The Red Pill.

Courtesy Jaye Bird Productions.

Courtesy Jaye Bird Productions.

The kickstarter funded documentary (I use that word lightly) The Red Pill, all about those poor, downtrodden yet valiant MRA heroes has been reviewed. Note that in the comments, a few MRAs get a bit, um, bonkers over how a film reviewer could have possibly seen the film before it was released, gasp! Unleash the lawyers! It’s a fine demonstration of the distance between these men and reality.

Here’s a great example of how not to open your documentary. “After releasing my film in 2012 about marriage equality, I was at a loss of what topic to explore next,” says Cassie Jaye in the halting tones of a hostage reading her captors’ statement to the world. That comes at the start of her film The Red Pill, and the high drama of her search for a subject gets illustrated with the results of a web search. “I started to research this ‘rape culture,’ ” she tells us, each syllable so far from the next one that a tumbleweed could breeze through the gap.

We literally see the words rape culture get typed into Google. “A website called A Voice for Men popped up,” she tells us. And then, for two agonizing hours, Jaye tumbles slowly down America’s stupidest rabbit hole, discovering that Men’s Rights Activists are actually just dudes who have been dicked over by a culture that punishes masculinity.

[…]

Here’s something Elam wrote on A Voice for Men in 2010: “Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.” What excuse would any serious documentarian have for not asking Elam to explain that?

You don’t even have to put in that tiny bit of online legwork to suspect that something’s hinky with Jaye’s film. (It’s a Kickstarter job, and A Voice for Men and Reddit’s most misogynistic MRA subs were active in the campaigns.) Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016, endorsing their anecdotal complaints about unfair family courts, incidents of men being tricked into being fathers, and — I didn’t quite follow this one — one father’s conviction that the women who had custody of his son were systematically trying to make the boy fat. That story drags on forever, and Jaye cuts from it to footage of herself tooling around in her car, driving past a Supercuts.

Like many amateurish Kickstarter docs, The Red Pill doesn’t always have visuals worth regarding on a screen, but I do cherish one flourish: an animated sequence of falling snowflakes, each with a different MRA complaint printed on it, meant to illustrate the movement’s diversity of grievances. There’s “Misandry”! There’s “Restraining Orders”! Even the metaphor is hilariously white.

[…]

What the film and the movement fail to demonstrate is any kind of systemic cause. Instead, the author of men’s troubles here is always that vague bugaboo feminism, which we’re told is designed to silence its opponents. (Is it even worth pointing out that being criticized for what you say is not the same as being denied your right to say it?) Jaye renounces her own feminist past toward the end of the film, the announcement delivered over video of her typing, then looking at a computer, then driving around some more.

[…]

“Why can’t men talk about their problems?” Elam asks Jaye’s camera in earnest, apparently unaware that he gets shouted at and pilloried not for identifying “problems” but for being a dick. Hey, Elam — men can talk about our problems. You’re one of them.

Alan Scherstuhl’s full review is at The Village Voice. I fully appreciate Mr. Scherstuhl’s willingness to watch this documentary, as it’s not something I could bring myself to watch, even it were free and I was promised the proverbial month of Sundays.

That Damn Gay Agenda!

Muay Thai fighting champion Fatima Pinto appears in an ad for H&M (Screen cap).

Muay Thai fighting champion Fatima Pinto appears in an ad for H&M (Screen cap).

Puritanical Christian group One Million Moms has launched a boycott of H&M after mistaking a Muay Thai fighting champ for a transgender woman.

The right-wing pressure group, renowned for its ridiculous string of anti-LGBT boycotts, threatened the fashion chain in a release this week over latest fashion ad ‘She’s a Lady’.

The Christian group fumed: “1MM is not sure of H&M clothing company’s thought process behind their new television ad, but if they are attempting to offend customers and families, they have succeeded.

“H&M’s newest ‘She’s A Lady’ commercial includes what appears to be a man dressed as a woman in one segment, another woman wearing skimpy lingerie, and ends with two teenage girls kissing while underwater.

“Parents find this type of advertising inappropriate and unnecessary especially since H&M’s target market is teens.

“H&M Marketing Team may have thought this type of advertising was politically correct, but not only is it disgusting and confusing for children, it is pushing the LBGT agenda.

