Today I’m going to talk about Janet Bloomfield — AKA JudgyBitch — and her bizarre attack on the original Don’t Be That Guy anti-rape posters in Edmonton. But I’m going to take a bit of a detour first, so bear with me.
I recently picked up a copy of Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, a nonfiction account of a scientific feud that provided me with some diverting travel reading and put me in the mood to read more of Koestler’s nonfiction.
But doing some rudimentary Googling I made a rather horrifying discovery about Koestler, whom I’d admired since reading his bracing account of breaking with Communism in the classic The God That Failed anthology: according to a recent biographer, Koestler was a serial rapist and abuser of women.
While some doubt the evidence of rape, even his supporters have had to acknowledge, as one reviewer has written, that Koestler’s “treatment of the many women in his life [was] – even without the ‘rape’ – deeply unpleasant. He was manipulative, demanding, sexually voracious and utterly faithless.”
Koestler himself doesn’t exactly make a persuasive witness for his own defense, having once written to his second wife that “without an element of initial rape there is no delight.”
But in some ways as eye-opening as these revelations has been the response of some of Koestler’s defenders. Case in point: Michael Scammell, the author of a nearly 700-page biography of Koestler. After detailing many instances of Koestler’s mistreatment of women, he writes of the accusations of violent rape:
The exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time … The line between consensual and forced sex was often blurred.
Hey, it was the 1950s. EVERYBODY raped women back then.
The sad fact is that, while this is no defense of Koestler’s alleged behavior, there is an element of truth to Scammell’s claims. The line between consensual sex and rape was often blurred back then. Women were often cajoled, pressured, manipulated, and forced into sex by more physically powerful men. And neither party necessarily recognized what had happened as rape.
The fact that the line between consensual sex and rape is a lot clearer today — and that the rate of rape has declined markedly in the past several decades — is largely due to feminism. Feminism challenged older attitudes and definitions of rape and worked at changing these attitudes through education and awareness campaigns.
Feminist activists worked on teaching — and reteaching — both men and women what is and what isn’t acceptable sexual behavior.
It’s an ongoing process, which continues in awareness campaigns like this one, the Don’t Be That Guy campaign launched in Edmonton (and elsewhere):
It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot more work to be done, as the reactions to this campaign have pretty clearly shown.
Anyone who has read much in the so-called manosphere — on MRA and PUA sites alike — will have noticed a lot of alarmist nonsense about the alleged difficulties men have in determining if a sex act with a woman is consensual or not, as if it is simply impossible, if there is any confusion, for men to open their mouths and ask. MRAs and PUAs act as if obtaining consent “the way feminists want it” would consist of some complicated legalistic procedure that would ruin sex forever.
This is patent nonsense. Clarifying issues of consent about (and during) sex — making anything that’s blurry clear — can be done in less time than it takes to read this sentence.
“Do you like this?” “Yes.”
“Do you want me to [incredibly dirty thing]?” “Yes.”
But, as I said, the MRAs and PUAs complaining about the alleged difficulties of consent don’t really seem to be interested in making things clear. They would, it seems, rather have things as blurry as possible.
And that’s because a lot of them want to return to a world in which, to paraphrase that quote from Scammell above, the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction isn’t exactly uncommon, and in which the line between consensual and forced sex is often blurred.
They would prefer to return to a world in which it’s considered fair game to “take advantage” of seriously drunk women. One in which all accusations of date rape could be dismissed as the result of a fickle woman changing her mind later.
And that, I think, is why MRAs have such a problem with date rape awareness campaigns like Edmonton’s Don’t Be That Guy campaign — which they try to both ridicule as unnecessary and denounce as an exercise in Nazi-style anti-male propaganda. Sometimes both at the same time.
Consider, for example, Janet Bloomfield/JudgyBitch’s recent A Voice for Men post on the Edmonton poster controversies. Bloomfield — who apparently likes to think of herself as one of those no-nonsense women who can get by just fine without any help from feminists, thank you very much — begins by trying to ridicule the original Don’t Be That Guy posters as simple-minded, obvious and utterly unnecessary.
Referring to several specific posters from the original campaign, she writes:
No, obviously, you should not be having sex with a woman so drunk she is passed out face down on the couch with her ass in the air. …
Obviously, helping a drunk woman home does not entitle you to sex.
