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.
You “sense” wrong. I’m addressing what is being said here and now and who is saying it.
Would anyone else like to reprimand me for my tone or accuse me of being irrational and unjustly pissed off while we’re on a feminist blog talking about the things women should not do lest other people decide to bully their children?
@marinerachel:
I suppose that one is aimed at me. Fair enough. I’m definitely not an expert on social justice, but I will still have to disagree. Yes, bullying is a reality in our imperfect society, but what the comment I quoted seemed to imply was that at least part of the blame for bullying can, to a certain degree, be laid on the actions of the victims’ parents.
That, to me, is arguing that in certain situations, bullies may have valid reasons for their bullying (if the parents of the victims are assholes, as in this instance), which is an attitude that fosters harmful ideas. Bullies have learned their entitled attitude from somewhere, and they would probably use any excuse to bully if they think that’s their right. It’s the bullying itself that is the problem IMO, not what anyone else has or hasn’t done. It doesn’t matter if the victim is being bullied for zir race or for being the child of a horrible person, the onus should always, always be on the bully, not on any circumstances surrounding the victim.
Umm… I hope you’re not reading my comment to Auntie Alias as bringing in hostility from elsewhere, since this is, to my recollection, the first time I’ve read a comment from zir that I disagree with.
@Auntie Alias:
I feel no hostility towards you whatsoever, and I certainly did not mean for my comment to be uncivil in any way. If I failed, I’m sorry. I will back down now in any case.
That new tweet is particularly horrible because the template is taken from, or might even be a misplaced attempt to mirror, the drop-down question-and-answer graph commonly used to clarify safeguarding procedures for frontline support staff working with vulnerable children and/or adults who they suspect may be experiencing abuse. I draw them up frequently as part of our organisation’s staff guidelines and it is so, so not cool to see that replicated, however unintentionally, for JB’s victim-shaming purposes.
Just no. Just…ugh.
That graph fucking sucks because it exposes JB’s view that the only women who get raped are drunk, slutty whores who were asking for it anyhow. And that those rapes aren’t rapes.
I read on her blog once about the Stubenville rape, which she claims is “not a rape”, because the victim had been drinking and “didn’t have respect for herself”. Here’s the article I wrote about that.
http://idledillettante.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/jb-b-crazy-and-also-probably-hell-bound/
There, JB defines “rape” with examples of rapes so brutal the victims were both murdered.
@Lea
Presuming that I understand your point correctly, I pretty much agree. It’s not okay to tell a woman, “Before you speak up for yourself, little lady, be sure to think of what your kids’ classmates might say.” It’s telling a woman to censor herself, make herself small and inoffensive, and using her kids to send that message to her. It’s putting the onus to avoid actions that might trigger bullying onto the mother, and by no coincidence requiring that she comply with the standard, misogynist template for how a “good woman” should behave.
@idledillettante
It also exposes her view that the only people who are raped are women. Where’s that compassion for men and boys again?
@idledillettante, I read over your article and… ugggghhhh, every time I think JB couldn’t be worse.
It was totes the right decision to ban IB22 the moment she pulled out that “defining rape” trash. It’s just a slightly better decorated version of JB’s victim-blaming hideousness and comes from that same place in the abyss.
PoM,
That’s what I’m saying.
Again, the context of it is absolutely horrifying. I don’t know what to say. Completely misappropriating a format often used to SUPPORT victims of rape and sexual assault to directly suggest women are ‘children’ who cry rape when drunk … argh. I don’t even. Wrong wrong wrong.
I know what you mean. There is no bottom of that barrel to scrape. She’s tunneling through the Earth’s core at this point.
I’m calling dibs on the confused cakes against Judgy Bitch tumblr and hash tag. Actually, I would call dibs on them but I don’t really do tumblr or twitter. Lazy.
In my experience, parents who are themselves bullies, like JB, tend to bully their children and families too. So it’s just sad all around, since it creates a lot of trauma.
http://imgur.com/10BYFY5
Here’s what JB told me on Twitter when I asked her about her new account.
She’ll be in trouble when she reached Pellucidar!
(BTW, Edgar Rice Burroughs, another classic example of “art that I can enjoy while at the same time recognizing the faults — like pro-eugenics.”)
*reaches
Yeah, who the fuck are you to engage with me on public social media platforms that exist so that people can engage with each other!
False equivalence and erasure of male rape victims in one picture! What a wonderful person she is!
The more I read JB stuff, the more I’m amused by the assumption that JB would have kids who would be victims of bullying rather than perpatrators. After all, look what kind of example their mom sets…
FWIW a kid can be a bully and also get bullied by their parents. It’s a Teufelskreis, like JB’s moral code.
And why does asking the question = entitlement?
That pretty much sums it up. I can’t imagine anyone expecting a father to watch what he says in case it causes bullying of his kids to occur. I know Auntie Alias is here in good faith and doesn’t have a history of saying asshole things. It just goes to show that in our culture we all internalize misogyny and even a feminist can unintentionally fall into patriarchal ways of thinking sometimes.
@Caroline, thanks for putting yourself in the firing line.
That response is right out of JB’s book of PR professionalism, isn’t it.
This point cannot be emphasized enough:
Janet Bloomfield is the social media director for A Voice for Men.
@Aitch, it’s nothing. Since reading David’s work I’ve gained a greater appreciation for going out and actually getting the quote; from the horses’ mouth. There’s really nothing more damning than using these people’s own words against them.
I’m glad JB is showing her ass all over Twitter. Seriously, she does so much to undermine AVfM that I sometimes wonder if she’s a feminist gone deep undercover.
She makes no sense at all.