A Young Feminist's Compassionate View of Men

Article here. Excerpt:

'For nearly 25 years I have been concerned about an issue that has received scant attention in the academy or the media: the problems faced by boys and men in our society. My own work on this started with a piece I wrote in 1993, titled “Loving Pale Males,” which talked about the dilemma I found myself in, as the liberal father of three boys, when men—especially white men, but really men in general—were being attacked by a growing feminist movement.

The piece came very close to being published in the New York Times magazine, but didn’t, and I couldn’t find a publisher elsewhere. Naively, I didn’t realize that with so much attention being paid to girls and women and their struggles, there was little room for anything dealing with concerns about males of any age.

In the years since, while I have found that I have a lot of company in my concerns, they have not hit the mainstream. But finally that may all be changing, with the release of a documentary by a young and courageous filmmaker named Cassie Jaye. The Red Pill is a look at the men’s rights movement by a self-identified feminist, who started out wanting to do a documentary about “rape culture,” but found herself suddenly listening to the voices of men talking about their pain. (The movie’s title comes from the 1999 feature film, The Matrix, where taking the red pill meant that you would now be able to see the unvarnished truth. It’s a term that has been widely used by men’s rights activists (or MRAs).)'