And in what is going to come as SHOCKING news to everyone, if someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, you should not have sex with them.
I’ll give you a while to process that information, because I’m sure that until this clever campaign came along, you were all busy screwing comatose girls at parties and gleefully hailing cabs so you could help ladies home and then rape them.
That would be very witty and pointed but for the fact that, guess what, men do attempt to “have sex” with women who are passed out or asleep, and that there are plenty of men who seem to think that this counts as a sort of “no harm, no foul, no rape” situation.
Take a look at the discussion whenever this topic comes up on Reddit, for example. Or consider all those supporters of Julian Assange who pretend that the issue is women changing their mind after sex when in fact one of the things he’s been accused of is penetrating a woman sans condom while she was sleeping.
And as for “taking advantage” of seriously drunk women, well, there are plenty of men who think this is perfectly fine — and some who make this the centerpiece of their “seduction” technique. Indeed, one prominent PUA — Roosh V — has confessed to doing just that with one woman who was clearly too drunk to consent:
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn’t give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.
Somehow this confession — boast? — hasn’t, to my knowledge, earned him any condemnations from manosphere or MRA bloggers, or even, it seems, cost him any fans.
Meanwhile, on the very site Bloomfield is publishing her post, Paul Elam blames drunk women for being sexually assaulted, writing (as I pointed out yesterday) that women who drink with men are, “freaking begging” to be raped,
Damn near demanding it. … walk[ing] though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
After dismissing the Don’t Be That Guy campaign as so much silliness, Bloomfield makes a sudden 180 degree turn and declares it the virtual equivalent of Nazi propaganda against Jews.
Which would be offensive if it weren’t so manifestly absurd. The Don’t Be That Guy campaign isn’t directed at men, per se. It’s directed at men WHO THINK IT’S OK TO RAPE WOMEN and/or MEN WHO MAKE EXCUSES FOR RAPISTS.
A good number of these men — and some women with similar beliefs — seem to spend much of their time reading and/or writing for manosphere sites like Roosh V’s blog and A Voice for Men.
Seriously, so true. Which is why it is mostly ignored. 0_o
Aw. Petey was feminist until he took a Women’s studies class and they failed to care about him and his boner!
Petey,
“B) Why do you think that people [read:women] lie just for the heck of it?
Where is your evidence suggesting that false reports are so much higher?
Why do you think that??
Why do you think/where is your evidence to suggest that women lie in large numbers?”
Anyone who’s lived for any length of time knows that most people lie and a lot of people lie constantly. There are plenty of studies that can attach numbers to it. Most of them give women the edge, though it’s not always statistically significant. Really, this is just common sense. Just about everybody lies.
D) Women who drink: [sighs, I can’t leave this one alone]
“A few disjointed thoughts on the matter:
If you got yourself plastered, and went out and walked on the edge of the road and someone ran you over with their car, is it your fault that they ran you over? If they are drunk themselves, does that mean they are absolved of running you over?
“Your statement about whether a woman is drunk and has sex and a man is drunk is poorly phrased. This is how it should go: If a woman is too drunk to consent and someone has has sex with her, is she raped? If a man is too drunk to consent and someone has sex with him, is he raped? The answer in both cases is an EMPHATIC yes! Yes they are! The person initiating the sexual encounter is the one who has to ensure the person they are trying to have sex with is not too drunk to consent and is consenting. If the person initiating the encounter is even the slightest bit uncertain whether both those things are happening, they should assume the answer to either is no. If anyone is too drunk to consent, and yet still fucking throwing themselves at you when you’ve initiated an encounter, and you can tell they are too drunk to consent, you probably shouldn’t have sex with them. Which is worse: Missing out on potentially consensual sex? Or becoming a fucking rapist and raping someone?
“Additionally, (re: “Remember: you are feminists. You are searching for equality, or so you claim.”) no one here is going to tell you that if someone has sex with a man and he is too drunk to consent to it it’s not rape. Sorry to burst that “Gotcha!” bubble there – we do believe you can rape a man and we do hold the same standard to women. Just because we recognize it doesn’t happen as often, doesn’t mean we’re claiming it never happens.
“Plus, after any kind of incident like this, how are you going to prove anything?
