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.
Well that moved fast. So, our troll dropped exactly one link to one study which, interestingly, admitted that one other study showed that in some circumstances women are more risk-taking/competitive than men.
Since she didn’t provide a full citation, here ’tis:
Journal of theoretical biology (2012) volume: 310 page: 43 -54
@kirbywarp, Now I want to hear your argument for financial abortions. I need to test my irony meter — it didn’t explode yet, so I’m worried the calibration might be off.
I can’t remember his name but there was a particularly tedious evo psych troll in one of the Eliot Rodger threads who kept talking about ape behavior supposedly proving that men are more aggressive. It was clear that he hadn’t done research and was just making assumptions because he was equating chimps with every other primate among other crimes against science.
I don’t remember if he was the one who signed off with smileys though.
@Cloudiah:
Well, you see
*rumble*
… huh. Anyways, society already forces men to become parents do to the conniving wiles of women. In fact, men are forced into parenthood so often that
*RUMBLE*
*ahem* So often, that it has become necessary to include a way for a father to “opt out” of parenthood, because women can totally do the same thing. Which brings me to my next point about how black people are so terrible because they keep running away from parenthood and
*KABLOOM*
DANG IT! I paid good money for those things. Money which I worked hard for but my wife shouldn’t because she’s a woman that needs to take care of the kids that nobody recognizes my ability to parent for but I don’t want because women use kids to steal my money that I don’t believe they should be able to earn
*thermo-irono-nuclear explosion*
… You know, I think I’ll just… sit quietly over here.
Jules was the annoying evo psych troll. I just looked it up. He had a different writing style than “Linda” though.
JB must hate herself…a lot. I mean, how else to explain why someone would consent to playing the court jester on behalf of a hate group.
I love when trolls go on and on about how men are bigger and have more muscles and that’s why most CEOs are dudes and congress is mostly male. Slavers used to make similar arguements but in the other direction.
That’s what a modern CEO really needs, huge muscles.
@kirbywarp, I had to fiddle with the dials a bit, but my meter did finally explode. (Luckily I was behind the blast shields by that point.) Sorry about the whole chain reaction thing on your end. I hope at least you’ve acquired some new superpowers due to your radiation exposure!
Most of these people are pretty fucking racist so I’m sure they agree with those arguments about teh blax.
You need a lot of muscle mass to excel in a STEM field. That’s why the STEM fields are dominated by men. Sexual dimorphism.
kit33! That’s who I was thinking of! Never acknowledged anyone’s counter arguments. Jules was annoying but a lot more persistent.
But all these trolls spout the same bs. They all start to blend together after a while.
What exactly was JB’s plan here?
Step 1: dislike shirt
Step 2: make up quotes and attribute them to shirt wearer
Step 3: wait for response saying “you made that quote up”
Step 4: …
Step 5: Victory!
How is Valenti stupid (“not smart”) for responding to libel by pointing out it is false? It’s like a kid pretending to punch someone and then laughing at them for flinching.
And now JB is going on and on about David being a pedophile on twitter. What a grown up!
OH NO, SHE HAS TO OWN HER SHIT NOW!
Wow. Shameless.
@cloudiah:
Irony meters run off of Ironium, a very potent but unstable energy source. Exploding irony meters give off massive doses of I-rays. I’ve set off so many that my DNA has changed fundamentally, reconstructing itself into an unknown matrix. Now I get terrible headaches around hypocrisy. Contradictions set my stomach churning. And, at times, when the bullshit gets too strong, I get…
Ironic.
You won’t like me when I’m ironic.
The rush of outrage sets my blood boiling, my skin turns lavender, and I become Irony Man! I channel irony to take down my foes, pointing out how you can’t simultaneously argue that women must be clothed carefully for fear that men succumb to their lust and that feminists are evil for reducing males to slavering beasts. I smash through ignorance and people who cite scientific papers that say the exact opposite of what they’re arguing. I go until my mind runs blank, and I wake up naked and confused, a trail of destruction and foolishness in my wake.
And if you tell me that nothing I’ve mentioned has anything to do with irony, know this. You’ve fallen into my trap. Behold my power and tremble.
Oh it’s a thing here too. There was a public health campaign where I lived that ran billboards with statistics saying “This year X number of men will die of stubbornness.” (I don’t recall the exact number.) It explained that men were less likely to seek medical help and then urged men to get regular health check ups and go to the doctor. They may or may not have been using some football players? The guys in the images were big, beefy-looking dudes, presumably to emphasize that macho masculine men can go to the doctor without harming their reputations.
Homo sapiens’ lower testosterone levels relative to other hominids were apparently an important factor in the development of civilization.
I’m damned if I can find a link for it, but a few years ago I read a paper discussing the role of testosterone in human evolution… and yes, it links to the fact that humans have less sexual dimorphism than their closest relatives. Anyhow, it had to do with higher testosterone levels being linked to female sexual behaviour, and therefor higher testosterone in males was a by-product of female behaviour. Also, high testosterone also makes one more susceptible to infection, which really kicks in when we stopped wandering around in small groups. The author described it as “a race between testosterone and disease.” I’m rambling, but there was, for much of history and protohistory a “hard ceiling” on human testosterone levels. Thanks, Y pestis!
The relative lack of sexual dimorphism in humjans (and relatively large penis size) means *less* intra male competition and a tendency towards monogamy, somewhere in our evolutionary (physical and cultural) background.
Things MRAs don’t like about science… actual science.
@drst:
Interesting. I haven’t seen anything like that in the areas I’ve lived.
“This year X number of men will die of stubbornness.”
that’s one of the points of the Movember thing, a group that really is promoting good things for men.
and irony meters should be hooked up in series to prevent overload.
The misters on reddit hated that “men will die of stubbornness” campaign because they said #notallmen are stubborn.
Linda is boring and annoying. Bootsy is much more charming!
http://lovemeow.com/2014/06/bootsy-the-cat-with-anime-eyes/
Too stubborn to admit that other men are stubborn even if doing so will save some men’s lives. The MRM, ladies and gentlemen!
He said ironically.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. 😀
Anyway, one last assfax on the whole “men are aggressive and competitive”: I am a cis man. In my social dealings, I am all cooperation, no competition. You could say that I find aggressive and competitive behaviour – outside of rare events and situations specifically designed for such behavior – extremely childish and immature. Which is part of the reason why I’m an anarchist, but that’s beside the point. The point is, being a cis man does not make me naturally more competitive. Gee, it’s almost as if a troll’s incomplete understanding of biology doesn’t dictate my behavior.
JB better hope she never needs to go looking for a job, who would hire her? A simple Google search would put paid to any candidacy.
I think “Linda” is Pell.
I thought they taught “First Rule of Holes” in PR college.