Review of The Red Pill (2016) by Montaillou — 04 Mar 2017

It's true, and unfortunate, that Jaye doesn't really challenge any of her MRA interviewees about the more toxic rhetoric that seems to afflict much of the movement (though the same could certainly be said about many radical feminists).

But that doesn't, on its own, answer any of the substantive points that are made in the film, and it's no excuse for the disgraceful, contemptuous way in which it seems to have been dismissed by professional critics - more concerned, no doubt, with the need not to depart from what has become a bien pensant orthodoxy, and thus lose party invitations, than to come to the film with a genuinely open mind.

There are a few areas in which I think Jaye is a little out of her depth, and the innocent-among-wolves act (though perhaps quite genuine) is a limited structure on which to hang the whole film. Most of all, if she HAD been more challenging to some of her subjects about the out-of-hand rhetoric (to put it no higher) on both sides of this toxic battlefront, she would have inoculated her film more effectively against the general tendency to dismiss its more substantive contents.

But, given how little coverage this topic gets from anything remotely like this perspective, I'd say she does a pretty decent job.