So our old dear friend Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield — you know, the A Voice for Men PR gal best known for her habit of calling people “whores,” including the underage victims of the late, disgraced British “entertainer” Jimmy Savile — has been suspended from Twitter, for reasons unknown.
Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:
So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.
Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”
Here it is, folks: the pastriarchal construct that got @Judgybitch1 suspended! #pastriarchy #FreeJudgyBitch1 #nomra pic.twitter.com/poK1puKcrn
— Hannah Wallen | Professional Smartass (@Oneiorosgrip) August 30, 2014
And in her most recent post, Bloomfield seems to have decided to go with this “explanation” as well.
Yeah, somehow I don’t think that was it.
Let me offer an alternate hypothesis: Bloomfield was suspended for sending threatening and harassing Tweets to assorted feminists on Twitter and/or for spamming Twitter with graphic images of a baby boy being circumcised.
Now, this is just a hypothesis, but I do have some evidence that seems to back it up.
While Bloomfield’s “JudgyBitch1” account on Twitter is suspended, as a helpful reader pointed out to me, you can still see some of the pictures she’s posted to Twitter in an archive over on Twicsy.com.
If you go there you’ll see a mixture of pics and broken pic icons. The pics that remain seem to be pics that she’s retweeted; the others are ones she tweeted directly, and most link back to her suspended account.
But there’s an interesting thing about these broken pic icons: if you click on them, some of them will actually load.
So what does a little bit of clicking reveal?
Well, in addition to a few pics of the cakes she’s been baking, we find pics featuring threatening language and imagery directed at feminists. Like the one I posted above.
We also find a graphic picture of a boy being circumcised, which she reposted several times, and which I imagine violates all sorts of Twitter rules.
Most of her pics, alas, won’t load. But somehow I suspect we’d find a few more like these in the bunch.
And if it’s not always clear what photos she posted, it is clear that she has her own little army of followers who are happy to spam feminists with these pics. Here’s a link to an old post of hers archived on Topsy showing various JudgyBitch fans all sending Jessica Valenti the same hostile message and the same (now deleted) pic. Somehow I suspect it wasn’t a picture of a cake.
Here are other harassing tweets sent by Bloomfield to Valenti, most of them retweeted by her fans:
- A sexually harassing reference to oral sex
- A misleading misquotation of Valenti, pasted onto an unflattering picture of her, that completely distorts the meaning of what she really wrote. As you may recall, Bloomfield has a history of fabricating quotes out of thin air and claiming they came from Valenti.
- More tweets directed at Valenti that offer up alleged quotations of hers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
These are just in the past ten days.
Going through these pics not only suggests that AVFMers are being dishonest in how they’re trying to spin Bloomfield’s Twitter suspension; it also reveals a lot about the workings of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Twitter edition.
Consider this tweet I ran across, which tries to equate feminist writer Jessica Valenti’s “male tears” t-shirt with beheadings carried out by Islamic terrorists.
.@JudgyBitch1 @AppSame @PolitiBunny @JessicaValenti Differences between the two are? pic.twitter.com/e4Jj57LVW2
— Andraos Al-Sulh (@AndrewV691) August 16, 2014
The original Tweeter, a reactionary antifeminist living in Canada, is clearly a reader of A Voice for Men and assorted alt-right racist websites. If you scroll down through his Twitter timeline, you’ll see that he retweets AVFMers like Paul Elam and Dan Perrins, as well as “dark enlightenment” Twitter accounts like the explicitly racist “hbd chick.” And as you can see, he included JudgyBitch1 in the list of recipients for his tweet.
The AVFMers also pay attention to him; if you look at the archive of this tweet on Topsy, you can see that Elam retweeted his graphic comparison of Valenti to a terrorist, as did AVFM fans Markis One and Cora Newbold. One of his other retweeters is a big fan of Roosh and a regular retweeter of assorted other “dark enlightenment” assholes.
[EDIT: AndrewV691 is perhaps better known, at least in Skeptic circles, as AndrewV69, a prolific contributor to the SlymePit, an online forum largely devoted to attacking feminist skeptics on FreeThoughtBlogs and elsewhere, where he has offered his considered opinion on topics such as “Ophelia Benson is a complete fuckwit!” Needless to say, his Twitter avatar is not actually a picture of him; it’s of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.]
