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.
Misogynist ranting 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, 1 thought men had all of the adv ant ages
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 majority of the drug addicted.
They are the majority of the unemployed.
They are majority of the school drop outs.
They are the majority of those in prison...
How do we know that they're not the cause of these problems?
There's a reason that 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.
And when men are married to women who scream like you
they just want to die sooner.
- I'm not screaming. - When you have...
A voice for men...
An online hub for men's rights actmsts.
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.
This 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 bitch" month.
"I mean, literally to grab them by the hair,
and smack their face against the wall," he wrote.
Here he is.
You may be wondering why I'm sitting in a car
with notorious men's rights actmst 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.
1 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.
Billy?
Granted, i had a good scream.
But the characters I played
weren't alone in feeling objectified.
I was commonly harassed on the streets,
hit on by married producers,
told by photographers to come back
when I lost 15 pounds and got a boob job,
and a plethora of other uncomfortable experiences,
all while still being a teenager.
I started to realize my role in the world
seemed a little too similar to the unfortunate roles 1 was audittoning 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.
That's like rape. It is rape.
- Bro. - They raped her.
- This is the funniest... - They raped her.
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 of the bus...
Every day, every woman is facing violence on the streets.
People are scared...
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 1 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 half-way mark
in every article, because I could only read
so many "bitch," "fuck," "feminazi,"
and "rapetard" 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,
and 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's and boy's issues.
We have got serious problems.
I have been working in this area,
advocating for the rights of...
Mra! Go away!
And here we go.
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 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 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, we all know that you guys
are a fascist Nazi front group of white supremacists,
no other way to openly organize
other than calling yourselves a men's rights group.
Yeah!
"We're somehow disempowered because we're white men."
Maybe it's just because you're pathetic.
We're here to fight how misogynistic assholes
think they have the right to oppress women.
White men are starting to feel misplaced
because women are sharing space.
It's disgusting, and just grow the fuck up
and don't confuse suffrage with oppression.
Everyone suffers. It's universal.
I am a man and I need feminism.
We're feminists'. We're fabulous'.!
We're here! We're queer!
And it is crystal clear
that the problems for men and boys are real.
I would like to turn the microphone
over to Paul elam of a voice for men
for some words.
Whoo!
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.
Trying to articulate the entire platform
of the men's rights movement
is kinda like trying to understand a snow drift
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
at very alarming rates.
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.
You got the paternity front issue,
and the wrongful paternity issue,
the 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.
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 U.S. government
does not want to send you to die.
It would rather send me to die.
Young men that are fatltng to launch.
They're staying in their homes of origin
far past the time that we would normally expect them
to indmduate and move out
and go live their lives.
We have video game addiction.
We have pornography addiction.
We have 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 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.
But if you start to talk about those issues
and address them 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.
[3 ayet shortly after 1 began filming men's rights actmsts,
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
in 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.
A cab driver who is drmng 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 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning
in rain and sleet and snow
and get out to do the garbage
so he 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 or 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 questioned our notions of power,
of who had power and where it was,
and it questioned the roles of men,
but not the way feminists
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 life
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.
Even when that plane went down in New York City
a few years ago and, you know,
the pilot was a hero
for the way he landed it and saved everybody...
Word arrived over the city-wide fire frequency
that a commercial jet liner 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,
there's still women into the life boats first.
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 were 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're immune to the pain
of the people who are dying
because you have an investment
in their being willing to die.
You say, "1 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.
Both sexes in the area where they are rejected
tend to turn what rejects them into an object.
So the area where men...
I'm watching this, um, lecture
that Warren Farrell's gmng 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 kinda 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"?
Women hold up half the sky!
Fuck Warren Farrell!
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.
be fucking ashamed of yourself.
You're fucking scum. You are fucking scum.
Fucking rape apologist,
incest-supporting, woman-hating fucking scum.
You're fucking scum. Yeah, just another...
You know what, though? Why would you pay money
to fucking support a fucking rape apologist
if you weren't fucking one?
I never heard him saying...
Well, it... Fucking scum!
Who do you serve? Who do you protect?
No! Fuck! They're fucking scum!
Fuck you!
Get a real fucking job.
Get out of here.
This is what men's rights look like'.!
This is what men's rights look like!
- Hi. How are you? - Warren, I'm Cassie.
