Revisiting The Red Pill (2016) Seven Years Later

Remember when we reviewed The Red Pill (2016) for the podcast? No? Good, because we didn’t!

As a matter of fact, Olivia and I watched this seven full years ago—multiple years before we started the podcast—and had a heated debate about its findings. Then, a week ago, we both transformed the memory of having that argument into one where we had argued on the show. We made a plan to watch the movie again, relisten to the old episode, and compare our opinions then to now. Except bad news! The episode doesn’t exist! So instead of a cool throwback, we just reviewed the documentary lol.

But we remembered enough about our old analysis (if you could call it that) to know that we’re, uh, very different people than we were seven years ago. See, that first argument was basically two liberal-at-best-libertarian-at-worst ideological black holes fully buying into the propaganda this film tries to hawk as legitimate. We disagreed about the findings and whether they were compelling, but our understanding of intersectional feminism and the way Capitalism traumatizes us was so thin that we had nothing insightful to say about it.

Oh, how things change.

Upon a second viewing with seven years of growth under our belts, this “documentary” is a technically mediocre attempt at a propaganda piece. It’s dishonestly framed (there’s no way the documentarian, Cassie Jaye, stumbled on Paul Elam’s anti-feminism site by searching “rape culture” in Google, folks), staged to the point of being comical, and manipulatively edited and arranged to coerce the viewer into drawing a very specific conclusion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In a nutshell, The Red Pill is allegedly the very-real-not-staged process of Cassie Jaye (a self-identified feminist) filming a documentary about MRAs and suddenly realizing that feminism is a crock because their arguments are so compelling. At the end of the film (spoilers, I guess?), Jaye dramatically announces to the audience that, though she doesn’t know where she’s headed, she knows she no longer identifies as a feminist.

From the perspective of having many years of immersion in activist spaces, involvement in mutual aid, and a passable knowledge of anti-Capitalist/anti-fascist theory, it was immediately obvious that Cassie never had a foundation in actual feminism. Her idea of feminism includes 1.) not liking when men are mean to her, 2.) resenting being typecast during her short acting career, and 3.) noticing that it takes her longer to get ready in the morning than men. Never once does she mention involvement in feminist organizing, study, or collaborative learning. She never claims to be familiar with feminist activists. In fact, for the entire unbelievable two-hour runtime of the movie, she never once brings up the intersection between feminism and race, gender expression, social class, or really anything. “Feminism” is a word she knows means “equal rights for women and men,” and that’s as far as her initial analysis takes her.

Without a solid foundation, Cassie is doomed from the start. In fact, we would argue that Cassie was doomed before she ever picked up her camera. As I mentioned before, the alleged process of making this documentary started as a profile on men’s rights activists from a feminist’s perspective. She claims that she was searching for information on rape culture when she stumbled across Paul Elam’s site, which is so full of vitriolic absurdity that I won’t bother to link it here. Instead of being immediately turned off to what she read, she says she “kept reading,” interested in why these poor men felt so uncared for. She then presents interviews with several MRAs who basically spit statistics off the tops of their heads as facts—which Cassie never bothers to press them on (or independently confirm or refute).

Some of the stats are basically true but misleadingly presented, like, for instance, the chart of military deaths by sex. Over dark, moody music, we see a comparison of female and male deaths in military combat in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and a couple specific battles from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Across the board, men account for at least 95% of deaths. BUT WHY, CASSIE? Could it be that women weren’t allowed to see combat until the late 90s/early 2000s? Could that be it? Could it be that the military protocol ban on women in combat wasn’t fully lifted until 2015? Could that have been part of the problem, Cassie?

Other factoids are just completely false. One interviewee, for example, claims that it’s illegal to get a paternity test in France. Sorry folks, that one’s a big ole lie. It’s true that paternity tests are more regulated in France than they are in the U.S. for the safety of both parties (and paternity tests are outlawed for unborn fetuses), you absolutely can get a paternity test through the court system.

