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
I am genuinely confused as to why anyone would think that discrimination against gay people in the US makes the fact that Japan and South Korea are sitting right next to Yemen in the gender equality index (the only highly developed countries that are that low on the list) OK.
@Cassandrakitty
I googled up a wage gap chart because South Korea is jaw dropping in that regard and Japan isn’t much better.
http://www.movehub.com/blog/global-gender-pay-gap-map
More info.
News Release
Increased Political Participation Helps Narrow Global Gender Gap in 2013
Oliver Cann, Associate Director, Media, Tel.: +41 (0)79 799 3405 [email protected]
عربي I Español I Français I Deutsch I Português I 日本語 I 中文
The Global Gender Gap Report 2013 finds 86 out of 133 countries improved their global gender gap between 2012 and 2013, with the area of political participation seeing the greatest progress
Iceland has the narrowest gender gap in the world, followed by Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Data indicates overall slight gains in gender parity mask the emergence of twin-track paths towards economic equality in many countries and regions.
Download the full report, covering 136 economies including rankings, video and an interactive map.
Geneva, Switzerland, 25 October 2013 – The world’s gender gaps narrowed slightly in 2013 on the back of definite if not universal improvements in economic equality and political participation between the sexes, according to the Global Gender Gap Report 2013, which is published today.
The eighth annual edition of the Report ranks 136 countries on their ability to close the gender gap in four key areas: economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, health and survival, educational attainment, political participation and economic equality. Of the 133 countries that were measured in both 2012 and 2013, 86 actually improved their gender gap during this time. Overall, the Report finds Iceland the most advanced country in the world in terms of gender equality for the fifth year running. It, along with Finland (2nd), Norway (3rd) and Sweden (4th), has now closed over 80% of its gender gap. These countries are joined in the top 10 by the Philippines, which enters the top five for the first time, Ireland (6th), New Zealand (7th), Denmark (8th), Switzerland (9th) and Nicaragua (10th).
Elsewhere, in 14th place Germany is the highest-placed individual G20 economy, although it falls one place from 2012. Next is South Africa (17th, down one), the United Kingdom (level on 18th) and Canada (up one to 20th). The United States comes 23rd, also down one place since 2012. After South Africa, the next highest BRICS nation is Russia (61st), followed by Brazil (62nd), China (69th) and India (101st). At the bottom of the ranking are Chad (134th), Pakistan (135th) and Yemen (136th).
At the global level, the Report finds that in 2013, 96% of the health and survival gender gap has now been closed. It is the only one of the four pillars that has widened since the Report was first compiled in 2006. In terms of education, the global gender gap stands at 93%, with 25 countries having closed their gaps completely. The gender gaps for economic equality and political participation are only 60% and 21% closed respectively, although progress is being made in these areas, with political participation narrowing by almost 2% over the last year. In both developing and developed countries alike, relative to the numbers of women in tertiary education and in the workforce overall, women’s presence in economic leadership positions is limited.
Regional Analysis
Europe’s progress towards eliminating its gender gap is polarized, with countries from Northern and Western Europe presenting a stark contrast to those from the South and East. Spain comes in 30th, having closed 72% of its gender gap, France ranks 45th (70% closed) while Italy ranks 71st.
The Philippines is the highest ranking country in Asia, primarily due to success in health, education and economic participation. China stays in the same position as last year. India remains the lowest-ranked of the BRICS economies, even after gaining four places. Japan (105th) slips four places despite some improvements in the economic participation and opportunity subindex score. Japan is followed in the region by the Republic of Korea (111th).
(From here – http://www.weforum.org/news/increased-political-participation-helps-narrow-global-gender-gap-2013)
Only 25 years ago, I could cite you examples where women who trained men watched as those same men got promoted above them.