Now, MRAs like to pretend that they have no connection with the alt-right – that is, racist – assholes who populate much of the “manosphere.” In reality, MRAs and “manosphereians” intermix freely, and there are more than a few who are both MRAs and racist right-wingers.
It’s not just that these people share remarkably similar ideologies, similar obsessions, similar buzzwords, and similar misogynistic attitudes towards women. They also work together in a de facto alliance to harass feminists online.
In other words, MRAs and manospherians are both heavily implicated in what I call the Greater Internet Harasssment Machine. Indeed, as we can see from the above, notable MRA figures like Elam and Bloomfield are themselves part of the Harassment Machine.
Whatever it was that got JudgyBitch1’s Twitter account suspended almost certainly had nothing to do with cake.
I thought the cake was pretty. Not my speed, with all those rosettes, but not bad for a homemade job.
Speaking of cake, I was going to make green tea cupcakes for work today, but I got invited to brunch instead. So Whole Foods mini cupcakes it is.
Nequam, I googled this, and apparently by “inappropriate” your meant “really fucking sexist”. Thanks for sharing?
As an other-believer, I’d find that environment pretty hostile.
Except by having crosses and scripture in their classrooms and media exhorting students to pray. It doesn’t have to come out of someone’s mouth to be proselytizing.
Mildlymagnificent (and other Aussies), can I just say how much I love the word “chook”? It’s adorable and it sounds like the sound chickens make when they’re contented.
Apparently “responsible for your actions” only applies to rape survivors. Getting suspended from Twitter, otoh, is not her fault in any way.
It’s a flow chart. They’re hardly unique to your field. Then again, given these people’s tendency to take anti-rape campaigns and turn them against survivors, it’s entirely possible someone saw a flow chart like the ones you work with and decided to make this crap.
@thread: I found a recipe for “cookie dough” for one, without the salmonella (I used butter instead of coconut oil, and it was nom). I find the texture of the flour overpowering and it lacks the graininess of cookie dough made with granulated sugar, so I might experiment with swapping out some of the flour and maple for brown sugar or something. But it sire does the trick for those sweets cravings!
titianblue, I of course agree that people shouldn’t make veiled threats against someones children, that’s not the part I was disagreeing with. I kind of glossed over that part as I thought it was obvious but didn’t make that clear, so soz for that.
@daintydougal, ni probs – I suspected we were talking past each other. Sorry if I came over as ‘splainy 🙂
Thanks for the lemon recipes! I am bookmarking the page for when my lemons come ripe. Can’t wait to try some of these!
My guess would be that nothing would happen, because the kid would know better than to bring that kind of thing up with Mom after everything she’s said, and would just suffer in silence and self-blaming toxicity.
Not that I have any personal experience with that or anything.
@emilygoddess
*blushes. Of course – very embarrassed I might have hit the ceiling there, so thanks for the nod. It was a bit of a trigger that led to awkward tunnel-vision on my part.
The roots of the pastriarchy run deep …
@emilygoddess
I know. And I’m sorry that I said otherwise, my wording was really poor.
And I know that because I’m not doing anything to fight this, I’m contributing to the problem. I’m buying some peace at the expense of principles. It’s wrong and cowardly, but it’s what I’ve decided to do until my kids are old enough to be part of the decision, too, since they’ll bear most of the fallout. So here I am, holding up the status quo by default. It’s not a decision that sits easily with me, and it’s not one I can defend. But it’s where I am.
FM — order of operations on Everest — your health and safety, other people’s health and safety, summiting. Applied to parents that’d be the health and safety of you and your dependents, everybody else’s health and safety, and then your bigger goals. Point is putting your principles in second place behind protecting your kids makes perfect sense to me. (Which is not to say that risking bullying in order to uphold your principles would make you a bad person or anything, just that your decision makes as much sense to me as climbers who turn back for their safety.)
Blarg, I hope I’m not stirring the earlier debate, maybe that Everest comparison is too life and death, I’m reading a book on the ’96 disaster year and my brain is full of gorgeous, deadly, mountains.
