The Red Pill - Men's Rights DOCUMENTARY

Foreign. 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. Thank you.

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Misogynist rantings would be at home in the far-reaching internet subculture widely described as the Men's Rights Movement. A toxic distillation of the worst aspects of American sexism, it's a universe of message boards where men get together to express their hatred towards women.

Well, I, I thought men have all the advantages in the world these days. That's utter nonsense. Men are routinely ground up in a family court system that is misandrist and biased against them. They are the majority of the homeless. They are the majority of suicides. They are the majority of the drug-addicted. They are the majority of the unemployed. They are the majority of school dropouts. They are the majority of those in prison. How do we know that they're not the cause of these problems?

Women live longer. Mark, let me tell you, it is because we are stronger and we are happier at the end of the day than most men, and that is factual, and you know it. When men are married to women who scream like you, they just want to die sooner. Yeah.

A Voice for Men, an online hub for men's rights activists. And they were founded by a man named Paul Elam. It's a website called A Voice for Men that's run by a man named Paul Elam, which is male spelled backwards, but it is his real name, apparently. It's a gathering of women-haters. The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified that group and men's rights groups as hate groups. He wrote a piece declaring the month of October to be "BASH-a-Violent-[__] Month." I mean, literally, to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall.

He wrote, "You may be wondering why I'm sitting in a car with notorious men's rights 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.

I was a quiet kid, preferring to observe from afar. My mom put me in theater classes when I was eight years old to break me out of my shell, and I loved it so much to the point 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 be pigeonholed as the blonde who always died.

Foreign. 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 seemed a little too similar to the unfortunate roles I was auditioning for, and it was not how I saw myself or the person that 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 2008, when I was 21 years old. Most of my work has been about women's issues and sexuality. I've covered a range of topics from the phenomenon of purity balls to reproductive rights, single motherhood, and LGBT rights.

After releasing my film in 2012 about marriage equality, I was at a loss of what topic to explore next. And that's when two horrific stories broke the news. Two star high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, have been found guilty of raping a West Virginia teenager. The video shows the former Steubenville student callously joking about the incident. [__] outrage across India as a 23-year-old woman, the victim of one of the most horrific rapes India has ever heard of. A 90-minute horror for a 23-year-old medicine student on this bus. Gang-raped and beaten. Her friend assaulted and thrown out off the bus. Every day, pilots on the street.

I started to research this rape culture. A website called A Voice for Men popped up. Paul Elam wrote about how women long to live out their rape fantasies, to be taken by a man she's never spoken to, let alone given consent to. As I read, I was asking myself, "Is this the rape apologist that I've been hearing about? The victim-blamer who perpetuates rape culture?"

I continued to read A Voice for Men's website, often stopping around the halfway mark in every article because I could only read so many [__] [__] feminazi and raped hard words per minute. But even still, I kept reading and thinking and reading some more. I was trying to understand how these, what I perceived to be women-haters, could have so many followers. So I decided to meet these MRAs, the ones leading the movement, some of their followers too. And this begins my journey down the rabbit hole.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is an historic moment. Never before has there been a gathering of this magnitude to support men and boys' issues. We have got serious problems. I have been working in this area, advocating for the rights. And here we go.

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What you'll hear is that we hate women. You'll hear that it's a backlash against women's rights. You'll hear that we're regressives that want women back in the kitchen and making sandwiches and and barefoot and pregnant. You're just bitter. You're a loser. You're a whiner. You're ugly. You're undesirable. You're lazy. You're scary. You must be a racist. You must be a misogynist. When we do speak out, women often don't want to hear what, what we have to say. And so then we're called names. We're called whiners. And this is the way people who don't want men to talk about issues try to shut us up. Um, no other way to openly organize other than calling yourselves a men's rights group. Worse, maybe it's just because you're pathetic. We're here to fight. How something is different. [__] think they have the right to oppress women. White men are starting to feel misplaced because women are sharing space. It's disgusting. And scroll the [__] up. And don't confuse suffrage with oppression. Everyone suffers. It's universal. I am a man, and I need feminism.

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And it is crystal clear that the problems for men and boys are real. I would like to turn a microphone over to, um, of A Voice for Men for some words.

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This is a historic day. I've never seen a gathering like this out of concern for the general state of affairs for men and boys in this culture. And to articulate the entire platform of the Men's Rights Movement is kind of like trying to understand a snowdrift, one snowflake at a time. It's a very, very complicated matter. Just consider this: that 93% of workplace fatalities are men. Four of five suicides are men. Men are dropping out of higher education in very alarming ranks. We're down to 38% now of college students are men, and it's dropping rapidly. Male suicide, male abuse, male unemployment, male homelessness, male failure in education, male health issues. We've got the paternity fraud issue and the wrongful paternity issue. A false allegation issue. Men are sentenced to 63% more prison time for the same crime as women. They're less likely to see a doctor. They're less likely to have health insurance. The family court system truly is biased against men. I mean, there's just no question about it. And it's really the pro-choice for women only movement because men, they're denying men any kind of choice. Once a child is conceived, her body, her choice, right? Think about men, his body, his choice. Not so much. Because the US government does not want to send you to die if you'd rather send me. Did I? Young men that are failing to launch. They're staying in their homes of origin far past the time that we would normally expect them to individuate and move out and and go live their lives. We have video game addiction. We have pornography addiction. We have, uh, the abuse of young boys with drugs like Ritalin to manage their behavior. Almost all victims of autism spectrum disorders are boys. Boys are most likely to be homeless. Most likely to get cancer. Most likely to die young. And of every major cause, most likely to be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, and even executed while being completely innocent. It doesn't matter what their race is. It doesn't matter what their ethnicity is. It doesn't matter what their religious or non-religious views are. It doesn't matter if they're gay or straight. Men and boys are in crisis, and they need your help, and they need your support because they are human beings too. And you will not shame me or anybody here into silence about it anymore.

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But if you start to talk about those issues and address them in, in terms of how they affect men and boys as a group, people get hostile about it. The idea is that men have all the rights, they've always had the power. But if that's true, why can't men talk about their problems? And that's what really got me interested in this to begin with.

Shortly after I began filming men's rights activists, I realized my own views were being challenged. I kept a video diary throughout filming, and I've decided to share some of those diaries with you. I really do feel like learning about the men's movement and their specific issues, the issues that they have issue with, it's hard for me to completely understand them and just automatically feel welcome in that space of talking about these issues. Because at least with feminism, whenever I heard about the issues that feminists were fighting against, I always felt like I had something to draw from and experience to be on board with that. And that's always been why I've been drawn to the feminist movement, is because a lot of what they spoke about, I had personal experiences with. And with the men's movement, I have very little personal experiences with the issues that they talk about.

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A cab driver who was driving a cab 70 hours a week was not saying, "I am earning this money to have power over my wife." He was earning this money, even though it took power away from his life. He was doing that so his child wouldn't have to drive that cab. The garbage collector does not get up at three or four in the morning in rain and sleet and snow and and get out to do the garbage so we can have more power over his wife. That's power he's losing over his life in order to make his contribution, his sacrifice, his way of loving. And this has been translated into the culture of, "You make more money than women do, you must therefore have more power."

