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
@kitteh
All the LOLs, I set that up and you knocked it out of the park. (Sorry for complimenting a non-American with a baseball metaphor, it’s the best I could come up with.)
I also want to thank everyone for NOT pointing out that I make plenty of typos and grammatical errors every time I post and can’t really blame the booze. See elizabeth, Mammothers can be nice and kind on this board! We don’t need mfism or fmism for that.
Same here! Part of the reason we never did have a stable housing situation when I was a kid (even more so before I was born) was that my father’s status ambitions always exceeded his income.
Interesting thing: I would always see both my parents as middle-class, but their childhoods certainly weren’t. They got their status, such as it is, from their education – not very high, either, but higher than anyone else in their families. (Oh, the inverted snobbery my mother copped from her mother, the one who’d insisted she go to the Loreto boarding school in the first place …)
LOL baseball metaphor happily accepted – I guess hit it for six would be the cricket equivalent, though not quite as impressive! 😀
That’s especially funny since Americans never say “posted” we say “mailed.”
Luckily each English speaking nations consume enough of each other’s popular culture that for the most we can understand each other’s colloquialisms. I watch enough British TV/movies that I have to guard against speaking in Britishisms because it’s so pretentious when Americans do that!
Holy shit, this thread is pure gold. You have no idea how unprofessional you are and that no real company or competent organization would hire someone like you in a million years. You base your approach to PR on 4Chan of all fucking things and think you’re good at it. Please post here more often JudgeyB, this is even better than when you begged us to talk to the protester AVfM was doxxing for her innocuous “super fun” comment.
I think Mariangela was suffering from a case of Undigested Marxist Dogma Syndrome. I come from the 60s when their was a lot of Marxist rhetoric around, and I could sort of follow her argument — she really sounded like a number of heavily Marxist feminists from about 40 years ago. For me it was like a trip in the Wayback Machine. Marxism puts practically all its eggs in the basket of class, and tends to be rather inflexible. Feminist thought has come a long way since then, particularly in understanding that there are many sources of privilege (so that women who are divorced do not necessarily lose everything), but she is quite open about the fact that she does not wish to make the journey.
Well, the thing is, what’s JB’s goal? If it’s real-world change then she’s terrible at PR, but if it’s to get attention on the internet and disrupt the lives of people she doesn’t like then 4chan actually is a good template to imitate.
I’m sorry if I got the context completely wrong, but trans men have male privilege and therefore have a dominant social position even though their transness makes them marginalized compared to cis men.
So JB thinks that having the MRM associated in the public mind with a 4Chan troll is somehow a PR victory? Is it just me or is JB reminding anyone else of Muhammad Saed al-Sahhaf aka Baghdad Bob?
Aw, I missed the time traveling second-waver 🙁
It’s probably for the best. I think I would have poked her and made her mad.
Sorry, Ally, I prolly got my wording wrong (typing in a hurry: not the best idea). It seemed as if marieangela was assuming she was talking to a white het cis singlet guy. Not that intersectionality was a feature of her comments. 😛
LOL so do I, though I don’t bother trying not to – they’re embedded in my speech ‘cos I grew up watching almost entirely British telly, and still do.
I like that these guys admit (unconsciously?) the major difference between male on female violence and female on male violence. This is precisely why a lot of people, not only feminists, prioritize female victims: the “martial competency”.
There’s something called “abuse of power” in my country, it’s an offense used mostly in the workplace or civil servants but it comes to mind when I compare the two m/f violence cases: one can fight back, while the other cannot. And this is why most people are much more disturbed by male on female violence, or any violence/abuse committed by someone stronger in status/body.
Feminists claiming that “women are fit for combat” certainly do not mean that we are fit to fight with bare hands against a man outside our weight category. I have never heard an actual feminist claiming that if a woman is violent towards a man, he must endure it quietly…
Too right. We also have to remember that there was a fairly neat, but incomplete, match between those Marxist ideas and the sort of thing the 2nd wave had to fight for. The sort of job I had – well-paid, permanent, professional, employed by the federal govt – had only been available to married women for about 5 years when I began. Equal pay took a few years longer. And it took even longer for teachers employed by state governments not to be dismissed from their permanent positions and, in the next stroke of the same pen, rehired as casual staff. Which meant that any teacher or other qualified professional employee immediately lost all entitlements to continued work, and to paid leave and, especially, to superannuation. They also had to wait even longer for equal pay.