You' re Cassie? Oh, for some reason 1 thought you were a male.
I'm just delighted that you're a female.
Well, thank you.
Very glad to meet you. Come on in.
- Thank you. - 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."
I 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 men's 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,
'cause I was really totally in the feminist's camp.
And immediately I saw my standing ovations drop.
I started hearing that there was people saying,
"don't invite him there to speak with us."
And pretty soon I had, you know,
very few college and university speaking engagements.
How did you originally get involved with feminism?
Where did that all begin?
I was doing my doctorate
at political science at nyu in the late '60s,
and the women's movement surfaced.
And I started to say,
"this is the most exciting thing I've ever heard."
Because I'd heard of cml rights, gay rights,
but suddenly women were saying,
"i don't wanna be confined to just being
a homemaker, a secretary."
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 marrying men
that they weren't completely in love with,
but the man earned a fair amount.
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 gonna 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
appeared to be women who would free men
from having to be all, you know,
wrapped up in just being the only bread winner,
and supporting one, two, three, four, five people.
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 wanna spend my life raising children."
You know, "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
was 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 drmng 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 is still men carrying the lion's share
for what it takes to operate and maintain this society,
and it is still the expectation
that if somebody's gonna go down with the ship,
it's gonna be men.
Flexibility in roles is where we should be all headed.
Any men's rights actmsts 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... 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°/o 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 the vice versa.
Traditionally, women's power and responsibility
has been in the reproductive sphere,
while men's power and responsibility
was in the productive sphere.
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 diwied up roles
because women were responsible for childbirth
and were more likely to breastfeed.
They're not more likely to...
They did the breastfeeding.
They tended to be involved in the role of raising children.
Men tended to be involved in the role of raising money
or making a killing of the animals
or making a killing in wall street.
But those were our obligations.
So that's why industry was male dominated
and government was male dominated,
'cause that was our job.
So what we call patriarchy
is men gmng in to the expected roles
that they're supposed to give in to,
and many of those roles are very harmful...
Working exceptionally long hours, difficult hours,
dangerous jobs, getting killed on a 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.
Oh, I think we got a pen for everybody.
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?
All the evils of the world is from patriarchy.
But we're the ones dying, you know?
And we die for you guys, you know?
To protect our families, our friends.
In every society that's ever existed,
women have had prmlege and protection that men did not.
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,
enforced 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°/o 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.
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 he 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,
semi-comatose state forever,
and probably be a lot happier.
It's a pretty apt analogy.
So what is the blue pill in this world?
Well, the blue 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 rape. Only men can stop rape.
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 that we're brainwashed to believe this,
and that it's not true,
and that men are slaves in this world
and women are...
1 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...
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 are saying that this is all a lie
and that guys are actually the ones
that are disadvantaged and discriminated against.
And, actually, the more 1 learn from them,
the more I think, "thank god i wasn't born a guy."
Because I don't think
that 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, 5o years ago,
no, I wouldn't have wanted to be a woman.
But now, I mean, maybe just 11"s right now
that the tides are changing
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 gmng 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.
Yes, this is Cassie jaye.
It's regarding a documentary about the men's rights movement,
and we're looking for feminist voices now
to speak in the documentary.
Feminist majority.
Yeah, hold on just one second.
So I realized, "okay,
I need to bring some feminists into the mix...
- Good. - ...To make sure that we have that side.“
good.
I was researching rape culture,
and so that's how i stumbled across a website
called avoiceformen.Com.
So some of the people that we've already interviewed
on the mra side is Paul elam with a voice for men.
- Yeah. - Are you familiar with him?
Oh, I'm familiar with him. I've never met him.
- Yeah. - Obviously, 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.
- The backlash? - To feminism.
The men's rights movement really got going
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
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,
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 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 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.
Um, it's, uh... It's part of the backlash.
Political organizing comes from a feeling of victimization,
which 1s 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 look around and it's hard to see it.
We don't have movements called, you know, straight liberation.
Is the men's... 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.
Of course, it's not gonna have very much traction.
You can't really organize the people who are super ordinate.
So do you think that men
are being discriminated against in any way?
Not under the law.
Men are not disadvantaged under our laws
or in the business world.
As a class, men are not underrepresented on corporate boards
or the top of the fortune 1,000 companies.