I did some research on the public service in New Zealand, and up to the 1970s, women who got married had to resign upon marriage as married women were legally not allowed to work in the public service. There was also some, related idea that the wages of men were tied to the cost of “keeping” a wife and children. Of course, those were back in the days of strong unions and a much smaller disparity between the lowest-paid and the highest-paid in an organisation.
It wasn’t just an idea. It was the explicit judgement in Australia’s famous Harvester decision. The empire being what it was, judgements in one empire (now Commonwealth) country were often cited in other jurisdictions in other countries.
http://worksite.actu.org.au/the-harvester-judgement-and-australias-minimum-wage/
A briefer description here.
http://worksite.actu.org.au/the-harvester-judgement-and-australias-minimum-wage/
What we have to remember is that in the days before washing machines, cheap ready-made clothing, cooking equipment (other than a wood stove) and vacuum cleaners, the job of a housekeeper/wife was, in fact, very high value. Making and mending most of the children’s clothing, doing the laundry with a potstick over a pot of boiling water on a fire in the backyard, washing and polishing floors on hands and knees took a hefty amount of time and effort. Having a husband who earned enough for the whole family rather than both parents having to work outside the home was a huge social advance.
Although things have noticeably changed in the last three decades. When Britain’s Channel 4 first started broadcasting in late 1982, they deliberately and polemically hired continuity announcers with very strong regional accents – and I remember being struck by this at the time and thinking how refreshing it was. And today, it’s routine to hear (for instance) a pronounced Newcastle accent commentating over Big Brother, one of British TV’s highest-rated programmes – we think nothing of it, but this would have been unimaginable in the 1970s.
On the other hand, when it comes to accents for export, the range narrows dramatically. Daniel Craig massively tones down his native Wirral accent to play James Bond, and you’d never know that David Tennant was Scottish on the evidence of Doctor Who. I also understand that Ken Loach’s films, if they play in the US at all, generally do so with subtitles – in fact, one of his films, the Scotland-set Sweet Sixteen, even played in English cinemas with subtitles in the first fifteen minutes, just to ease audiences into the accents and dialect.
Scottish accents aren’t at all unusual in British media, but they tend to drift more towards “Edinburgh” – i.e. the Scots equivalent of the kind of middle/upper class accents you’re talking about – than to Glasgow or anything more overtly regional. The sitcom Rab C. Nesbitt (clip here) is very unusual in that it’s in unvarnished Glaswegian, but the mere fact that it’s always singled out as an example shows how rare it is – at least on national television.
Oh my giddy fingers.
That first link should be to this piece. http://www.abc.net.au/federation/fedstory/ep3/ep3_events.htm
I do like it when they include more diversity. Especially when a show is set in a location outside the SE too. Even when I need subtitles to understand it.
Which reminds me. I was playing Wolfenstein: the new order the other day. I had subtitles set to “foregin only” because I hate teletext in games (pet peeve – it’s not a subtitle if it’s the same language) but they were still showing and I thought it was a bug. Turns out that English in a perfectly understandable Scottish accent counts as “foreign”.
I’m as likely to hear northern accents as south-eastern ones on the television I watch, whether we’re talking Dalziel and Pascoe or Time Team or Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
I have trouble understanding the “satire” these people like to engage in. Even if their ideas weren’t terrible to begin with, their definition of satire doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
Say I’m a comic book writer in the ’90s. I’m an outspoken critic of the extreme, violent anti-hero trend of superhero comics of the time period, and propose a return to the more lighthearted, silly superhero comics of the Silver Age. In order to make my point, I write a story featuring Superman gaining the ability to change people’s eye color by farting, Jimmy Olsen briefly becoming the Amazing Ferret-Man and Lois Lane trying to discover Superman’s secret identity by means of a robot who bursts into song at the most inappropriate moments. Everywhere in the story, I use my characters as mouthpieces for anti-gritty comic commentary by ways of straw men. I frequently confuse comics like Watchmen for pointlessly violent ’90s comics.
