A Voice for Men’s “social media director” Janet Bloomfield is proving to be quite the innovator in the world of public relations. You may recall her cheeky approach to publicizing the recent AVFM conference, which involved awarding herself “whore points” for calling critics of AVFM “whores.”
Now she’s moved on to straight-up libel, making up fake quotes in order to make feminist writer Jessica Valenti look bad, and then bragging about it on her blog.
This whole sordid episode began several days ago when Valenti, on vacation, decided to send a message to “all the misogynist whiners in my feed today” in the form of a photo of her on a beach wearing a t-shirt saying “I bathe in male tears.”
The AVFM social media attack squad seized on this at once, with Bloomfield telling her followers, wrongly, that the picture had been posted in response to a question about male suicide. When Valenti corrected her on this point, Bloomfield offered a half-assed apology (“My bad”).
Then Bloomfield, demonstrating just how insincere her apology had been, decided to up the ante, concocting four “quotes” from thin air and attributing them to Valenti.
[EDIT: JB’s Twitter account was suspended, so here’s a screenshot of the tweets; I’ll keep the original links up in case she’s ever unsuspended, though that seems unlikely.]
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495366752168329216
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367262187302913
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367996337295360
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495374177013346304
Naturally, as you’ll see if you follow any of these Tweets back to their original context on Twitter, many of Bloomfield’s fans assumed that these quotes were real.
Needless to say, some responded to Bloomfield’s dirty tricks with all-too predictable harassment of her target:
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559012449267713
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559068841680896
After brazenly libeling Valenti, Bloomfield went on to boast about it on her blog. In a post with the smug title “Jessica Valenti is not having a good day,” she wrote:
Now, these fake quotes may have been “utterly plausible” only to those who are ignorant of Valenti’s work, but in the hothouse world of the Men’s Rights movement there are people who would probably believe that Valenti eats babies. As I noted, JB’s followers had no trouble believing them.
Later in the post Bloomfield added, with more than a hint of maliciousness:
It’s not clear how having made-up quotes attributed to you counts as “owning your shit,” but I guess I just don’t understand Bloomfield’s higher morality.
Needless to say, in the real world, deliberately publishing false information about someone in order to harm their reputation is libel.
When confronted with this on Twitter, Bloomfield offered some inventive excuses:
@JudgyBitch1 @JessicaValenti JB, "I didn't like her shirt so I lied about her maliciously to harm her" isn't an acceptable defense for libel
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014
Later on she attempted to prove that her libelous fake Valenti quotes didn’t matter … by making up things about me:
https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495684048237633536
As I noted,
@Alzael1 @virtuarat @JudgyBitch1 I'm pretty sure that "well, I lied about David Futrelle too" is not an acceptable libel defense either.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014
Of course, I’m no lawyer. I can only hope that some people who are lawyers are taking a good hard look at Bloomfield’s lies.
I would encourage you all to screenshot or otherwise archive Bloomfield’s self-incriminatory blog post, as well as her tweets, just in case she decides to talk to a lawyer and take them all down.
At this point, I think it’s probably safe to assume that anything and everything anyone from AVFM says should be taken not with a grain but with an entire shaker of salt.
“It,” not “if.”
Congratulations, emilygoddess! Seven years! That’s wonderful!
Congrats emilygoddess. 🙂
Re Pharyngula: I wouldn’t go so far as to call them all good people, particularly not for those here who are religious, for obvious reasons, or who are social scientists/humanists because apparently our fields are useless. Not PZ, who seems reasonable, but some of the commenters are extreme in these areas.
pallygirl,
I’m one of those people. I’m Jackie with this same gravatar. I don’t discuss religion here to be friendly and inclusive, but I am a skeptical anti-theist and still a good person. you may not like my perspective on various beliefs without me being a bad person. In my life there are no real world spaces for me to be open about my atheism and skepticism. There are only a few online. Pharyngula is one space where I feel free to discuss social justice and religion openly because that is what the space is for. If that does not float your boat, don’t go to that site. I did not say Nate was good people because he is a regular there, but that he was good people and I recognized him from there.
That’s not a popular opinion on Pharyngula. I don’t know why you think it is.
Congratulations, emilygoddess!
Emilygoddess — that’s awesome! Congrats!
