By Tracy Clark-Flory: When Cassie Jaye started filming her documentary about men’s rights activists, she was a self-described liberal feminist. Jaye had previously considered making a film on rape culture or legalizing sex work, but the MRAs, as men’s rights activists are known for short, beckoned. “I just found it really fascinating, but also terrifying,” she said of the community, which largely organizes on social networks and deep web forums. MRAs are notorious for threatening feminists and disturbing things like flooding a sexual assault hotline with false reports.
“I really did think in the beginning that I was going to make a film about the men’s rights activists as a fly on the wall—maybe with some puzzling music in the background, like, who are these people?’”
During filming, Jaye, 29, began to question her feminist beliefs and soon she became a character in her own movie. Ultimately, that wasn’t even the most shocking part. The film came close to being shelved due to financial issues, but will now be completed thanks largely to the conservative website Breitbart.com and the men’s rights movement coming to her aid last week. The same MRAs she once feared have championed her project, helping to raise more than $135,000 to finish post-production on the documentary.
This past Monday morning, Jaye called a meeting with her producer to discuss the film’s fate. She had launched a Kickstarter campaign earlier in the month and, with two weeks to go, had reached only a quarter of her $97,000 goal. During the meeting, though, “our phones started buzzing with backer notifications,” she said.
Breitbart had just published a piece about the fundraising effort, claiming that the film was imperiled as a result of Jaye interrogating her feminist beliefs. All of a sudden, MRAs and other inhabitants of the anti-feminist “manosphere,” were urging support across social media. The subreddit The Red Pill, which is not considered an MRA community, although it uses much of the same language, joined in the fundraising push as well.
During an interview with Vocativ in a picturesque park in her hometown of Marin, Calif., the next afternoon, Jaye checked her Kickstarter page on her iPhone. “Oh, what, oh my God, we just made it!” she squealed. “Oh my God, really?!” Just then the fundraising total jumped by another thousand dollars. “I can’t believe it,” she said, and wiped away a tear. “We can actually make this now!”
Jaye explained in her Kickstarter plea video that she refused to accept funding from ideologically-driven organizations in order to keep the film “non-partisan”—but now her documentary on men’s rights activists is, as she puts it, “kind of being funded by men’s rights advocates.” She denies that this will change the message of the film, which will mostly consist of interviews with MRAs, as well as a few feminists, and video diaries capturing her “transformation.” “The story is done, I’m not going to reenact a different story,” she said.
Jaye went into the project intending to challenge MRA’s “misogynist” arguments and ended up impressed by their rebuttals. For example, one told her, “How can you say that a woman misses twenty percent of her income versus a man missing seven years of his life because they die earlier on average?” She hadn’t thought about shorter life expectancies in this way, or known about the higher rates of homelessness, suicide and workplace deaths among men. Jaye was swayed by arguments about the tendency to not take male victims of sexual assault as seriously and the ways that men are discouraged from being caretakers.
Many of these are issues that feminism has in fact engaged with and advocated around, but Jaye came to believe that women’s rights activists were giving men’s issues short shrift.
“It’s scary to question everything you believe, your basis for what you know to be reality,” she said, using language reminiscent to that of her subjects, who refer to “waking up” to the MRA ideology as taking “the red pill,” a reference to a scene in the movie “The Matrix” in which the hero Neo is given the choice between taking a blue pill and going back to a life of blissful ignorance or taking a red pill and discovering the truth about society and his existence. Fittingly, Jaye has decided to title the documentary “The Red Pill.” She said, “It changed my life and I am so thankful.”
Jaye is hardly the first woman to support MRA arguments. The movement has gained a small but influential faction of female supporters who are referred to as “Honey Badgers” (a reference to the creature that went viral for not “[giving] a shit”). These women are vital to the cause because they challenge the perception that “we’re a bunch of sad, pathetic losers who can’t get laid and are just bitter because our wives left us,” as Dean Esmay of the popular MRA site A Voice for Men told Mother Jones last year.
Jaye, who hopped around the country as an army brat, says she first began to call herself a feminist when she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18 to become an actress. “I got pigeonholed in horror films as the girl who always dies,” she said. “That kind of fueled my feminist fire.” She said was also propositioned by married producers in situations where she felt “like I didn’t have a way out if I wanted to keep the job.” As she began to speak out about her views on such things, others started calling her a feminist. “Then I looked it up,” she said, “and realized that being for women’s rights, I was totally on board with, so it was like sign me up, I’m a feminist.”