The comic is published, and everyone except my most loyal ideological supporters are all “this is a really stupid comic.” My point is questioned, my writing skills are criticised and my heavy use of straw man arguments is ridiculed. To avoid criticism, I turn around and say it was satire all along.
But… what, exactly, was I satirizing? The way certain writers and artists use characters as mouthpieces for their own agendas? An inability to understand other writers’ points? My own views? What?
It’s shitty enough to try to weasel your way out of what you’ve said before by saying “just kidding!”, instead of taking responsibility for the crap that comes out of your mouth (or pen, or typewriter, or whatever). It’s even shittier when your views are clearly bigoted, hateful and violent, and the “satire” you’re creating perfectly aligns with your actual, stated views.
Went to bed kind of early last night, so I’m just now catching up with the thread. Please forgive me for resurrecting stuff from comment page one.
::applause::
I’m currently a SAHM myself. When my husband and I sat down to hammer out changes to our life insurance policies a few years ago, we crunched numbers and realized that it made sense to insure us both for the same amount. Mr. FM’s (admittedly well-paying) job requires him to be on the road anywhere from 3-6 months out of the year. If he dies, I’ll have a hard adjustment as I have to look for work. But he’ll also struggle if I’m gone, since he’ll either have to quit his job or pay for someone to handle all the housework, yardwork, and above all, childcare.
Also, I wonder if JB realizes that by dismissing unpaid domestic labor, she’s also throwing SAHM dads under the bus, as well as men who cut back on their work hours or change their career paths in order to better serve their families? How is it helping these men to reinforce the stereotypes that domestic pursuits are worthless?
Ok, I had to click that link by Vulcan.
34 paragraphs, and the takeaway is: “As a gay man, I think it’s a excellent point that marriage is all about procreation, and this is a vital and important argument which in no way makes someone a homophobe for writing a bill to prevent gay marriage.”
You would think he’d spend all those paragraphs proving that’s not actually indicative of her opinions on gay people, or denouncing her bill, or downplaying past actions.
Nope. Just a lot of whining about how the feminists are “hijacking” LGBT rights and “attacking” someone by… describing their actions?
Janet Bloomfield really is a nasty piece of work. I don’t know if she genuinely has these opinions or just wants to please some of her followers but this woman really is quite vile. She is also a hypocrite. She wrote an article about how rape isn’t that terrible and she would rather be ‘raped than have a broken arm’ (true story but I can’t be bothered to wade through her blog and dig it up. I do not feel like torturing myself today) then when a child at school turns around and threatens her daughter with rape she goes balistic and calls everyone from the town baker to the postman to the villiage barber and goes on a rampage (and yes it’s right for a Mother to be concerned. I would be even more worried if she brushed it off, but still, it shows her pure hypocrasy). If it isn’t that bad Jan then why all the fuss? After all, it’s better than her recieving a broken arm, right? Then she really goes on to take the biscuit by justifying Jimmy Saville’s actions and blaming his victims, but when it comes relatively close to happening to one of her own, it’s the most terrible thing in the world. So Jan, it doesn’t matter when it happens to other people’s kids, just yours, because your such a special snowflake and you are higher in value than every other human being on earth?