This illustrates one of the film’s biggest shortcomings: context. Or, rather, the complete omission of context. Over and over again, we’re shown anecdotal evidence of men whose lives have been ruined by women and then the bold claim that these examples prove that women are systemically the more powerful demographic. And when MRAs raise issues that actually warrant criticism (like the bias toward women in the justice system, police dismissing violence against men, and men representing the massive majority of workplace deaths), they assign blame to the nameless, faceless women they believe keep them systemically oppressed. In reality, all these are indictments against Capitalism, poor workplace safety, the historical assumption that women are nature’s caregivers, etc.

On one hand, I get why these men are so angry. They’ve been conditioned into a right-wing worldview that inherently paints them as both victim and hero. Then, as a result, they’re spoon-fed examples of why those darn liberal feminists are trying to destroy men by saying it’s their fault the world is bad. And since they don’t feel like they benefit from privilege because they still have bad experiences, they jump to the conclusion that feminist theory must be a conspiracy to make men subservient to women.

But it’s a mindset that eats its own tail. They claim women only keep men around as breadwinners to fund their lifestyles, but they also say that women think men are disposable and don’t care if they die in blue collar jobs. They claim the patriarchy doesn’t exist, but the entire basis of their fear of women stems from the idea that women won’t be seen as below men. Instead of analyzing where their own beliefs come from, they build an ideology around their impulses—and their impulses say women are inferior, that equality can only be achieved by everyone suffering the same amount, and women “winning” anything means men inherently lose.

And because their worldview is so tied to right-wing conservatism, they can’t allow themselves to consider the idea that they feel oppressed because they are being oppressed by the ruling class. The are considered expendable by rich white men who would rather make $5 more profit than improve working conditions. They are missing out on being considered equal parents because of the rich white men who demanded that women stay home and take care of the kids so they could make money. They do struggle—not because of women holding them down, but because of other men using them as a step-ladder toward more power.

But these men aren’t angry at the men in power holding them underwater because they want to be them. Their fantasize about having the kind of power they perceive Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos having, and their ideology prevents them from considering that mindset to be a problem. So, instead, they cherry-pick factoids, use their own life stories as ammunition, and target people who are lonely, hurting, and angry to groom into their echo chamber.

I would feel sorry for them if, you know, they weren’t busy claiming that women secretly all have rape fantasies.

Anyway, Cassie Jaye doesn’t cover any of this. Instead, she gives wide-eyed nods to the MRAs and bored (or outright disgusted) grimaces to the academics and one (1) activist she interviews. She signals her alignment from the very beginning by labelling MRAs with red name cards and everyone else with blue ones, using MRA symbology and the context of The Matrix franchise to implicitly communicate that she thinks feminists are ignorant. She films painfully staged video diaries to chronicle her crisis of “faith” to the feminist lifestyle. She goes out of her way to choose feminist interviewees who are either painfully academic and inaccessible or (in the case of her single feminist activist interviewee, Big Red) obnoxious, reactive, and insufferable. She edits the MRAs to be as sympathetic as possible while taking seconds-long clips of feminists to manipulate her audience into agreeing with her point.

And most egregiously, she does exactly what the MRAs do—she assumes that her understanding of feminism is all there is. Her privileged, circumstantial, fashionable relationship to feminism is the only window through which she analyzes an entire movement that has existed in some form since the development of civilization. Of course she’d be attracted to these MRAs and their opinions! Her only understanding of feminism is a self-serving one without any real conviction. She saw herself in the MRAs’ descriptions of feminists, so it was easy to let her “beliefs” be swallowed by theirs.

Life isn’t simple. It will never be simple. People are, by and large, doing their best with the information they have, but their best is often plagued by conditioning and impulses that hurt other people. The most dangerous of these types are the ones who will try to convince you that there’s an easy solution to your problems, that the blame lies with a single person or type of people. Folks, our problems are systemic. Beware of people who sell you false promises of liberation—true liberation only comes from committing to a life of continuous learning (and even then, it isn’t guaranteed). The world needs more insightful, careful gentleness, and it’s our passionate recommendation that you leave unbalanced, actively harmful pieces of propaganda like this behind on your journey toward finding it.