“Let H&M know their new ad is irresponsible.”

The group encouraged its supporters to send a pre-written email complaining about the “disgusting commercial” that should be pulled “for our children’s best interest”.

The problem? The so-called “man dressed as a woman” in the ad is actually female Champion Muay Thai Boxer Fatima Pinto, who is not transgender. She does have some world class muscles, to be sure. I rather expect that would be needed if you’re a champion Muay Thai boxer.

Ironically, the ad does also fleetingly feature H&M model Hari Nef, who is transgender, but 1MM apparently didn’t notice.

Via Pink News.

Charles Blow Gets Blunt.

Charles Blow.

Charles Blow.

Charles Blow has something to say about Donald Trump, and I don’t think one word could possibly be said better. Just a bit here, click over the full, glorious read.

Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist; only his form of terror doesn’t boil down to blowing things up. He’s the 70-year-old toddler who knows nearly nothing, hurls insults, has simplistic solutions for complex problems and is quick to throw a tantrum. Also, in case you didn’t know it, this toddler is mean to girls and is a bit of a bigot.

It isn’t so much that he is a strict disciple of radical ideology, but rather that he is devoid of fixed principles, willing to do anything and everything to gain fame, fortune and power. He has an endless, consuming need for perpetual affirmation. This is a bully who just wants to be liked, a man-boy nursing a nagging internal emptiness.

He’s fickle and spoiled and rotten.

So, when he loses at something, anything, he lashes out. When someone chastises him for bad behavior, he chafes. This is the kind of silver-spoon scion quick to yell at those he views as less privileged, and therefore less-than, “Do you know who I am?”

We do now, sir.

[…]

This is the kind of childish person who, when losing, flips over the board and yells insults at his family, rather than learning from the loss so that he can get better and be in a stronger position to win the next time.

This man is a brat whose money has stunted his maturation.

He shouldn’t be ushered into the White House; he should be laughed into hiding. His querulous nature shouldn’t be coddled; it should be crushed.

America is in need of a leader, not a puerile, sophomoric sniveler who is too easily baited and grossly ill-behaved.

Go to your gilded room, Donald. The adults need to pick a president.

Whew. Full column at The NY Times.

“Miss Piggy” “Miss Housekeeping” “Miss Eating Machine”.

Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, was photographed in May of this year in Los Angeles. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times.

Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, was photographed in May of this year in Los Angeles. Credit Emily Berl for The New York Times.

The undeniably beautiful Ms. Machado, who is beautiful at any size, (preferably a well-nourished one) speaks out about her treatment at Trump’s hands, and the trauma she’s lived with for 20 years. As I understand it, Ms. Clinton had quite a moment in the debate regarding Trump’s abusive tactics with Ms. Machado. The whole article is a good read. I’d dearly like to think that Trump was at the very least moderately shamed, but no. All he cared about was how he was caught out. Nasty creep, that one.

For 20 years, Alicia Machado has lived with the agony of what Donald J. Trump did to her after she won the Miss Universe title: shame her, over and over, for gaining weight.

Private scolding was apparently insufficient. Mr. Trump, at the time an executive producer of the pageant, insisted on accompanying Ms. Machado, then a teenager, to a gym, where dozens of reporters and cameramen watched as she exercised.

Mr. Trump, in his trademark suit and tie, posed for photographs beside her as she burned calories in front of the news media. “This is somebody who likes to eat,” Mr. Trump said from inside the gym.

[…]

“I was sick — anorexia and bulimia for five years,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in May. “I was 18. My personality wasn’t created yet. I was just a girl.”

Mr. Trump has acknowledged pressuring her to lose weight, saying it was her job as Miss Universe to remain in peak physical shape. On Tuesday morning, he made no apologies for that.

“She gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem,” Mr. Trump told Fox News.

The full story is here.