This was a departure from the evangelical household that she grew up in, where “the father’s word was the final word,” she said. Her parents eventually divorced, and both she and her mom ended up leaving the church. Now, mother and daughter make films together—their first was a documentary on the purity movement and the harm of abstinence-only education called “Daddy I Do.” They later made the documentary, “The Right To Love: An American Family,” which followed a gay couple fighting for their right to get married. She’s also created a short film for GoldiBlox, a company that creates toys designed to spark girls’ early interest in engineering.
Jaye still calls herself a liberal, but in order to maintain suspense around “The Red Pill,” she doesn’t want to say whether she’s a feminist anymore—at least not directly. “Your beliefs can go so much deeper than labels,” she said. Later, when asked whether there is a need for feminism, she said, “I think having energy behind protecting women’s rights and acknowledging women’s issues is important. The big question is, ‘Is the answer feminism?’”
One quickly gets the impression that her answer is “no.”
The Breitbart article implies that potential feminist funders bailed on the project because they learned about Jaye’s change of heart. But Jaye says they simply changed their minds about helping give MRAs a platform to speak, especially as the movement gained traction during filming. An undeniable piece of this is the harassment and death threats that some MRAs have directed at certain feminists.
It turns out Jaye understands fear of MRAs. “I luckily moved recently,” she said toward the end of our nearly three-hour-long conversation, explaining that some of the men she interviewed had her home address. “I was really glad to move.” Such is the conflicted and at times contradictory nature of her relationship to MRAs.
On nearly a dozen occasions, she received calls in the middle of the night from one of her MRA subjects. (There were multiple emails, too.) Jaye implied that her repeat caller had on the mind what one might charitably call romance—but that isn’t her only worry.
“I think any bad seeds would probably want to see the film first before taking me down,” she said with a laugh. What if they do see the film and view it as unfavorable, though? “I guess I could go into hiding,” Jaye said. “Do I want to have any kind of allegiance to them to make sure I’m not harmed in the end?” She paused, the question lingering, and then explained that her video diaries show her reacting negatively to the MRAs, but that those clips were part of her early “evolution” on the subject. “I think that protects me from people wanting to attack what I said then,” she said.
The implication seemingly being that the position she ultimately came to would not make MRAs angry with her. “I think it’ll be OK,” she said.
During filming, Jaye, 29, began to question her feminist beliefs and soon she became a character in her own movie. Ultimately, that wasn’t even the most shocking part. The film came close to being shelved due to financial issues, but will now be completed thanks largely to the conservative website Breitbart.com and the men’s rights movement coming to her aid last week. The same MRAs she once feared have championed her project, helping to raise more than $135,000 to finish post-production on the documentary.
This past Monday morning, Jaye called a meeting with her producer to discuss the film’s fate. She had launched a Kickstarter campaign earlier in the month and, with two weeks to go, had reached only a quarter of her $97,000 goal. During the meeting, though, “our phones started buzzing with backer notifications,” she said.
Breitbart had just published a piece about the fundraising effort, claiming that the film was imperiled as a result of Jaye interrogating her feminist beliefs. All of a sudden, MRAs and other inhabitants of the anti-feminist “manosphere,” were urging support across social media. The subreddit The Red Pill, which is not considered an MRA community, although it uses much of the same language, joined in the fundraising push as well.
During an interview with Vocativ in a picturesque park in her hometown of Marin, Calif., the next afternoon, Jaye checked her Kickstarter page on her iPhone. “Oh, what, oh my God, we just made it!” she squealed. “Oh my God, really?!” Just then the fundraising total jumped by another thousand dollars. “I can’t believe it,” she said, and wiped away a tear. “We can actually make this now!”
Jaye explained in her Kickstarter plea video that she refused to accept funding from ideologically-driven organizations in order to keep the film “non-partisan”—but now her documentary on men’s rights activists is, as she puts it, “kind of being funded by men’s rights advocates.” She denies that this will change the message of the film, which will mostly consist of interviews with MRAs, as well as a few feminists, and video diaries capturing her “transformation.” “The story is done, I’m not going to reenact a different story,” she said.
