Janet “Judgy Bitch” Bloomfield, A Voice for Men’s pseudonymous PR genius, is definitely an out-of-the-box thinker.
Unfortunately, she seems to be an out-of-the-box thinker in the same way that some cats are out-of-the-box poopers, leaving odorous and disgusting little “gifts” everywhere she goes.
Today I want to take a look at one of her recent gifts: her, well, ingenious attempt to answer the question “How do we make society care about men as much as they care about women?”
I’m going to ignore the fact that even the basic premise of this question is backwards. Because her solution is even more backwards, if it’s even possible to be more backwards than completely backwards.
So what is this solution? Make it a felony for a woman to give birth, if the father doesn’t want a child.
Er, what? I’ll let her explain, because I sure can’t:
I’ve written before about legal parental surrender and allowing men to walk away from children they have contributed genetic material to, just as women may do, but having given the issue more thought, I am convinced that will only lead to increased hatred of men, not less. For a law surrounding reproductive rights to create a society that genuinely cares about men, the law needs more bite. …
Here it comes:
No human child may be born without the on going and affirmative consent of the adults involved.
What? What on earth does this even mean?
Gender neutral and perfectly clear. To give birth to a child without the explicit consent of everyone who contributed genetic material should be a felony and the child should immediately be seized and placed for adoption by the state.
Really? Yes, really:
In the beginning, to be sure, we are going to end up seizing a lot of babies under equal reproductive rights, but it will not take long for reality to sink in: make this choice and you will suffer for it.
I’m pretty sure the kid will suffer, too, but that never seems to be an issue with most MRAs.
So does Bloomfield’s, er, ingenious solution mean that men who don’t want children will be able to force women they’ve impregnated into having abortions? Oh, don’t be silly. They can give birth to all the babies they want, assuming they don’t mind nine months of pregnancy and, oh yeah, having the government seize their babies after they’re born.
[N]o one will be forced into abortions they do not want. If a woman falls pregnant with a child the father does not consent to, she will not be forced to abort that child. She is free to follow her conscience and give birth to that child. She will not be allowed to keep it, but she may give birth to it. Marital status will make no difference. If you do not have the consent of the father, the infant will be seized.
Uh, JB, what about those felony charges? You just said that doing this would be a felony. Is it too much for me to ask that your crackpot solution at least be internally consistent?
Apparently so, since she forgets about the felony bit and moves on to some of the wonderful things she thinks will happen if her proposal were to become law.
The most immediate effect of a law like this is that a market for male reproductive services emerges. A 35-year-old woman that no man on the planet has consented to reproduce with has a choice: she can pay a man to consent to parenthood. His consent means that he is obliged to support the resulting child so his fee will be:
Child support + ongoing expenses over 18 years + premium for looks, intelligence, height, etc.
That could be a very sweet deal, and men will suddenly be rather valued by women who choose to forgo any efforts towards attracting men into a mutually beneficial pair-bond.
The always classy Bloomfield illustrates this last point with a picture of feminist writer Jessica Valenti, a woman whom Bloomfield seems just a teensy bit obsessed with. It’s an odd choice, given that Valenti is married and a mother.
Bloomfield goes on to endorse “the presumption of shared parenting” in the wake of a divorce. This is a bit of an old chestnut with the Men’s Rights crowd, but Bloomfield has some, well, original thoughts about the possible consequences of making this the law.
Wanna break up your relationship? Have at it. But you will not take the children with you.
Really? What if your ex has never shown any interest in raising these children? What if your ex is an abuser? Apparently, in Bloomfield’s world, all accusations of abuse directed at men are false accusations. She skips merrily past this issue and indulges in more fantasizing:
This also creates a market. Let’s say a woman whom no man has consented to have a child with desperately wants children. She will have to prove her worth to the man by parenting his existing children brilliantly. This is gender neutral, of course. A man who wishes to have more children will also have to parent a woman’s existing children very well to prove his worth.
Bloomfield’s repeated attempts to claim that her proposals are “gender neutral” are a bit odd, given that the whole point of both proposals is to punish women. I’m not reading between the lines here: she states it outright.
Women have gotten away with shit from time immemorial because we have the babies. No society can live without us. It is the sole source of our value and always will be.
