Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Explores preconceived notions with an open mind, painting a stark contrast between feminist activists and men's rights activists. It was helpful to put a face to the authors of the controversial A Voice for Men articles, which use satire and offense in their attempt to wake up feminists to their hypocrisy. Surely not all feminists are angry and want to hurt men, but the policies feminist activists successfully pursue are destructive. They put children in danger and reinforce the cycle of abuse. When we remove a non-violent male victim from the home due to our assumptions of partner violence, we leave children in the custody of a violent and abusive person. Men aren't asking for pity. They're asking for equality. The film points out the bias of media coverage which ignores countless brutal murders of men while piling onto any women's cause, as in the case of Boko Haram massacring boys for receiving Western education but resorting to kidnapping girls in their desperate attempt to garner media attention. Father's rights are given attention in the film as well. How many of us know a perfectly good father who is only allowed to see his child a few hours a week, yet pays out huge portions of his paycheck to the mother? A close family member of mine was duped into having a child when his girlfriend lied about birth control. Why is it socially acceptable to trick men into having children? I went through a similar journey as the filmmaker a few years ago, rejecting the dogma of feminism and opening my mind to counterarguments and transparent statistics. I had rejected the cult of the Mormon faith a few years prior to that. It takes a conscious effort and a seed of doubt to address bias, spot propaganda or detect manipulation. It's a shame we need the divisiveness of gendered movements in our day, but for now men need to push for any awareness of the present imbalance. I know firsthand that women can be just as violent as men, and if we were truly compassionate we would seek to treat people of any sex without shame-based assumptions of power. The cycle of violence starts when a child watches either or both parents being violent or abusive. In our current paradigm, boys learn that asking for help just gets you blamed. Girls learn that they can abuse without consequence, enlisting the aid of a system which assumes men are the danger and hauls them away in handcuffs. I've seen this firsthand as well, when a nonviolent male friend called the cops on his wife who was slapping him while holding their baby. Can you guess which parent spent the night in jail? I was at a humanist gathering a few years ago where the head of a domestic violence program spoke and passed around handouts of the Duluth Model of power and control, which is shown in this film. It was obvious by the pronouns that this was heavily biased against men as perpetrators and females as victims. In the Q&A session I presented facts from the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge (PASK), which recommends policy changes paying more attention to female-perpetrated violence, mutual abuse, and needs of male victims. "Among PASK’s findings are that, except for sexual coercion, men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons." When I asked her how they were addressing families who are under-served, like ones where abuse is mutual, she could not give me a straight answer. I was shaking with anxiety, but the male abuse survivor who thanked me afterward made it worth it. To this day I struggle with comforting the part of me that was abused by both my parents so that I don't lash out at men I love when I'm under stress. I used dissociation as a coping mechanism to survive as a child, but as an adult it is maladaptive. If it weren't for women like Cassie Jaye who can compassionately hold up a mirror to feminists, I might not have accepted that I am responsible for my behavior just as much as men are. We are all worthy of getting help.