Rachel Corbett, The Red Pill And Zombie Journalism Down Under

By Paul Elam: I don’t think I ever imagined I would get tired of talking about The Red Pill movie. Then again, I never imagined the level of idiocy that the movie would inspire. I should have factor weighed for Australia before imagining either.  The feminists in that country, especially in the media, have proven to be under-socialized misfits, aggressively ignorant on a galactic scale.
It’s as though they should change the name of the country to pornography, just to escape the embarrassment.
Rachel Corbett, writing for the Daily Telegraph, has come out with an attempt to salvage whatever remains of the integrity she imagined she had before participating in the attempted tag team ambush of Jaye on the Australian issues program, The Project.
As might be predicted when someone tries to reclaim something they did not have in the first place, Corbett only managed to fall again, this time directly on her face next to Andrew O’Keefe, Monique Wright and the rest of Australia’s yellow brigade of hack journos.
I am going to share her article with you, most of it anyway, and give my response. When I’m done, I am going to treat myself to some relief and go back to what is important to me. The lives of men and boys. I won’t be writing any more articles on Australian grade zombie-journalism. There is just too many of the walking dead Down Under to bother with it any more.
Perhaps I will revisit this in better days, like after Australia is annexed by China, or some other country with a better press corp.
Anyway, let’s look at what Rachel Corbett had to say.

UNTIL recently the Men’s Rights Movement and its controversial “leader” in the United States, Paul Elam, might not have been familiar to many Australians.
But after the documentary The Red Pill was banned from Australian cinemas and the film’s director, Cassie Jaye, claimed she’d been treated poorly by the media on her publicity tour, the phenomenon has hit a few more people’s radars.
As a panelist on Network Ten’s The Project the night Jaye was interviewed, I was one of those accused of bad behavior.

I wonder if Rachel understands the meaning of cause and effect. She took part in a heavily biased hack job, an ideologically driven agenda to discredit an innocent person so that she could try to shut down an honest discussion of men’s issues. Forget what I said about cause and effect. The challenge here is Corbett’s understanding of the word journalism.
She is wrong about something else, too. While it is true that the majority of Australians have likely never heard of me, I take some pride in pointing out that people from Australia, a nation of 22 million, represent a disproportionately high percentage of traffic to AVFM, and to the financial support AVFM gets from across the globe.
Anway, Corbett goes on to dig her hole deeper.

While many have claimed the interview was an attempt to silence her, the truth is there were things in the film that needed to be called into question. If all she’d wanted for her film was an advertisement she could have bought one in the commercial break.
And before you start screaming that this is classic lefty feminism and I clearly couldn’t deal with the issues raised in her film let me assure you: just the opposite is true.

Feminists have trigger alerts. I have bullshit alerts and I am issuing one now. Corbett is letting us all know that she is the reasonable one in her clan of misfits. No, she’s not at all like Carrie Bickmore or Waleed Aly, who did nothing but spout disingenuous feminist dogma during the heavily edited portion of the interview we were allowed to see.
Corbett must have excused herself to the little girls room while her compatriots alleged that The Red Pill was funded by MRAs and that Cassie was a mouthpiece for the MRM, only to have those lies completely debunked and consequently find home on the cutting room floor.
Oh no, Corbett had no part in that. She’s the reasonable one, as she is about to go on telling us.

I’m one of those women who finds it difficult to identify with the word “feminist”, she says, because I want equality for everyone, not just women.

Hold the presses. I want to take a moment to enshrine that statement. It is the first time I have seen an MSM journalist, much less one in Australia, actually admit that feminism is not about equality for both sexes. And since you cannot, ever, have equality for just one group, it is also a tacit admission that feminism isn’t about equality at all.
I don’t think she actually realizes what she’s admitted to, and neither have her peers or she would have her professional head on a spike by now. But she does go on, quite strong in her convictions.

I don’t think an overly simplistic view, says Corbett, that men have it easy and women are hard done by does anyone any favours and that’s why I thought many of the issues raised in Jaye’s film were worthy of discussion.
And yes, I watched it. Twice.

Once again, Corbett says a mouthful without fully realizing what she is saying.
“And yes, I watched it. Twice”?
It is clear that Corbett is well aware that when it comes to the handling of the Red Pill Movie as an Australian journalist you have to tell your readers that you actually watched it. It’s bragging rights in a media environment where the natural assumption would be that she had not bothered watching it before forming an opinion.
It’s like a sports reporter covering the Super Bowl and triumphantly declaring to the audience, “And yes! I watched the game!”
Rachel Corbett, a career television journalist, is bragging about having watched a movie before commenting on it. One to wonder if it registers on her how completely lame that is, and precisely what it says about her associates on Project and throughout Australian media. She goes on to demonstrate her keen understanding of the issues.

Topics like child custody, men’s suicide rates and domestic violence where the perpetrator is female are all areas where issues facing men are often overlooked and they shouldn’t be.
In an interview with a number of so-called Men’s Rights Activists or MRAs for short, they raised the point that while men’s work has been valued over women’s work, women’s lives have been valued over men’s and continue to be so.
These activists pointed to events such as 2009’s famous Hudson River plane crash when rescuers asked for woman and children to exit the plane first. Surely in an emergency, they asked, shouldn’t we be seen as identical amorphous blobs equally worthy of immediate rescue no matter what bits we were born with?
Observations like this are important to add to the conversation as well as questions about whether Family Law Courts unfairly favour mothers or the fact that we often don’t take male victims of domestic violence as seriously as we do female victims.

