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.
@ lith
“I’m just going to sit here and quietly glare at you. And vote Green.”
Aw come on, Boudicca was brilliant! Say what you like about her policies but at least you can walk around St Albans now without being harassed by Roman legionaries. 🙂
I missed this post til now. Wow. I can’t even finish it. The self loathing it must take to write something like that. I can’t even. Such hatred of children. She’s happy to torture babies to punish their mothers. What a bitter, unhinged, boot licking kook.
I can’t work out if she considers herself to be not part of the ‘women’ group, considering how intensely she appears to hate everyone in it.
I don’t get the concept of hating people for something they have never had control over, and that ultimately doesn’t define them. Sorry – shouldn’t define them.
@ Danah
Hi, must confess, had to Google that term but I see your point.
I’d like to see a society where people can live how they want without being judged on it (well, maybe draw the line at serial killers). You should be entitled to explore your feminine side with the same acceptance I get for being blokey. And it shouldn’t be a pigeon hole scenario in an “all or nothing” sense. A femboi could have an interest in some stereotypical ‘masculine’ pursuit and I can enjoy my donkeys.
Same for women, you should be allowed to dress conservatively or get your breasts out on Page 3; whatever you choose without being judged. Both women and men can be engineers or midwives if they want. It’s nobody’s business to say otherwise.
She doubled down. I can’t believe I’m surprised. It’s shock and dismay-ception. She equates a woman’s mere bodily autonomy to a power held over men while she talks about children like livestock or some sort of point system. Whoever can control a woman’s body gets all the points! The world won’t be “fair” enough for JB until women belong to men at penalty of torture and imprisonment. (Taking a baby from it’s mother for the crime of not being properly owned by a man is fucking torture.)
You know she’s talking about girls too. Teen girls, rape victims…she would punish them all with glee.
These MRAs sure love to fantasize about abusing, imprisoning and murdering women, don’t they? How human rightsy of them.
0.o
The states can’t afford care for the children already in custody because of abusive and neglectful parents. Foster homes and group homes are scarce and I wouldn’t put my dogs in some of them.
Of course a bunch of abusers, pedos and rapists would want to overburden that system further. It’s a way to turn a protective service into another way to abuse. It’s win/win for MRAs.
JB’s ultimate goal is to get the creeps to cheer for her and they really get off on her calling little girls whores, supporting rapists and and telling abusive men their ex wives and other assorted victims deserve to be punished.
I need an Andromeda Strain shower.
@Alan:
From Perdido Street Station I really like (but can’t fully remember) the way one culture handled law. Something like – there was only one crime and that was taking away someone else’s choices. So stealing from someone took away their choice to use whatever you stole and killing someone took away all of their choices.
I like that it basically says anything goes as long as there’s consent from everyone affected.
@Lea:
It’s not just me reading that tone into it then? She does come across as particularly pleased with herself for having thought of such a ‘wonderful’ ‘solution’ to the world’s problems. And gleeful at the thought of punishing the evil women (i.e. all of them except/including her?).
Caustic Soda covered pregnancy and childbirth. Maybe MRAs should listen to them before they call being the person who has to go through pregnancy and childbirth the one with all the “power”. Maybe they should pick up a maternity nursing text book while they’re at it.
http://www.causticsodapodcast.com/2014/11/17/pregnancy-childbirth/
I get JB’s shtick. She wants something. She thinks she’s competing with other women to get it and she has to go with her strengths.
JB believes that male approval is the end all be all and women without it should be punished. I think it’s safe to draw from that belief an intense desire on her part to receive male approval. Her own status as safe and valued in a world she sees as belonging to men hinges on her head pats. There are men who admire smart women, funny women, ambitious women, confident women, kind women, etc. She’s not any of those things. The kind of men who value those traits in a person aren’t impressed with her. So, she’s working the crowd who likes what she has to offer. To impress them all she needs to do is give lip service to being happily owned by a man and hating women who aren’t. She’s horrible because that’s where she really shines. That is her special skill.
She’d be the Uncle Ruckus of misogyny if she was serious about her beliefs. There is no way in hell she’d really want laws like that to apply to her. I don’t think even JB is that big a fool. She’s pandering for approval.
I think you’re probably right, nothing else seems to fit. I can’t imagine having so little empathy that I could do that. Or worse, having empathy and doing it anyway. She comes across as a Cruella DeVille type character, I wonder if that’s deliberate?
lith,
Oh yeah. She’s jubilant.
This is hypothetical but what if her husband left her? Would she have to give up her children?