Meet Warren Farrell, best-selling author and self-styled social anthropologist, leading an assault on our traditional thinking about men. I asked my girlfriend at the time to buy me as a gift, I think it was for Christmas, for my birthday, Warren Farrell's book, "The Myth of Male Power," which she did, and it just changed my whole life. And his premise was, while women are often seen as sex objects, men are often seen as success objects. And this resonated with me. He wrote this book that that questioned our notions of power, of who had power and where it was. And it questioned the roles of men, but not the white feminist had always questioned gender roles.

Every society that survived, survived based on its ability to train its 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. What happens in men's lives when they're raised that they're worthless unless they're a provider? That they must work even if they have to take on extremely dangerous work? They must get this done or they're useless as men. That is very, very powerful stuff. See, feminism did see accurately that we value male work more than we value female work. But there's also the issue that we value female life more than we value male life.

Thank you. Even when that plane went down in New York City a few years ago, and that, you know, the pilot was a hero for the way he landed it and saved everybody. Ward arrived over the city-wide fire frequency that a commercial jetliner was in the water with 155 people on board. Then over the next few minutes, the doors opened, life vests were inflated, and women and children first. Everyone got off that plane. They saved all the women first. That's still when I went on a cruise, you know, they're still women into the lifeboats for, you know, because you're not, because you're a man, so you should be able to swim halfway across the ocean. But because you're a man, you're expendable. We have to look at not just the glass ceilings, but also the glass cellars. And Paul, I think, as you are saying, we have to look at men just not only as human doings, but also as human beings.

When you survive because somebody else is willing to die, like in war, then that you are immune to the pain of the people who are dying because you have an investment in there being willing to die. You say, "I will build a statue. I will remember you in a history book." But if you look at that from another perspective, that building of the statue or remembering you in a history book is a bribe to be willing to die so that I can live.

Tend to turn what rejects them into an object. So the area where I'm watching this lecture that Warren Farrell's giving in the '90s, I see some women in the crowd, and a lot of them have their hands folded. And there is a little bit of uncomfortableness by being a woman in a crowd of people while the speaker's talking about how men are oppressed and women have it so great. It kind of puts you on the defensive as a woman. And understanding that, I feel that way makes me wonder, are men having their arms crossed listening to a feminist speaker talk about how men have all the power and women are oppressed? Are men feeling like, "What are you talking about? I don't have power, and we have it pretty shitty on this side of the grass too?"

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In 2012, Dr. Warren Farrell was speaking on behalf of men's issues at the University of Toronto in Canada. A feminist group protested the event.

You are [__] scum. [__] brave apologists. Incest supporting woman-hating [__] scum. As many people as I can. You know what, though? Why would you pay money to [__] support a [__] rape apologist if you weren't [__] once?

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[__] stop.

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This is [Music] [Music] Thank you. [Music] Thank you.

But Farrell wasn't always so attentive to men. In fact, for years, he focused almost exclusively on women's issues, rubbing shoulders with feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem. And he's still a card-carrying member of the National Organization for Women. I believe that women cannot hear what men do not say. And he's got a lot to say to both men and women in his provocative new book, "The Myth of Male Power." That was making a very significant amount of money speaking around the world on behalf of women's issues alone. I went through a period of forming lens groups, and then when I listened to them, I thought, "Well, gee, this will be really helpful to present to audiences so that they can understand not only women's side but men's side too." Because I was released totally in the feminist camp, and immediately I saw my standing ovations dropped. I started hearing that there was people saying, "No, don't invite him there, you know, to speak with us." And pretty soon, I had, you know, very few college and university speaking agents.

How did you originally get involved with feminism? Write a battle again. I was doing my doctorate in political science at NYU in the late '60s, and the women's movement surfaced.

Thank you. And I started to say, "This is the most exciting thing I've ever heard." Because I'd heard of civil rights, gay rights, but suddenly women were saying, "I don't want to be confined to just being a homemaker or secretary." And so it's like, "Why shouldn't women be encouraged to do everything they possibly can do?" And at that point in time, I saw a lot of women marry men that they weren't completely in love with, but they, the man earned a fair amount. And so I thought, "That's just a form of prostitution extended over a lifetime." How depressed that must make a woman, and it's not going to be good for a man either. He never knows whether he's loved for who he is or loved for what he has. And he's afraid to give up producing because he's afraid to lose love. And so women who were successful, to me, appear to be women who were free men from having to be all, you know, wrapped up in just being the only breadwinner and supporting one, two, three, four, five people. Which, you know, it's one thing to support yourself. When you're supporting five people, you don't have the freedom to question your boss because you're supporting five people.

The first issue of feminism was to say, "Just because I'm a woman, maybe I don't want to spend my life raising children." You know, "Don't, don't force me into that role against my will." So they looked at men and said, "Well, you're not forced to raise children. You don't have any issue." But for men, the traditional sex role was not raising children. For us, the traditional sex role is to be a provider, a protector, and to initiate relationships. Each of us has traditional sex roles. Don't force us to carry out those traditional sex roles. We have the same rules set up for men that they've always lived by, that you need to protect and provide at any cost. But we've changed everything where it concerns women. They now have access to everything men have always had access to, to education, to work, to whatever they want to do. But they're not the ones driving the semis, and they're not the ones in the coal mines. You don't hear the National Organization for Women complaining that there is just not enough female ditch diggers. It has still been carrying the lion's share for what it takes to to operate and maintain this society. And it is still the expectation that if somebody's going to go down with the ship, it's going to be men.

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Flexibility in roles is where we should be all headed. Any men's rights activist that I would support would support the portions of the women's movement that is encouraging women to have more flexibility in roles. So where do the men's movement and feminism disagree? Well, only on the fundamental belief that the women's movement says men are the oppressors. That they are, we are involved in a patriarchal world in which men invented the rules to benefit men at the expense of women.

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 5% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women? You have to look at this in a larger perspective. Patriarchy is the result of gender roles, and not, not the vice versa. Traditionally, women's power and responsibility has been in the reproductive sphere, while men's power and responsibility was in the productosphere. You know, you have to reproduce to continue the species, and you have to produce to feed people so that they can reproduce. So, you know, it's like they work together. And most cultures divvied up roles because women were responsible for childbirth and were more likely to breastfeed. They're not more likely to, they were, they did the breastfeeding. They tended to be involved in the role of raising children. Men tended to be involved in the role of embracing money, or making a killing of the animals, or making a killing on Wall Street. But those were our obligations. So that's why industry was male-dominated, and government was male-dominated, because that, that was our job. And so what we call patriarchy is men giving in to the expected roles that they're supposed to give into. And many of those roles are very harmful: working exceptionally long hours, difficult hours, dangerous jobs, getting killed on the job. Even politics, a lot of people describe as masochism. Imagine what it takes to be a successful politician. Imagine how much of your personal life that you give up, how much you work, how much privacy that you sacrifice, how much freedom in your day-to-day life that goes out the window. There are more men willing to do those things than there are women. But also, just because men are the ones, for instance, writing the laws in general, doesn't mean that the laws are protecting men.