@mariaangela
“That is my point, that for a woman there is no striving through accomplishments for status, it is removable for reasons she has no control over. ”
Maybe I don’t understand the notion of status. But a woman academic and professional accomplishments are not wiped out when the spouse is out of the picture. My grand-mother used to tell me that it was more important for a woman to get an education than to get married. So I got an education and married late, after my career was established. Keeping my family name was a non-negotiable condition as there was no way in Hell that I would agree to lose any of the recognition attached to my name. Hubby never objected. When my husband passed away, it was difficult for a number of reasons but my credentials and my capacity to earn decent wages remained. I see losing some of the economic power I had related to losing the benefits of being a two incomes household. The one thing I will acknowledge is that it is harder for a woman to climb the professional ladder and to find a partner who is supportive and willing to share equally in caring of the children and sharing the domestic choirs. But its not impossible. Many of my friends have the full package, a lovely family and a great job. In Canada anyway, the laws are not discriminatory in terms of gender. What causes the problems is the misogyny which is still part of many men and some women mentality. Some times I feel its not enough to squash misogyny in men, its really essential that women see themselves as worthy of fending for their own rights inside the relationship and value their life independently of being a mother and a spouse. One of the nastiest comment I ever had came from a woman who told me that I was less because I did not have children of my own. I think she resented her career going nowhere because she had many kids from a partner who expected her to be a traditional wife and saw her work as a temporary source of income until he made the big bucks. It was easier to dump on me than examine her own life. I guess this explains why I loathe Femras even more than their male counterpart. i sense lots of resentment and a desire to lash at women who get respect professionally. I find that raising a family is an admirable choice, but its not an automatic choice and who stays at home should not be necessarily the woman. There are all kind of scenarios that works. A buddy of mine who is a candidate for Ph.D. is the one who stayed home the first year of his son since his wife was already working as a professor and it was the option that was affecting the less their finance. The archaic picture of gender roles is so harmful in so many ways, it’s really the Procrustes bed which amputates big chunks of men and women souls. I am still resentful for my mother forcing me to take ballet lessons because she thought that I was not feminine enough instead of the karate lessons I wanted. My apology for the long rant, I needed to get it off my chest.
@Flying Mouse
“If he dies, I’ll have a hard adjustment as I have to look for work. But he’ll also struggle if I’m gone, since he’ll either have to quit his job or pay for someone to handle all the housework, yardwork, and above all, childcare.
Also, I wonder if JB realizes that by dismissing unpaid domestic labor, she’s also throwing SAHM dads under the bus, as well as men who cut back on their work hours or change their career paths in order to better serve their families? How is it helping these men to reinforce the stereotypes that domestic pursuits are worthless?”
I would think so. There is some strange accounting going on about what we value. The attitude of equating unpaid and worthless is just too prevalent for my taste. Personally, I think benefits should be granted for parental leave until the children are in school full time independently of gender. If only to recognize the importance and hard work of parenting and mitigating the economic impact and career setback of raising children.
LOL. You know people share things to mock them or comment on how awful they are, right?
Pretty sure everyone here thought that article was terrible, and agrees that Jezebel itself is pretty terrible.
Curious how you fail to note the difference between David’s relationship to Jezebel and Paul’s relationship to AVfM. In case you’re having a brain fart, let me spell it out for you: David does not write for or contribute to Jez and has no responsibility for its content. Paul is the founder and bossman of AVfM and the author of the article in question. Apples, oranges.
You don’t understand how intersectionality works. First of all, that homeless veteran is not oppressed for his maleness. Like you said, that is an issue of class (and disability). Second, no one here is going to argue that all men have an advantage over all women. The question is: what advantage does a homeless male veteran contemplating suicide have over a homeless female veteran contemplating suicide? What advantage does an affluent white man have over you?
I don’t know why I’m bothering. If you haven’t bothered to understand the arguments we’re making by now, there’s no reason to think you’ll start any time soon.
Haha. For all their claims that David doesn’t matter, they sure do rush to defend themselves when he calls them on their shit. Notice how the story has changed from “she maybe a homophobe but she has something of value to say” to “she’s not a homophobe at all”.
AVfM has updated the original article to include satire tags…
… which reveal the worst parts, the parts saying the violence is not wrong but not worth the trouble, are **not** satire. That’s the part he sincerely believes. Apparently he thinks “satire” is the part where he uses colorful language to describe his sincere beliefs.
@mariangela
wow you are a condescending asshole.