Yes, Janet, because nothing would bring about society caring about men more (and the concept of society not care about men is bass aackwards in the first place) than yanking a newborn out of the hands of a woman and then cuffing her and sending her to jail. Yeah, OOOOKKKKAYYY. I also love that she thinks gender neutral means benefiting only the men and does not help f#@k all about the woman and child. Per usual, no sense at all.
She could be somewhat sincere.
We now know from her own account why she’s so invested in supporting rape culture. She’s a rapist. She relies on the mindset that dismisses rape of a young man as being something he probably wanted anyway because that’s how men are.
Patriarchy has been good to her. It allows her to believe the act of making sandwiches for her husband is revolutionary and bragging about it clever. She does seem to share the delusion of adequacy we see so often in bigots.
It is possible she doesn’t want to believe sexist men think of her the way they do other women. If they did, that would be terrible. Maybe she doesn’t want that so she does triple mental back-flips to explain it away. Maybe she just likes hanging out with dudes who hate ladies as much as she does.
Even if all that were true, I think this stuff is mostly just a put on. She has an easy audience to please. They’re hateful, misogynist scum and when she tells them what they want to hear they tell her she “rocks”. From what she’s written I think she needs to hear that, even if it’s only from scum. Without male approval she thinks she’s worthless. What wouldn’t she do then to get it?
Either she’s the sort of person who would call molested children “whores” because she means it or because she knows she can get some male validation for saying it. I can’t decide which is worse.
*hums Yer So Bad*
She’s an incredible hypocrite when it comes to her own children (as these judgmental types always are). Did you ever read her blog post about what happened when her 11-year-old daughter was the target of a lewd comment from a classmate one day while walking home from school?
Guess what her response was:
a) Boys will be boys! We can’t criminalize natural masculinity! Anyway, she probably had it coming to her, the harlot! What was she wearing?
b) RAAARRRRRRGH A BOY HAS THREATENED MY DAUGHTER I WILL DESTROY HIM CALL THE SCHOOL CALL HIS PARENTS CALL THE POLICE HIS LIFE IS **OVER**
If you guessed b, “ballistic-helicopter-mama-bear-Hulk”, you’re correct. She didn’t just follow up with the parents to make sure it didn’t happen again, she went out of her way to pursue a scorched-earth policy against the other kid, dragging every authority she could think of into the picture. Then she posted it on the internet to further humiliate him, and to brag about how she ruined his life. It’s a sickening read.
I wonder how she would have reacted if the MRAs had flooded her comments section, blaming her daughter for leading the kid on, blaming her for falsely accusing a male of wrongdoing, making death threats, and graphic suggestions of what they’d like to do to her. After all, she loves it when they do that to other women who have been the targets of harassment. Why should her daughter be the snowflake exception?
(Note, I am not advocating that people actually do this to her daughter…just, there’s a double standard here. I am advocating that JB transform herself into a decent human being and understand that if it’s not acceptable to do to your own daughter, it is not acceptable to do to other people’s daughters.)
Buttercup – clearly HER daughter is not like those OTHER girls. Her daughter didn’t deserve that treatment. I have no difficulty imagining JB as one of those clinic protestors who take a day off from waving posters of aborted fetuses to take her daughter in for hers, then go back to poster-waving the next day.
Just to clarify – nobody deserves that treatment, which is something JB has trouble with.
@ Lith
“there was only one crime and that was taking away someone else’s choices.”
That’s an interesting concept. I’ve been thinking about how it would work in practice. It is superficially attractive. Some offences do indeed have at their heart a taking away of choice. One way you can be convicted of theft in England for instance is where you “appropriate the rights of the owner” in regard to property. The case law actually mentions not allowing the real owner to do what he chooses with it.
Such a jurisprudence though wouldn’t cover ‘risk’ based offending and incohate offences. I could for instance drive on the wrong side of the road at whatever speed I liked through a school zone and I’d only commit an offence if I actually ran over someone. In common law countries we tend to punish the actions not the consequences (as they can be random) hence it being an offence to drive carelessly even if no one is hurt (on the flipside, until very recently it didn’t matter if you did kill someone whilst driving carelessly, the penalty was the same as if no one had been affected)
Also attempted murder wouldn’t be a crime, no attempt would. Although that might not be an issue. To quote Sideshow Bob “You don’t get the Nobel Prize for Attempted Chemistry”. 🙂
Sorry, I’m late to the party. Alan, a few pages ago you said
Even if there were some way to do it that was as safe as termination, I feel like that conversation would be “Should we take away women’s bodily rights in favor of men who want babies?”. My answer to that conversation or almost any conversation about someone’s body is always going to be “Keep your hands off of it unless they say so or need desperate medical help”.