“Proving something, something being shown to be true under the law, is not the same as something being morally repugnant. Many cases of rape are not provable, for many different reasons. It’s still rape, and it’s still horrific. The posters are designed to make those cases of rape easier to prove by providing clear understandings of what constitutes consent. Let’s not make it easier for rapists to get away with raping people, shall we?
“I notice you didn’t respond to my charge about the posters empowering bystanders to interfere either, presumably because you can’t really say shit about it.”
I certainly hope that if I become too drunk and do something I regret that I will have the maturity to take responsibility for my actions.
If, knowing in advance that in the case of being raped while unconscious it will be hard to prove anything in a court of law, why put yourself in such a dangerous situation in the first place? Don’t go home with a strange man while intoxicated if you don’t 100% intend to have sex with him. Don’t get drunk to the point of loss of control with people you don’t trust. As the old saw goes: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Perhaps the posters empower bystanders. I somehow doubt it. People who engage in such behaviour will usually make sure not to be seen by anyone who doesn’t share their psychopathy…
“E) If, as you claim, you have no evidence to back up your piss-poor thoughts on rape stats, then why are you so certain about them? Are you basing that on “common sense” ideas? Are you basing it on what you would do if you thought you could get away with it? Are you basing it on what you want to be true?
“Maybe, and this is just a thought, you should withhold judgement on something until there is evidence for it? And once that evidence has been provided, which I see people have provided upthread but I can certainly add to/link again if you want, you should take that evidence as the evidence that it is? If this is not your direction, why not? What would it take to convince you that this evidence we’ve provided is true? (No seriously, I’m asking, what would it take?)”
The 1 in 4 statistic is clearly bullshit. How many other lies are the feminists feeding us? Certainly false rape reports is probably one of them. For every reported rape, very few of those actually go to trial and even fewer actually result in convictions. It could be that there are a whole slew of rapists gone free but it’s just as likely that there were a whole slew of false reports. Pick your poison. As far as I know, these non-prosecuted rapes usually don’t make it into the stats for false reports.
“F) Why are you here? Why are you arguing when you dismiss evidence and make unsubstantiated claims? What is the purpose of your visit to our site today and why do you desire to argue with us about it?”
I already told you. Because I’m tired of being shamed for being a man and because I’m tired of the double standard that allows women to accuse men of being rapists while a man can’t accuse women of being liars. Both are equally offensive (actually I think the first is more so) yet only one is socially acceptable. I am also tired of the lies (like the 1 in 4 statistic) that continually get pushed on unsuspecting men all the time.
Cloudiah, I went ahead and did it. Not surprised to find a lot of crap including a “Geeks versus Girls” screed that claims anything falling under the nerd umbrella belongs to men alone, and women are only interested in geeky things now because it’s popular. Look, he wrote this:
“Geek loser makes good. Except now come the wannabes and coat-tail hangers who want in on a piece of the action, even though they may not have half the passion or ability. It’s hard to view feminist complaining about this issue in any other way–they see what men are up to and they want a piece of the pie. Nothing is stopping a determined woman–any woman–from opening an account on Sourceforge and starting up her own Software project or from starting an article on Wikipedia.
One of the complaints that gets bandied about from feminist quarters is this nebulous concept of “harassment”–that women who try to do so are routinely harassed. In many instances, I suspect they are confusing standards and normal “turf wars” with harassment. Wikipedia has certain rules and guidelines that must be adhered to in order for it to be what it is. If you fail to abide by these rules, yes you will be warned and your edits removed if you do not address the issues.”
Jesus H. Christ.
“I already told you. Because I’m tired of being shamed for being a man and because I’m tired of the double standard that allows women to accuse men of being rapists while a man can’t accuse women of being liars. Both are equally offensive (actually I think the first is more so) yet only one is socially acceptable. I am also tired of the lies (like the 1 in 4 statistic) that continually get pushed on unsuspecting men all the time.”
More straw feminist bullshit, here. Men aren’t allowed to call women liars? Where’s this now? Fantasyland?
You’re not being shamed for being a man, you’re being shamed (I hope) for being a raging dumbass who’s OK with some rape.
You’re a dumbass because you really think false accusations are a real big thing, despite all evidence to the contrary. You are a failure.
“Guys, click on Petey’s name and then read his piece on Women in Science. So much laughage!”