In those circumstances, when men traditionally owned their homes in their own names rather than in the joint names of themselves plus spouse, women could be in a pretty desperate situation if their husbands were unable to work, were sacked or died or walked out on the family. The only saving grace for many women in my mother’s generation was that many men were returned soldiers, so even though there were no generally available pensions or benefits, many such women/families benefited from war widows’ pensions or a full/partial payment of TPI (totally and permanently incapacitated) pensions from veterans affairs.
We also couldn’t buy any significant property like a house or a car without a man’s “involvement”. Legally we couldn’t take out a loan or sign a lease without a male guarantor until the late 70s here. Even later in many other countries, and not at all in some places even now.
But I think our friend mariangela may be from a country/region/culture where these problems haven’t been satisfactorily dealt with or she’s doing a cultural Rip Van Winkle on us. Hasn’t kept up with the literature nor with the movement nor taken much notice of what’s been happening around her – just woke up and found some people to talk at.
Whoops!
And it took even longer for teachers employed by state governments not to be dismissed from their permanent positions when they got married and, in the next stroke of the same pen, rehired as casual staff. Which meant that any teacher or other qualified professional employee immediately lost all entitlements to continued work, and to paid leave and, especially, to superannuation.
Lea mentioned single mothers, which reminded of a conversation I had recently about Fox News Bill O’Really’s vague support for gay marriage. I somewhat shocked someone when I informed them that O’Really now says that he’s openly sympathetic to the pro-gay marriage argument, even though he uses States Rights as an escape clause by saying it should be left up to voters in individual states. The conversation turned to how it’s noticeable that he’s a lot more charitable to “homosexuals” than he’s towards single mothers, who are aggressively demonized by O’Really and his associate Fox News vermin and are cast by the network as villains destroying America’s future.
I think his sympathy stems from the fact that gays pop up everywhere regardless of class and race, plus they are usually associated with white college-educated people, especially by non-gay white college-educated people. “Single Mothers” aren’t just single mothers, they are women who have never wed, often have children with multiple fathers, are poor and receive government assistance. Finally, especially when it comes to professional race baiters like O’Really, the ultimate single mothers are black and often described as breeding like animals. Therefore gays, despite the association with sexual deviancy and the challenge to heteronormativity, are sympathetic to O’Really because their class and race makes them worthy of sympathy. It’s probably hard for him to demonize gay marriage when he socializes with gay white millionaires.
Not sure how helpful this is to the discussion of class now they I typed it out, but here it is. Here’s a link to an article on Bill O’Really’s “evolving” position on gay marriage in case anyone cares, but feel free to not give a shit about that douchecanoe.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/03/bill-oreilly-gay-marriage-evolution-timeline.html
*now that I typed it out
There are presumably other typos, so I won’t check for them.
FWIW, I think she’s legit. Elizabeth is what happens when an MRA pretends to be a feminist. This sounds like a genuine privileged white lady who’s had the luxury of not caring about any of the developments of the past 20 years and who is unlikely to ever learn about them because she’s already convinced that she is the ultimate authority on all things feminist.
Although I don’t know how long you’d need to ignore current events to think that women weren’t allowed to inherit property. Perhaps she’s from Westeros?
“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”
Lol no. It was easy to believe because it came a few weeks after a crime motivated by misogynist ideas and after the success of other tags related to this crime.
And it was also easy for the public’s mind to accept that 4chan was behind all this #endfathersday shit, because they know this site is a gathering for all “hateful, awful” misogynists failed boys (non-MRA included).
As easy as it is for the public’s mind to accept people showing “hateful, awful” attitude towards women in their everyday life too (see 4chan for good examples or see everyday life), because we’re all used to misogyny.
It is also very easy for the public to believe that a man related to MRAs circles and mass killing because women aren’t attracted to him wrote the misogynist version of Mein Kampf.
And it is so easy to convince the public’s mind of MRA’s hatred… that we don’t even try, one just has to open their websites and they will want to keep you away from women. Most men wouldn’t even bother though, they’re too busy being privileged to read rants of guys trying hard to prove they are the oppressed class.
People whining about feminists’ hateful and unfair attitude, while misogyny caused and still causes tons of shit everyday, everywhere, explain??? Don’t even get me started with crimes that are still mostly committed by men. Where are the female oppression and the feminist threat exactly? You got to be trolling. Or we are quite a nice oppressor: even with many feminist books, even after decades, even when saying #KillAllMen, almost nobody died because of our words.