You hear about patriarchy, right? Although evil's the world from patriarchy, but we're the ones dying, and we die for you guys, you know, protect our families, our friends. In every society that's ever existed, women have been, have had privilege and protection that men haven't. For example, we never hear about how men were excluded from the Forced Labor Convention of 1930. For years, the Forced Labor Convention was an international treaty that banned slavery and forced servitude, but it made an exception for able-bodied males ages 18 to 45. Eventually, they got rid of that, but there was still an exemption for prisoners and military, which is 90% male. Stop pretending that you're oppressed, and men are your oppressors. It's a lie, and it's a hurtful lie, and it's a hateful lie, and it's wrong.

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You talk a lot about the red pill in A Voice for Men. What is the red pill? Oh, it's sort of a cultural slogan. It comes from the movie "The Matrix," where the character Neo is given the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. And if she swallows the red pill, the scales will be peeled back from his eyes. He will see everything that he hasn't been able to see. And if he takes the blue pill, he'll just go back to sleep and live in his sort of unaware, semicomatose state forever, and probably be a lot happier. It's, it's a pretty apt analogy. So what is the blue pill in this world? Well, the blue pill is the paradigm that most people live by: that men have all the power, that they've always had all the power, that domestic violence is a problem that's committed by men against women only, that sexual assaults are only committed by men against women, that women don't make the same money for the same work as men. Teach men not to write. Only men can stop right. Men commit domestic violence. We need to stop violence against women instead of just stopping violence. That is feminist training. The MRAs say that we live in a blue pill world where women are victims, men are perpetrators, and it's all a lie. And now we're brainwashed to believe this, and that it's not true, and that men are slaves in this world, and women are. I don't think women are necessarily the puppet masters, but I think they're saying that women have the easy way out, and men are, um, they're given medals and statues and written in the history books to justify them dying and being slaves to work, or being, uh, being used to progress societies. And I've just, I've believed for so long that that I'm at a disadvantage for being a woman and that I have to work harder than everyone else and I have more to overcome and I have more to prove just because of my gender. But the MRAs, they're saying that this is all a lie, and that guys are actually the ones that are disadvantaged and discriminated against. And actually, the more I learned from them, the more I think, "Thank God I wasn't born a guy." Because I, I don't think that the, the expectations on men is good or healthy. I mean, they have so much pressure to succeed and to be strong and to stand up and protect others and to put their lives on the line. I don't think I would want that responsibility. But, you know, 50 years ago, no, I wouldn't have wanted to be a woman. But now, I, I mean, maybe just, it's right now that the tides are changing and and women are the, have the better deal. Well, no, I don't know. And then sometimes I think the MRAs are just duping me and giving such a strong pitch about what they believe in to convince me of something that's actually just some out there theory that men are discriminated against and women are have the advantage.

This is Cassie J. It's regarding a documentary about the Men's Rights Movement, and we're looking for feminist, uh, voices now to speak in the documentary.

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And Miss Majority. Yeah, hold on just one second.

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So I realized, okay, I need to bring some sunrise into the mix. Make sure that we have that side. It's good. I was researching rape culture, and so that's how I stumbled across a website called voiceformen.com. So some of the people that we've already interviewed on the MRA side is Paul Elam, A Voice for Men. Yeah. Oh, I'm familiar with them. I've never met. Ever? Yeah. Obviously, they've, they've spent a significant amount of time and energy denouncing me. So I figured I might as well have a look at what they say. Yeah. Really? The Men's Rights Movement is part of the backlash? Is it backlash to feminism? The Men's Rights Movement really got going when as women began to make gains, and some men have felt threatened by the opportunities that have been opened up to women. And I don't know if it's because, uh, some of them feel threatened that they now have to compete with a lot more people for their jobs. They now can't get into the best schools if a woman or a girl has better grades. Think about it. Grandfather's generation probably had it pretty well, right? All of his needs, his shirts were ironed, just all of that was always taken care of. Well, you know, grow up, realize the world has changed. And as much as the MRAs would like things to go back to the way they were and use the argument that women have an advantage now, no person looking at the data can possibly say women have an advantage. We're just beginning to get an even a level playing field here. It's not tilted in our favor, I can tell you that. And they know it. They know it. But it's the, it's the constant distortion of the data. It's the spinning of a situation to make it look like women are somehow getting ahead, getting an advantage they don't deserve. It's, uh, it's part of the backlash. Political organizing comes from a feeling of victimization, which is why the Men's Rights Movement makes that claim that men are the victims of discrimination. But it doesn't have much traction because, you know, you look around and it's hard to see it. We don't have movements called, you know, straight liberation. You know, instrument. The question I would pose rhetorically is, is the Men's Rights Movement really the gendered version of the white nationalist movement? Because there are plenty of white people who say that they are the victims of reverse discrimination. So it's, of course, it's not going to have very much traction. You can't really organize the people who are superordinate.

So do you think that men are being discriminated against in any way? Not under the law. Men are not disadvantaged under our laws, um, or in the business world. As a class, men are not underrepresented on corporate boards or at the top of the Fortune 1000 companies. In the corporate world, in the, in the business world, in a lot of parts of academia, in the military, and the sports world, still pretty much a male-dominated world, and where a lot of the privileges and power and status accrue to men. Men are advantaged over women, no question. No one can, no one can, uh, debate that. Not with a serious, not in any seriousness.

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. You need to listen to us. You can't really compare how men and women have suffered from sexism, um, because they're, there's no way to quantify, you know, that kind of suffering. So if a woman says, "Well, I miss 30% of my income more than you miss six years of life," there's no way to quantify that. Or, "I've lost a job opportunity because I'm a woman." There's no way to say, "Well, I've suffered more than you because you've lost a kid because you're a man." You know, we can't. But it's serious. It is serious. And, um, and at least if you, if, if you're denied a job because you're a woman, at least you can go to another company and apply for a job. You know, but you can't when you lose your kid. Like you can say, "Well, okay, I'll get custody of that kid. You know, I'll try for that one." It's, it's a terrible thing that that happens.

There was a case, the Serpico case. It's about a New York City undercover cop. You get shot at the end of the movie and retires from the police force. And he was a real man, Frank Serpico. A woman, after the movie, after this was made, decided she wanted to become a single mother and tricked him into fathering a child. And the court accepted that because she told her friend she was going to trick him, and they testified, and the court said, "Yes, you were tricked into it," and still awarded her over 90% of his police pension. So everything that he goes through in this movie to, you know, including getting shot to earn his, his pension, she won by sleeping with him one night.