Wait, what? The only reason women have value is because they can give birth? What about those women who can’t have children?
Actually, wait a minute: if women’s worth is determined solely by popping out babies at regular intervals, why am I even bothering to read a blog post by a woman – a blog post the author evidently thinks is worthless, because it’s not a baby?
A society in which all women are brilliant engineers and not one of them will have children is a dead society.
Huh? A society in which all men are trapeze artists and not one of them will have children is also a dead society. You can’t really have much of a society if half the population works a single job. Or if no one in the society ever has kids.
Reproductive equality is the key to making a society that cares about men as much as women. Equality leads to more equality?
Yep.
Lots of women ain’t gonna like that. Tough shit.
Yeah, I don’t think that “equality” is the reason that no decent or sensible person of any gender is going to like Bloomfield’s “solution” here. Somehow I think the whole baby-seizing business is going to be a bigger sticking point. Hell, even a few of the commenters at AVFM had a problem with that part of her proposal.
So the obvious question is: Does Bloomfield really want the government to go into the baby seizing business? Or is this a sort of “outrage clickbait,” an attempt to garner attention by saying the most outrageous thing she can think of?
I’m guessing the truth lies somewhere between these two poles; it’s reminiscent of Roosh’s “stop rape by legalizing it” post not that long ago. Sure, she’s interested in driving traffic to her blog and to AVFM. But she seems to actually believe at least most of the nonsense she posts. And, for what it’s worth, the commenters at AVFM seem to think she’s sincere.
One thing this clearly isn’t is satire – at least not using any definition of the word that anyone outside of AVFM would agree with.
Indeed, the only way this could be considered “satire” would be if Bloomfield was attempting to satirize the sort of terrible person who would actually propose baby seizing as a way to bring about equality.
But Bloomfield isn’t satirizing that sort of terrible person. She is that sort of terrible person.
But you know what, great idea for a dystopian scifi story.
You’re not going to fool the MRA’s with your feminist trick questions. Everyone knows that real rape is incredibly rare – enough so that this is an almost nonexistent issue. Almost all supposed rapes are false accusations.
Welcome to The Handmaid’s Tale… *pukes*
Here’s a thought. If I was an unwed, pregnant woman, what if I had another woman help parent my baby? Or raised my kid with the help of a relative or friend, but didn’t have a romantic relationship with them?
I’ve mentioned this story before, but since jackasses keep bringing appropriate topics up (looking at you, JB)…
What would have happened in my situation? My biological father was perfectly happy with my mother being pregnant, but changed his mind the moment he found out I was female, and left my mother for another woman (that he was cheating on her with anyways).
Should my mother have been punished for the oh-so-heinous crime of having a female child? Should she have been forced to watch me be taken away all because my father decided that he didn’t want me, but she still did?
Should I have been forced to live in a system that’s already so overburdened it can’t take care of the children already in it, moving from house to house, constantly on guard in case one of those houses turned out to be full of abusive fucks who only wanted money?
Seriously, fuck JB. She’s a terrible fucking person and I hope she steps in a bucket of Legos.
What if the pregnant person does’nt consent to giving birth as well as refuse abortion? In JB’s theoretical world of wonders that could happen.
No, Macho Pig, no she does not, unless you are referring to what she uses in place of brains, heart and conscience.
I am going to say it – any child who grows within the womb of a woman is part of that woman, until she/he emerges into the larger world. In the end, the choice is TOTALLY hers…not his. It is love and courtesy to even include you at all in the decision making process. And too many male persons wrongly believe that THEY should have that choice. Is it because they want/do not want children? Sometimes, but more often it is because they cannot stand the idea that a woman has ANY power, anywhere, with anything. You guys are like the tea party types and wealthy guys – anything that anyone else has is stolen from you.
Get over it, you big babies. You do NOT own the world and all in it. Personally, I would love to be part of a mass movement of women who walk away from men like you and never, EVER give you the time of day again.
Um, dumbass, there are these things called “sperm banks”, where the donors voluntarily renounce all claim to both custody and child support, and women can become single mothers by choice, all for the price of shipping and “materials”. You actually think women would pay 8 kazillion dollars to a man for the exact same outcome? (Or an even worse outcome, should he decide to weasel out of the deal and keep the 8 kazillon dollars.)