I can’t even imagine what would the MRA do if a woman committed a mass murder because “men don’t date her”, if an ACTUAL threat appeared. They’re already violent entitled trolls by nature, I guess they would just go down the streets and kill everyone.
@Yuli:
Yeah, Laci Green does a great video about Isla Vista, and discussing how out of 71 mass murders committed in the past 32 years in the US, 70 were committed by men. It takes some supreme effort of will on the part of the manosphere to look at figures like that and still argue that woman-on-man violence is an equally large problem, and then have the nerve to say that WE are trivialising the victims when we try to correct their errors of fact!
[content note for video: LOTS of violent misogyny screencaps, some ableist language, footage from Elliot Rodgers]
@mildlymagnificent
IIRC, I read that working women in Japan and South Korea are not getting married because there is still a cultural expectation that women will quit their job when they get married. It’s hard two give up the income and/or interesting job and immediately become a stay at home wife when there isn’t any children and often just an apartment to look after.
I’m often annoyed by how people act as if pre-anti-discrimination laws America is some distant past. When I was growing up my father told me how in the 70s his company only had men as store managers and women, no matter how good or how long she worked there, topped out as head cashiers. Of course, even if every employee and customer was black, the manager was always white as well.
Oh, they’re still getting married, they’re just not having kids. Which, combined with a resistance to immigration, is going to wreck the economies of both countries and completely destroy Japan’s welfare system (including healthcare) unless some of the politicians in power develop enough sense to try to turn the misogyny ship around pretty damn soon.
Funnily enough, there’s an interesting backstory on that. It’s absolutely true that women couldn’t inherit property in England if it was “entailed” so that only sons or other male relatives could inherit. It’s an unremarkable fact that fathers usually love their daughters. If those fathers happen to be wealthy they may not be able to overcome the legal hurdles of entailed succession – but they could hire inventive lawyers.
What did they come up with? The trust fund.
Modern reformers of taxation lurks and perks hate trusts the way they are often used now. But for married women who really truly couldn’t own property in their own right – any valuable property became her husband’s on their marriage – the trust fund was an absolute godsend.
There was no way she could get her hands on the capital. But nor could anyone else. So wealthy fathers could ensure their daughters could maintain themselves in the manner to which they were accustomed without risking loss of assets in the hands of reckless or feckless sons in law. It also meant that those women had some security in the event of widowhood or abandonment. She had a permanent source of income. (Of course, lawyers and bankers were sometimes a bit cavalier with the investments. Back in the days before limited liability companies that was often a real problem through no fault of the investor so they could also lose out that way – and there’s always outright dishonesty resulting in losses. But that was a general risk rather than one specific to women.)
This may just be the circles that I move in, but I think in the US we still have a very strong causal relationship that leads to women leaving their jobs as a result of getting married, we just don’t spell it out.
There’s a very strong pressure that married het people should have kids. (Is there child-having privilege? Sometimes it seems like there is.) And that the wife will be the primary childcare provider. And, of course, nobody has that magical flexible job that you can do while caring for children.
It’s not representative or anything, but all my female college friends swore that they would keep up with their careers – not a single one aspired to be a stay-at-home mom – but every single one who got married proceeded to work for two to five years, have kids, leave their jobs or reduce their hours to almost nothing, and not have any plans to go back.
There are all kinds of cultural ideas that, when combined, make it very likely that women who have kids will end up quitting their jobs. Which illustrates the fact that equality on paper isn’t the same thing as actual equality.
That’s not at all the same situation as what’s going on in Japan and South Korea, though, where until very recently it was totally legal to fire female workers for getting pregnant (or turning 25 and thus becoming “Christmas cake”).
Luckily each English speaking nations consume enough of each other’s popular culture that for the most we can understand each other’s colloquialisms. I watch enough British TV/movies that I have to guard against speaking in Britishisms because it’s so pretentious when Americans do that!
Well no, other English speaking countries consume far more American media than vice versa.
You do realise that out of the whole UK population with all its linguistic diversity, for the most part only a small segment (South Eastern, middle/upper class) gets a decent amount of media representation, and an even smaller amount of that media ends up reaching an US audience. So the pretentious ‘Britishisms’ you’re having to stop yourself speaking in are probably not even representative of how most people speak.
Then again, in the USA it’s still legal to fire someone for being gay or lesbian, so meh.