"I'm curious about what is different about Australia that makes a film like The Red Pill such a subject of fear and censorship," she muses. Although The Red Pill caused debate among the chattering classes when it was released in New York last October, and then more heated exchanges in the UK, it was nothing compared to the outcry Jaye encountered in Australia. Welcome to Australia's insanely overblown gender wars, in which men's rights activists (MRAs) rail against "feminazis" and "manginas" (male feminists) and feminists dismiss the MRAs as angry, neurotic misogynists. The Red Pill is "an antidote to the vicious misandry which is now the bread and butter of feminism", Devine fulminated in her column in Sydney's The Daily Telegraph.Ĭassie Jaye's recent visit to Australia to promote her documentary about the men's rights movement caused a media storm. With all that, Jaye also received showers of love from right-wing pundits, with Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen and Andrew Bolt gallantly springing to her defence. (Screenings of the film went ahead in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, and it's available online.) There were cancelled screenings, angry protests and boycotts in the months before Jaye arrived, and combative interviews on The Project and Weekend Sunrise after she set down on the Gold Coast for an international conference on men's issues. The bitter sore point seemed to be that in the course of making the documentary, she had begun questioning some of her feminist beliefs. In June the 31-year-old San Francisco filmmaker found herself in the eye of an Australian media storm because of her controversial film, which chronicles her journey through the polarising men's rights movement.
"I hope you don't mind," she says, promptly pressing the red button on her iPhone to record our interview, "but I've been misquoted so much." Despite her media wariness and feeling under par, Jaye is a model of genial, unaffected politeness, nudging a small plate of chocolate biscuits in my direction. Jaye has been staying here, in this neat bungalow in Sydney's eastern suburbs, for a few days, taking shelter from the media storm that's been raining down on her. We're sitting at a long dining table in the sun-drenched living room of high-profile psychologist Bettina Arndt, who helped organise screenings in Australia of Jaye's latest documentary film, The Red Pill, against considerable resistance. Nursing a head cold, she's in no mood to be grilled by yet another importunate reporter. Cassie Jaye would rather not do this interview.
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