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 think it’s generally a giant violation of the kids’ privacy to post images of them being assault on the Twitter and I think it’s the wrong environment to even broach such matters in so, yeah, I would say “This is not the place to do that” if someone was posting images of little children having their genitals cut on Twitter.
And @janet_wilkinson, I’m a Brit so yes, I know who Harriet Harman is. She is a determined feminist who has been outspoken against child pornography and child abuse, was ruthlessly mocked by the Sun newspaper when she argued against page 3 and has regularly taken flak for being an outspoken feminist over the past 4 decades. Oh, yes, and in 1977 as a very young politician, she worked for the left wing group Liberty, 2 years after their leadership had allied themselves with PIE, something she had no connection with herself other than through her employers but which has been used, 40 years later, to smear her by association.
Thanks for bringing that up as the big GOTCHA. Yes, one feminist, 40 years ago, worked fro some grotty people while MRAs actively support the lowering of the age of consent and hail child abusers as heroes of their movement. Well done, there. You really showed us!
I don’t think Twitter is an appropriate space for posting graphic and possibly upsetting images in general, given the very high likelihood of people who may prefer not to see those images while they’re just going about their days running across them.
I’d also suggest that if you have a Twitter account, you might like to report JB’s new account. They’ll only know she’s bypassing their suspension if enough people tell them …
Especially with Twitter’s new policy showing you the pictures posted by people you follow automatically. I’ve had to stop following a number of people who were active in trying to protect animals because it was unbearable to see the pictures of cruelty they were posting (especially Taji)
@ Nitram
Better explain myself:
These are my diagnoses: Major Depressive Disorder that’s becoming more treatment resistant over time, PTSD (complex PTSD isn’t an official DX, but I looked it up and I’m like, oh yeah…) and DDNOS shading towards Dissociative Identity.
A fairly stiff case of the brain cooties, yes?
I can get pretty horrible to be around if my depression’s not under control.
I bite heads off.
I have both hard work on myself and gub’mint pills to thank for being the sort of person I want to be. Kind, empathic, patient…
I am not a screamy, potentially physically violent person who gets enraged at the drop of a hat.
And yeah, I have the potential to be the latter. Especially with the PTSD, because things that are innocuous read as life-threatening sometimes.
I don’t know if that makes a difference in how you read the post I made last night about my mom.
@ Everyone regarding whether Janet Bloomfield is being an irresponsible parent by, well, being Janet Bloomfield in public…
I think I stated it clearly enough back on page one of this thread, last night.
I refuse to go all SWIWOTI on you if you think Bloomfield’s being a bad mom by putting her kids at heightened risk for bullying.
I respect your right to see the facts and come to a different conclusion.
@ auntie:
Ok.
To you, it seems that we are twisting your words…but perhaps we’re simply misunderstanding them.
What I personally understood your position to be is the following:
JB’s obnoxious public behavior could inspire people to harass her kids, therefore she really should moderate her behavior for the sake of her children.
Have I grasped your position correctly?
If not, would you please be so kind as to correct my error?
Ok, I don’t know where to start, so I’ll start with the OP and that circumcision pic — I have tweeted WAAAAY worse. I’ll spare you all a rant about Myanmar (Burma) and genocide, but go google Rohingya genocide. Tweeting pictures of, uh, massive trigger warning here, cuz genocide, children burnt beyond recognition, burnt corpses being dragged through the streets, etc? Not gotten me banned. And I think we can all agree that that’s more graphic than the circumcision pic. So, on this one point, I’m gonna defend JB — I have no problem with tweeting graphic pics to raise awareness of a cause you believe in. (Edit after finishing the thread, ah, I see you no longer have to click to view and thus trigger warnings would be useless, yes, in that case I think you should use links to pics, not pics themselves.)
Now, that cake? Can’t defend that, way too much frosting!
