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.
Question, Auntie Alias: do you blame activist feminist (or activists in other laudable causes) for bringing bullying down on the heads of their children? Because they do.
Of all the things we can criticize JB for, “She should be thinking about how her activism affects her children” is just about the last.
Wow, even in Virginia, that sort of explicit display of religion would be out of line outside of a private Protestant school.
Hell, three days ago we had a post on this very site about how Anita Sarkeesian received death threats to her family. Do you blame her for continuing to make her videos when that happens?
We should all bake “So glad JB is gone” cakes and post them to our twitter feeds, to prove that it isn’t posting cake photos that gets folks kicked off twitter.
Bonus points if there’s a JB quote on the cake! And if you don’t bake, don’t sweat it. Buy a cake from the grocery store and just ask the baker to write the word “whores” on it over and over again. I think that will be pretty amusing for the baker.
And though I don’t want JB’s kids to get bullied by anyone, I’m most worried about JB herself bullying her children.
I called her a rage alcoholic because it seems like the only way it would be tolerable to fly off the handle multiple times a day (like JB does) is if the rush of being angry is pleasant to you, like the rush I get from rowing or skiing. I wasn’t trying to be ableist, @Nitram. I don’t think JB is mentally ill; I have no qualifications to decide if she is or not.
Hah! Went to a CWA* talk put on by my daughter’s group the other day. The speaker has written a couple of books about competitive show cooking in Australia.
Some really amazing details about criteria for competing in various classes. Apparently men who are retired engineers, fitters and turners or patternmakers walk away with most of the first prizes in categories like slices. They use amazingly precise tools to ensure that every individual slice on a plate of vanilla slices is exactly the same size, perfect rectangles. And for the first among firsts, the rich fruit cake. How? By spending hours and hours for weeks beforehand cutting all the raisins, sultanas, dates, cherries, candied citrus and whatever else they used into pieces exactly the same size – as currants. It’s the best way to ensure that the fruit is evenly distributed throughout the cake apparently. And there’s a hell of a lot of fruit in 3 or 4 large fruit cakes which is how many you need to cook to make sure you that you have one perfect one to enter for a prize.
For sponges, one woman who regularly won firsts at shows in her district made sure that they would be the right colour. How? By changing the feed for the chooks that laid the eggs she used for cooking a few weeks before the competition date.
*Country Women’s Association
Hah hah! Well, I tried to create a good a representation of my Furrinati mistress, Cassie. I showed her the image, and she seemed unimpressed, but this is standard behavior for her.
@ idledilettante: I think there are some actual studies out there that found that rage – the adrenaline rush and the sense of righteousness associated with it – are indeed addictive. Thus people who spend all day arguing with people who are wrong on the internet. I know that I’m trying to wean myself off it, and it’s harder than you’d think for something that’s fundamentally unpleasant.
UGH FUCK I think she got a new Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/thejudgybitch/status/506092751998685184
Here’s a tweet from it.
@Anarchonist/Auntie Alias — I can see the case for bullying being considered “natural” in that it seems fairly typical for toddlers to go through a phase of hitting, yelling, name-calling, tantrums, etc. However, pooping in one’s pants is equally natural behavior. But an adult, or even an older child, who was still openly pooping his or her pants (without some compelling medical cause) would be considered — well, we’d think there was something seriously wrong with them.
We think of toilet training as an absolute, no arguments, necessity for socialization — we could see learning not to bully in exactly the same way. But we don’t. That’s the flaw in our culture that needs to change.
@idledillettante
FFS!!
I already reported it. But if you want to ask JB what’s so mature about getting back on Twitter two days post-ban you’re welcome to. It might motivate Twitter to ban her and make it stick.
Not a big surprise. It’s not like we expected her to just give up. Just keep reporting her to twitter, who, I’m sure, will be a bit annoyed by someone trying to subvert their banning.
Think of it like the Stop Rush campaign. You don’t expect to beat them all at once. You just make things difficult until the Manosphere decides they want another spokestoken.
No, but seeing how long it took for Twitter to get its act together and ban her at all, I’m not confident we’re going to see much action on the sock-banning front. So maybe tweet her with some quotes of her own shit and that might remind them why they banned her in the first place.
Re: the new Twitter account – It was only a matter of time, really. Maybe this time she will avoid direct threats and libel.
And maybe pigs will learn to fly.
Gah. She’s such a slimy slime ball. Sex and rape are different. If she doesn’t know the difference she shouldn’t be throwing around words like ‘adult’.
Whats the point of suspending an account if people can just set up new ones immediately?
I clicked on the new JB Twitter account, but received “Account Suspended” page.
Yeah, I know, right?
The only thing she’s lost is the thousands of followers attached to the account. A post on her new feed suggests she’d trying to get the account back online for that very reason.
No, wait, I clicked on the “at JudgyBitch,” which has the suspension, but clicking on “Janet Bloomfield” shows it’s active. Guess I’m not 100% sure how accounts and emails work at Twitter (I have an account but almost never use it).
NB: it’s @thejudgybitch, not @JudgyBitch1. She’s tweeting the suspended account, presumably so she doesn’t lose any tweets if it’s reinstated. But her sock is coming through just fine on my end of the internet.
https://twitter.com/thejudgybitch
@daintydougal Want the recipe? I’m all for sharing.
4oz self-raising flour
1oz cocoa powder
1tsp baking powder
5oz butter/similar spread – slightly soft
50z caster sugar
3 large eggs, beaten
2tbsp water
Preheat oven to a low medium heat. You want to grease and line two medium-sized cake tins. (Shallow – sorry, I have no measurements!)
Mix all the ingredients together until you have a smooth batter. Split that equally between the two tins and bake for 35-40 minutes. The cakes should come out springy. Let the two cakes stand for 10 minutes, and then take them out and let them cool completely.
Icing:
5oz dark chocolate (75% minimum)
1/4 pint of double cream.
1tsp of vanilla essence
Apricot or any other jam you like
Break up the chocolate and either melt in into the cream and vanilla with a double boiler or microwave it. Whisk that with a fork and it’ll become a nice, thick icing.
Make a chocolate icing and jam sandwich with the two cakes, and then cover the whole thing with chocolate icing!
RE Is bullying natural? I think that children can and must be taught at a young age not to bully. I don’t buy it’s 100% natural after the terrible twos. Children will screw up as they age and often do the wrong thing, so it’s our job as adults to teach them better – and expect better!
@idledillettante
I can’t even begin with that chart.
Damn stinky socks!
If anyone wants a tweet to tweet at @thejudgybitch, you can write:
@thejudgybitch Can you explain to me what’s so mature about making a sock for yourself to evade your recent @twitter ban?
There’s even room to sign your name at the end.
Then she can address you by name when she responds, calling you a whore!
It fails rather spectacularly with the horrible misunderstanding of cause-and-effect right in that first box, doesn’t it? Sorry, JB, but actual children will right away have questions about that first box that you can’t answer.
In the words of Cersei Lannister “I shall wear this like a badge of honor.”