The Red Pill

The term THE RED PILL has been adopted by the men's rights movement (MRM) from the Matrix movie to signal the choice we have between seeing the world as it really is -- in this vision, a hotbed of discrimination against men -- or taking the blue pill, which supposedly offers the blissful but false view that ignores terrible prejudice causing men's widespread suffering. In Cassie Jaye's documentary about the MRM, the advocates and leaders she interviews give moving examples of real-life individual instances of unfairness visited on good men. Some men get a raw deal from the justice system while trying to get custody of their children, and other innocent guys can't get the authorities to recognize that they've been battered and sexually assaulted by women. These accounts seem to be valid individual examples of true injustices, but notably absent from the film are comparisons to equally disturbing stories from women about abusive men and social systems long rigged to favor men. The MRM leaders Jaye presents are generally soft-spoken, likable, and articulate espousers of the claim that men are disadvantaged in society. Friendly, warm, and polite, they cite statistics showing that men die younger than women, visit the doctor less frequently, become addicted more often, and are arrested, convicted, imprisoned, and executed more often. Their sentences are longer than convicted women's sentences, too. Plus, men now attend college less often than women, and those who attend graduate even less often than that. Jaye's response to most of this is a renunciation of her previous status as a "feminist."