She even moved on to an almost balanced account of my writing regarding a piece I did titled, “If you see Jezebel in the road, run the bitch down,” more popularly know as Bash a Violent Bitch Month”

One of Elam’s more controversial articles on his website A Voice for Men, suggested the month of October should be “bash a violent bitch” month. This was written in response to an article on Jezebel which made light of women beating their male partners.
Again, there’s no doubt there is a double standard there that needed to be called out but while Elam claims his article was a piece of “Juvenalian satire”, I don’t think it’s unfair to question whether there might have been a less aggressive, more intelligent way to express himself. Particularly when couching arguments in that kind of vitriolic language ends up making you look less like a person with a genuine point and more like a misogynist with an axe to grind.

Of course, Rachel, it’s fair to question anything and everything. It’s also fair to expect the questioner to be intelligent enough to understand the answers. In a better world, and by that I mean the world outside Australia, it’s also fair to expect seasoned journalists to ask intelligent questions, and this isn’t one.
But no harm I suppose in asking stupid questions, so I’ll offer an answer. As to whether there might have been a less aggressive, more intelligent way for me to express myself. Yes, there might have been a less aggressive way but it would not have been more intelligent.
The entire point of writing satire is to provoke thought and discussion. The only way to write satire that forces any kind of meaningful discussion on issues faced by men and boys is to be aggressive about it.
And why? Because anyone who understands a damn thing about the men’s movement knows full well that a hundred years of impeccably reasonable, button-down collar advocacy for men and boys has resulted only in the world shrugging and moving on without notice.
Because, as Cassie Jaye has said publicly on several occasions herself, without that satire she would never have noticed the men’s movement and would have never done the movie.
So, Rachel, you tell me what is intelligent. Sparking enough controversy that journalists wound up making asses of themselves by condemning a movie they didn’t bother to watch, prompting you to write a column parroting men’s issues and pretending like you support discussing them? Or maintaining a blog with wonderfully inoffensive content that the world would promptly ignore?
If you are going to look down your nose at my style, Rachel, you might want to consider that it is people like you, and only people like you, who made the harsh satire necessary. After all, where were you and your phony cohorts when a leading feminist publication like Jezebel was literally bragging and laughing about bashing their husbands and boyfriend? Where were you when insanity dressed up as women’s advocacy took over your nation? Was all that during another trip to the girl’s room?
Next Corbett goes on to try to close the deal on convincing us that she is the one good reasonable voice that stands above the distasteful rest of us, feminists included.

The same can be said for feminists who scream about how all men are bastards and that women need to rule the world instead of us all having a crack at it together. But on Elam’s website things have been written that should have been challenged in a documentary that was supposed to be about the movement, warts and all.
All through his A Voice for Men website, viewers see points we should be discussing alongside language like “Valentine’s Day, for far too many men, is actually Lighten Up and Don’t be such an Insufferable Bitch Day, but only if you get the present right.” Language the writer might believe is a work of Juvenalian art but that just sounds juvenile.

I won’t dwell on the fact that Jaye did challenge me on my writing, and indeed featured one of those challenges as an integral part of the film. I won’t even question the strangeness of Corbett’s complaint given she watched the movie. Twice. I will say, however, that Corbett’s true colors, despite her attempts to build a reasonable, even somewhat sympathetic façade,now emerges. Corbett wants to shame me, no us, for being uppity. By speaking our minds, directly and honestly, we are resembling those pesky black people from 1960’s America who didn’t know how to mind their betters.
America’s family courts, criminal courts and college disciplinary systems represent the biggest civil rights rollback since Jim Crow. Men of all colors are suffering and even dying from these injustices. It’s happening in Australia, too. And now Corbett, like a plantation mistress, wants to clutch pearls and virtue signal because men are starting to deride sacred gynocentric traditions that put the onus on men to please women at all costs. She is tone policing like an irate librarian as she rattles off enough lip service to men’s issues to put on a front of open-mindedness.
At least Andrew O’Keefe was more up front and honest about his bigotry.
The rest of her commentary gushes out like a nobility fit.

I want to live in a society where we can have complex, robust, uncomfortable conversations. I want everyone, particularly those who don’t fit the stereotype, to have their views heard because assuming we know everything is arrogant and dangerous.
Being challenged and opening your mind to different points of view is important but it has to go both ways. If you want me to listen to you and appreciate where you’re coming from you don’t need to call me an “insufferable bitch” before we’ve even gotten the introductions out of the way.

Rachel, let me give you a 101 on the men’s movement, generally speaking. No one really gives a damn if you are listening, or if you appreciate anything we are saying.
The men’s movement, at least the most active part of it, is not about men’s advocates trying to convince the world of anything. It is about men talking to each other, inviting tone police to piss off while they do it. It’s about men giving themselves permission to treat the opinion of women like you with the dismissal it deserves.
It’s about creating an intellectual haven in which women and men like you don’t matter. That’s because we have finally started to figure out that in every way possible, whether it is domestic violence, suicide or any of the other issues about which you have feigned compassion, we have never mattered at all. Be thankful that “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” was the worst of what happened.
The rest of Corbett’s article amounts pretty much to a schoolmarm’s lecture on how we are all in this together, the pitfalls of zero sum games, the dangers of extremism, and pretty much everything else that feminists have suddenly found passion for when they realized a growing number of men would no longer be silenced.
It is just amazing how some people drone about how ‘we are all in this together’ the moment the people they were ignoring decided they would not be ignored any more.

About Paul Elam

Paul Elam is an author, the founder of A Voice for Men and An Ear for Men, where he offers more material on men's mental health issues and personal consulting services. Paul was featured in The Red Pill Movie and founded the International Conference on Men's Issues series.

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