence towards women fully acknowledged and take critical steps to protect vulnerable women and ensure their safety. But it has been shocking to watch this morph into a world-wide domestic violence industry determined to ignore evidence showing the complexities of violence in the home and avoid prevention strategies that would tackle the real risk factors underpinning this vital social issue.

Here, too, we are witnessing Solberg’s “huge social betrayal” by denying the reality of the violence being witnessed by many Australian children. Just look at the bizarre $30 million television campaign which the federal government ran last year, which starts with a little boy slamming a door in a little girl’s face. The whole thing is based on the erroneous notion that domestic violence is caused by disrespect for women – precisely the type of “tired gender analysis” that Eva Solberg has so thoroughly discredited. Yet our government spent at least $700,000 funding for research and production of this campaign – just one example of the shocking misuse of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Malcolm Turnbull boasts our government is spending on domestic violence.

Our key organisations all sing from the same songbook, regularly distorting statistics to present only one part of this complex story. We are failing to acknowledge the reality faced by most children in violent homes which is two-way couple violence involving both their parents.

I had to work extremely hard to dig out the true figures about domestic violence in Australia, let alone to find experts willing to speak out about them. But here, in brief are some of the main points I unearthed in my research:

• There is no epidemic of domestic violence in Australia, says Don Weatherburn, Director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
• A tiny 1.06 per cent of Australian women experience physical violence from their partners, says the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
• Very few children witnessing their dads terrorising their mothers but large numbers are being affected by their parents’ two-way couple violence which impacts a third of all couples, says our leading couple expert Professor Kim Halford.
• Legal protection for men falsely accused of violence is eroding as women gain more power to destroy men’s lives, says WA Law Reform Commissioner Augusto Zimmerman.
• The real risk factors revealed in evidence-based research – like mental health issues, poverty, alcohol and drug abuse – are being ignored while femocrats promote the gender card.
• There’s long been no help for male victims and their children, no support, no refuges. Our official policy requires male victims seeking help to be treated as perpetrators.
• Vast sums are being spent on ideologically-based batterers’ programs shown to be ineffective, says Deakin University violence prevention expert Professor Peter Miller.

We know that at least one in three Australian victims of domestic violence are men. That’s very similar to the proportion of females to males committing suicide. Imagine the outcry if the smaller number of female suicides was used to justify devoting the entire suicide prevention budget to men.

In fact, the folks in charge of Suicide Prevention in Australia have long resisted devoting any funds at all specifically targeting men, let alone addressing vulnerable groups like men involved in marital separation. Fifteen years ago I was writing about this issue, noting that Beyond Blue was then devoting $3.5 million to post-partum women yet not a cent to separating men aged 25-44, a group which research had just shown to be a key at-risk group. Since then there have been some feeble moves to acknowledge the male problem – you may have seen the ABC’s Man Up program, all about teaching men to show their feelings but barely a word about why men are committing suicide. And government funding for organisations supporting separating men has been dramatically cut back.

Of course it is not just the feminist bugaboo which stops issues like this receiving proper examination.  Powerful men are part of the problem. Here we have Malcolm Turnbull endlessly sprouting lies about domestic violence, partly because he thinks this will shore up the women’s vote but also because like most male leaders he cannot imagine himself as a victim of domestic violence and is loathe to identify with male victims. It’s not just women who don’t want to know – most men see men’s rights advocates as losers, men who can’t hack it in the real world where men still dominate in the public domain. Boy, do they get a shock when they find themselves on the receiving end. I vividly remember talking to a senior Canberra bureaucrat who told me how he used to sneer at the men’s groups until the day he found himself taken off in a police car and when he came home discovered the locks had been changed and his wife had made accusations of violence as part of what proved a very effective strategy to gain custody of the children.

That’s another reason why it is so hard for men’s issues to get any real traction – the men in charge aren’t interested. Some of you might remember the huge fuss back in the 1990s over boy’s education when parents suddenly noticed that midst all the celebration about how wonderfully well girls were doing in schools, there was a growing problem of boys doing badly. Our education system was failing to engage our boys who were falling behind, filling the classes needing remedial help, dropping out of school and university. There was a NSW parliamentary enquiry, parents and teachers from all over the state sent submissions, drastic measures were called for, pilot programs implemented – all of which sunk without a trace when the Coalition lost power. In all the years I have been writing about all this, I have hardly ever come across a Labor politician with any interest in what’s happening to men and boys – they are totally captured by the feminist lobby. And Malcolm Turnbull’s government is similar. Is it any wonder Pauline Hanson continues to attract voters as one of the few politicians acknowledging these issues?

One of my most vivid memories of The Red Pill was an image filled with little boys’ bodies lying face down on the ground.  These Nigerian boys were victims of Boko Haram which set fire to a school dormitory killing 59 sleeping boys – the third tragedy of its kind in just eight months. How come there wasn’t a peep about this in the world press yet two months later when the same terrorist organisation kidnapped a group of schoolgirls  the world showed impressive unity and compassion, mounting a viral campaign in minutes?

I wish I had a dollar for every letter I have received from an Australian man congratulating me for daring to write about what’s happening to men in this country. My correspondents claim they wouldn’t dare speak out about these issues for fear they will be howled down. That’s the great irony. The men who still rule our world are too frightened to stand up for themselves, too embarrassed to support men they see as losers.

In June this year an important international conference on men’s issues will be held in Brisbane. ( https://icmi.info/) Some great international speakers coming to that event are bound to shake things up, including Erin Pizzey and Cassie Jaye. The Red Pill will also be shown. This could just be a game changer, finally inspiring people to come on board and change the dialogue around such issues in this country. Everyone who has men they love in their lives – sons, brothers, lovers, friends – needs to open their eyes, look beyond the lies and see what’s happening to men. Attending this conference is a very way to start to do something about it.