I realize you said a conversation and not a definitive statement, but I was a little bit surprised there no push back.
So where does JB suggest that all these babies go once they are seized? Who is going to take care of them? My only guess would be that all of these children once siezed would go off to state funded orphanages or institutions, and any person with a tad of common sense would understand the implications of this.
Yes Janet’s proposal would somewhat reduce the number of accidental pregnancies , but not enough for something like this not to have hideous consequences.
Taking the ethics out of it Janet’s proposal would still have dire consequences for society in other areas. (JB has no sense of ethics so there is no use arguing that point with her. Is there any use in arguing ANY point with her though?)
And for someone who hates the state JB seems pretty in favour of some rather totalitarian state intervention when it suits her bizarre beliefs.
JB is a very strange woman.
I have so many thoughts after reading up on what the whole “choice-theft” thing was (I had heard of it before), but it’s based on only ever reading other people’s analyses of it and on lots of spoils, so, urk.
@Alan:
“Choice-theft” could be interpreted to include a lot of actions that don’t result in harm. I mean, if you literally talk about “theft of a choice,” a person driving recklessly on the wrong side of the road prevents other people from driving in certain ways lest they get hit and injured, and prevents children in the school zone from being able to navigate normally on the streets (for fear of a driver barreling through). It definitely could include risk.
There’s a huge swath of cultural baggage that comes with this law. Apparently the Garuda are nomadic, and view themselves as individuals in a matrix of interactions with others. They are acutely aware that every action they take affects others, and nobody is independent. Unless an attempt at murder was witnessed by nobody, and the victim never learned of it, even attempted murder would be an action that negatively affects others. Knowing that someone tried to kill you would force you to alter your life in one way or another, and therefore is, in a sense, a theft of choice.
On the other hand, I suppose there would be no legal sense of obligation to others… it would never be a crime to ignore cries for help or something.
Well, from our perspective anyway, like physical harm or trauma. From the Garuda’s perspective, loss of choice is it’s own harm… really the only harm.
@ kirbywarp
” it would never be a crime to ignore cries for help or something.”
Well, that’s the case in most common law jurisdictions anyway. Under English law you could stand by and watch a blind man walk off a cliff without any legal recourse. Generally you can only be liable for commissions if you owe a specific duty of care to the victim (parents to kids mainly).
It’s interesting what you say about inchoate offences having an effect on choice. That tallies with a lot of the discussions around here. If a fear of crime prevents a woman going out or choosing to walk alone for instance.
One thing I like about fictional legal systems is thinking how they’d play out in reality. I once got a really good mark in a jurisprudence essay for my explanation as to why Judge Dredd was the best exemplar of the American Realism school of legal analysis. 🙂
“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.”
Dat self esteem tho
Ellie
That’s why when I’m hard up for cash I just rob banks with the threat of withholding babies. I don’t even bother with a mask because I have gotten away with shit from time immemorial. I’m just like “Put the money in the bag or I’ll refuse to reproduce!!! Take me to the vault!” and they comply because..babies.
She tells a sad tale of self-hate, doesn’t she? Her only remaining value is in raising a man’s children so he doesn’t have to. She’s middle aged. She’s probably at the end of her usefulness as a walking womb. According to her MRAsshole buddies, her “value” as a sex toy has waned away to nearly nothing too. Once the kids are raised her husband is doing her a favor by keeping her around. A young Wife 2.0 could make sandwiches too. She could even have another litter for her new owner and raise them for him. Why not? According to JB, she’ll be a worthless old boner killer by then. If she gets sick and cannot fulfill her duties as boner pleaser, housekeeper and childcare provider she loses all value even before the nest is empty. Hers is not an enviable existence. No wonder she expends so much effort convincing herself she’s superior to common “whores”. It must be how she sleeps at night.
@Ellie
LOL! Yeah, she just overflows with self esteem, don’t cha know? You nailed it.
@booburry
Damn, I should have gotten my baby-making get out of jail free card while I had the chance. 🙂
@Lea It is a rather bleak picture she paints for herself (I mean polices other women with because none of this applies to her of course).
This is, however, the crux of a lot of blatherings that the MRA like to promulgate. That the only value women have is what they can give or do for a man (men’s very existence is like a golden shower of awe and that should be enough for you ladies).