My son's mom wanted to have children with me, and I had to always refuse. You know, saying, "You, you have this anger problem. You need to get counseling. I'm not going to consider having children with you until that's dealt with." Because she would lose her temper almost every day and just use any weapon she could. And like a child's the perfect weapon. So I was really definite about that. But she also used to proofread my articles for me. And I wrote an article for Playboy about Serpico. And when she read that, she told her friend she's going to trick me into bothering the child. She doesn't need my permission. And so that's how my son was conceived. Then she said, "If you want to see your son, you have to stay in a relationship with me. But if you break up with me, I know all the things that a woman can do to a man." You know, she's read all my articles, she saw my talk shows, said, "I know all the things a woman can do to a man, and I'll do them to you." So, um, that's what I had to deal with. Like everything that I had been raising awareness about for the previous 17 years, then she combined into one thing for me to live through. Really ironic.

For the first five to seven, seven years, I guess, we would see each other four times a day for exchanges on average, every single day. I had to deal with some scene. The scene, meaning she would just not show up, you know, or she would hold a kid out and then pull him back and hold him out and pull him and just kind of play with me. Or she'd let me have the kids, and then she'd stand in the front of the car so I couldn't move. "You stay in Mommy Town tomorrow. I'm gonna stay in Mommy Town for a couple of days. Two days. And then you come back to Daddy." Though another time, I saw her hold him by the shoulders and say, "Daddy is a bad man. Daddy is a very bad man." And so he had to go through this long custody battle. And, and the decisions that they would make, you would just go, "Wow." There couldn't be any explanation. You know, either they're absolute idiots, or it's biased. There's just no other explanation for it.

One other thing, his mom is obese and wanted him to be obese for various reasons. One thing is so he would identify more with her side of the family than mine, because we're all almost down. Another was out, so that he would enjoy being with her more, I guess. When he was at my house, he had to get activity, you know, and eat well-balanced meals and get sleep and stuff. And, and at her house, they would bake brownies and stay up late and just watch TV. And so where would you, if you're a little kid, you know, where would you enjoy being more? But he self-reported to the mediator how upset he was about being obvious. That the worst thing in school is when kids call him fatty. And now how he cried. And his physician said that he's really concerned medically. And then when I did, he was at an age where he would imitate things that I would do. You know, I gave him a broken shaver, so when I shaved, he would pretend to shave. And what I did was I started weighing myself every morning and writing down my weight, the date, and the weight. And I taught him how to read a scale, so he kept his own records. So I had six months worth of statistics to show consistently that every time he was with his mom for a few days, he'd come back weighing three or four pounds more, and then he'd lose it while he was with me. So they had, you know, how much he was upset about the problem, they had his physician being upset about the problem, and they had the proof of where the problem lay. So the judge's decision was that father should no longer be allowed to weigh the child. Problem solved.

After 14 years, my body gave out, and I got sicker than I've ever been. I realized I'm gonna die. That's not going to do anybody any good. I've got to give up the fight. So I gave up custody. And so I, I don't see my son anymore. He hasn't been in my house since.

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Fred claims that during his 14-year custody battle, he spent the equivalent of five years of his gross income on legal fees, mediators, and child support payments. I was really in his life a lot longer than most fathers would have been. It's something most fathers can't afford.

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Able to me.

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We generally know that fathers don't get as good a deal in family court, and we don't really complain about it until it happens to us. And even then, a lot of men don't. 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. 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 to 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 two 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. 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. Some of this stuff ends up in horrific consequences, like this gentleman here. That's his little son. They found him dead, not the son, but the young man in the desert with a bullet in his head. The day before the family court, where it became known that he was going to get to see his little guy even less. And of course, he'd been falsely accused one time after another after another. It had destroyed his life, it had bankrupt him and driven him into debt. It caused him to miss work. He was about ready to lose his job. He was in, he was rope. So he just decided to end it. The unfairness in, in the family courts, the unfairness in the way child support is so often structured, it's commonplace, and it's everywhere. And the more you start to become conscious of it, the more you realize that it's there.

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I started to research some fathers' rights issues and came across some harrowing stories, like this man in South Carolina who found out his only daughter was adopted away by the mother without his knowledge or consent. His daughter was with an adoptive family in California, so he began his fight to get his daughter back. Adoption is for children without families, not children with a willing and capable family. And this man in Colorado who lost his daughter when the mother left the state to give birth in Utah, where he wouldn't have legal rights to his child. He fought for four years in court and finally won visitation rights, only visitation. I can't explain the emotion, the happiness. There's this hard fight, and this, what this means to me. And then there's this heartbreaking story. The 20-year-old father never left her side until he was forced to give her to adoptive parents this week. After Kaylee's mother decided to put her up for adoption, in order to keep Kaylee, Colby needed to file paternity action and affidavit and a commencement notice with Utah's Vital Records a day before the mother signed the adoption papers relinquishing her rights. But in Colby's case, the mother only gave him a few hours' notice of what she was going to do. Men in the men and the many fathers, they're upset because they're not allowed to be fathers. Okay. Pulls his head out, blows his brains out. It's a family court, and people don't think there's something wrong with that. We just opened the doors tomorrow for business as usual, and that's okay.

I've always thought of feminism as being the fight for gender equality, and yet I've never heard about fathers' rights and the injustices going on in family court. Why is this? I decided to ask gender studies professor Michael Messner. Well, I'll just say, I, I don't think that a lot of their assumptions are correct to start with. There's no doubt that there have been some men who get just screwed by court decisions and custody cases. But I think when you look at the broader patterns, um, you know, it's still the case that in intact heterosexual families with with kids, women are still doing the vast majority of the housework and child care, and and a lot of, there's a lot of sort of father absence, lack of participation by fathers, some of whom, I think, then after divorce happens, end up, uh, suddenly wanting equality, you know, as fathers when they haven't really been participating equally as fathers before. So to me, it always kind of swings back to the feminist perspective of how we need to push for full equality across the board, including before divorces, um, and, uh, if we have that, then we might expect more symmetry after divorce is happening.

Laughs. The more I researched fathers' rights, the more I realized how deep this rabbit hole goes, not only in the amount of issues but also in the vast array of perspectives on these issues. I decided to create a flow chart of what I thought father's options might be following a surprise pregnancy. Then I put a green line for the paths that I thought would be good turnouts for the father, and I put red lines for the paths that seem to not be good for the father. Then I created a flow chart for women's options and did the same with green and red lines. And as I stepped back, I saw all the red lines for the women's options if she does not want the child. But something dawned on me: of every path the biological father could go down, he's at the mercy of the woman's sole discretion. Although women have very difficult choices to make, she at least has the choice. But for biological fathers, they have no say over their parental destiny.

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This is my friend Dara. She's eight months pregnant with her first child, and she's a lifelong feminist. It seems for memorized from what I've read that women seem to have more reproductive rights than men do. I don't know what to say. Like, we carry children. They're never going to carry children. It's just a different thing. So I guess as much as possible, take the steps to prevent yourself being in that situation. It's just like, I don't know what to say. There's no, there's nothing left. Like a woman, you know, has been, women have been blamed for, and, and still are, for, you know, unwanted pregnancies, choosing to have an abortion, not choosing to have an abortion, choosing to put their child up for adoption. When you know the, the burden lies on a single mother if the man leaves, there's real, you know, societally, she's, she's lambasted. So there's a lot of things that women deal with in that regard that men don't actually deal with. So I can have compassion for their situation, but I don't know that it's going to change in the way they want it to, because it's biology. You know, so if you're going to be having sex that could result in pregnancy, and you haven't had this conversation with the woman that you're having sex with, you better have it. Better have it fast. That's when the man has the ability to make decisions, either not to engage in sex, or to use, uh, condoms and to use other forms of contraception. So that's where his role comes in. Once he's impregnated her, she's the one now faced with continuing a pregnancy, faced with the health risks that accompany pregnancy. So his rights have to be exercised early. But once she's pregnant, all decisions must be hers, because ultimately she is the most impacted. There's just no question, and she ultimately has the responsibility for that child.