She actually thinks a man’s “permission” should be worth that much.
Does it work the other way around? Can I get paid 8 kazillion dollars in exchange for “allowing” a man to become a father, if I don’t want the baby and he does?
Here’s an idea, JB: you shouldn’t be allowed to produce social media content without the express consent of at least one certified decent human being. And you should have to pay that person a premium for the trouble of wading through your noxious thoughts.
I wonder why this woman is so obsessed with the idea of ‘male reproductive rights’? It seems a strange thing to carry on about.
Give me a W. Give me a T. Give me an F.
That seems about right. JB’s proposal here already says that if men need to be bribed for their consent they should be given bonuses based on their attractiveness. I really don’t understand how that will work. Who decides how valuable a man’s genes are?
I also don’t understand the proposal in general. It’s clearly bad for the children involved. In addition to the reasons everyone else has mentioned, why should the person willing to care for the child have to pay money to the other person? Child support = money to help support your child. That shouldn’t be a hard concept. Kids are expensive and paying that much up front would seriously impact someone’s ability to properly care for a child. Of course, that implies that they actually care about the child and not just about winning, because, let’s face it. That’s what this really comes down to. They need to “win” every interaction. They see getting custody of the children (who they may or may not care about) as a way to prove they are superior.
But what do I know. I’m just a woman and this comment is not a baby.
I always think that it’s interesting to notice that an outspoken anti-feminist such as Janet Bloomfield would never ever approve of the things they write about and promote being imposed on other women be applied to them. Would Janet Bloomfield give up blogging and accept being confined to sticking to the kitchen making sandwhiches? She somehow fails to see that the distinction that she makes between herself and other women is not made by the men that “support” her.
What I don’t understand is the credibility issue around shock or crackpot journalism. Here’s a masthead writer for AVFM saying something misogynist and crackpot. I think she knows this, but she writes it straight, with no disclaimer that it’s satire. So that makes her a writer with no credibility. But she seems to think that somehow this isn’t so, that there is a category of journalism in which one can say crackpot things and somehow still also present oneself as a serious commenter. She seems to think that writing idiotic ideas, lies, defamation, and targeted abuse of people shouldn’t affect her insistence that she be taken seriously. As AVFM supports this kind of writing, it also has no credibility whatever, but the other staffers there also seem to want to be able to be taken seriously anyway. I can only think that they think of themselves as rabble-rousers who think they can get a serious message through even with all that crackpot writing. They can’t. No one with any brains would take anything written on that site seriously, because there’s no boundary between truth and fiction. It’s strictly entertainment for misogynists.
So we can’t control a woman’s body by telling her she has to be pregnant?
Fine.
Then she can’t be pregnant when men don’t want it!
Here’s a heretical thought that will get me flamed, but I’ll put it out there anyway – is Janet Bloomfield just a bored housewife who can’t admit it?
I was tempted to satirize this on my blog, by suggesting we take the procreative equality even further, given that only women die or suffer physical damage as a result of childbirth, should we go around killing and maiming the same number of men each year? And what about everything a woman seeking an abortion has to go through? Should men also be forced to travel across state in order to be screamed at by placard waving fundies if they decide they don’t want to be fathers?
But in the event I don’t have the stomach for it, even in jest.
@Bodycrimes, I’m inclined to agree. While I’ve nothing but respect for your average housewife, I doubt very much that ‘Janet’ is fulfilled by her role, otherwise where is all this seething resentment coming from?
@snorkmaiden – there’s a long and honourable tradition of housewives doing all sorts of things for fulfilment. Some create lovely homes and volunteer in the community. Back in the 1960s, bored housewives were the ones marching for feminism. They were pioneers. More recently, some have created businesses off the back of domestic goddess-ery.
JB is a pioneering first, turning her boredom into toxic hatred of women.
I am so confused by her argument.
So her problem is that women can have abortions when a man wants to her to have a child. But the other problem is also that a woman can have a kid that the man doesn’t want. Due to biology (which they like to harken to so much) men cannot have children a woman doesn’t want. So gender neutral language aside, this obviously puts the onus on women.
In any case, the first part is clear – if your man doesn’t want you to have the baby you have to give it up in some capacity. If you don’t want the baby, you can abort.