Sparky — if she’s anything like me she’ll go “well you’re a poopyhead and I like dinos so :-p ” — mind you, this won’t win her many friends, and she may still feel the need to meet social standards, but good on you for giving her a background where not meeting them is perfectly okay. Sounds like she’s still Dr. Suess aged — be who you are and say what you feel because those who matter don’t mind, and those that mind don’t matter.
@Lea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmxfZGkfByE ?
Congratulations emilygoddess! That’s wonderful!
Pharyngula more often, but yes I do. I love Freethought Blogs, to be honest. Probably my fave space on the internet.
As to my shirt… not sure how many here know who Miri Mogilevksy is? She blogs at FTB under the Brute Reason banner? She took that pic back at WiSIII this past May. We dubbed it Ceiling Cat. 😀
I’m wracking my brains trying to remember if I ever read anything about a matriarchy ever existing. At least in recorded history, even when women were in power, most if not all societies were and are patriarchies… right? Or am I wrong about that?
Which is why, after I flounced and then realized how terrible I’d been, I stayed away for so long. I’m not sure how long memories are here, but I was the idiot who tried to say that it was cynicism/misanthropy behind the “how not to get raped” “advice”. I flounced. Then did more research and realized what an absolute idiot I had been and that I had deserved everything everyone here flung at me over that.
Hi! I was trying to place you, then I recognized your gravatar. How are you?
I’m studying to be an anthropologist. Pharyngulites (or The Horde… whatever you wanna call them :D) don’t have problems with the social sciences in general. It’s just that, occasionally, certain aspects of social sciences can be used by certain people to justify inequality and the status quo. See Evolutionary Psychology, Cultural Relativism, arm-chair psychology, etc.
I would argue that if anyone has disdain for the social sciences, it’s Richard Dawkins (*spits*) and his fans.
As for religion… since PZ’s first claim to fame (or at least, when I first heard about him) is “desecrating” a blessed communion wafer, that really isn’t surprising. Like Lea, that’s also part of why I’m part of that community. I’ll save my personal thoughts about religion and faith for another time, or you can read about them on my blog.
DonB: When the MRM actually decides to do something for the male victims of domestic violence other than try to exploit them with false equivalencies, maybe we’ll stop treating you all like a bunch of shitweasels.
Particularly history.
Re Pharyngula, things may have changed over time re the social sciences, but it wasn’t too long ago when the commenters started throwing a lot of humanities and social sciences disciplines under the bus. That’s about the time I stopped reading the comments and stuck to reading what PZ was saying. Things may have changed over time but YMMV.
Re the religion side of things, same issue re throwing all religious people under the bus a la religion poisons everything.
As such, I choose to stay away from the comments there generally, unless there is a thread I’m interested in, but I will not comment in that website.
There’s still a nastiness to the comments there, which I have been reading with interest in the “I agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson” thread.
@AL3H:
Fair call. What I was trying to say to Nathan was “You made mistakes in the past, and you know it, and you’re trying to make a positive change, so don’t beat yourself up too much”, but I can understand how it could come across as dismissive of troll-ees when generalised. Thanks for reminding me to be mindful of others and to avoid making sweeping statements. 🙂
/delurking
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that “men’s tears” was an expression like “white women’s tears”, i.e. a derailing tactic by the privileged group to turn the discussion about bigotry into how they feel attacked and how bad it makes them feel and paint the marginalized person as the villain for being so “mean”.
@strivingally
Speaking of being dismissive of trollees, the next time you waltz onto a site full of feminists, trash them, compare them to AVFM and MGTOWs, invite good faith debate and then bail without responding to it, DON’T.
AA: I’mma take that conversation to my own blog to avoid derailing anything here. Long story short, I wasn’t feeling the good faith in the dogpile at that other site.
I actually haven’t really read the comments on the Neil deGrasse Tyson post… hrm…
The Pharyngulite Horde can indeed be mean. I’ve heard so many description of them… but I think Rabid Shark Den was the best. I do honestly enjoy it, though. Y’all here are amazing with trolls, but the Horde… I sometimes wonder why trolls even bother. I’m surprised there aren’t, like, Creepy Pasta stories around troll sites about the Horde… 😀
I say all this with love, of course, because I love most of them. I’m a commenter there myself, of course, and have quite a bit of fun with them often. I consider the vast majority of them friends, some of whom I’ve met in meat space (at Women in Secularism II and III) and others who are, at least so far, just online friends.