Married. He promised me we would have two kids, and now he doesn't want anymore. My friends think I should trick him and stop taking my birth control. Men have never been in control of our bodies. We're the ones in control. Clap if you think that she should trick him. My people up next. Every step. So it sounds like men's reproductive rights are limited to the choice of whether or not to have sex and the choice of whether or not to use protection. But what if he's tricked into fatherhood? Or what if he's not even the father? What does paternity fraud look like? It's ugly. Ordinary ugly. And we have to distinguish between paternity fraud and wrongful paternity. It's the difference. Wrongful paternity can be innocent. Okay, I went to a party. I had sex with six guys. I think it was when I was hanging out the window. I got pregnant, but I wasn't sure. But you know, if anybody knows that guy's name, would you please have him call me? And then she names one of the other guys, and he didn't have sex with her. It wasn't malicious. It wasn't intentional. She wasn't trying to harm anybody. She was just trying to figure out who it was. Wrongful paternity. More often, unless facetiously, okay, I'm married. I had an affair. Obviously, here there are all sorts of problems because there are more victims than the person who's named as the dad, who may be the wrong one. There's everybody involved in the family. Like a situation in Texas where the family had five little towhead kids, all guys, all little blondeos. And all of a sudden, one day, one little Blondo kid gets in trouble, has to go to the hospital. They can't get a hold of Mom. They get a hold of Dad. Dad dresses to the hospital, needs to give blood. Whoops, can't do it. Wrong blood. What? All the kids look alike. Turns out it was the guy down the street. You've heard of this place? No, it's a real case. So what happens to this family? Can you fathom what happens to this family now? Do you think the kids feel when they find out Daryl Dad isn't Daryl Dad, and it's the guy down the street? I think Dad feels that these five little boys that he still loves dearly, when he finds out they're not his bio children, but he can't tear away because he loves him, he's devoted himself to these. How do you think it feels? I mean, it's horrific, horrific. That's not wrongful, that's deliberate. That's paternity fraud. That's paternity fraud. She knew who the father was and lied about it.

Paul was right when he said trying to understand the Men's Rights Movement is like trying to understand a snowdrift, one snowflake at a time. There are unique fathers' rights issues that vary between unmarried, married, and divorced dads. But there are also men's rights issues for non-biological fathers, like this man who is facing jail time for failure to pay child support for a child that DNA tests prove isn't his. Carnell Alexander still owes more than thirty.

thousand dollars to the state for a child that's not his because the mom wrote his name down because she needed to name someone in order to get welfare benefits. I had to pull him down as the father. That was done working against the system. I'm almost homeless. I'm almost in jail. I'm out of work. My money is being threatened and be taken. He says the law needs to be changed so when this happens, as it often does, other men don't become dad by default. Oh, a lot of times people wonder about MRAs. Why are you guys so angry? Am I sure that is why? Aren't you? How can anybody look at this and not be angered by it? And the only answer to that I've ever been able to come up with is that people aren't angry because they don't see men as human beings.

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I continued traveling North America, meeting MRAs from all walks of life, hearing their personal stories, the red pill moments. I met a young man who was sexually abused when he was 16 years old while living at a residential home for people with developmental disabilities. "She's the only woman I've done anything ever with, right? Because it just messed me up so much. She continues working there. He hit me in the face. She actually hit me throughout the house, chasing me throughout the house." When I reported my domestic assault to the police officers, I did not at all bring up the fact that I was sexually assaulted because if he wasn't going to believe that I was a victim of domestic violence, there was no way he was going to believe that I was going to be a victim of sexual assault.

I met the Honey Badgers, women who are men's rights advocates.

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And then there was a 15-year-old boy. It was a 35-year-old woman, and then 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. So there's, there's lack of fairness for men in the court systems. When police officers would show up to a domestic violence case, it was often men were just taken away without asking what even happened. It's just presumed that men are the criminals. I was assaulted several times, you know, and and I never got any help. I went to the police, still bleeding, a couple of times, and one police officer said, I'll never forget this, he said, "If she starts hitting you again, you better get out of there fast because if she just breaks her fingernail trying to hit you, we'll arrest you." I mean, 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, when I would talk about it, invariably men would start coming out of the woodwork with stories, stories they were afraid to tell, stories that they got laughed at for, stories that they got blamed for. It's, it's hideous. This is not flattering to men to talk about men's vulnerabilities. No, to talk about the ways that they are not strong and that they, they are, well, weak and to be honest about it. It's not flattering. A solution for both genders is that we need to be able to recognize how men are vulnerable and we need to be able to recognize how women are actors because we have a huge blind spot, especially when women do bad things.

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My best friend that I grew up with since kindergarten was being physically abused by his wife, who he had been married to for 20 years. Actual break glass and throw it out and punch him. I've seen it just happen spontaneously and it was frequent. And he's bigger than her, but he didn't want to hit her, and he didn't want the children. They had three minor children. He didn't want them seeing this at all. So he would usually just go outside because there would be glass breaking or things being smashed or yelling, and he knew that the neighbors might think it's him. So he would go outside so the neighbors could see what's happening. Eventually, I said, "Look, you're gonna need, you need professional help, and so does she, and maybe the kids do too." So I called a bunch of domestic violence shelters. I, I just looked around online and I called, but every place that I called said, "We don't help men. We don't help male men at all." And I started becoming curious about why that was because I learned that these were state-funded shelters, and I know that men pay at least half of the taxes that fund these shelters if they stay funded. And I just was wondering why. So basically, there was no place to take him, and it just continued. The problem just kept going. In the United States, there are over 2,000 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 all suicides are men. If suicide prevention services only served men, wouldn't we see the gender discrimination immediately? If there are over 2,000 women's shelters that turn away men and only one shelter for men, obviously the resources don't match the need. In the Men's Rights Movement, well, from the very beginning, when I first opened the Refuge, which was in 1971 in Chiswick in London, almost as soon as I took the women in, I got a house for men.

A Voice for Men's editor-at-large, Erin Pizzey, founded the first ever women's shelter in 1971. And she is widely revered in the men's rights community because, you see, what I knew from the beginning, most domestic violence is consensual. Both are involved. Sometimes one is the perpetrator, the other plays the victim, then it crosses over. It's not, it's not as though it's just all men or all women. It's both. And occasionally, the innocent victims, very innocent children, grow up to batter. And 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. I haven't been allowed to speak. That's the difficulty. Why is that? Because I'm completely barred from all conferences. Like, I'm not allowed to walk up the step of my own refuge. I bought the bloody building. But no. Does this feminist, the woman who runs it, is a very heavy firm, and she won't happen to do with me. What did you say that made them hate you? That women could be equally advanced as men. That was from the beginning. Erin Pizzey says that 62% of the first 100 women to enter her refuge were just as violent as the men they left, and violent towards their children.

