It’s always refreshing to see Men’s Rights Activists momentarily cease their grousing about the alleged evil and inferiority of women and take up the important issues of our time — like, for example, whether we men should rise up as one and take away women’s right to vote.
Canadian MRA Andrea Hardie — perhaps better known by her pseudonyms “Janet Bloomfield” and “Judgy Bitch” — is leading the way, starting up the #WhyWomenShouldNotVote hashtag on Twitter and following this up with a couple of blog posts arguing that women need to have the vote taken from them.
Why does Hardie think that women (presumably including herself) have collectively forfeited the right to vote? Mostly because they disagree with her.
Hardie starts off her case against women’s suffrage with a familiar MRA argument, declaring that
No draft = no vote.
Women should not vote, because they will never be subject, in any meaningful way, to the draft.
As they used to say on Laugh-In, “very interesting, but stupid.” So how silly is this argument? Let me count the ways:
MRA assertions to the contrary, voting rights for men aren’t tied to the draft.
In the US, (white) men got the vote a long time before the draft began in earnest in World War I. (There was a draft during the civil war, but it only accounted for a very small percentage of soldiers.)
Men did not lose the vote when the draft was abolished in 1973. Nor was the right to vote ever stripped from Amish, Mennonite, or Quaker men who were granted conscientious objector status.
When selective service registration was reinstated in 1980, the draft itself did not return, nor has it during the wars the US has fought since then. Barring an invasion by giant spider monsters from space, the draft isn’t going to return to the US any time soon.
And while failure to register could, in theory, lead to jail time, this law isn’t enforced, and it’s been literally 30 years since anyone has faced charges for not registering.
Not only that, but male-only selective service registration seems destined for the scrapheap of history. With women now being allowed in combat positions in the armed forces, we will almost certainly see registration extended to women — or, perhaps, eliminated entirely for everyone.
Hardie offers two other reasons why women shouldn’t have the vote; both boil down to the fact that women do things with their votes that she doesn’t approve of.
First off, women tend to support a more robust welfare states than men. Well, that’s not exactly how Hardie puts it:
Women will consume government resources until the state collapses. As long as women can vote, they will consume, whilst not producing those resources.
She also blames women for stripping away the defense budget and leaving the US defenseless. Admittedly, this hasn’t actually happened, but Hardie is so sure it will that she has decided that women need to be punished in advance for this terrible hypothetical crime:
Recall that women cannot be drafted. They do not think in terms of military sacrifice, because they will never vote for themselves to be sacrificed. When the money starts to run out, which department do you think women will vote to begin stripping resources from? Which department do they have the least stake in? The least ability to understand?
They will strip money from the Department of Defense. …
Women should not vote, because they will eventually cannibalize the military, leaving us all at the mercy of our enemies.
Hardie is also angry that other women aren’t as racist as she is; indeed, she fears that “European women” will be so welcoming to darker-skinned Islamic invaders that civilization itself will crumble. Again, while this is her underlying argument, this is not exactly how Hardie would phrase things.
We can see the effects of women wanting to be ‘nice’ in Europe. The demographics of modern Europe aredownright terrifying. Ethnic European women refuse to have children, yet turn around and welcome in migrants with birth rates that will inevitably spell the end of ethnic Europeans.
This is what the neo-Nazies like to call “white genocide.”
This simply can’t happen. The European nuclear arsenal cannot fall into the hands of radical Islam. It’s a death sentence for all of us, and one being written by women. As long as women can vote, the great liberal civilizations built by men are going to fall. …
Are we willing to sacrifice our children to rapists while women contemplate whether being ‘nice’ is all it’s cracked up to be?
At this point, it seems like the only thing separating Hardie from the white power gang is that she’s less willing to use ethnic and racial slurs than they are. Oh, and that white supremacists tend to think more highly of women — at least those with white skin, anyway.
Hardie’s grand conclusion:
Women have had the vote in the West for almost 100 years, and all they have done is vote to destroy and destabilize the world men built for us, while protecting themselves from the blood consequences. They have voted selfishly, rapaciously, irrationally and quite possibly, irrevocably.
