For the sake of interest, I found an extensive
YouTube interview with the film's director, Cassie Jaye. I'm going to assume that the host doing the interview was himself an MRA (looking at his other content, I'm guessing he's a Bill Maher-style libertarian, but I didn't peruse anything further), or at least really sympathetic to the cause judging by the softball questions he was lobbing to her, but I have no reason to doubt the director's authenticity in her responses.
A few things I noticed:
-She has a weird understanding of feminism. First, she seems to believe that feminism only really became "mainstream" with in the past 10 years or so with the rise of social media, and prior to that point, calling yourself a feminist or believing a lot of the things she seems to think feminists believe wasn't really all that common. She likens feminism to a religion, though the only question that really throws her is when the interviewer asks her to define feminism, which she's unable or unwilling to do, though she does say (at an earlier point) that feminism is not simply a belief in equality of rights between men and women, but rather a particular ideological position (though she doesn't ever specify what that ideology is). I'm not really sure how to resolve the contradiction here, and she's never pressed to do so. A better interviewer would have explored this further.
-Her views on MRAs are extremely sympathetic. She claims to have never read or experienced any misogyny on any of the MRA websites she visited or any of the people she interviewed, though she allows that the men who write on these cites are sometimes uncouth, but claims that a lot of what people believe is misogyny on these sites is either attempts at humor or irony, if not outright distortions by the media who bother to actually report on MRAs. This latter point is illustrated by a favorable anecdote about Paul Elam. So definitely no commentary on misogyny in the movement, as she claims it doesn't exist. The most generous interpretation I can give to this is that she's basically saying that she's seeing a hatred of feminism, but not a hatred of women or women's rights, which are entirely different things.
-As I noted in my earlier post, the specific issues that MRAs claim to want to deal with don't seem particularly unreasonable--she mentions differences in male/female suicide rates, service deaths and the draft, prison rape, etc., which all same perfectly legitimate topics to be concerned about. What seems to have really seeped into her thinking is that even if it is not the cause of, at least the main impediment to, resolving any of these issues is feminism, and most of what is discussed is framed in that lens. This again, despite the fact that she isn't really able to clearly identify (at least in the interview) what feminism actually is or what it stands for, beyond its role in suppressing the MRA movement.
It sounds like that's really the gist of the movie.
