One of the benefits of running a cult – or so I have heard – is the ability to define reality for your cult followers. The principals at the cultish A Voice for Men do this all the time – pretending, for example, that former AVFM Number Two John Hembling had once faced off against a mob of 20-30 angry feminists brandishing boxcutters when his own video of the event showed him conversing with a handful of peaceful activists. And who can forget their attempts to cast their embarrassingly poorly attended rally on Toronto as a “huge success?”
However successful they are at redefining reality for their cult followers, cult leaders encounter problems when they try to do the same thing for those outside of their sphere of influence.
Take AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam’s continual attempts to recast some of the vilest things he’s written as “satire,” an explanation that only seems to fly amongst MRAs with a large capacity for the willing suspension of disbelief.
Well, now AVFM’s comically inept PR maven Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield has taken on the project of trying to retroactively redefine Elam’s most despicable writings as satire.
In a post on Thought Catalog, Bloomfield argues, as best she can, that Elam’s notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was not arguing, as it plainly seemed to be, that the best way to stop women from abusing their male partners was to let said male partners beat the shit out of them.
In the piece, you may recall, Elam said this:
In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.
I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.
And then make them clean up the mess.
Now, am I serious about this?
No. Not because it’s wrong. It’s not wrong.
But it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.
There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that any of this is “satirical” or sarcastic or anything other than what it seems on the surface to be: a suggestion that the proper response to violence from women is violence against women – or that this would be the proper response, if this sort of “self-defense” from men didn’t result in jail time or anger management classes.
Indeed, the argument of this piece is entirely in keeping with a short story Elam published around this same time, titled “Anger Management,” that has as its hero a man unfairly punished for breaking his wife’s nose in a fit of righteous rage after she left him for his business partner.
But Bloomfield shamelessly if unconvincingly tries to argue that
What Paul Elam did in his article was engage in satire – he flipped the genders to highlight just how awful it is to hurt another person, and dramatically highlighted our double standards when it comes to who got hurt.
Yep, she’s honestly claiming that’s what he meant when he said beating the shit out of a “violent bitch” is “not wrong” just not “worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.”
The argument went over well with the small army of misfit misogynists populating the comments section to Bloomfield’s post on Thought Catalog. And perhaps she will see this as a victory.
But if you read the following comments critically, you’ll notice that the commenters — including her fans — aren’t buying the satire argument at all.
Notice the upvotes. This was a popular argument in the comments.
This comment was a response to one of the only feminists who ventured into the fray:
One commenter recalled a famous passage in Shakespeare:
The passage in question in A Merchant of Venice is Shylock’s famous “if you prick us, do we not bleed” speech. You may recall that Shylock used this argument as a justification for revenge, declaring that
[t]he villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
This is Elam’s argument as well.
In other words, none of these commenters — and those who upvoted them — believe that Elam’s post was satirical. None of them see Elam’s argument as being anything other than what it was: a Shylockean paean to righteous “revenge” upon abusive women.
They know he was serious. And they agree with him.
EDITED TO ADD: Bloomfield has responded to this post with a detailed and lucid critique. By which I mean she tweeted this:
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/480512762393944064
A Wolverine
“sycophants”
Now there is a word I had to look up!
Also no one should be hitting or abusing anyone! A boy hit me once and I didn’t hit him back that is called revenge.
Society tells boys not to hit girls because boys are physically stronger than girls. They can easily put a girl into a hospital or kill her without much effort. Society has said that women are weak.
To be fair, nobody with a scrap of intelligence or common sense takes anything written on Thought Catalog seriously. It’s a widely mocked, notorious cesspool of navel gazing idiocy.
Um. I wasn’t diagnosing the folks running the conference and AVfM. None of us have the ability to do that, even if we have training elsewhere.
I am sorry for triggering folks here. I was not funny, clearly.
Ah JB, you’re doing logic wrong. Say, for argument’s sake, that your assertion in your first sentence is correct. This is still a logical fallacy, one known as the “two-wrongs fallacy”, and in Latin “tu quoque”. It is a subset of ad hominem fallacies, in that it fails to attack the original argument but tries to attack on the basis of the (presumed, flawed) qualities of the original attacker.
Want to try again with a proper argument JB?
@fruitloopsie
oh good god, I know women on average are not as strong as men but I thin kyou are over exaggerating a bit fucking much.
@stuff fantod
No shit.