Women should not vote. That’s not misogyny.
It’s self-defence.
If Hardie sincerely believes all the junk she posts, I hope she draws the obvious conclusion: that as a woman, she herself shouldn’t be allowed to vote. While Canada has not passed a law to this effect, she can certainly remove herself from the voter rolls.
And if women are as inherently damaging to politics as she thinks they are, then perhaps she should not be allowed to post her opinions on the internet either? Again, there is no law mandating that Hardie shut up, but she can voluntarily silence herself, before her perfidious womanhood does more damage to the body politik than it already has.
Ms. Hardie, if you really believe that women are this inherently wrong and evil, the only real option available is to DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT.
@Lea: Women of any occupation can be drafted. Even if a country has a male-only drafting law, if things get bad enough, the powers that be will draft women regardless. And when it’s over, women veterans will be denied veteran status and benefits because their draft was illegal, and thus their service — even freakin’ combat — doesn’t count. That’s what happened to a lot of Soviet women in WWII — including both of my grandmothers.
@Amused
I 100% agree with your first post/analysis of “JB” being an attention-starved troll. She comes off as someone trying way too hard to sound intelligent and interesting while still being cool and “rational.” She reminds me of a less relevant Ann Coulter…. A lost woman who will say anything to get the attention/affection of right-wing men. Blech!
@bina- ha, I was looking that stuff up too, immediately after I made my smart ass remark about Canadians not having the draft! Apparently the 1918 or there a outs act was specifically for WW1 with the aim of getting 100,000 conscripts. They conscripted about 90,000 and only about 20,000 actually went, and they were nicknamed ‘zombies’. They had to make amother act to conscript people for the Second World War. So whenever there is a war on they run it through parliament again and decide who is getting drafted then. I am under the impression men in the United states are always on standby for conscription or something? But here, theoretically they could introduce an act conscripting Canadian cats as easily as men or women. But that would never pass because as soon as we arm the cats we are all doomed.
@Lolallama
Cats are already armed with teeth and claws.
And unless we accede to their demands, we are doomed.
It was edgier when Ann Coulter said it. 0/10, troll harder, Judgy.
@Lea
You make some really excellent, levelheaded points, not limited to your quotes above.
@snowberry
Good point! And that’s because she’s not actually from the USA.
I’m pretty sure she has a husband (I randomly saw her “debate” a feminist on YouTube and she mentioned how it’s OK for her to wake him up with a BJ, so needing consent is bullshit, QED), and I wonder, is he an MRA too? Or is he an ok person and does he just hear her opinions and be like “OK honey, yes honey, that’s great”?
Holy shit, Ohanion broke his spine from patting himself on the back so hard for his “brave” stance in removing certain reddit communities on the nightly show.
Naturally noone called him on the shady crap he pulled and how he threw a woman under the bus to keep racists and sexists happy.
I’m sorry for the off-topic, but fuck this guy.
Hardie is singing one of Coulter’s golden oldies again.
I don’t believe the “we can’t let woman vote because I won’t like what they’d vote for” “argument” is even new. I distinctly remember reading that one of the excuses given opposing woman’s suffrage in the US was that women would vote for prohibition. (Fun fact: women didn’t get the vote here until after prohibition was enacted)
@Tovius: None of the arguments I’ve heard against women’s votes or even against feminism are new. It’s always the same old shit.
It’s the means of which that anti-feminists hurt men and women that keep evolving.
Women should not vote. That’s not misogyny.
It’s self-defence.
LOL… I think.
Is she openly a part of the white supremacy / alt-right movement or just an “accidental” sympathizer?
Ha! The spider aliens example you used got to me. I once told AFVM during an argument the draft would only be used if aliens invade and everyone is screwed anyway.
Other anti-suffragist theories:
1. Married women would just vote for whoever/whatever their husband did. Unmarried women usually wouldn’t bother. So it would effectively give married men two votes, which is discrimination against unmarried men.
