On Wednesday night, I put the kids to bed, poured myself a glass of wine and took The Red Pill.
That is to say, I watched the men's rights movie that has been chased out of cinemas in Australia. The title of the film – taken from The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves is offered the choice of a red pill (which delivers lacerating truth and self knowledge) or a blue pill (blissful ignorance) – is portentous. Viewers are invited to infer that revelations – perhaps shocking ones – will almost certainly be forthcoming. Protests! Cancellation of screenings! This must be some heavy stuff. I paid my $6.95 to rent the title, and sat back, prepared for outrage.
Now I'm a feminist. A feature shared – I discover, as the film opens – with director and narrator Cassie Jaye, a friendly Oklahoman who seems always to be having a good hair day. She explains that her feminism derives from having moved to Hollywood when she was 18 to pursue an acting career, and finding herself only ever cast as one of the scantily-clad teen cuties butchered in the early scenes of budget horror flicks. (This being a dot-the-Is, cross-the-Ts type documentary, we are shown some brief sequences of a younger Cassie being murdered by a giant lizard. Her story checks out.)
Cassie explains she soon opted out of acting, in favour of directing, and went on to be a documentary film-maker, on a range of irreproachable subjects including women's health (cue images of sad-looking women), teen celibacy (girls in confirmation dresses) and gay marriage (two neat T-shirted men holding hands in a field).
But now, she explains, she's become interested in rape culture. After Googling the term (a process dutifully captured on camera) she sets out to meet some Men's Rights Activists (MRAs).
It's a bumpy transition. This is pretty much, for instance, the last you hear about rape for the whole movie. No one Cassie interviews is asked by her about rape. Even Paul Elam, the founder of A Voice For Men (and former writer of a blog called "The Happy Misogynist"), who has written at length about how women make up rape charges, is never asked about this stuff by Cassie.
Which creates an ironic standoff. The film-maker has entirely failed to address the main phenomenon she set out to investigate, and the protesters have shut down (and, in so doing, wildly over-promoted) a film because of something that's not actually in it.
It's an absurdity that only modern PR and online activism could create.
On her journey, the film-maker professes herself surprised to learn men are more likely to be killed in a workplace accident or at war, less likely to graduate from college or get custody of their children and more likely to be prescribed Ritalin or diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.
But she also "learns" that MRA Fred Hayward was tricked into fathering a son by his ex-wife who then maliciously over-fed the child mainly to annoy Hayward. This sequence is overlaid with home videos of Hayward trying to coax a chubby boy into physical activity. And yes – it's as awful as it sounds.
One guy's heard a story about a guy who gave blood for his son's transfusion only to discover he wasn't the real dad. One of the Honey Badgers (an inexplicably-named troupe of women who define themselves as MRA supporters) tells a story about a female teacher who had sex with her 15-year-old student and then pursued him for child support.
The good bits of the film are about expectations of men, and how they haven't changed all that much and are unfair; the expectation that they will be silent earners and absent parents, for instance.
But there's also a lot of aggressive non-sequitur (one MRA offers to swap the higher pay he gets as a man for the five years of life expectancy women enjoy over men), and all too often the stories told have the bitter patina of having been passed hand to hand, or polished in private over decades of personal dispute.
The movie is journalistically weak; it veers between obviousness and querulousness and I learned nothing that surprised me apart from the fact that a group of grown women would call themselves the "Honey Badgers", which surprised me quite a lot.
But the sexual violence apologia that spawned all the protests? It was as non-appearing as the epiphanic body blow to my feminist principles that was also promised.
Banning or silencing this movie is not only daft; it also generates pretty much the only effective PR the thing could hope for. Left alone, one suspects it would quietly be interred in an unmarked grave.
Red pill? Blue pill? I'd suggest a chill pill.
Twitter: annabelcrabb
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