And if we have to remember in MRA land consent only needs to be given once. So, hypothetically, if a man agrees to have the kid at the start of the pregnancy the rest doesn’t matter. So, that’s dumb, but logically consistent
The rest gets wonky. Apparently if you get a divorce you can rescind consent? … sounds like ‘false rape’ accusations to me – a night you regret, blahblahblah.
But what throws me is how is this supposed to increase either equality or men’s value. It really just sounds like, not only are men able to refuse to pay child support, then get the woman jailed. How is that going to make me respect men a whole, more?* But the real question is, could a woman do the same thing? Divorce, man gets the kids, and the woman is all “I didn’t want them ANYWAY”
*this is a trick question, really, since I respect men as human beings, just like women. So maybe that’s where my confusion is?
@me and not you,
I don’t think JB has an argument, which is why it’s hard to decipher. But her intent with this article can be summarized as:
‘LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME……..!’
@Bodycrimes. But we’re forgetting what an exceptional individual JB is, didn’t she just turn down some high powered job paying squillions of dollars even though she hadn’t even graduated yet? I’m waiting for the blog post explaining why she won’t be publishing her inspired masterpiece, The Bunger Bames, on account of it being so brilliant that all the book tours and award ceremonies would distract her from her wifely duties. I expect this will be right after she turns down NASA’s offer to let her solo pilot the next space shuttle.
Ok, huh.
So, I was going to go through this long list of cases and see how the law would change things (mostly it wouldn’t, except put women at the mercy of potentially abusive men to force her to give up or abort a child at the last moment, or make a woman unable to keep a child if the father is not around), but here’s something odd.
Could a woman seek to adopt her own child? Wouldn’t that get around the whole “I want a baby, I’m fine with raising it on my own, but the father won’t let me?”
Actually, if abortions aren’t mandatory, why on earth phrase the law in terms of “a child cannot be born if all parents don’t agree?” According to JB’s description, a child can be born, the mother just can’t keep it.
And if that’s the case, what’s the point? Why not let a mother keep the child she gave birth to, and just change the way child support laws work? How is this functionally different from “paper abortions?”
The only way it’s different is that it adds punishment to the woman who wants to keep the child by preventing her from doing so, and even then that’s only if you add a stipulation that the woman can’t just “adopt” the child immediately after birth. It’s either a convoluted, extreme punishment directed at women, or an intricate paper tiger.
All of this for the sake of the extremely specific case where a man does not want a child, a woman does, and the woman petitions for child support once the child is born.
So basically, a woman would have to spend around $300,000 + extra up front to have a man have sex with her, impregnate her, and then spend 18 years slowly having most of that money filter back to her?
Huh?
Why not… I dunno… just have a contractual agreement that the man isn’t going to pay child support at all, and just have her pay for the premium garbage?
Not that I think this should be a thing. It’s just that it’s such a complicated thing that’s fraught with perils. What if the man hits financial difficulties, burns through much of the upfront payment, and then can’t afford some of the child support payment? Can the woman sue for the missing support? Does JB want this to be the case? Because this is only even remotely possible if there is a guarantee that the man will in fact hold up his end of the bargain once there is a child.
Maybe JB would respond by saying “well, how is that any different than how it is now?” And I’d respond by saying “Exactly! I mean, that’s not how it works in real life, but shouldn’t you be suggesting a way to fix things so that innocent men aren’t punished rather than suggesting ways to punish innocent women (or make them vulnerable to exploitation)?”
Nothing about this makes any sense. It’s only purpose is to get revenge on some type of woman that lives only in JB’s mind, that’s why none of the details add up.
By “support the resulting child,” does JB mean just money? Or is a woman basically paying a man to be a father; living with her, helping with chores, driving kids to school, making lunches, doing laundry..
This basically sounds like mail-order-husbands, only a bit less exploitative. And JB thinks this would be a victory for men.
@Kirbywarp,
I think this just a clumsy bit of false equivalence, she’s trying to draw parallels with rape by talking about ongoing consent. But it doesn’t work because rape is a crime and it can happen to men or women, and a baby is a human being and only women can conceive them.
So basically she’s Ann Coulter but stupid?