In the corporate world, in the business world,
in a lot of parts of academia,
in the military, in the sports world,
it's still pretty much a male-dominated world,
where a lot of the prmleges
and power and status accrue to men.
Men are advantaged over women, no question.
No one can... No one can debate that.
Not with a serious...
Not in any seriousness.
1 was a math major as an undergraduate,
and one of the fundamental things about geometry
is the distance from point "a" to point "b"
equals the distance from point "b" to point "a,"
and if women are so different from men
that men can't understand the female experience,
we need to listen to women to describe it,
then the male experience is so different
from the female experience that you can't understand it.
You need to listen to us.
You can't really compare
how men and women have suffered from sexism.
There's no way to quantify,
you know, that kind of suffering.
So 1f a woman says, “well, 1 miss 30°10 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, "I've suffered more than you"
because you've lost a kid because you're a man.
You know, we can't... But it is serious.
And at least 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,
you can't say, "okay, I'll get custody of that kid.
I'll try for that one."
It's a terrible thing that happens.
There was a case... The serpico case.
You might be too young to know the movie "serpico"
- with al Pacino. - Yeah, I don't know.
It was about a New York City undercover cop.
He gets 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 friends 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°/o of his police pension.
So everything that he goes through in this movie,
including getting shot, to earn his pension,
she won by sleeping with him one night.
My son's mom wanted to have children with me
and I had always refused,
you know, saying, "you have this anger problem.
You need to get counseling.
I'm not gonna consider having children with you
until that's dealt with,"
'cause 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 gonna trick me into fathering the child.
She doesn't need my permission.
And so that's how my son was conceived.
Then she said, "if you wanna 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 read all my articles. She saw my talk shows.
She said, "1 know all the things a woman can do to a man,
and I'll do 'em to you."
So, um, that's what i had to deal with.
Everything that I had been raising awareness about
for the previous 17 years,
she combined into one thing for me to live through.
It's really ironic.
For the first...
Five to 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...
A scene meaning she would just not show up
or she would hold the 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 kid
and then she'd stand in front of the car
so I couldn't move.
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 I had to go through this long custody battle,
and the decisions that they would make,
you would just go, "how... "
there couldn't be any explanation.
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,
'cause we're all... All thin.
Another was so that he would enjoy being with her more,
'cause when he was at my house, he had to get actmty,
you know, and eat well-balanced meals,
and get his sleep and stuff.
And at her house, they would bake brownies
and stay up late and just watch TV.
So where would you... If you're a little kid,
where would you enjoy being more?
But he self-reported to the mediator
how upset he was about being obese,
that the worst thing in school
was when kids called him fatty and how he cried,
and his physician said that
he's really concerned medically.
And then what 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 my 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 to 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 judges' decision
was, um, 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 gonna do anybody good.
I've gotta give up the fight.
So I gave up custody,
and so I don't see my son anymore.
He hasn't been in my house since.
- Um. - I'm so sorry.
So I did lose him.
♪ Just like a dream
♪ you're like a guiding light shining in the night
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.
♪ You are so beautiful
ito me
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 actmsts
come into being men's rights actmsts
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 1n 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.
Yeah, and 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 gonna get to see his little guy even less.
And of course, he'd be falsely accused
one time after another after another.
It had destroyed his life.
It had bankrupt him, driven him into debt.
It caused him to miss work.
He was about ready to lose his job.
He was at the end of his rope,
so he just decided to end it.
The unfairness 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.
1 started to research some father's 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.
1 can't explain the emotion, the happiness...
This hard fight, and what this means to me...
And then there's this heartbreaking story.
The 2o 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, an affidavit,
and a commencement notice with Utah's vital records
a day before the mother signed
the adoption papers relinquishing her rights.
But 1n Colby's case, the mother only gave him a few hours notice
of what she was going to do.
I would like her back.
Men in the men's movement
are not upset about having to be fathers.
They're upset because they're not allowed to be fathers.
That guy...
Blows his head off, blows his brains out.
Out of family court?
And people don't think there's something wrong with that?
We just open 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 father's 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 don't think 11"s...
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,
it's still the case that
in intact heterosexual families with kids,
women are still doing the vast majority
of the housework and child care,
and there's a lot of sort of father absence,
lack of participation by fathers,
some of whom, I think, after divorce happens,
end up 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.
And if we have that, then we might expect
more symmetry after divorces happen.