In uncontroversial things, Nivi just wandered by and the way ze rounded the corner made it look like waving.
@Argenti,
Nope, not for me you’re not. I’m pro-choice and it is totally FM’s choice.
In fact I disagree with “it’s wrong and cowardly”, FM. Only you know the comparative values to you of your children’s comfort vs those particular principles, you’ve obviously made a considered choice based on a difficult situation, and the only thing that is “wrong and cowardly” is anyone trying to guilt you into making the choice they deem to be “right”.
Which, for clarity, is not what I am accusing Emilygoddess of doing but rather just explaining a different reaction to the school to your own.
I think you can still be an activist and protect your kids.
I think it would be good parenting to have a plan in place for protecting the kids from possible harassment, to talk about what to do about bullying, and ( most important! ) keeping good lines of communication open.
That is good parenting regardless of whether you do activist stuff or not, because kids can be selected as targets based on anything, and it can be really damaging.
JB is a reactionary. She has the right to be craniorectally inserted, though.
Thanks, guys. I wasn’t asking for reassurance, but it’s nice to get some all the same. 🙂
I don’t think emilygoddess is trying to guilt me, either. She was rightly pointing out that the stuff I was writing off as “not too bad” is actually “really in your damned face bad.” I think I have a higher tolerance for look-at-me-Christianity because I’ve lived in the Bible Belt for my entire adult life. If no one’s in your face with the scripture, threatening hell (which happened to me when I opened my door a few Saturdays ago) I tend to dismiss it as less harmful. And emilygoddess is right, it’s not less harmful. The passively allowed stuff is probably worse, because it establishes that one religion as normal and acceptable.
The guilt I feel over not doing anything at my daughter’s school is all mine, not influenced by anyone else. I mainly wanted to express that it was there, and that it’s there because I know I’m silently endorsing a harmful system. The guilt’s just not great enough to make me change my mind about torpedoing my kids’ lives. Not just yet, anyway.
We so need pictures of Nivi!
Ask and ye shall receive!
Wow do I fail!
http://www.feministborg.com/2014/08/31/introducing-nivi/
🙂 Beautiful Nivi.
@ grumpyoldman
I like you too :p
Flying mouse, I’m so sorry if I implied that you were wrong to take the path you’ve chosen with respect to your kids’ school. We all have to make tough choices about whether or not to speak up about things, and whether the consequences of speaking up outweigh the consequences of staying silent. You’re doing what you feel is best for yourself and your family and there’s nothing wrong with that.
@emilygoddess: I don’t think you implied that I was wrong; you were just reminding me that I what I’ve decided is the lesser of a bunch of evils is still pretty darned bad. Which is sadly true.
I also didn’t want anyone to think that I take my inaction lightly. It’s just one of those times when I’m wrong any way I turn. The whole situation sucks. :
But anyway, those are my problems, and you were only reminding me that they’re a lot other people’s problems, too. We’re good 🙂
It really amuses me that she’s hoping to become an academic. “Janet Bloomfield” is not her real name, but it’s not hard to figure out who she is IRL, particularly given that she makes YouTube video-harangues. You can’t *lose* tenure for being an abhorrent antisocial narcissist – nor should you, I would argue – but you certainly are less likely ever to get hired with that reputation. Her hiring committee is going to rupture something laughing at her.
To the poster above speculating about her childhood – she’s pretty open about the fact that she had the living daylights beaten out of her continually, by both parents. For some reason, she’s reconciled with her father and has decided that the abuse was entirely due to her mother, which goes some way to explaining her damage. I tend to cut people like that a lot of slack for philosophical and political deficiencies; I cut them less slack when they refer to child victims of rape as, y’know, whores and cunts.
@ flying mouse: living in Jesusland can be pretty difficult, even as a grownup.
I also know how ugly people can get. I’m glad I didn’t have a kid because I’d either have to homeschool or move, I think. I went to school in this district, I would not want my kid to have to.
@Jess:yeah, that explains a lot about JB. I’m glad I did not take it in that direction.
The number of people who are surprised that JB refuses to take no for an answer is still zero.
I like it too. It probably comes from trying to imitate that sound. 🙂