"The Red Pill"

The Red Pill is a reference to the Matrix movies that the MRA’s have adopted as a signifier of their movement. This means that feminism and feminist ideology take the form of the “blue pill” that keeps us going about our day-to-day lives happily. When we take "the red pill"however, our eyes are opened up to a new reality – the one of the MRA’s.

The Red Pill by Cassie Jaye was an eye-opening documentary comparing the views of men’s rights activists against the thoughts of feminists, asking the audience to decide who they think is right.

Jaye herself identified as feminist when she began her documentary, but found as time went on she could see the faults in the movements, and felt sympathy for the men she met. There was definitely an element of confusion in her video pieces, what she had previously thought about MRA’s simply using their movement to ‘hate on women’ was no longer true and she was starting to understand why the movement was growing traction in the US.

I felt I could somewhat relate to her experiences. Whilst researching for Femme or Foe, I learned a lot more about the way feminism could seem unappealing to men – despite the changes in the movement made to try and accommodate them. Improvements have definitely been made for men since the making of The Red Pill but only at a slow pace.

It was interesting to see that a lot of the issues they discussed in the documentary were things I had found out about in my research too. From the lack of male mental health funding, lack of support for male domestic violence victims and the big issue of paternity rights, these were all issues my interviewees had discussed with me. My key research issue has been on domestic and sexual violence against men, and I was shocked to here that in 2016, there was only 1 refuge centre in the US that accepted male victims.

It was noted that the violence against women campaigns in the US alone draw in around 1 billion dollars of revenue for the feminist campaigns. The majority of this funding goes into campaigns that aim to prevent violence, but most of these result in solely blaming and shaming men as abusers.

Similar to my interviews, many of the men did not have a problem with feminists or women as a whole, but merely felt like some parts of the movement did not help give them a voice or ignored their points. Many of them had faced feminist backlash from their talks at colleges for example, and when they had tried to talk to these protestors, were faced with nothing but hateful comments and no proper debate.

However, it is important to note that the documentary does interview a more extreme men’s rights activist, Paul Elam. He is known to have made “anti-female” comments, such as blaming women for their own rapes, and also once said “October should be Bash a Violent B**** month”. His views are not representative of the whole movement, but do show that sometimes it can be taken to the extreme of “women-hating” rather than trying to tackle men’s issues.

Like all movements, it was clear to see a good and bad side of both feminism and men’s rights activists. And this does prove that things need to change to make life better for us all as a human race, not just as men or women. I believe that both movements should work together to make feminism more inclusive of men and representative of men’s issues to ensure a better grasp of what gender equality means for our society.

#mensrightsactivism #theredpill