- 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.
- Karen Straughan: The omnipotent, ever present patriarchy. The invisible force that directs all of our lives and causes all oppression and all suffering, our Devil. And the beautiful, wonderful, force for justice, Feminism, the way. It's the way. It sounds like religion. It sounds like religion. And oh my goodness- for a movement that's only about equality, and isn't blaming of men, they named the force for evil after men, and the force for justice after women. And this being a movement that is very very concerned with the implications of language. So concerned that if you call a firefighter a "fireman", it will discourage little girls from aspiring to be firefighters, and sometimes discourage grown women from aspiring to be firefighters by calling them "firemen", but we can call the force for all oppression, we can call that essentially men: Patriarchy. Right? And we can call the force for good and justice: women. And that kind of language, that has no implications? "We're not blaming men, we just named everything bad after them."
- 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.
- Kristal Garcia: There was a fifteen-year-old boy and there was a thirty-five-year-old woman, and later on she came out of jail and she was able to collect child support from this boy that she raped - after getting out of jail.
- 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.
- Paul Elam: It's one thing when you look at what happens to women and you feel normal healthy outrage about it and that should happen. But when you can look at what's happening in our courts to men, and in our medical establishment to men, in our schools to men, and yet we remain so cerebral about all of it, "Yes, well that is certainly something to consider." If it were happening to any other group, we would be having protests from coast to coast. The fact is that it's happening to men every day in front of our eyes and people will get angry at you if you try to talk about it. That's how deep the prejudice runs.
- Fred Hayward: I was a math major as an undergraduate and one of the fundamental things about geometry is the distance from point A to point B equals the distance from point B to point A. And if women are so different from men that men can't understand the female experience, we need to listen to women to describe it, then the male experience is so different from the female experience that you can't understand it. You need to listen to us.
- Warren Farrell: Many Men's Rights Activists come into being Men's Rights Activists as a result of getting a divorce, wanting to be equally involved with the children and realizing that women have the right to children and men have to fight for children.
- Paul Elam: When your family courts run on the supposition that mothers are more fit to be custodial parents, and that fathers are more fit to provide a check every month, and become what we like to call "uncle-daddy" where they visit, visit their children. To me that's one of the greatest obscenities in the world, the idea of visiting your own children. Where you get to see them for 2 hours on Wednesday night, and you get to have them for "x" amount of hours every other weekend, and you have no say in how they're brought up.
- Harry Crouch: You know I can't tell you how many men have been in this office, in that chair, in tears because they can't see their kids.
- Dean Esmay: I can't tell you at this point how many guys I've talked to who are like, "Yeah, you know she stabbed me and they put me in jail." Not only are there endless studies that show women are just as violent as men are. But when I would talk about it, invariably men would start come out of the woodwork with stories. Stories that they were afraid to tell, stories they got laughed at for, stories that they got blamed for. It's hideous.
- 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.
- Sage Gerard: It's so hard to convince people to look at men's rights activism and support it without first allowing them to at least escape the stranglehold that feminism has on their minds. I do believe it is dogma, it's zealotry.
- Harry Crouch: There are good people in the feminist movement. There are not good people in the radical feminist movement. That system is based on hate, and hate in my opinion, hate is the most destructive force in the world.
- Erin Pizzey: Battered children grow up to batter. That's what I learned. Whether it be a man or a woman. I now know that if a woman comes in with a history of violence in her own childhood, the chances are she will be probably violent to her children and she will want to live on this knife edge of crisis and danger.
- 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.
- Harry Crouch: What's the motivation? People don't ask what's the motivation? Do we need the men's rights movement? No. We need common sense. If there's going to be this woman's movement and this is the movement that's going to do all these things, then maybe we need a counter balance. They call it the men's rights movement or men's movement. I hate to see them at all. I think it's a shame, I think it's destructive.
- Paul Elam: The red pill is about looking at these issues in an honest way even when it's uncomfortable. And these things are uncomfortable, but without the willingness to set aside the programming and to set aside the false beliefs about what power is, and what women are, and who women are. Part of what we do is a pretty serious critique of both sexes. It's brutal. But critiquing the sexes is a real valuable thing; feminists don't want you to do it though, unless you're portraying women as victims and men as perpetrators. The red pill is about understanding that men and women are like everything else in the world, it's a mixed bag, you've got victims and perpetrators on both sides of the fence. And that's all, it's real simple, it's just not easy.
- Warren Farrell: Every society that survived, survived based on its ability to train their sons to be disposable. Disposable in war as warriors, disposable in work as firefighters, as workers on oil rigs and so on, coal miners. And indirectly, therefore, disposable as dads.