The more i researched father's 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 fathers' options might be
following a surprise pregnancy.
I then put a green line for the paths
that I thought would be good turn-outs for the father.
And I put red lines for the paths
that seemed 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.
This is my friend darrah.
She's eight months pregnant with her first child
and she's a lifelong feminist.
It seems from what I've read, that women seem to have
more reproductive rights than men do.
I don't know what to say. We carry children.
They're never gonna carry children.
It's just a different thing.
So, 1 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...
A woman has been...
Women have been blamed for, and still are,
for unwanted pregnancies,
choosing to have an abortion,
not choosing to have an abortion,
choosing to put their child up for adoption.
When the burden lies on a single mother 1f the man leaves,
societally, she's lam basted.
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 gonna change
in the way they want it to, because it's biology.
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. You better have it fast.
That's when the man has the ability to make decisions...
Either not to engage in sex or to use condoms
and to use other forms of contraception.
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.
She ultimately has the responsibility for that child.
So before we were married,
he promised me we would have two kids,
and now he doesn't want anymore.
Aww.
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, everybody...
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. It's extraordinary ugly.
And we have to distinguish it between paternity fraud
- and wrongful paternity. - What's the difference?
Wrongful paternity can be innocent.
"Okay, we 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, and less facetiously,
"okay, I'm married and I had an affair."
Obviously, here there's all sorts of problems,
because there are more victims
than the person who's named as dear old dad
who may be the wrong one.
There's everybody involved in the family,
like the situation in Texas
where the family had five little towhead kids...
All guys, all little blondos.
And all of a sudden,
one day one of the little blondo kids gets in trouble,
has to go to the hospital.
They can't get ahold of mom. They get ahold of dad.
Dad rushes 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 case? - It's a real case.
So what happens to this family?
Can you fathom what happens to this family?
How do think the kids feel when they find out
dear old dad isn't dear old dad
and it's the guy down the street?
How do you 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, 'cause he loves them.
He's devoted himself to these...
How do you think he feels?
I mean, it's horrific.
Horrific.
That's not wrongful. That's deliberate.
- So 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 father's rights issues
that vary between unmarried, married,
and divorced dads.
But there are also men's right's 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 $30,000 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 put him down as the father.
That was the only way i could get assistance.
I'm almost homeless. I'm almost in jail.
I'm out of work
my money is being threatened to be taken.
Reporter} He says the law needs to be changed,
so when this happens, as it often does,
other men don't become dad by default.
A lot of times people wonder about mras,
"why are you guys so angry?"
And my answer to 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.
I continued traveling north America,
meeting mras from all walks of life,
hearing their personal stories,
their red pill moments.
I met a young man who was sexually abused
when he was 16 years old
while lmng at a residential home
for people with developmental disabilities.
She was the only woman I've done anything ever with,
partly because it just messed me up so much.
She continues working there.
She hit me in the face.
She actually hit me throughout the house,
chased me throughout the house.
When I reported my domestic assault to 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 gonna believe
that I was gonna be a victim of sexual assault.
I met the honey badgers,
women who are men's rights advocates.
And then there was a 15-year-old boy,
there 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.
Yeah.
After getting out of jail.
So there's lack of fairness for men
in the court systems.
When police officers show up to a domestic violence case
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, 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
a 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 they they got blamed for.
It's hideous.
This is not flattering to men
to talk about men's vulnerabilities,
to talk about the ways that they are not strong
and that 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.
My best friend
that I grew up with since kindergarten
was being physically abused by his wife
who he'd been married to for 20 years.
She' ll break glass and throw 1t at him, punch him.
I've seen it 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 that the neighbors could see what's happened.
Eventually, I said, "look, you're gonna need...
You need professional help, and so does she.
Maybe the kids do, too."
So I called a bunch of domestic violence shelters.
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,
'cause 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're state funded,
and I just was wondering why.
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 deny men help?
Couldn't this be considered gender discrimination?
Think of it this way.
Roughly 78°/o 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.
How are you involved 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.
'Cause you see, what 1 knew from the beginning,
most domestic violence is consensual.
Both are involved.
Sometimes one's the perpetrator,
the other plays the victim, then it crosses over.
It's not as though it's just all men or all women.
It's both, and occasionally, innocent victims...
Very innocent.
Battered children grow up to batter, that's what t. Learned,
whether it be a man or a woman.