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Isn't it? I'm violent. Um, and, you know, I could quite easily hit somebody. You know, very, very easily. And I've had an argument. But the feminists I've met have an entirely different take on domestic violence. On the whole issue of domestic violence, that's just another word, really. It's a cleanup 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. And we have very few, what's called domestic violence shelters, which are places that women can leave their home with their children and get a new start, get out of the violence. But they're not nearly enough of them. We need more funding and more resources because it, it is a tremendous disadvantage for women and girls.

The CDC released a report revealing that over 5.4 million men and 4.7 million women had been victims of intimate partner physical violence within the previous 12 months. But then why does the media paint domestic violence as a women's issue? The World Health Organization says one in three women are abused by their partner. One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life. And when it was addressed as a men's issue, the speaker's point was that it's a men's issue because men are the problem. I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence. I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues. Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the United States and all over the world? What's going on? Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, and other verbally, in other ways, the women and girls and the men and boys that they claim to love? What's going on with men? Let's grant every single empirical case as being true. Yes, it is true. Let's just say, I mean, it is not true, but let's just assume that there is gender symmetry in domestic violence, that women hit men as men hit women. If, if I were to say that, I would say, "And therefore, we need boatloads more funding for domestic violence to develop shelters and adequate interventions because there's this hidden epidemic of men who are being beaten up by women." Or I could say, as the Men's Rights Movement, "Therefore, we shouldn't have these shelters and we shouldn't fund them because the women are all lying." Well, it seems to me that if you really believe in gender symmetry, it's not that you want to support, you're not questioning the number of women, you're just saying the number of men in stock. You would want to join with women who are anti-violence to say, "We have a real problem here. You know, it's not even a gender problem. It's a problem of women hitting men, and many women. We've got to get boatloads more funding. Let's work together." That seems the logical response to this. But instead, they're saying it's like a zero-sum game. If, if we fund the women, then we're going to ignore the matter. Well, we're not going to ignore the women because we all agree that the levels are as high as we say. But it does sound like a zero-sum game when only women are receiving services in domestic violence situations. And of all the men's rights activists I've met, none of them question the number of female victims, but they are calling attention to the high number of male victims that are being dismissed. So why aren't men's rights activists and feminists working together? Michael Kimmel briefly said something that made me wonder. He said, "It would no longer be a gender problem if both men and women were equally victims of domestic violence." Is that why the number of male victims are never addressed? To me, it's been fraud for all these years. Why is it we have this enormously colorful feminist movement and virtually nothing for men? Originally, it was capitalism was the big enemy in the '60s and '70s, and it was the radical feminists in America. They moved the goalposts. They said, "No, it's no longer capitalism to the enemy. The enemy is patriarchy." Oh, man.

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And that's how the women's movement began, and it was enormously successful. The new mood in, in the refuges was going to be that no men could work in refuges. And, God, today they can't sit on the boards. And boys over nine or possibly 12 can't go into refuges, or you call them shelters. Their mothers have to make other arrangements for them, which I find shocking. And it ring-fenced money. I think that that particular time when the feminist movement were desperate for funding because they'd run out of, of publicity and they were desperate for funding and they needed a just cause. And unfortunately, it fell into their laps. It's an enormous industry. I mean, violence against women, they get something like was a billion and over a year, and an awful lot of that goes on really supposedly rehabilitating men, but essentially punishing them with something that's called the Duluth Model. Duluth Power and Control Wheel. You guys know about that? No. I'll give you a copy. You know, in 1977, I think, a bunch of crazy women up in Duluth, Minnesota, figured out they had the solution to domestic violence, and it was all about patriarchy and all about men. And it's a little power and control wheel because men are all about power and control. Of course, not you ladies. You guys, you don't control anything. You have no power. You're just sweet, innocent little things, okay? So in this parallel control wheel is divided up in all these things, you know, about who does this and who does that, blah, blah, blah. Of course, it's all men.

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The entire domestic violence industry was founded on that. I think it's still 37 or 32 states in the United States that by law they have to use the Duluth Model for batterer intervention programs, and it's all shame, blame, guilt-driven. If you're a man and you walk in, you must admit you did it upfront, or you're in denial. There's no debate. There's no discussion. There's no possibility that you could be falsely accused. The criminal justice system could have made a mistake. None whatsoever. You are in a state of denial, and you will complete that course, so you're going to go to jail. You will be re-engineered.

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Frightening? Yes, that's right. I think it's terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. All I had to die. A simple choice. I could just say, "Yes, you're right. Men are the enemy." No problem. But I couldn't. I absolutely couldn't. Just getting overwhelmed because I don't know where I'm headed, um, with what I believe and what is right and what is wrong, and who is wrong and who is right. And the truth is somewhere in the middle. And that's why I'm feeling frustrated because I don't know where the truth is. And I don't know when I decided to make a film on the Men's Rights Movement, I never anticipated questioning my feminist views, but the more MREs I met, the more I felt compelled to remind myself why I was a feminist. I signed up for a women's group hair workshop. Only 400 companies are led by women. Women only hold about 14% of corporate executive positions and less than 20% of our governmental positions. I made video diaries complaining about how I had to change what I wore to walk alone at night, how much time it took me to get ready for work, all the housekeeping that was on my shoulders. In comparison to other gender issues, these videos seem trivial, but I made them nonetheless. I attended women's rights rallies. No to violence. That's what we are here for. To say no more to violence in any forms, especially against women and girls.

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A repeated women's issues in my head like a broken record: female genital mutilation, sex trafficking, reproductive rights, maternity leave. And social media helped remind me of women's issues. We have fought for everybody else's equal rights. It's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America. We are struggling for a uniting word, but the good news is that we have a uniting movement. It is called He For She.

[Applause]

Whenever I hear the MRA's point of view about how difficult it is for them, I immediately go to, "Well, what about us? What, what is it like for us?" And then I get on the defensive and want to, want to make sure that women's struggles are also heard. And I don't know if that's necessary because the MREs 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 MREs have been dealing with is so, he's hearing about women's issues and feeling like their issues are neglected. But whenever I hear them talk about men's issues, I feel like I need to stand up for women and say, "This is what we're dealing with." An equal opposite.