@ judgybitch, How sad that you can’t use real name, or at least a name that isn’t self-hating.How sad, your allegiance to male masters who are not worth your effort. You are a woman. You are part of the group of women. What are you doing, trying to mansplain Elam? Why? Please, think about the effect you are having. Is this your legacy?
Marie
Sorry you’re right
RE: Tulgey Logger
Isn’t JudgyBitch the one who wrote a post about how she’d like to leave a scathing letter to “princess cupcake” women on college campuses about how her fantasy son is too good for them?
I could’ve SWORN that was Sunshine Mary. Totally different person.
It was Suzanne McCarley, and I don’t remember what handle she corresponds to.
JB blocks David on Twitter then comes here to taunt him. Real mature!
I remember that driversuz wrote an open letter to all young women about how her hot Marine son was on to their wicked wiles, but I must have missed JB’s foray into speculative fiction. Not sorry about that at all.
Driversuz, that’s the one.
The meaning of language does not depend upon speaker intent.
How does that change the meaning of the word satire?
I loved your comic, katz! 😀
I’m getting my FeMRAs mixed up again, huh? Typhon Blue is really the only one who stands out as distinct, just because she’s so incredibly weird.
I sincerely hope so. I want humanism, which is what the equality feminists wanted, too. Gender feminists are so warped by their hatred of men they constitute a hate movement, IMO, bleating on about patriarchy and male privilege, neither of which exist.
You know what does exist? Class privilege. Rich men AND women have power over all of us. What privilege does a homeless veteran contemplating suicide have over me, an affluent white woman who has a husband to pay all her bills?
I have more privilege and power than 95% of all men, and I will not stop advocating for the rights of those men and boys until the world wakes up and sees feminism for the hateful movement it really is.
And we are winning the PR battle. Why was it so easy for 4Chan to create the #endfathersday tag? Because in the public’s mind, the hateful, awful things they wrote were completely believable as feminist statements.
That’s how you do new PR.
And I think I’m pretty good at it.
I’ll go ahead and add “privilege” to “satire” on the List Of Words You Don’t Understand.
@zoon (is it okay if I shorten your nym to that?): can you also add “PR”?
RE: katz
It was Suzanne McCarley, and I don’t remember what handle she corresponds to.
Wow I suck. *hangs head in shame*
@judgybitch
here I found a thing for you
Good point judgy bitch I wonder who has more money on average men or women hmmmmmm
My good…its’ like..almost like…people can be priviliged in some ways and not in others!!!! I’m glad you pointed that one out a plus
Holy shit thats not what Humanism even means.
Reactionaries generally have trouble understanding nuances of language or humor, but the incomprehension of satire is getting to be one of my pet peeves.
People! For future reference! Satire means “this is the opposite of what I believe, humorously exaggerated to make my opponents’ view look ridiculous.” It’s not “thing I actually believe, but stated in a ‘funny’ voice so if I’m called on it I can backpedal and say it was a joke.” Nor is it “thing I actually believe, but exaggerated into a masturbatory fantasy of violent revenge against my opponents.”
Jonathan Swift did not actually think Irish babies should be eaten. He was satirizing the callousness of the British government toward the Irish famine. If some anti-Irish MP had responded by writing, “I hereby declare March ‘Starve a Drunken Mick Month,’ since they deserve to die, plus imagine how satisfying it’d be…mmm, in my happy place now…okay, I’m not actually going to murder an Irishman, but only because I’d get in trouble with those Paddy-loving PC liberals,” that wouldn’t be satire. It’d just be a guy being an asshole.
IN ADDITION humanism also puts a very high value on rationalism and empiricism which are in very short supply among the MRA movement
So it’s the feMRAs that have their husbands buy their scented fucking candles and that sit around eating bon-bons all day?
Oh noes, my whole outlook on life has changed.
@ judgybitch, I am sorry for you. Your privilege is contingent on your husband. It is not yours. All your accomplishments, all your struggles, will be worth nothing if you are abandoned. Nothing is yours in this society. To call feminism hateful is a reversal. Please look at Mr. Elam’s hatred directed against women. Class privilege does exist, against men and women, as you say, and is developed and overseen by men, by the patriarchal system. That some men tried to hurt women with that hashtag is only their attempts to control us, in no way some sort of triumph for the men you speak for. I have been as a confused as you and tried everything to earn men’s respect. But it is not ever earnable for women. That is the lesson of feminism. Please remember all this in the future. Good luck to you.