Cassie Jaye's recent visit to Australia to promote her documentary about the men's rights movement caused a media storm. Credit:Louie Douvis 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. 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. "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. "I don't know whether it's because the feminist movement here is particularly strong." Whatever their political leanings, a reasonable person could ask why Jaye, an award-winning director, can't make a documentary about the growing men's rights movement without causing such an operatic flap? Especially as it became clear some of her fiercest critics hadn't even seen the film. For the uninitiated, MRAs believe that there is a rising tide of discrimination against men, that although women may have once been unequal, technological change and feminism have created an uneven playing field stacked against blokes. MRAs can range from men with grievances such as custody settlements favouring mothers over fathers, to those claiming rampant paternity fraud and false rape allegations, to a small group of trolls spewing women-hating vitriol into the darker corners of the internet. The men's movement also includes a group of anti-feminist women who call themselves "honey badgers", the most high profile of whom, tough-talking Canadian Karen Straughan, appears in The Red Pill declaring that male lives – from military conflict to dangerous jobs – are regarded as more disposable than those of women.

Taken from a scene in The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves's character chooses between swallowing a red pill (a truth-revealing chemical that allows him to see ruthless reality) or a blue pill (which maintains the blinkers of blissful ignorance), The Red Pill was the second top-selling movie in Australia on YouTube in June, after Hugh Jackman's blockbuster, Logan. The term has been co-opted by the men's rights movement to refer to the so-called "red pill" moments when it dawns on them they are really living in a women's world. "You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,"says Laurence Fishburne's character Morpheus in The Matrix. "You take the red pill … and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." As Jaye explains it, she was sucked down a rabbit hole herself in the course of making the documentary, not only with regards to her feminism but also the policy prescriptions of the men's movement ("Sometimes I think the MRAs are just duping me," she reflects in one of her many in-film video diaries). "When I started this project, my perception of MRAs was definitely negative," she tells me. "I thought they'd say shocking things, that it would be a peek inside a misogynistic community. But when I started to listen to them, I began to empathise with a lot of their issues." While the overall arc of The Red Pill is sympathetic to the MRAs, choosing to focus on their gentler rather than darker side, it also contains interviews with feminists and critics of the men's movement, who point out that the real-life data on the position of women doesn't back up the MRA vision of the world. Says Jaye: "As a filmmaker I'm not trying to insist that the audience agrees with the MRAs or the feminist voices in the movie – they can make up their own minds." It's not easy teasing the strands of the men's movement apart. On the one hand they seem a throwback, complaining that in an increasingly feminised society, men – no longer kings of the castle – are belittled in the likes of popular culture (think jokes about multiskilling) and the Family Court (being devalued as fathers). On the other, they're calling for an end to old-fashioned chivalry (opening a car door, being the last off a sinking ship), declaring it redundant in an equal world. I’m not anti-feminist nor do I consider The Red Pill anti-feminist. But that’s how the Australian media were trying to brand me.

The MRAs fire off a battery of US statistics (outlined in The Red Pill) to prove their point and repeatedly insist they're not trying to drive women, barefoot and pregnant, back into the kitchen. Among those numbers: that men represent 80 per cent of suicides, 93 per cent of workplace fatalities and 98 per cent of deaths on the battlefield. The MRAs put this down to male life being seen as less valuable, more disposable, citing news reports on natural disasters and terrorist attacks in which phrases abound like "100 people were killed, including women and children". In calling for an end to chivalry, the MRAs don't seem so far away from feminists who call for a stop to the male-power thinking that underpins it, that only decades ago branded women the "weaker sex" in need of masculine protection. "Men are seen as success objects and women as sex objects," says author Warren Farrell, whose book The Myth of Male Power is the bible of the men's movement. "Women cannot hear what men do not say," adds Farrell in The Red Pill. Reflecting on some men's tendency to silence, Jaye says: "Even in my own relationship with my fiancé, I began to realise he knew every grievance I had, because I'd let him know." Most of his own sacrifices, especially during the filming of The Red Pill, went unspoken, she explains. The MRAs point out that it's overwhelmingly men who do society's more dangerous jobs: securing steel beams on 100-storey skyscrapers, going down mines, building interstate highways and rail lines and driving the trucks and trains that run on them, operating oil rigs, excavating for natural gas, fighting bushfires, rescuing injured people from mountain tops and burning buildings. Predictably, this prompts Paul Elam, the ruddy-faced, high-profile public face of the men's movement in the US, to gripe in The Red Pill: "You don't hear feminists complaining that there aren't more women coal miners and ditch diggers." Jaye weighs in on whether, to purloin a comment from American social critic Camille Paglia, feminists shouldn't give credit – to men – where credit is due. "Our cultural conditioning is that women have been oppressed and men are the oppressors, but it's more complicated than that," she tells me. The subtleties, she argues, often aren't picked up in the media, which usually opt for default political positions.

Jaye took particular exception to the "gotcha" video graphic that preceded her interview with Waleed Aly, Carrie Bickmore and Peter Helliar on The Project, which claimed that 2300 men's right's activists funded her film. Jaye says she emphatically denied this in her 15-minute pre-recorded interview with the show, a statement which didn't make it to air. "The film, which took three-and-a-half years to make, was funded by three self-identifying feminists: myself, my mother, who was the producer of the film, and my fiancé, who was the director of photography," she tells me. Only in post-production did Jaye, having depleted her coffers, upload a Kickstarter video for crowd funding, the online equivalent of standing on the street, holding out your hat. "It was very clear that feminists, men's activists, and mostly people who don't identify with either, contributed funds," she explains. "But this explanation wasn't a snappy enough sound-bite for The Project." Jaye scored a counter strike when she appeared on Weekend Sunrise, where she faced co-hosts Andrew O'Keefe and Monique Wright. "Did you see the film?" she asked, frustrated by the line of questioning. O'Keefe had to admit he hadn't watched it in its entirety. (To be fair, he went on to suggest viewers watch it, and has since emailed Jaye his own critique.) Jaye being grilled during her The media weren't the only ones trigger-ready to object: the University of Sydney's student union set up a campus protest and screening boycott, claiming The Red Pill had "the capacity to intimidate and physically threaten women on campus". To someone like me who's seen the film, that seems a very big stretch. For those who haven't, Jaye's earlier films are not the stuff of right-wing cultural propaganda. Daddy I Do, her 2010 documentary about the US purity ball movement – the odd and vaguely creepy practice of girls pledging to their fathers to remain virgins until they wed – shows that sex education results in a lower teen pregnancy rate because many pledgers still had sex before marriage while being less likely to use contraception. Daddy I Do won numerous awards at film festivals around the world, and became an educational tool to promote sex education in US schools.

Jaye's heart-wrenching 2012 documentary about gay marriage, The Right to Love, features two gay fathers – one a police officer and Gulf War veteran, the other a stay-at-home dad – who are raising a pair of kids while battling against a tide of hate and prejudice. Explains Jaye: "No straight couple was willing to adopt the kids as a pair – some were willing to take the girl, but not the boy, because he suffers from Goldenhar syndrome [a life-threatening disease in which half the face develops at a slower rate]." Jaye, who was drawn to the solidarity she saw within the couple's local circle, enthuses that "it was very well received by the LGBTI community". The film went on to win four documentary awards. So let's back up a little. A critique of purity balls? A crusading doco about gay marriage? How then did Jaye become a cause célèbre for conservatives and target practice for the left? She explains that as a documentary filmmaker she's simply drawn to politically controversial topics, and in the course of making The Red Pill began to question her feminist beliefs. But there was no flash moment, no post-feminist epiphany. In fact, Jaye insists she has a firm commitment to equality of the sexes. "I'm not anti-feminist, nor do I consider The Red Pill anti-feminist. But that's how the Australian media were trying to brand me. I'm not a men's rights activist, and there are many aspects of the men's rights movement with which I personally disagree." It's probably not hard to guess why Jaye would seem the perfect poster girl for anti-feminists: young, attractive and media friendly, she cuts quite a different shape from the testy, grey-haired men who usually front the cameras on MRA issues. "I interviewed some younger men, but they weren't as articulate as the older generation," she says. Jaye, who won a Women in Film award for The Red Pill at the Hollywood DigiFest festival the day before we meet, began her career at 18, when she set off for LA to take a crack at acting after graduating from high school in Las Vegas. For three years from 2004 she endured the usual struggling-actor lows: surviving on waitressing shifts ("I was the worst waiter"), refusing to go topless ("I was frequently scantily clad") and grabbing walk-on roles in low-budget horror films, the most notable of which was Cosmic Radio with Daryl Hannah. "I was very blonde with a round face and so would often be cast as a bimbo, but in my mind I wanted Hilary Swank-type roles," she recalls with a smile.

The Hollywood blast furnace forged Jaye's feminism as a young woman, if only because she was taken aback by the excess of old-fashioned sexism. "In LA, women's sexuality is their power, whether it's being a sexual figure in films or behind the scenes, becoming sexually friendly with the producers," she says. "It wasn't something I felt at all comfortable with. Although I'm no longer a feminist [as a result of making The Red Pill], I still care about women's issues." Jaye discovered her true calling during the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007, when all the acting work dried up. Living in a rundown apartment in West Hollywood, the then 21-year-old found herself with free days and an unlimited subscription to the Blockbuster video rental chain. "After exhausting all the independent films I wanted to watch, I started hiring documentaries, and fell in love with the way they caught all those authentic moments – unspoken things like tics, frowns or the way a mouth moves." Jaye discovered that the documentary form synthesised her two passions: true-life stories and the real human characters who form them. Within months she had established a production company with her mother, abstract artist Nena Jaye, naming it Jaye Bird Productions. Because of her own preference for stepping back, Jaye has an ability to put her subjects at ease – a gift for a documentary maker ("People reveal more when you give them the air to think"). This has led to accusations that Jaye didn't challenge her subjects enough in The Red Pill, especially MRA head Paul Elam, whose website has been described as misogynist by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a hate-group watchdog. "It just seems to me you don't really question their views in the film," said O'Keefe in the Weekend Sunrise interview. Jaye interviewed the MRA’s public face, Paul Elam.

While it's a safe bet Elam probably wouldn't have stayed in front of the cameras – and vented about how he really felt – had Jaye adopted a more hardline form of questioning, viewers were owed a more balanced back-story. You don't have to dig very deeply to learn that the now 60-year-old Elam once created a website called RegisterHer, which encouraged men to name and shame women who supposedly made false rape allegations. He also set up the A Voice for Men site in 2009 that has its 13,000 members posting grievances in Reddit-like forums. Among other things, A Voice for Men calls for an "end to rape hysteria" and contains many highly offensive comments about women, posted under the convenient cloak of anonymity. Married three times, and estranged from his first two wives, Elam abandoned the biological kids from his first marriage, refusing to pay child support. "I went into The Red Pill thinking I was going to expose the men's rights movement, which is why I interviewed Paul Elam," explains Jaye. "I was horrified by what I'd read and thought he was the source of the problem. But if I didn't feature Elam, Sunrise and The Project would be asking why I didn't interview the most high-profile MRA. As a documentary filmmaker I'm interested in listening to all sides of a group." Which of course doesn't address the issue of why a more balanced approach wasn't taken. Jaye acknowledges that men are more predisposed to violence than women. US figures presented in The Red Pill report that men commit more than 90 per cent of homicides and 98 per cent of rapes. Across the globe, from armed conflict to terrorism, most violence is committed by men. But the component that is often overlooked – raised in The Red Pill – is that while women are far and away the primary victims of domestic violence, in 2010 men were the victims in almost four out of five non-domestic homicides and aggravated assaults. Jaye was blind-sided on The Project when co-host Carrie Bickmore explained that domestic violence is "really on the agenda" in Australia because of Rosie Batty, who has campaigned against it since 2014, when her 11-year-old son Luke was killed by his father Greg Anderson (Batty was named Australian of the Year in 2015).

Jaye hadn't heard of the tragedy. "And it was his son that passed away?" a bewildered Jaye asked her hosts. "It was her son that was killed by his father," Waleed Aly said. "That's interesting, because it shows that there are male victims of domestic violence," Jaye replied. "Sorry – that's the lesson you took from that?" Aly asked incredulously. ’s Carrie Bickmore caught Jaye off-guard.

It wasn't a great moment for Jaye, who now explains: "I had no idea who Rosie Batty was. Violence against women is a huge problem in Australia and the rest of the world. But we shouldn't be saying that only women can be victims." Having since read up on the case, Jaye acknowledges that Batty suffered horrendously at the hands of Anderson. "But there are many boys who are victims of domestic violence by male figures, and we shouldn't forget that." Indeed we shouldn't, but experts on domestic violence don't claim that victims are purely female; just mostly. Further, many see crimes such as the murder of Luke Batty as really all about punishing the mother. If a red pill moment is one in which you see the world with brutal, unforgiving clarity, then by any measure it's still a man's world. Never mind the very real problems for women in the West. For women in other parts of the world it's a far, far grimmer picture of powerlessness. Honour killings. Arranged marriage. Child marriage. Sexual slavery. Minimal or no education. Restricted reproductive rights. No right to vote, to drive, to travel without permission. The women who blazed a path to the freedoms and rights Western women enjoy today faced hostility and scorn not only from men, but from a powerful posse of conservative women who opposed female suffrage and any divergence from non-traditional paths. The resistance rumbled on over the decades, from opposing access to the pill in the 1960s, with claims it would lead to promiscuity and the breakdown of marriage, to later resisting reproductive rights, equal workplace opportunities and abortion. Jaye acknowledges her own career would not have been possible without the sacrifice of her brave feminist predecessors. "I'm career-driven, so I'm grateful to the previous generations who brought about a more even playing field," she says, adding as I prepare to leave: "You know why I'm not anti-feminist? Because I see feminists doing wonderful things for gender equality. All my friends and family are feminists; after all, I live in San Francisco."

No longer a feminist but not an anti-feminist. Many will be anticipating Cassie Jaye's next documentary project with great interest.