As for the thread…I’m more confused by wtf happened here than by the endings of Clue! But I think we’ve got some people saying that bullying is a reality, others saying it doesn’t have to be, and more people asking how to make it not one? Yes? My two cents on that? Well, at least one of my bullies had parents who were PROUD of the bullying, because gotta stamp out us different people, or something like that. Are kids inherently bullies? Terrible twos? Yeah, they really can be at that age, otoh, we know bonobos understand sharing because of the psych tests developed for kids in that age range (bonobos can, afaik, do all the tests we’ve developed for pre-verbal kids, and kids at that age are equal opportunity assholes, it’s the all about me show, not bigotry — bigotry has to be taught). Point is, kids can be jerks, some are more prone to it than others, particularly by grade school age, but who they chose to be jerks to? You can thank society and their parents for that part, excluding anything under the lovely heading “child psychopathology” (fun class, not fun disorders). In case, that one is six degrees of complex, and doesn’t seem to be why people are making accusations of nastiness.
I’m pretty sure all the nasty is stemming from whether it’s JB’s fault if people decide to be nasty to her kids because she’s a nasty person? Or whether anyone said that it would be her fault? Or whether parents need to consider how their actions might affect their kids? Or if only women get that line? Idk, I’m seeing lots of nasty when it seems most/all of us would agree that jerk kids can and will use the actions of a kid’s parent to bully the kid, but those jerks are gonna bully based on SOMETHING prolly anyways, and policing what women say cuz think of her kids! is BS…but JB is a horrible person who should STFU.
In other things, LBT wanted me to let everyone know that he’s doing another write-a-thon, but not really up for socialization yet, so here’s the info — “The theme will be servitude, and I’ll have a post on my blog, LB-Lee.livejournal.com, either late tonight or tomorrow morning.”
And I named the axolotl (and yes, there will be pics, give me a minute to get them online) — Nivi. Niveum is a Latin adjective, for snowy or white, and salamander is Latin is salamandra, a feminine noun, so Nivi’s full name is Nivea Salamandra. Were salamander a masculine noun, the plural would be niveī, which sounds very much like Nivi in English, and sounds feminine, despite being a masculine word. So I like it, and it works regardless which sex ze turns out to be once sexually mature. Now then, back in a jiff with pics!
Now I’m going to keep thinking that the critter is named after a hand cream.
I’m re-reading JB’s brilliant thoughts about Jimmy Savile again (as linked to in the OP), and wow, Twitter should have exorcised her, not just banned her. 😛
Cassandra, yeah, I know, but it’s Nivi, not Nivea (and frankly, they named their cream snowy/white? Did they just think it sounded like something you’d name something pretty? Cuz it’s not exactly the standard Latin word for white)
Anyways, Nivi! http://www.feministborg.com/2014/08/31/introducing-nivi/
I’m reasonably confident in my belief that JB was not banned for tweeting pictures, of either circumcision or of cake, but for harassment, and let’s not forget that recent libel.
What a cutie, Argenti! I’m glad ze’s settling in so well.
Little cutie!
Though yeah, since you mentioned Nivea I’m thinking handcream too, now. My favourite brand. 😀
That is a cute axolotl! 🙂
And yeah, I’m saying she should have been exorcised so she’d stay banned. Just ew ew ew ew ew.
I had forgotten about the possibility of litigation. That may very well be the pattern of behavior that prompted them to ban her.
I suspect that sock puppeting to get arond a ban will likely get a permanent banishment.
How, though? All she needs to do is keep setting up new accounts under burner emails and it’ll be like playing whack-a-troll.
Nivi!!! Adorableness x 100000
Who’s a cute little salamander? You are!
Nivi is a fascinating amphibian that has gills and never leaves the water! Thanks Wikipedia!
@thebewilderness: I hope so. Between defending people like Paul Elam and Jimmy-boy, and harassing anyone that even suggests that she may be in the wrong, I think it’s well past time for some discipline on her part.
I think they use bots for that cassandrakitty. Whack a mole bots patrolling. That is what others do, so I am assuming they do as well.
Also, I imagine they have ways of banning really egregious trolls by IP if it comes to that.
I was under the impression that Twitter doesn’t do permabans? I don’t use it, so obvs going off of hearsay and whatnot, but I thought that banning the account (not the actual user) was basically their harshest penalty.
Could very well be. I do not twit.