Jaye went into the project intending to challenge MRA’s “misogynist” arguments and ended up impressed by their rebuttals. For example, one told her, “How can you say that a woman misses twenty percent of her income versus a man missing seven years of his life because they die earlier on average?” She hadn’t thought about shorter life expectancies in this way, or known about the higher rates of homelessness, suicide and workplace deaths among men. Jaye was swayed by arguments about the tendency to not take male victims of sexual assault as seriously and the ways that men are discouraged from being caretakers.
Many of these are issues that feminism has in fact engaged with and advocated around, but Jaye came to believe that women’s rights activists were giving men’s issues short shrift.
“It’s scary to question everything you believe, your basis for what you know to be reality,” she said, using language reminiscent to that of her subjects, who refer to “waking up” to the MRA ideology as taking “the red pill,” a reference to a scene in the movie “The Matrix” in which the hero Neo is given the choice between taking a blue pill and going back to a life of blissful ignorance or taking a red pill and discovering the truth about society and his existence. Fittingly, Jaye has decided to title the documentary “The Red Pill.” She said, “It changed my life and I am so thankful.”
Jaye is hardly the first woman to support MRA arguments. The movement has gained a small but influential faction of female supporters who are referred to as “Honey Badgers” (a reference to the creature that went viral for not “[giving] a shit”). These women are vital to the cause because they challenge the perception that “we’re a bunch of sad, pathetic losers who can’t get laid and are just bitter because our wives left us,” as Dean Esmay of the popular MRA site A Voice for Men told Mother Jones last year.
Jaye, who hopped around the country as an army brat, says she first began to call herself a feminist when she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18 to become an actress. “I got pigeonholed in horror films as the girl who always dies,” she said. “That kind of fueled my feminist fire.” She said was also propositioned by married producers in situations where she felt “like I didn’t have a way out if I wanted to keep the job.” As she began to speak out about her views on such things, others started calling her a feminist. “Then I looked it up,” she said, “and realized that being for women’s rights, I was totally on board with, so it was like sign me up, I’m a feminist.”
This was a departure from the evangelical household that she grew up in, where “the father’s word was the final word,” she said. Her parents eventually divorced, and both she and her mom ended up leaving the church. Now, mother and daughter make films together—their first was a documentary on the purity movement and the harm of abstinence-only education called “Daddy I Do.” They later made the documentary, “The Right To Love: An American Family,” which followed a gay couple fighting for their right to get married. She’s also created a short film for GoldiBlox, a company that creates toys designed to spark girls’ early interest in engineering.
Jaye still calls herself a liberal, but in order to maintain suspense around “The Red Pill,” she doesn’t want to say whether she’s a feminist anymore—at least not directly. “Your beliefs can go so much deeper than labels,” she said. Later, when asked whether there is a need for feminism, she said, “I think having energy behind protecting women’s rights and acknowledging women’s issues is important. The big question is, ‘Is the answer feminism?’”
One quickly gets the impression that her answer is “no.”
The Breitbart article implies that potential feminist funders bailed on the project because they learned about Jaye’s change of heart. But Jaye says they simply changed their minds about helping give MRAs a platform to speak, especially as the movement gained traction during filming. An undeniable piece of this is the harassment and death threats that some MRAs have directed at certain feminists.
It turns out Jaye understands fear of MRAs. “I luckily moved recently,” she said toward the end of our nearly three-hour-long conversation, explaining that some of the men she interviewed had her home address. “I was really glad to move.” Such is the conflicted and at times contradictory nature of her relationship to MRAs.
On nearly a dozen occasions, she received calls in the middle of the night from one of her MRA subjects. (There were multiple emails, too.) Jaye implied that her repeat caller had on the mind what one might charitably call romance—but that isn’t her only worry.
“I think any bad seeds would probably want to see the film first before taking me down,” she said with a laugh. What if they do see the film and view it as unfavorable, though? “I guess I could go into hiding,” Jaye said. “Do I want to have any kind of allegiance to them to make sure I’m not harmed in the end?” She paused, the question lingering, and then explained that her video diaries show her reacting negatively to the MRAs, but that those clips were part of her early “evolution” on the subject. “I think that protects me from people wanting to attack what I said then,” she said.
The implication seemingly being that the position she ultimately came to would not make MRAs angry with her. “I think it’ll be OK,” she said.
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