Tackling the B Word.

jenni-olson-2015-tighter-headshot-2-wide_0

Film maker Jenni Olsen takes on the B Word, and does a great job of it, too. The word is pervasive, now more than ever, and it’s a damn difficult word to get out of your head, even if you manage to get it out of your speech and writing. I came of age in the early ’70s, and being a native Southern Californian, spent much time at various beaches. Back then, bitchin‘ was used as an overall positive. How that came about, I don’t know. Like most of my peers, that expression dropped from lips often. My grandmothers disapproved, in pursed lip fashion. They also felt that geez was near blasphemous, so I didn’t pay much attention to the pursing. Later on, bitchin! disappeared, and bitch was in, in a very dark and nasty way. The nastiness of it hasn’t disappeared in the least, if anything, it’s dug in, and bitch is more widespread than ever. It’s directed at pretty much everyone these days, but the basic of it has not changed. When you call someone a bitch, you’re calling them a woman, and that remains a very lowly and bad thing to be. Just a small excerpt from Jenni Olsen’s article, because the whole thing is an excellent read:

As this terrific Vice.com article on the word’s long history concludes: “ ‘Bitch’ has come a long way, sure, but perhaps the reason it hasn’t been truly reclaimed is because conditions for women haven’t really changed, either…Words only make sense in context. When we see the day when the context is changed, then the core meaning of the word will change, too.”

[…]

Just to anticipate the two arguments in your head. Yes, it’s true that women use the term. We’re women—we get to do that sometimes because it’s ours. And no, it’s not the same as the reclamation of the word queer, at least not for you. Britney, Rihanna, Madonna and Alanis Morissette can shout it at the top of their lungs. But as men you can’t reclaim something that was never yours in the first place. And I confess that, as a feminist raising two daughters in our still very sexist society I’m not really that comfortable with those songs and reclamations either—the hostility towards women and continued sexism in our culture just makes it hard for me to accept so much mainstream flippant usage of the term. Quite simply: It still feels hurtful and hateful to me.

So maybe just ask yourself next time you have it on the tip of your tongue. Does this word really mean so much to you? And if it does, why is that? If you felt that compelled and entitled to use those other F and N epithets on a daily basis—what would it say about you? As my thirteen year-old daughter Sylvie often urges me when considering her requests: “Think about it.”

Read the article, and think about it.

Women Don’t Need Anything Special.

Delegate Phyllis Schafly watches the speeches Wednesday night of the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

Delegate Phyllis Schlafly watches the speeches Wednesday night of the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

Phyllis Schlafly. Christ, I thought she was dead. I was in my teens when Ms. Schlafly was fighting ERA tooth and nail. She was a nightmarish dinosaur back then, and I see absolutely nothing has changed.

As delegates at the Republican National Convention approved a platform banning women from combat, restricting a woman’s right to an abortion in cases of rape or incest, and without any mention of equal pay or paid family leave, Phyllis Schlafly looked on with a huge smile.

[…]

But Schlafly, whose group Eagle Forum successfully defeated the ERA, said Clinton’s plans are an insult to women and that it is “ridiculous” to think she would help women get ahead.

“Women don’t need anything special,” she said. “Women need a free country just like men.”

That disgusting party and candidate you’re so happily embracing don’t want a free country. Well, perhaps a free country, so to speak, for white males who happen to be Christian. Outside of that, what they want more resembles a concentration camp for the rest of us.

Schlafly, agreeing with her party’s platform, said that a national policy on paid leave is “not what we want at all.”

“We’ve got very generous family leave right now,” she said. “I do think the support of the children is the responsibility of the husband, not the employer.”

Right, because that has worked so very fucking well. Jesus Christ, what is it with these morons who refuse to advance one bloody centimeter? Oh, no, let’s never ever look at countries 10 times more functional and progressive than ours, and take an example. That would be unamerikkkan or something.

Of all the pro-women policies Clinton is endorsing, however, Schlafly took the most issue with the Democratic Party’s support for women in combat. The GOP platform calls for reinstating the ban, which was lifted in December by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. Clinton supported that decision and has said women should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether or not they engage in combat.

“The worst thing she’s doing is calling for the drafting of women,” Schlafly said. “It’s terrible because once you go in the army, you go where you’re told, and women are not suitable for combat and can’t do combat as well as men. It’s endangering the survival of our country to pretend that women can engage in military combat like men.”

Oh, the survival of our country depends on keeping women out of combat? What in the fuckety fuck would you know about combat, Ms. Schlafly? I already know where Ms. Schlafly wants women – back in the kitchen, with their mouths shut, pretending they don’t have any brain at all. Fuck you, and Fuck off, Phyllis.

ThinkProgress has the full story. I think I’ll just wander off for a moment and scream.

