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
That actually still isn’t satire, Grumpyoldman. That’s just sarcasm.
The bit about Elizabeth was pretty splainey too.
Watching the fallout from this is going to be fun. Screencaps will be shared, angry accusations of feminist conspiracy aired, claims of satire and irony thrown right, left, and center. And I wonder how the classic AVfM-ers are going to take to the kinder, gentler site?
Gonna need more popcorn.
I’m sorry, but this sounds a lot more like a dude’s idea about what a privileged woman’s life is like than what an actual privileged woman’s life is like.
I think that even if you’re from a very comfortable background, odds are you encountered some kind of gender-based pressure if you’re female (and even if you’re not).
Elizabeth was also clearly lying about being a Brit, as the actual Brits here immediately spotted. People who’re lying about one thing are usually lying about other things too.
I’m going with Elizabeth being a troll and possibly not even being a woman because she claimed to be English but then didn’t speak like one. The sheer volume of posts was suspicious too.
Ninja’d by Cassandra.
Yeah, I didn’t read Elizabeth as being English, or a woman. Which reminds me: is the term private school used in the UK, or are they still referred to as public schools – or does that only refer to some?
@strivingally, “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!”
seems kinda nuts for the manosphere to look at 71 incidents of mass-murder and argue any point about woman-on-man violence, or for that matter man-on-man violence. Heck, it would be crazy to use the acts of 71 people over 30 years to make any kind of general statement at all about hundreds of millions of people regarding anything.
That terminology confused the fuck out of me the first time I heard it.
We were still calling the posh schools public schools when I was in high school.
Yeah. It’s really hard to think of public school not being “public” in the way we normally think of it.
The easy way to remember it is that it’s not comparing schools, it’s comparing lifestyles. It’s going away from home to a public school versus private tutors coming to your home, rather than distinguishing different kinds of schools.
If Elizabeth was a male troll, he was a very sophisticated one because he did an excellent job of staying in persona pretty flawlessly for a very long time. I was zonked all day Friday due to minor surgery, so I only read the exchange after it was over. What frustrated me was I thought “her” underlying assumption was that we could all get along if we would be nice and polite, which would be true if everyone in the world actually was nice and polite. But nobody really attacked that assumption by quoting one or more of Paul Elam’s vile remarks and asking her if she thought a legitimate human rights advocate would say something like that. If “she” was in fact a troll I think her response to that would have outed her. I think we were a bit too quick to decide that someone who disagreed with us was a troll. I have never found trolls all that difficult to unmask.
I can’t put too much weight on diction because with all the BBC shows that go on the telly in the states those two dialects of English are getting fairly mixed up.
This is part of the reason why trolls shouldn’t even try faking being from a place they’re not familiar with. Language is too regional.
Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I’m pretty sure people did ask her something along those lines? She just continued on with her, “But they’ll be nice to us if we’re nice to them!” spiel.
He couldn’t have been all that sophisticated if pretty much all the women here read him as a. a dude and b. not British right away. Also, note how all the Brits and even non-Brits who’re familiar with the dialects were able to spot the linguistic inconsistencies really easily? Maybe consider not assuming that we must all be wrong just because you personally didn’t notice these things.
grumpyoldman, I really think you’re the only one she fooled.
Ah! I didn’t know that.
We’ve a long history of unmasking trolls, GrumpyOldMan. Some of them keep it up for a good while, some give themselves away much sooner. Please, don’t go the “play nice” route – we had that with “Erin” recently, and look where that went.
Even if Elizabeth was for real, this isn’t a Feminism 101 site, as we’ve told so many people over the years. We’re not here to educate starry-eyed Wouldn’t It Be Nice If Everyone Was Nice types any more than to educate MRAs. School ’em, maybe, but that’s all.
When you boil it all right down, all the MRM is is a really inept PR campaign. They don’t have any beliefs other than old fashioned misogyny, and all they do is try to make it palatable.
The trouble (for them) has always been that it doesn’t work. They are incredibly bad at plausible deniabilty. Their leadership has no idea how they look to the outside world, and the rank and file usually don’t even bother trying to camouflage their hatred. We see this here all the time when they come here, make a show of being reasonable then explode into rage and threats when people disagree with them.
What have they achieved? Well, when people are arguing with misogynists online, they tend to call them ‘MRAs’ whether they are or not, and to call misogynist arguments ‘MRAish’. In attempting to hide misogyny, they’ve become the public face of misogyny. In spite of this being a complete failure of their original intent, they seem to think this is a victory because people are talking about them!
So while it’s fun to mock JB for being a seriously crappy PR person, I think it only fair to remember that she’s part of a seriously crappy PR movement.
The thing is, trolls are generally angry people, and you can usually goad them into blowing their cover fairly easily. I couldn’t pick up much anger, though maybe the fact that she didn’t seem to get frustrated would point to an assumed persona. As I say, if “she” was a male troll, “she” was damn good.
Thing is, too: when someone comes in telling us to be nice to misogynists, whether they include MRAs et al or claim to know nothing about them, that person is almost always shown to be a troll sooner or later. At the very least, they aren’t posting in good faith.
Nah, not all trolls blow up that fast (it was kind of disappointing that Elizabeth’s protracted whining didn’t lead to a meltdown, I admit. Troll meltdowns are fun.)
Whoever it was they didn’t use the term “innit” at anytime which is kinda of odd of a Brit, innit?
Sometimes you get genuine people turning up and demanding everyone play by their rules, but usually they go stomping off after a little pushback. The fact that she was sticking around posting again and again and again was not at all usual for ‘be nice’ types.
Some trolls are. But she’s a tone troll, and since their whole schtick is politeness, they can act polite for a REALLY long time. Possibly forever. Because while they may be lying about everything else, “people should always act nice” is not something they’re lying about.
Also, we weren’t really trying to pop her. Maybe we were bored or whatever, but most people chose to engage her at face value.