Indeed. Where is the flaw in logic in that piece? You want to make free software? Get coding. There is nothing, I repeat, nothing, stopping any woman from getting involved in free software and I hope to have shown that conclusively…
It really is disgusting how women these days play the victim. “Oh, I had no role models.” Cry me a river. Anyone who’s done anything great (and that includes women), never needed anyone to show them the way beforehand. Take a look at a woman like Dervla Murphy who cycled from Belfast to India at a time when something like this was very uncommon. (Although realistically, the route was probably easier at that time, even as a woman) She didn’t ask for anyone’s blessing or wait until someone else had led the way, she just went ahead and did it.
,blockquote>Anyone who’s done anything great (and that includes women), never needed anyone to show them the way beforehand.
Citation needed, dipshit.
I’m curious as to how Petey thinks that us making fun of him here is going to prevent the “shaming” of men in general.
Your priviledge is showing, Pete.
You wrote, “Anyone who’s done anything great…never needed anyone to show them the way.”
Being a man, I guess you never tried to enter a field that wasn’t dominated by a man. Try being a minority in a room filled with people who are hostile towards your presense. You know, like you. Your projecting your sexism onto us. You don’t like the idea of women working in STEM fields, obviously — based on your “writings” page. You also wrote that women don’t have the passion or drive to do it. That’s sexist. You’re a sexist, in the classic shit lord sense. You’re projecting your hang-ups on us.
I’m sure Petey thinks there’s no such thing as privilege, it’s bootstraps all the way in Petey Land.
Please don’t quote my article out-of-context. There is a larger point I was trying to make and you people obviously don’t get it. (And it has nothing to do with “men are better.”) People like you on this website make a mockery of heroes like Dervla Murphy who aren’t afraid to do things for themselves.
No, Petey, we make a mockery of jackholes like you. Get it right.
“The 1 in 4 statistic is clearly bullshit.”
Because you say so, right?
Fuck off and read those studies instead of pestering us with your misogyny, victim-blaming, and rape apologia.
And I’m not sure long-distance cycling counts as heroic.
“Being a man, I guess you never tried to enter a field that wasn’t dominated by a man. Try being a minority in a room filled with people who are hostile towards your presense.”
This only applies if you are actually working with other people. A large fraction of free software developers (like me) work completely independently. Didn’t you understand that point?
The rate of victimization for rape in any first world country is less than 1 in 1000 per year. By ammortizing, that means, even neglecting repeat victimization, you would need several lifetimes to arrive at the 1 in 4 statistic. There have been so many articles debunking it I’m not going to repeat them here. Do some research.
That was your point? Gosh, you’re kind of a sucky writer, Pete.
Petey, you’re advancing the claim, you need to show the work. Lazy fucker.
I see. People tell lies so it follows, “logically”, that most women are lying about rape. Even though most women never report being raped. And most men who are raped don’t report being raped either. Are they also lying?
“Everybody lies” is a pretty bleak way to go through life.
Software developers also don’t get hired by human beings, sell software to human beings, or have human beings as clients.
“The rate of victimization for rape in any first world country is less than 1 in 1000 per year. By ammortizing, that means, even neglecting repeat victimization, you would need several lifetimes to arrive at the 1 in 4 statistic. There have been so many articles debunking it I’m not going to repeat them here. Do some research.”
The 1-in-4 figure, based on Mary P Koss’s well-known victimization survey, is not a figure for annual incidence of rape.
Yup, looks like you don’t know shit about what you’re criticizing. Not surprised.
I don’t understand: you’re all about science and logic and evidence.
Show us the studies that prove that women lie constantly. Show us the studies that prove that most of the women -even those who don’t report their assaults- are lying about being raped.
This is a too childish and foot-stompy to even address.
Question, Petey:
Why do you feel that you’re -specifically- being shamed for being a man because there are campaigns to discourage rape? You’re the one claiming that it’s difficult to tell when sex is consensual. If that’s true wouldn’t many people, regardless of gender, benefit from a campaign that discourages rape.
When I was in highschool there were all kinds of posters about avoiding/preventing teenaged pregnancy but I didn’t feel like I was being shamed for being a teenaged girl.
“That was your point? Gosh, you’re kind of a sucky writer, Pete.”
Maybe the problem is that you’re a lousy reader. I really shouldn’t waste my time arguing with stupid people.