I met with men's rights activist Karen Strawn late one night in a noisy bar. She became well-known for her YouTube videos talking about male disposability and other men's rights issues, and she's a Honey Badger. Part of what I do and what I research and what I think about is the, the reasons psychologically why feminism seems to be such a comfortable, warm blanket emotionally for so many people, men and women alike. And it, it is so comfortable that it will make them not see things that are right in front of their face. Look at Boko Haram. Hundreds of young girls, fast asleep in their beds, are awakened by the sound of gunfire. Armed attackers have stormed their boarding school and set fire to dozens of buildings. Nearly 300 of them are dragged from their dorm, loaded onto trucks, and carried away deep into the forest. From New York to London, rallied yesterday demanding that the terrorist group Boko Haram Bring Back Our Girls. It just gets to the core. You, this, this unconscionable act was committed by a terrorist group determined to keep these girls from getting an education. And what happened in Nigeria was not an isolated incident. It is a story we see every day as girls around the world risk their lives to pursue their ambitions. Right? That's being spawned as a fundamentalist Islamic group that is so determined to be misogynistic and oppress girls that they want to deny girls an education. But they are not against girls being educated. They're against anybody getting a Western, secular, or Christian education. The initial attacks, and there were several of them, there was one, there were over a hundred men killed and one woman killed. And the victims were described as people, right, or villagers. And in the previous attacks on the schools, they actually let the girls go. They separated out the boys and girls, and they let the girls go. And they told them, "Go home, get married, renounce your sins, and live a righteous life under Allah." Right? And then they burn the boys alive. There was literally no outrage. Right? It was barely reported on. Me, it was one of those things. There was no opinion pieces on it, no nothing. Right? Until the girls were kidnapped. And look at this way, because we played right into their hands because they want attention, right? And they weren't getting any attention from the Western media when they were just slaughtering the boys, right? They want attention. And what do they do? They kidnap girls and sell them into marriage or slavery, right? And everybody, the UN, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, the UK government, the Canadian Federal Minister of Defense, right? They're all promising aid and help and equipment and personnel to help find these girls and bring them back because this is such an outrage. And oh my goodness, something needs to be done. Well, maybe if, like last year, maybe if we did something, then all of these girls will be safe in their dorms right now. But we didn't. And the reason why they kidnapped those girls is because we didn't do anything. We didn't pay attention. And they want attention, right? And we know that attacking girls or women is going to get the potential. What are we gonna do? Start a campaign, "Bring Back Our Boys"? Oh, wait, they're dead. Never mind. Right? The men, the, the people in Boko Haram, they're chivalrous. If those girls were boys, they wouldn't be getting education. They'd be dead. They wouldn't be sold into slavery. They'd be dead. Boko Haram has been fighting for Islamic rule in Nigeria since 2002. Its members have killed hundreds of people.

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At least 69 dead, although some reports put the number at about 150, and scores more injured for that day. When we should lay down, lay down, finally brother, after a while, the battle will be over. For that day when we shall lay down.

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And start it wrong. No more. Finally, brother, after a while, the battle will be over. For that day when we should lay down our bird and study well. No more. Finally, brother, after a while, the battle will be over. For that day when we should lay down and start it while you'll move. Finally, driving after a while. Thank you. The battle will be over.

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Study well. One of the most important things the men's movement is doing is being able to say men need compassion and men deserve compassion. And to have that happen, I'm not expecting it in my lifetime. It's an ocean of pain out there. This stuff we're talking about has been going on for so long, and nobody listens, nobody cares. It's one thing when you looked 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, 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. And the fact is that it is happening to men every day, right in front of our eyes. And people will get angry at you if you try to talk about it. That's how deep the practice response. But there have been protests, not with the intention of shining light on men's issues, but rather with the goal of silencing any discussion of men's issues. Like at Ottawa University, when Professor Janice Fiamango attempted to give a lecture that questioned the feminist narrative. So you think this is a victory? Yeah. Why are you so frightened of hearing an opinion different from your own? Then there was the first International Conference on Men's Issues in Michigan, where even Ms. Magazine urged its readers to protest the conference in hopes of shutting it down.

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But perhaps the most well-known protest of a pro-men's rights event happened in April 2013 at the University of Toronto, when the Canadian Association for Equality hosted a discussion titled "From Misogyny and Misandry to Intersexual Dialogue."

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Everybody.

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A feminist group protesting the event illegally pulled the fire alarm and successfully shut down the event.

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Once outside the lecture hall, feminist protesters and men's rights activists got to speak face to face. Do not want you to lose custody of your children. The assumption that women are naturally better caregivers is part of patriarchy. Feminists do not like commercials in which bumbling dads mess up the laundry and confident wives have to bustle in and fix it. The assumption that women is a list of the things that we're working towards now. If you would shut the [ __ ] up for the 50th billion times, these are things that we're extremely wrong and these are things that you've actually all got skewed [ __ ] views on. You think that feminists are trying to take away your [ __ ] rights, but it, as a matter of fact, what we're trying to do is we're actually trying to work on the same things that you're working on, but accept the fact that you're so too big, you're just too busy hating women now. We're trying to work on those same situations. Are you conflating feminism, which is an ideology, with women, which is a demographic of societies? Okay, Mr. Really, for example, okay, you're still a hate an ideology. Yes. Okay. I hate a lot of other. Israel. So you admit though, racism, [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ]. You hate sexism, but you're an MRA? Okay. No point. Take. Do not want you to have to make alimony payments. Alimony is set up to combat the fact that women have been historically expected to prioritize domestic duties over professional goals, thus minimizing their earning potential if their traditional marriages end. The assumption I'm reading [ __ ] face for some of the hunting cameras. I'm trying to [ __ ]. I'm letting everybody else hear it, okay? It's not just for you, Mr. Entitled. The assumption that wives should. Why do you think the Men's Rights Movement is at odds with feminism? What has created that clash and that war between each other? Well, one, feminism has spent the last 50 years demonizing men, which is sort of one of the problems. Feminist scholars have characterized men as inherently violent, inherently bad, inherently predatory, inherently oppressive. They have postulated that masculinity is a disease. Feminists aren't the only problem. They didn't, 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 he's privileged, therefore anything he's gone through or anything he has to say doesn't matter. His lived experiences don't matter because he's privileged. So how old were you when you started calling yourself a feminist? Or how many years ago? Oh, it's probably about three years ago, I guess. You can say I'm relatively new. Yeah, but I'm pretty loud. So silence only helps the oppressor, not be oppressed. A lot of MREs say that feminism doesn't fight for the rights of men. What would you say to that? Crimea River, really, because feminism is a movement about the discrepancies when it comes to women's equality because we're not up, we're still not there yet, you know? So don't start with that whole, "Oh, but you don't think about the men's issue." Well, then, you know what? 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, [ __ ] 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, you know, women get custody more often than men do. Women are supposed to be the mothers. They're supposed to be the natural-born caregivers. So obviously, duh, you have a vagina, so obviously you're going to be able to take care of the kitties. That's, that's really what it is. It all stems from sexism against women. It's just the oppression dialectic needs to go. 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 feminism has on their minds. I do believe it is dogma. It's zealotry. There are good people in the feminist movement. Um, there are not good people. And the radical feminist movement, that system is based on hate and hand. In my opinion, hate is the most destructive force in the world. Call us man-haters.