But yes, I can’t disagree with you, pallygirl. Pharyngula is definitely not the place for everyone, and it isn’t even about thick skin, as I’m pretty sure they can gnaw through the thickest of skins. Even I have to take a break every once in a while…
Oh, fer fucksakes. Do you need to have basic logic explained to you personally? Okay, here goes:
Sarcastic t-shirt ≠ making defamatory shit up and stuffing it in someone else’s mouth.
You’re welcome. You’re even more welcome to fuck off!
@strivingally
I don’t see anything except two old posts.
@ magnesium:
“Maybe it’s not so much that they think the world is an oppressive matriarchy, as that they want it to be one.”
Methinks they want women to validate their concerns, so MRA women have a great deal of currency in their movement.
Exactly what those concerns are I’m not sure, but their concerns aren’t the stuff they rage about.
…mainly because if you start agreeing that optional infant genital surgery’s probably a human rights violation, point out that reversible male birth control is going to be on the market really soon now, or agree workers in predominantly-male areas deserve better workplace protections? Even that men do deserve to take paternity leave and stay home with kids?
Or that prison rape is a horrible thing, that women do abuse kids, et cetera?
They still want to scream about feminazis.
I stopped engaging with them when one denied that women had been mostly treated as property in Western Europe over the last 2K years… Documented historical fact, I thought…
The MRA guy flatly denied it.
They have their own reality side-spur going, and it’s really pointless to argue with either persons or groups who’ve become delusional. If you argue, you become the focus for their paranoid rage…
Though the crazier these folks get in public, the better, so I suppose engaging serves a purpose.
I wish they’d actually stop using real issues as stalking horses for
THINGS ARE CHANGING AND I WANT THEM TO GO BACK THE WAY THEY WERE!
And, you know, work on the issues… Because there’s *some* truth to some of them.
Auntie Alias:
I will be posting something soon. Including an apology.
Well, Don was certainly gross wasn’t he. Glad he ran himself out but fast.
Dammit. Much as I’m glad not have my green blotch anymore, the weird formatting shit that happens with my icon is kinda irritating; I keep NOT seeing pages of comments, and the “next page” at the bottom is completely missing! This is so weird and irritating!
RE: TheDjinni
The fact that you’re upset over JBs actions but not JVs actions is, I suppose, part of the dogmatic hypocrisy that all feminists cling to.
Um. Have you SEEN this shit JB says? Or did you just come here over this one thing and decide she was totally right because feminists have dogma?
RE: emilygoddess
Even less related: Sunday was my sobriety date. I haven’t had a drink in seven years (and two days)!
Yay! *firecrackers and sparkles*
I’m sure I was probably one of the ones having none of Nathan’s “they’re just being cynical” arguments before. Glad to see that he’s realized how messed up that argument was – wouldn’t it be nice if every guy who runs into a wall of “nope, and here’s why you’re wrong about this” could stop and have a rethink?
I’ve read a few of her posts, so the name’s familiar.
Ceiling Cat is my deity of choice! (And Basement Cat, of course. Let’s be fair about this.)
Strangely enough, there’s good evidence that the woman as property transactional marriage wasn’t really common. It certainly wasn’t universal. It was the usual practice for warlords and aristocrats for political purposes and for upper classes/ gentry generally. For the land owning, land rights holding yeoman and peasant classes, there were issues of whether a prospective partner was or wasn’t a good match for the purposes of farming the property.
But for most people most of the time, people formed their own marriages and lived in nuclear families, because they couldn’t afford to feed any more mouths than that. The large extended family living in a single dwelling is only possible for people with reasonably large landholdings or similar resources allowing all of them to be fed.
Of course, that wouldn’t suit the misters. They’d really not be interested in a history of marriage as mature women voluntarily marrying men of their own choice – married for love. Even if it was from a limited range of available suitors. And then both of them staying in a marriage/ nuclear family till death parted them. Sometimes very soon. Death in childbirth meant that there were far more short marriages in the past.