Last Friday, after the red carpet showing of the The Red Pill Movie, there was a Q & A for the audience. I was involved, along with Director Cassie Jaye, Karen Straughan, several other men’s advocates and none other than Professor Feminism himself, Michael Kimmel.
It was a brief affair, and pretty intense at points. For me personally, it was also a bit comical, and, well, fun.
As you know by now, Cassie Jaye’s movie, The Red Pill, has already created a watershed moment in the history of advocacy for men’s and boy’s issues.
As I promised earlier, I would provide an analysis of what happened at the question and answer session after the movie, and in particular for me, why I found it so damned funny.
To get this, I want to start with the end, when Michael Kimmel grabbed a taxi and left the area so fast you’d think he was running through a gauntlet of cameras with a raincoat over his head to hide his face.
It’s hard to blame him. First, part of the film had the audience laughing at him – while he was in the theater with them. Ya know, not really what you want to see on red carpet night. Or rather, not really who you want to be.
It didn’t end there. Not satisfied with the movie directly exposing his uniquely disingenuous form of buffoonery, he had to pour salt in his own wounds during the Q & A.
I didn’t take notes or record, so I can’t quote him verbatim, but the event was filmed by Jayebird Productions and as I understand it, it will be online in the days ahead.
To paraphrase the events, Michael, true to form, engaged in some mild filibustering to make his case for himself. Now, I have to issue a warning here. If you have food in your mouth, or are sipping on a drink please swallow them before you continue reading.
Are you ready? Good. Michael’s case, in a nutshell, was that he was on our side. He cares deeply about the issues facing men and boys. And of course while he delivered that message with the shopworn bit of “patriarchy hurts men, too” bullshit, he was literally gushing about how aware he was that men got a raw deal in family courts.
And yes, he was saying all this to an audience who had just witnessed him comparing men’s advocates to the white nationalist movement.
At this point I could not resist. I asked him about the National Organization of Men Against Sexism, or NOMAS, for which Michael Kimmel’s Wiki page lists him as a spokesperson.
NOMAS has called father’s rights groups nothing more than an abuser’s lobby, claiming that the only reason that men wanted more access to their children was so that they could abuse them.
That comes directly from an article by disbarred attorney Barry Goldstein on the NOMAS site. Goldstein lost his law license for, in part, fabricating evidence and lying to a court in a domestic violence case, but I digress.
Anyway, Kimmel’s response to my challenge to him to clean up his own house was, and I am quoting him here, “That’s not my house.”
Well, yes, it is Michael Kimmel’s house. He was just lying. While I don’t find him on the membership board now, he certainly was when Goldstein’s attempt to assassinate the character of grieving fathers was first published. And he was silent about it.
After all, these are his peers. They always have been, and they have worked actively to undermine alienated fathers for decades. Just as Kimmel and crew have worked to demonize any academic efforts to study men and boys that do not fall in line with the same hateful feminist agenda that attacks fathers and all other men.
As I recall, the next memorable part of the Q & A was Karen Straughan, who was just fantastic in the movie, trying to get Kimmel to answer the question, “What does toxic masculinity mean to an 8-year-old?”
It was one of the few times that the mendacious Kimmel, this time wisely, opted for silence.
He eventually pivoted, then tried to turn his crowing into a commercial for the movie he helped produce, a piece of agitprop call The Mask You Live In, touting it as good film making that demonstrated his brand of compassion for men and boys.
That was, at least possibly, the second lie. The only thing that may be more redeemable about this one though is that there is a possibility, however remote, that Kimmel actually believes what he is saying. He may actually believe that shaming masculinity, teaching boys to emulate girls, glorifying what he erroneously thinks are feminine values over masculine values and making men out to be a class of default rapists and abusers is helping men and boys.
Take that back. He was just lying again, just as he has throughout his entire, disgusting career.
I have seen The Mask You Live In, and apparently some of the Red Pill Movie audience had, too. They were audibly groaning during his spiel about how a hateful and bigoted feminist movie could possibly be an asset to millions of men and boys who are the targets of feminist abuses.
Kimmel also, with lameness fitting a Dickens novel, offered up the claim that one of the chapters he wrote in his book, Angry White Men, angered his feminist contemporaries because it offered some compassion for unjustly treated fathers.
There were two little tidbits that must have slipped his mind, though. One was that the objective of Angry White Men, which attacks the men’s movement, including AVFM, was to postulate the notion that much male violence, including mass shootings, was a result of white males aggrieved at their loss of privilege. No psychosis, criminality or other problem at the root, just a bunch of uppity crackers, pissed off that they don’t run the world (which they never actually ran).
And two, it made me wonder, though I did not want to dominate the Q & A with more questions for Kimmel, what does it say that Kimmel’s feminist peers were so offended that he might have offered some passing sympathy for abused men in one of his otherwise misandric books?
Perhaps someone can ask him that on another day.
Finally, after about 30 minutes of being cornered into mounting lies about his anti-male bias, Kimmel went completely off the gender grid.
The “real” problem was white people, he told the audience. The problem, apparently, is that white folk, male and female, have too much privilege.
He actually started talking as though he were at a Black Lives Matter rally, not a film on feminism and the men’s movement, the latter of which has no stake in race at all.
I think the audience was too busy rolling their eyes to know what to say.
Now, I have heard from more than one source that at the very least they gave Kimmel credit for being willing to take the stage and face the audience after the movie was shown. Sort of like Anthony Weiner going back on Twitter after, well, you know.
I indulged that for a second. As I recall, when that was brought up during the Q & A, I even offered some mild applause after someone recognized him for that.
I wish I hadn’t. On reflection, it was hardly courage methinks that brought Kimmel onto that stage. It was hubris, and an absolute disregard for the intelligence of the audience. Or, if I am being generous, proof of how steadfastly deluded the man really is.
Kimmel took the stage completely oblivious to the fact that, finally, he could not grease up and wiggle his way out of the truth staring him in the face like a loaded shotgun.
Kimmel comes from a world of Belfort Bax’s mock heroics, where fear and mob thinking assure he will be supported and that anyone who dissents will be demonized and silenced.
He lives in a world where articles of faith cannot be challenged, where his will and his word are regarded as sacrosanct. He is so complacent and insulated that he does not even notice the absurdity of staffing a board on the study of men with Jane Fonda, Carol Gilligan, Eve Enslar and Gloria Steinem.
It’s like populating a parole board with Klan members but Michael Kimmel does it with a straight face and a great deal of pride.
Well, for a brief, glorious couple of hours on Friday, October 7, 2016, the shoe was finally, painfully on the other foot for Michael Kimmel. The egg was dripping from his face, from which all smugness had been completely wiped away.
One had to wonder just how much that shoe was making him hurt as he made his mad dash for the cab.
Finally, and as a footnote here, I have noted the huge number of requests for information on DVD releases and other information on the Red Pill Movie. Sorry to say, I don’t have any of that. Naturally, I really want the DVD or download myself, but I don’t know when it will be available.
The Red Pill Movie Facebook page and website are your best bet for what you are looking for.
Also, here is another link to the National Coalition for Men page, organizing a meet and greet prior to the Los Angeles screening, this Friday, the 14th of October in North Hollywood.
There will be a Q & A there, as well, though I doubt seriously that Michael Kimmel will take the stage again.