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Like they're so quick to say that when all we're doing is talking about like patriarchal societies and structures that we want to dismantle. Um, nothing against men in particular, but just saying, "Hey, this is a system that we live in, and this puts men above women, and it's not necessarily their fault, but hey, recognize what's happening here and let's work together to dismantle it." The omnipotent, ever-present patriarchy, the invisible force that directs all of our lives, right? And causes all oppression and all suffering. Okay, our devil, and the beautiful, wonderful force for justice, feminism. The way it's, the way it sounds like religion. It sounds like religion. A movement that's that's, and isn't blaming of men. They name the force for evil after men, and the force for justice after women. And this being a movement, very, very, very concerned about the implications of language. So concerned that if you call a firefighter a fire-pen, it will discourage little girls from aspiring to firefighters, and sometimes discourage grown women from aspiring to firefighters, right? By calling the environment. But we can call the force for all oppression, we call that essentially men, right? And we can call the force for good and injustice, women. And that kind of language that has no implications. We're not blaming men. We just named everything bad after them. They're really angry, and they're angry at women. They're angry at feminist women. They're, um, but yes, men have gotten a crappy deal. But it's not the fault of women or gay people. When feminism says that they have no part in any of this, I think they're not being honest about it. I don't blame feminism for all of it, but I think they've had a role in it. They've written laws that discriminated against men. They fought to protect those laws, particularly in domestic violence areas. And for many, many years, second-wave feminism would go through the statutes and change everything that was gender-specific to something gender-neutral, unless it was something that benefited women, like the domestic violence laws. They didn't change those. Other types of areas, like fathers in prison, their statutes that specifically give mothers certain benefits that fathers in prison don't have. And I challenge that as well, legally. But we didn't win on that one. When I wanted to get a commission on men, like the county answer commission on women, the feminists fought that tooth and nail. When Prop 209 was before the California voters, which was to end affirmative action, every feminist organization opposed it. Every time men's rights groups try to pass joint custody legislation, feminist groups fight them. They fought us on fraternity fraud. The biggest opposition that I have faced has been from the radical feminists that said, "We don't want truth to be the standard." Because if we did, they wouldn't oppose automatic DNA testing at birth. And in countries like France, they're saying, "Well, DNA should mean do not ask," because it's now illegal to even get a test, and if you get a test without the mother's permission, you will be criminally prosecuted. In Sweden, they tried to create a man tax. In India, the Men's Rights Movement is trying to get the rape laws to include male victims, and the feminist groups apparently are fighting that. I'm not saying all feminists are this way, but I think the ones who are affecting public policy, who have the lobbying power, I think they are. If you just look at their actions, they don't want equality for women. They want special privileges for women and girls. And even though they know in a lot of areas men do not have equality, they are silent. The commander of the Marine Corps said that he thinks, and I quote, "All eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft," talking about Selective Service. Do you think women should also have to register for Selective Service like men? I have to think about whether I think it's necessary to go as far as our military officers are recommending the idea of having everybody register. Uh, concerns me a little bit, unless we have a better idea of where that's going to come out. Where I want people to register, I want every young person to register at the age of 18 to be able to vote automatically. And I think if Thank you. What's the motivation? People don't ask, what's the motivation? Do we need a men's rights movement? No, we need common sense. No, but if there's, there's going to be this women's movement, and this is the movement that's going to do all these things, then maybe we need a counterbalance. They call the men's, men's rights movement or men's movement. And I hate to see there went off like it's a shame. I think it's destructive.

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I'm hearing what the men's rights activists are saying, and I'm finding the sources to support what they're saying. Men are just as likely to be victims of intimate partner physical violence. Men have little to no control over their parental destiny, especially when he's tricked into fatherhood or he's raising a child that he later finds out isn't his. The sentencing disparity between men and women is six times larger than the sentencing disparity between blacks and whites. So while a black man may be sentenced to 10% more prison time for the same crime as a white man, a man is sentenced to over 60% more prison time than a woman arrested for the same crime. Boys are falling behind in education. They are enrolling at lower rates and earning less college degrees. And while not all MREs agree on the issue of infant male circumcision, most MREs do believe it is a human rights violation. I spent months learning about infant male circumcision, but it only took me watching a five-minute medical training video to convince me this is a barbaric practice that needs to stop. Okay, so first thing, make sure he's well restrained. All that was left a partial penis and his tiny testicles. Rhodes says Ashton urinates through a hole in his penis. She says she can't imagine now what she'll say to her son when he's old enough to understand what's happened to him. How could you explain it to your child that you don't have a penis or you might never be able to have kids?

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Yes, men are the majority of workplace deaths and injuries, war deaths, suicides.

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They have a shorter life expectancy. Warren Farrell makes the argument that prostate cancer and breast cancer mortality rates are similar, but funding disproportionately supports breast cancer research and awareness over prostate cancer. 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, like everything else in life, it's a mixed bag. You've got victims and perpetrators on both sides of the fence. And that's all it is. It's real simple. It's just not easy. And I think I agree with everything you said, but there's still some kind of unsettling doubt. And I don't know where that's coming from. I'm recognizing all of these very serious men's rights issues, but what I don't understand is how I could be agreeing with men's rights activists. Is this the same misogynist hate group I originally discovered online? The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified that group and men's rights groups as hate groups. I looked into what I was hearing from feminists and the mass media about the Men's Rights Movement. I've read a lot and I've heard a lot that the, the men's rights movement has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Is that correct? That's not quite true. Somehow written up on some kind of antennas rights websites as we, us, haven't listed them as as hate groups and so on, and we didn't do.

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He brought a piece declaring the month of October to be "Bash a Violent [ __ ] Month." Jesus. I mean, literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall. He wrote, "I then discovered that Paul Elam's famous 'Bash a Violent [ __ ]' article was written in response to this article by Jezebel called 'Have You Ever Beat Up a Boyfriend?' because, 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. Something else to think about. Arriving on campus, boys will also see the effects of women's studies programs, not usually termed gender studies programs. Make no mistake about it, however, they, they are still women's studies programs. I teach in the gender studies program at Wagner. There are about 900 such programs worldwide, and about 400 of them are in the states. By comparison to those 900 programs worldwide, there is one men's studies program. In four years, a Center for Men and Masculinities is to be established at a state of New York University, the one in Stony Brook. It will be headed by Professor Michael Kimmel, a sociologist. Its advisors will include, probably among the advisors are our funders as well, the actress and fitness expert Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Eve Ensler, the author of China. After my year of filming men's rights activists and feminists, my descent into the rabbit hole was not slowing down. My education on gender politics was really just beginning. 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. There are so many perspectives on gender, and I believe they are all worthy of listening to. However, the conversation is being silenced. For a society to accept anything said on behalf of women's rights and then to shame any dialogue about men's rights and call it hate speech is precisely the problem. I don't know where I'm headed, but I know what I left behind. I no longer call myself a feminist.

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How about [Music] kicks? Hang all your notions up. It's never what it is. Wisdom is asking why. There is another side down where the rabbit lives. My world will blow your mind. Just have a look at it.

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They think about it.

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Don't gotta change it. I'll let you use my eyes. See what I'm dealing with. People with different stories, different categories, and reasons why. The smartest thing, the wise, they listen. Anything.

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Anything. All right.

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Goodbye, baby. Baby.

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I like to use.

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Foreign.

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