And I now know that if a woman comes in
with a history of violence in her own childhood,
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.
I'm not allowed to walk up the step of my own refuge.
I bought the bloody building.
But, no, because there's feminists...
The woman who runs it is very heavily feminist.
She won't have anything to do with me.
What did you say that made them hate you?
That women could be equally as violent 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.
Verbally, and...
you know, 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 clean-up word about wife beating,
'cause 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 is a tremendous disadvantage
for women and girls.
In 2014, the coc 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?
Reporter} 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, verbally, and 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 much as men hit women.
If I were to say that, i would say,
therefore, we need boatloads more funding
for domestic violence
to develop shelters and adequate interventions,
'cause there's this hidden epidemic
of men who are being beaten up by women.
Or, I could say, as the men's rights movement do,
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,
you're not questioning the number of women.
You're just saying the number of men is...
You would want to join with women
who are antmolence
to say we have a real problem here.
It's not even a gender problem.
It's a problem of women hitting men and men hitting women.
We've gotta 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 we fund the women, then we're gonna ignore the men.
Well, we're not... we're not gonna ignore the women,
'cause we all agree that the levels are as high as we say.
[Lkyel but 1t does sound like a zero sum game
when only women are recemng services
in domestic violence situations.
And of all the men's rights actmsts 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 actmsts
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 powerful feminist movement
and virtually nothing for men?
Originally, it was capitalism
was the big enemy in the '60s and '70s.
And 1t was the radical feminists 1n America that moved the goal post.
They said, no, it's no longer capitalism is the enemy.
The enemy is patriarchy... Or men.
And that's how the women's movement began,
and it was enormously successful.
The new mood in the refuges
was gonna be that no man could work in refuges,
and can't today.
They can't sit on the boards.
And boys over 9,
or possibly 12, can't so into refuges.
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
'cause they'd run out of publicity...
They were desperate for funding
and they needed a just cause.
And, unfortunately, it fell into their laps.
It's an enormous industry.
1 mean, "violence against women,"
they get something like...
Well, it's a billion and over a year.
Hmm.
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. Well, you guys know about that?
- No. - I'll give you a copy.
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.
It's the duluth power and control wheel,
'cause 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 and innocent little things.
Okay, so this power and control wheel
is dmded up in all these things,
you know, about who does this and who does that,
and blah, blah, blah. And of course, it's all men.
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 batter intervention program.
It's all shame, blame, and guilt driven.
If you're a man and you walk in,
you must admit you did it up front
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've made a mistake.
None whatsoever. You are in a state of denial,
and you will complete that course
or you're gonna go to jail.
You will be reengineered.
That's frightening.
- Frightening? - Yes, that's frightening.
I think it's terrifying.
Absolutely terrifying.
All I had to do, i had 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 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 mras I met,
the more I felt compelled
to remind myself why I was a feminist.
I signed up for a women's group.
Welcome to our “women, own your power“ workshop.
Only four percent of the fortune 50d companies are led by women.
Women only hold about 14°/o
of corporate executive positions
and less than 20°/o 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 trmal,
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 form,
especially against women and girls.
I 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's 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."
Whenever I hear the mras' point of view
about how difficult it is for them,
I immediately go to,
well, what about us? What is like for us?
And then I get on the defensive
and want to make sure
that women's struggles are also heard.
And I don't know if that's necessary,
because the mras are saying that
the feminist perspective is the mainstream perspective.
But even when I hear their issues,
I still want to speak up for the women
because I feel like... I don't know.
I feel like talking about one gender's issues
now neglects the other,
and I guess that's what mras have been dealing with
is always hearing about women's issues
and feeling like their issues are neglected.
But whenever 1 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."
1 met with men's rights actmst Karen straughan
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,
what I research, and what I think about
is the reason psychologically
why feminism seems to be
such a comfortable warm blanket emotionally
for so many people, men and women alike.
And it's so comfortable
that it will make them not see things
that are right in front of their face.
Look at boko haram.
Hundreds 0f 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 on to trucks,
and carried away deep into the forest.
Mevoanaa} ...From New York to London rallied yesterday
demanding that the terrorist group boko haram bring back our girls.
It just gets to the core of you.
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.
I mean, you must have heard about all of that, right?
That's being spun 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 the 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 burned the boys alive.