@LBT
WOw I am soooo uneducated about this stuff, so I can’t help you. Sorry 😛
@cassandra
Ditto. I grew up middle class and we only went broke in teenage-hood. But like, even though we didn’t have money, both my parents had phds, I’d gotten a good education*, which made it way easier to take the GED. And my great aunt had enough money (not loads but some) to keep us afloat when my mom had now and probably more stuff I’m missing.
*not that you can’t when your poor, but generally schools in middle class areas get more well funded, and my parents even had money to send us to two years of private school.
IDK, I’m rambling, does any of that make sense?
@fruitloopsie
Is this your first encounter with judgybicth? I only ran into her up to a month ago. and yeah she’s kind of confusing and misleading 😛
@weirdwoodtreehugger
Drunk you still makes way more sense than mariangela 😛
@strivingally
Eh, I don’t want to play the no-true-scottmans game :/ There are plenty of feminists with weird theories. (not that the rest of you can’t say what u think, I just don’t feel like theorizing over whether it.)
mariangela, should you return, I have a pair of questions:
How would you define third wave feminism? And why do you want nothing to do with it? (I’m paraphrasing because my iPad will get cranky if I go back to quote)
I’m really behind, but did people see that AVfM seems to be systematically scrubbing their website and/or rewriting old posts to make them more palatable, while also adding robots.txt to their site to prevent archive.org from crawling? Good thing people have screen shots.
Indeed, I’m sure many people do not “wike” JudgyBitch. And for good reason.
The robot.txt cover-up is surely another PR victory on behalf of AVFM. Nothing deters those snoopy liberal journalists like a good cover up. That will make sure that they don’t believe you have something to hide.
It seemed to me that Mariangela was just too full of Marxist dogma. Marx was a very astute observer of economic life in the early part of the Industrial Revolution, but, like most of us, he was less astute in predicting the future. He predicted that Communism would come first to the most advanced nations (US, UK, Germany), and a backward country like Russia would be far behind and undeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America would be the last to adopt a Communist system. Marx was not a Marxist; Marxism has become a pseudo-religion with a rather inflexible dogma where everything is seen through class-colored glasses.
Elizabeth (from a couple of days ago), on the other hand, seemed to me to be a very nice, very young 20-year-old who had grown up among Very Nice People who protected and sheltered and cosseted her, so that whenever she needed something she asked politely and she got it. She was really very out-of-place here — a well-fed, well-groomed, pampered little kitty who wandered out of the safety of her home and encountered a pack of old, scruffy, battle-scarred alley cats (us). She thought we should all just join hands with the MRAs and sign Cumbayah, and everything would work out. Somebody else here used the phrase, “a poor grasp of how the world works,” and that was her problem as I see it. Her logic was fine, if the world was really how she saw it. It seems like if a woman was being raped, she would advise her to say (on a polite, ladylike voice) “Sir! What you are doing is most unpleasant” and the rapist would reply “Of course. How could I have been so inconsiderate!” and stop. She seemed to take the claim of the MRAs to be a human rights organization at face value. Instead of arguing with her, I think we should have answered with some of the vile things Paul Elam has written and ask her if that sounds like a great defender of human rights to her.
As to JudgyBitch, I can’t figure out whether she is a feminist mole doing her best to discredit the MRA by spouting noxious garbage in their name or merely the worst PR person in recorded history.
By the way, I would like to comment that David is indeed a terrible hypocrite. I have been visiting this blog for almost ten days, and I have yet to see him (or anyone else) condemn the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks, and it is obvious that his (our) silence in this matter is meant to condone genocide. (Note to MRAs: THIS is what real satire looks like.)
Thank you. I laughed.
Oh awesome. AVfM *is* trying to give their public image a makeover. I hope some IT-savvy people are mirroring/caching all the distilled woman-hating before AVfM can destroy the evidence. It really is just sad how an organisation which claims to be representing the interests of 50% of the population is so reluctant to publicise what their membership *really* thinks of the other 50%, not because it’s bad things to think about other human beings, but because it might make them look bad.