I just watched the movie The Red Pill [note italics] and I also just wrote a fairly lengthy review on Amazon:
First of all, this is a very ambitious and in many ways courageous movie to make. I'm glad it was made, and I think it does bring up some discussions that society should be having. I am a picture of privilege in our society, though—white, cis, male, educated, above-average income in my childhood home (in part due to two working parents)—and I resist the Men's Rights Movement now even more than I did before watching the film. Every complaint from the Men's Rights movement, no matter how legitimate (and some are, although not many), comes down to "men have it bad, too, so we should eliminate any progress women have made on that front." For example, (nearly) as many men are domestically abused as women*, so we shouldn't spend so much effort taking care of the abused women.
* If you believe the statistics cited, which at least one person interviewed in the movie did not. That same person is the only one who made the point that if the statistics are true, the solution should be to spend twice as much money on helping domestic violence victims.
There's also an enormous dose (to the point of overdose for me) of two-wrongs-make-a-right thinking. I reached the point of nearly vomiting when Elam's writing suggesting we have a month to beat up "violent bitches" is justified because he was responding to a feminist piece about beating up violent men.
The filmmaker herself had dialog with many people she did not agree with, but I don't remember her showing any dialog between feminists and so-called MRAs. She showed them shouting at each other a few times, but edited it such that the men always came off as being more calm and reasonable about the argument. It would be a more interesting movie to get some of these people who were shouting at each other, lock them in a comfortable room with cameras and microphones, and tell them you can come out after neither of you has shouted for 30 minutes. If they decide to sit in silence of 30 minutes, try again until you get two of them to talk to each other. The solution the MRAs offer is still one of us vs them when in fact we need a masculism movement which is not against feminism but is instead a male counterpart to it. That way more of us, no matter our gender or anything other identifies, can move on and get to a humanism movement. Then we'll be getting somewhere.
Honestly, I only gave this movie as many as 3 stars because I admire the filmmaker's willingness and desire to make it. The discussion is important to have, but it needs to be a dialog, not two monologues.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1761D74KFG2NZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B06XGY67WQ
There's more to say, though. Elam says early in the movie (and I'm paraphrasing) that trying to understand any part of his platform in isolation from the other parts is like trying to understand a snow drift by looking at each of the snow flakes individually. OK, so I'm trying to see the whole picture you've created. The whole picture that I see is that men have it worse than women and we have been oppressed by feminism. We work more dangerous jobs, die more in the military, lose out in custody battles, are fraudulently inflicted with fatherhood at times and illegally denied our paternal rights at other times, are victims of rape and domestic violence. Sure. All of these things are true. But they're not fighting to get the more rights for you. They're fighting to level the playing field even if that means denying women the rights they have been fighting for since, well, at least since the suffragette movement. That's the whole snowdrift, Mr. Elam, like it or not.
The red pill is such a beautiful metaphor, I hate to see it co-opted by the so-called Men's Right's Movement. One person's red pill is another's blue pill in this case. The men who use this term think they are waking up to reality instead of going back to sleep into the "comfort" of feminism. Feminists of the 60s and 70s (the feminists of my parents' generation and, I think, also the feminists of my generation in the 80s and early 90s) were clearly consuming a red pill and inviting everyone to join them. Many of us today are still inviting others to consume that very same red pill, then along comes a group of broflakes who tell us that red pill is actually blue and if I won't admit that it's red I'm the one who's sexist. Wake up, fellas, you have the power to make many of the changes you want to see in your lives. You have the power to engage in dialog with feminists instead of dismissing them. You have the power to build a genuine masculism which is not in opposition to, but in concert with, feminism to make a better society for all of us. Wake up.