There was literally no outrage.
It was barely reported on.
It was one of those things, there was no opinion pieces on it,
no nothing, right?
Until the girls were kidnapped.
And look at it 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 boys.
- Yeah. - Right?
They want attention.
And what do they do? They kidnap girls
and sell them into marriage or slavery, right?
And everybody... the U.N.,
Michelle Obama, Barack Obama,
the U.K. Government, the Canadian federal minister of defense,
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 would be safe 1n their dorms right now, right?
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.
And they know that attacking girls or women
is gonna get them attention.
What are we gonna do? Start a campaign, “bring back our boys“?
Oh, wait, they're dead. Never mind, right?
The men... 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
with the hope of escape. They'd be dead.
Boko haram has been fighting
for islamic rule in Nigeria since 2002.
Its members have killed hundreds of people.
♪ Finally, brother, after a while...
At least 69 dead,
although some reports put the number at about 150
and scores more injured.
♪ For that day when we shall lay down our burden
♪ and study war no more
♪ finally, brother, after a while
♪ the battle will be over
♪ for that day when we shall lay down our burden
♪ and study war no more
♪ finally, brother, after a while
♪ the battle will be over
♪ for that day when we shall lay down our burden
♪ and study war no more
♪ finally, brother, after a while
♪ the battle will be over
♪ for that day when we shall lay down our burden
♪ and study war no more
♪ finally, brother, after a while
♪ the battle will be over
♪ for that day when we should lay down our burden
♪ and study war no more
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 look at what happens to women
and you feel normal healthy outrage about it,
and that should happen.
But when you can look at what's happening
in our courts to men,
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 prejudice runs.
♪ No more
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 flamengo attempted to give a lecture
that questioned the feminist narrative.
We'll take a moment
until we enforce some decorum in the room.
So you think this is a victory?
What are you so frightened of...
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.
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."
Fuck the patriarchy!
Women hold up half the sky!
A feminist group protesting the event
illegally pulled the fire alarm
and successfully shut down the event.
Okay, let's go. We got a fire alarm!
Once outside the lecture hall,
feminist protesters and men's rights actmsts
got to speak face to face.
So, number one. Number one!
Shut the fuck up for a second.
Feminists 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 competent wives have to bustle in and fix it.
The assumption that women... This is a list
of the things that we're working toward.
Now if you would shut the fuck up
for the 50th billionth time...
These are things we agree on, actually.
These are things that we're agreeing on,
and these are things you've all got skewed fucking views on.
You think that feminists are trying to take away your fucking rights,
but as a matter of fact, what we're trying to do
1s we're actually trying to work on the same things that you're working on,
except the fact that you're so...
You're just too busy hating women...
You're a fucking hate group.
You can't see we're trying to work on those same situations.
Are you conflating feminism, which is an ideology,
with women, which is a demographic of society?
Okay, mister derailing for dummies.
So, really, your hatred is for feminists.
- You're still a hate group. - An ideology, yes.
I hate also hate a lot of other "isms".
- So you admit, though. - Racism, sexism.
Oh, bullshit, bullshit.
Bullshit, you hate sexism, but you're an mra.
Okay, no. Point taken. We... like, we win.
You obviously haven't read our literature.
Sorry. Okay!
You don't actually work on anything.
You're creating any change in the fucking world.
Your website, your fucking website,
the hate website against feminists...
You're not actually creating any change.
Feminists 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.
I'm right here. You don't have to yell.
I'm reading, fuckface.
- It's for the fucking camera. - I'm trying to fucking...
I'm letting everyone else hear it, okay?
It's not just for you, mister 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, that war between each other?
Well, one, feminism has spent the last 5o years
demonizing men, which 1s 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.
The problems didn't start with feminism.
So when I start criticizing feminism,
1 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 prmleged,
therefore, anything he's gone through
or anything he has to say doesn't matter.
His lived experiences don't matter
because he's prmleged.
So how old were you when you started calling yourself a feminist?
Or how many years ago?
It was probably, about three years agc, I guess you can say.
I'm relatively new, yeah.
But I'm pretty loud, so...
Silence only helps the oppressor, not the oppressed.
A lot of mras say that feminism
doesn't fight for the rights of men.
What would you say to that?