The Red Hot Assholes Revival.

Pastor Steven Anderson (Screenshot/YouTube)

Pastor Steven Anderson (Screenshot/YouTube)

Remember Steven ‘Pulpit Stomp’ Anderson? Steven and his other hateful buddies are getting together, for the Red Hot Preaching Conference in Sacramento, Ca. this weekend. Gosh, a whole weekend of poisonous hatred. Sounds charming.

The “Red Hot Preaching” conference scheduled for this coming weekend in Sacramento will feature four of the most repugnant King-James-Only pastors who have more than just their relentless hatred of gays in common … they’re all Quiverfull. These preachers of patriarchy are Truly True Believers™ who embrace Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar-style “family values” … Christian homeschooling mega-families who reject all forms of birth control and are devoted to raising up a “quiver full” of children to serve as “arrows” in God’s holy war.

Pastor Roger Jimenez, who celebrated the Orlando massacre, saying, “Christians shouldn’t be mourning the deaths of 50 sodomites,” will be hosting a four-day conference of “soul-winning” and “hard preaching” at his church, Verity Baptist, in Sacramento beginning Thursday evening.

Jimenez will be joined by three fellow “fire-breathing” preachers: Steven Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, who has advocated for the death penalty for gays and adulterers, Donnie Romero, pastor of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth, who prayed for the injured survivors of the Pulse nightclub attack to die and who threatened violence against LGBT people, and David Berzins, pastor of yet another Independent Fundamental Baptist church, Word of Truth, in Prescott Valley, Arizona.

When Jimenez and company are not busy condemning “sodomites” and “faggots,” they’re likely to be preaching about a woman’s duty to stay at home, dress modestly, submit to her husband, have lots of babies, homeschool, and always be sexually available when hubby’s in the mood.

The current political climate didn’t create these evil doucheweasels. They’d be evil any where, any time. That said, the current political climate is openly fostering and embracing every kind of bigotry and hatred, under one guise or another. The guise of Christianity is being used to push through one evil after another in the GOP dream platform. That’s why, while it’s very tempting to simply mock and dismiss these evil clowns, we cannot afford to do so. Here in uStates, if we aren’t vigilant, if we don’t make every possible effort to rouse people to get out and vote, to make a difference, these evil clowns could well be our future overseers.

The full story is here.

The Resurgence of Women-Only Art Shows

The Resurgence of Women-Only Art Shows

Clockwise from top left: Sonia Gomes; Shinique Smith; Perle Fine; and Eva Hesse. Credit Clockwise from top left: Ana Valadares; Gary Pennock; Maurice Berezov/AE Artworks; Henry Groskinsky/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images

Clockwise from top left: Sonia Gomes; Shinique Smith; Perle Fine; and Eva Hesse. Credit Clockwise from top left: Ana Valadares; Gary Pennock; Maurice Berezov/AE Artworks; Henry Groskinsky/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images

While some artists are ambivalent about being viewed through the lens of gender, the all-women’s group show, which fell out of favor in the ’80s and ’90s, is flourishing again. At least a dozen galleries and museums are featuring women-themed surveys, a surge curators and gallerists say is shining a light on neglected artists, resuscitating some careers and raising the commercial potential of others.

These shows are “playing catch-up after centuries of women’s marginality and invisibility,” said the artist Barbara Kruger, who has both declined and agreed to participate in all-women shows. Galleries looking for fresh names to promote and sell have more than altruism in mind: They are sensing opportunity “to cultivate a new market,” Ms. Kruger said.

[…]

 

In Ms. Reilly’s 2015 Artnews article “Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures and Fixes,” she showed statistically a vast gender imbalance in terms of museum exhibitions and permanent collections, prices, gallery representation and press coverage. Last year, just seven percent of the artists on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection galleries were women. “Obviously great women artists have emerged, but unfortunately those are still token achievers,” Ms. Reilly said.

If these shows don’t close the gender divide, they at least provide substantial investment and rigorous scholarship to illuminate narratives that have slipped from the art historical record. The intergenerational lineup of 34 sculptors at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel includes younger artists like Kaari Upson and Shinique Smith alongside modernist forerunners like Louise Bourgeois, Claire Falkenstein, Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis.

An excellent article, and some great shows coming up.