2. Women would mostly vote very differently than men, and again, unmarried women would rarely bother. So therefore married women would effectively negate their husband’s vote, skewing political power heavily towards unmarried men. Again, discrimination!
3. Give women the slightest bit of political power and the country will vote itself into a matriarchy.
4. Women would vote frivolously because they have no reason to be invested in political matters.
Basically, not that different from modern manlojik.
Ugh. Fuck Comcast. The internet is down. I had to fire up my old laptop to put a movie on.
And why is it Robert Dole and not William Clinton?
And if Europe mustn’t fall into the hands of the womenfolk, what about Frau Merkel?
I never understood this “women can’t have the vote because they’re somewhat more leftist on average than men” reasoning. If right-wingers think having leftist opinions should disqualify people from voting, why not be honestly fascist? A one-party system would effectively take the vote from leftist women AND leftist men. Surely that is what they really want. The disenfranchisement of women is an inferior alternative strategy, that admittedly has the pleasant bonus of being misogynist.
Oh right, they ARE trying to bring back fascism. I forgot.
When JudgyBitch proposes denying voting rights to women, she means women who don’t think as she does. When JudgyBitch proposes denying pretty much any right to women, she means women who aren’t her.
Not sure about the US, but – at least as far as I can tell – what the Canadian right-wingers want is a system consisting of two ideologically identical right-wing parties, competing to ensure neither stray from their right-wing roots.
Tho, when they *do* get two right-leaning parties (as was the case at the federal level with Reform & PC, and in Alberta with Wildrose and PC) they start calling to ‘unite the right,’ because a split right can’t actually beat the (more or less centrist) Liberals, even with the NDP and Greens bleeding the leftist vote away.
I can’t speak for any other country, but in the US, only about a third of them at most. The Trump fans are fascists, the Cruz fans are theocrats, the Rubio fans are libertarians, and the moderates seem to have largely jumped ship because the only remaining candidate who isn’t a horrible excuse for a human being is Kasich. But it’s not like we need another rich man who failed his way upward through life becoming president.
(Though Kasich does seem to have bumped up in popularity recently, if still behind the other three. So maybe the moderates are now figuring “to hell with this, he’s still a better option than those assholes”?)
@dust bunny
I can understand it, to a point. They’re convinced that their beliefs are obviously right, and are in the best interest of the country. So, at some point they have to ask themselves, why do these obviously correct views keep losing elections? Why did Obama get reelected?
Many right wingers solve this by saying that the voters were just misinformed or mislead, or that the majority do agree with them, they just didn’t turn out to vote. But it’s a pretty easy jump to blame it on some demographic that consistently votes more Democratic than the nation as a whole, and if you’re already inclined to think women are inferior and illogical…
Actually, there’s a German word for that idea that in modern society conscripts are the only worthy voters:
Heinleinfanfick…
The idea has been floating around for a long time, I guess, at least Old Greece. And “one man* one vote” with various asterisks used to be revolutionary even 100 years ago.
No reason to get back there.
PS tricky tricks to get me to comment first time. I just realized what inspired me to the Heinlein word above 🙂
@Kat et al
This seems to happen with British right-wingers and right-leaning libertarians as well, especially when they start talking about freeze peach, and numbered articles in Magna Carta, which does not have articles.
It is odd because they are often also hyper-nationalistic, but don’t seem to realise that the USA is a different nation from the one they are in.
I blame Ayn Rand.
@ bluecat
Actually Magna Carta (or at least the one that’s still on the statute book today) does/did have articles; seventeen of them.
The history of Magna Carta is convoluted but, if you’re a legal nerd like me, pretty interesting.
We all know the story of Bad King John and Runnymede in 1215. That’s the original one. But over time documents bearing that name have been repealed, re-enacted and re-drawn time and time again.
It’s the 1297 version that is still in force today, albeit with most of the articles repealed. As to how it’s incorporated into English law and/or the constitution, well you could write a book on that.
If you want to know some more on this fascinating topic and how it relates to contemporary law Google Articuli super Cartas. It’s pretty interesting.
ETA: you’re very correct of course that the original had clauses, not articles.