Cry me a 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, don't even 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 1t a little more about legitimate issues
like custody and alimony
and things that you think are unequal,
which all stem from patriarchy,
not from, "oh, my god,
feminists are trying to take away our kids."
No, dipshit.
That's not what we're trying to do.
We're not trying to do that.
I mean, if they look at the root causes of why,
for example, women get custody more often than men do,
women are supposed to be the mothers.
They're supposed to be the natural born caregivers.
So, obviously, duh, you has a vagina,
so, obviously, you're gonna be able to take care of the kiddies.
That's really what it is.
It all stems from sexism against women.
It's just, the oppression dialectic needs to go.
It's so hard to convince people
to look at men's rights actmsm and support it
without first allowing them to at least escape
the stranglehold that feminism has on their minds.
I do believe it is dogma. It's zealotry.
There are good people in the feminist movement.
Um...
There are not good people
in the radical feminist movement.
Um...
That system is based on hate,
and hate... in my opinion,
hate's the most destructive force in the world.
They're so quick to call us
man-haters or misandrists.
Misandry for life. No.
They're so quick to say that,
when all we're doing is talking about
patriarchal societies and structures
that we want to dismantle.
Nothing against men in particular,
but just saying, hey, this is the 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, right?
Our devil.
And the beautiful, wonderful force for justice...
Feminism, the way.
It's the way.
It sounds like religion. It sounds like religion.
And, oh, my goodness,
for a moment that's only about equality
and isn't blaming of men,
they named the force for evil after men
and the force for justice after women.
They're really angry, and they're angry at women,
they're angry at feminist women.
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 discriminate against men.
They've 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,
there are statutes that specifically give mothers certain benefits
that fathers in prison don't have.
And I challenged that as well, legally,
but we didn't win on that one.
When I wanted to get a commission on men
like the county has a 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 paternity 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,"'
'cause 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 prmleges 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
concerns me a little bit,
unless we have a better idea
of where that's gonna 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...
What's the motivation?
People don't ask, what's the motivation?
Do we need a men's rights moment?
No. We need common sense.
But if there's gonna be this woman's movement
and this is the movement that's gonna do all these things,
then maybe we need a counterbalance,
something called a men's rights movement,
or men's movement.
I hate to see either one of them.
I think it's a shame. I think it's destructive.
I'm hearing what the men's rights actmsts 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 ten percent more prison time
for the same crime as a white man,
a man is sentenced to over 60°/o 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 mras agree on the issue
of infant male circumcision,
most mras 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.
So the foreskin. Okay?
And we repeat the process with just one end on and clamp.
Anything that gets clamped gets cut.
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?
Yes, men are the majority
of workplace deaths and injuries,
war deaths, suicides.
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.
The red pill is about looking at these issues
in an honest way, even when it's uncomfortable.
And these things are uncomfortable.
But without the willingness
to set aside the programming
and to set aside the false beliefs about what power 1s
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 the victim
and men as perpetrator.
The red pill is about understanding
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's real simple.
It's just not easy.
Hmm.
I... I think I agree with everything you said.
But there's... 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 actmsts.
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.
1 looked into what 1 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 men's rights movement
has been labeled a hate group
by the Southern poverty law center.
- Is that correct? - Yeah, that's not quite true.
No, they got it wrong. No.
This was somehow written up
on some kind of anti-men's rights websites
as us having listed them as hate groups and so on.
That we didn't do.
He wrote a piece
declaring the month of October to be
"bash a violent bitch 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 bitch" article was written in response
to this article by jezebel called...
The article cited a study that revealed
70°/o 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.
After my year of filming men's rights actmsts 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 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
redd1t's “the red pill“ want to take adv ant age of the system,
and mgtow want to leave the system.
There are so many perspectives on gender,
and I believe they're 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.
This 1s what men's rights look like'.!
I don't know where I'm headed,
but I know what I left behind.
I no longer call myself a feminist.
♪ Just think about it
♪ put on some borrowed 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
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ don't gotta change your mind
♪ just try to open it
♪ I'll let you use my eyes
♪ see what I'm dealing with
♪ people with different stories
♪ dmded by different categories
♪ and reasons why
♪ the smart speak
♪ the wise, they listen
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ you gotta think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ come on and think about it
♪ there is another side
♪ down where the rabbit lives
♪ I'll let you use my eyes
♪ see what I'm dealing with
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it
♪ think, think about it
♪ just think about it