I saw that The Red Pill, the documentary about the men’s rights advocates group, abbreviated as MRA’s, was getting a lot of attention on reddit, so I decided to check it out and I wanted to give my thoughts of the documentary and the situation as a whole. If you don’t know the red pill gets its name from the scene in the matrix where Neo is offered the blue pill or the red pill. Essentially by taking the red pill he goes down the rabbit hole and sees what the majority of people don’t see, or don’t want to see. There is also a subreddit by the same name, but I will talk about this later.
The documentary starts off with the director, a self proclaimed feminist, interviewing various people from both sides of the camp, those who believe MRA’s are sexist assholes and the MRA’s themselves who believe they are bringing up decent issues that no one even wants to talk about. In this respect I think the people they interviewed definitely make the MRA’s look very good, many of them were people who were those who had life experiences that brought them to the movement and most of them didn’t seem like they really had much prejudice against women. Those from the feminist camp were very anti MRA and disagreed with almost all of their points without hearing their point of view to begin with.
Im not sure how researched the people were in this documentary before they were interviewed, but I would say the hardest part is finding moderates of both sides. The huge problem with feminism and MRA’s is that many people who join the groups taint the fundamentalist ideals and it transforms into something unexpected. For example one woman who built one of the first battered women’s shelters in the UK was kicked out of the feminist movement for suggesting that they open a battered men’s shelter as well. She was called a slave to the patriarchy and driven from the movement. It is these types of extremists that give both sides a bad view. Many men on the subreddit the redpill are sexists that claim to be MRA’s and many of the moderates despite them.
In fact many of the moderates for both groups have the same stances and positions on the same issues. Another big problem is both sides are looking for funding from the government and in many parts it is a zero sum game. Only x amount of dollars will be given to run certain shelters and either the women can get it or the men can get it, not both. Because of this, men who suffer marital abuse at a sizable rate, but one that happens to be lower than women, get no funding at all. There are only a handful of shelters that will even take men to begin with. This is why many of the MRAs are upset.
I don’t think moderates of either side are making claims that are completely sexist or out of the park. The documentary does a good job of highlighting the core beliefs of many MRAs and actually makes you think about some of the inequalities against men in our society. Every type of group no matter how privileged you think they are, has issues to deal with, some more than others, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the other groups. I think the best thing we can do is keep an open mind and listen to other people instead of instantly shutting them down. Those who don’t want people who have different views than them to speak, are just censoring people. If you could get groups to remove extremist members and keep the moderates who are willing to discuss and talk about both sides, we might actually have progress, but sadly I don’t think that will happen.
Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges