UNTIL recently the Men’s Rights Movement and its controversial “leader” in the United States, Paul Elam, might not have been familiar to many Australians.

But after the documentary The Red Pill was banned from Australian cinemas and the film’s director, Cassie Jaye, claimed she’d been treated poorly by the media on her publicity tour, the phenomenon has hit a few more people’s radars.

As a panellist on Network Ten’s The Project the night Jaye was interviewed, I was one of those accused of bad behaviour.

While many have claimed the interview was an attempt to silence her, the truth is there were things in the film that needed to be called into question. If all she’d wanted for her film was an advertisement she could have bought one in the commercial break.

And before you start screaming that this is classic lefty feminism and I clearly couldn’t deal with the issues raised in her film let me assure you: just the opposite is true.

I’m one of those women who finds it difficult to identify with the word “feminist” because I want equality for everyone, not just women. I don’t think an overly simplistic view that men have it easy and women are hard done by does anyone any favours and that’s why I thought many of the issues raised in Jaye’s film were worthy of discussion.

And yes, I watched it. Twice.

Topics like child custody, men’s suicide rates and domestic violence where the perpetrator is female are all areas where issues facing men are often overlooked and they shouldn’t be.

In an interview with a number of so-called Men’s Rights Activists or MRAs for short, they raised the point that while men’s work has been valued over women’s work, women’s lives have been valued over men’s and continue to be so.

These activists pointed to events such as 2009’s famous Hudson River plane crash when rescuers asked for woman and children to exit the plane first. Surely in an emergency, they asked, shouldn’t we be seen as identical amorphous blobs equally worthy of immediate rescue no matter what bits we were born with?

Observations like this are important to add to the conversation as well as questions about whether Family Law Courts unfairly favour mothers or the fact that we often don’t take male victims of domestic violence as seriously as we do female victims.

media_camera It feels like the extremes of both sides are so obsessed with playing victim or sledging their opponents, they’re not interested in coming to any resolution. (Pic: Cassie Jaye/The Red Pill)

Certainly there are statistics that show the incidence of domestic violence is higher for women and more women die at the hands of their male partner but that doesn’t mean we should disregard violence against men because “they’re blokes and they should be able to handle themselves.”

One of Elam’s more controversial articles on his website A Voice for Men suggested the month of October should be “bash a violent bitch” month. This was written in response to an article on Jezebel which made light of women beating their male partners.

Again, there’s no doubt there is a double standard there that needed to be called out but while Elam claims his article was a piece of “Juvenalian satire”, I don’t think it’s unfair to question whether there might have been a less aggressive, more intelligent way to express himself. Particularly when couching arguments in that kind of vitriolic language ends up making you look less like a person with a genuine point and more like a misogynist with an axe to grind.

The same can be said for feminists who scream about how all men are bastards and that women need to rule the world instead of us all having a crack at it together. But on Elam’s website things have been written that should have been challenged in a documentary that was supposed to be about the movement, warts and all.

All through his A Voice for Men website, viewers see points we should be discussing alongside language like “Valentine’s Day, for far too many men, is actually Lighten Up and Don’t be such an Insufferable Bitch Day, but only if you get the present right.” Language the writer might believe is a work of Juvenalian art but that just sounds juvenile.

I want to live in a society where we can have complex, robust, uncomfortable conversations. I want everyone, particularly those who don’t fit the stereotype, to have their views heard because assuming we know everything is arrogant and dangerous.

Being challenged and opening your mind to different points of view is important but it has to go both ways. If you want me to listen to you and appreciate where you’re coming from you don’t need to call me an “insufferable bitch” before we’ve even gotten the introductions out of the way.

It feels like the extremes of both sides are so obsessed with playing victim or sledging their opponents, they’re not interested in coming to any resolution.

Which is great if your only goal is to get more clicks on your website or grow your social media following but not terribly productive if you want insightful debate, bring about real change and make life better for your fellow man and woman.

This obsession with playing a zero-sum game gets us absolutely nowhere. The truth is that men and women are powerful and weak in their own ways and we’ve become too comfortable assuming, as a general rule, that men are always powerful and women are always weak. This puts too much pressure on men and doesn’t give women enough credit.

In the gender equality debate, both sides have valid arguments but nothing is gained by belittling the point of the other side, male or female, or by assuming you’re 100 per cent right because no one ever is.

Gains for one side shouldn’t come at the expense of the other and if we want to fight for true equality we need to learn from the past, not get caught up in it and realise that everyone’s voice deserves to be heard.