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.
@bluecat
That’s some stunning illogic!
Perhaps right wingers worldwide like to think that they’re citizens of the Most Powerful Country.
And, of course, alien invasions aren’t actually a thing that could happen. Given the logistical difficulties inherent in space travel, and the logistical difficulties inherent in invasions over long distances, it would be far easier to build a planet than to invade one.
I can provide numbers to defend this statement if need be.
@Alan:
It’s weird to read the history of the original 1215 Magna Carta and realise that contrary to what Robin Hood stories told us, King John was definitely the good guy. It requires something of a leap of empathy to put yourself into the heads of the barons at all, so distant is their reasoning from that of a modern-day human.
Thank you, Amused.
@ EJ
Yeah, certainly no worse than the power brokers, including the Barons, of the times. And of course Richard’s reputation has been somewhat whitewashed. Still, we all like things in black &; white, and that Disney film with the foxes is brilliant! 🙂
When the usual suspects do start banging on about Magna Carta and their ‘rights as a freeborn Englishman’ I like to shut them down with “Go on then, you can have some fish-traps in the Thames”
ETA: what’s funny about ‘progressive’ politics is that a lot of it isn’t that new. From the barons to the levellers, the basic idea that all should be equal under the law has been understood pretty well, just not applied. But a lot of what has been written in the far past, once you adjust for linguistic changes, wouldn’t sound out of place on a modern political website.
@ Snowberry
I know it’s not mainstream, but I’m horrified at how it’s only recently become more and more acceptable to be openly fascist and the “silent majority” the worst people have always claimed to be on their side has proved to be an actually existing large minority. It seriously took us only 70 years to forget what a horrible idea fascism is? Wasn’t that lesson costly enough?
@ sbel
That’s the thing though, it irks me so much when something that is done by 50% of men and 55% of women is seen as somehow being a “female” thing to do and gets blamed on women. That’s a consistent pattern in gender stereotyping, and I’m offended to the point of having vessels in my brain burst by just how incredibly dumb a way it is to look at the world.
An example:
And yet another MRA tosspot who is a massive racist – funny how they go together so often isn’t it?!
Karen Straughn has also said that women do not deserve the vote.
I do hope that neither of them have ever voted seeing as how they don’t deserve it an’ all.
@dust bunny
Well, it would seem to me that it’s not so much that people forgot about fascism than there is a general ignorance of what fascism means. A lot of those attracted to modern-day fascist movements (including but not limited to Trump and certain European right-populist parties) are under the impression that anything shy of calling for the outright annihilation of Jews can’t be called fascist.
It’s stupid but also predictable, and the fact remains that a lot of people of the older generations are hesitant to call out fascism (regardless of their own politics) for much the same reasons; if anything conservative can be called fascism, that demeans the experiences of those who suffered through the holocaust.
@ Terrabeau
Sigh. The way history is taught in school is worse than useless, if it can’t at least teach most kids what fascism is and why it’s bad.
I think you’re giving them too much credit, though. Many people on the internet at least embrace fascism quite openly, and admire the Nazis and WW2-era Japan a major difference.
The barons weren’t in favour of people being equal before the law, though. Not in the least bit.
For those unaware, a little British history.
Magna Carta’s insistence on trial by jury must be understood in its original context: tax avoidance by the wealthy. When Richard I died he left a country which was largely bankrupted by the cost of waging war in Outremer and which had its civil service (such as it was) largely taken over by the people whom it was intended to regulate. John’s first act upon becoming king and understanding how serious the problem was, was to attempt to get the barons to pay their taxes and to obey the law. Naturally, they recognised that this was essential in a civilised country and submitted.
Just kidding. Actually, they did the opposite: the barons rose up in arms and tried to topple him. John faced almost constant civil war throughout his reign, fighting warlords who feared that having to pay their back taxes would ruin them and that John planned to elevate skilled commoners to the civil service instead of their own proteges. Both of these were pretty accurate fears, it has to be said, but are lousy reasons to wage a war.
The central demand of the barons was that no freeman (that is, nobleman) could be imprisoned or have their possessions confiscated (that is, subject to lien or foreclosure for failure to pay taxes) unless they were found guilty by their peers (that is, the other barons who were also trying to avoid their taxes and therefore would not pass a guilty verdict against one of their own.) In 1215 at a place nowadays known by the majestic name of “Junction 12 of the M25”, John signed this agreement in a document called Magna Carta. Six months later John raised a new army under William Marshall (a typical follower of John, in that he was a skilled person from humble origins rather than being a protege of the noble families), routed the barons in open battle and dissolved the agreement.
That should have been the end of it but John accidentally drowned the next year and was replaced by a boy king, Henry III, whom the barons were able to coerce into signing Magna Carta and thus allowing them to once again get away with not paying their taxes.
This is the story of how trial by jury originates.
@ EJ
Well they were for a certain value of “people” (i.e. Barons) 😉
The jury thing is even more complicated. There are a few sources that combined. In the Danelaw it was a council of 12 ‘elders’ that adjudicated on disputes.
In some other jurisdictions you basically had to get 12 ‘character witnesses’ to vouch for you.
There are other similar examples.
It’s funny though that 12 was a common number. (I know there’s some theory that that’s the optimum number for decision making). Although not all juries have 12 members anyway.
Holy shit. Where can I read more about this?
There’s something else I should mention about this “draft=vote” nonsense, since I brought up the Soviet Union in WWII. Judgybitch and her ilk have a conception of warfare on the level of toddlers. They imagine that war consists of neat, perfectly contained battles, where two armies meet on an empty custom-designed battlefield and beat the crap out of each other, while the womenfolk are getting their nails done a couple of miles away without a care in the world. And whichever army is victorious, its soldiers will celebrate by respectfully buying those women drinks and dinner. By that logic, women during WWII did nothing but put their feet up and read romance novels while the men “fought for their rapacious interests”, WETF that means. For people who claim to be big experts on so-called “real life”, that’s an astounding degree if naivete.
If your country is invaded and succumbs to a full-scale existential conflict, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t get drafted. Everyone will get burned. In fact, your odds of survival in such a situation are probably better if you are a soldier rather than a civilian. All essentials of which there is a shortage — food, fuel, medicine, warm clothing, weapons — go to soldiers first. And contrary to MRAs’ belief, armies don’t do police work (not really) and don’t act as bodyguards for damsels in distress.
Aerial bombings are not gender-specific. It’s not like the bombs and the fires kill all the men and flatten all the strip clubs, but bypass the women and the bonbon shops. Gunfire, when battles are fought in populated areas, doesn’t discriminate, either. Mass deaths that result from the destruction of infrastructure and the means of production, as well as the inevitable agricultural collapse — deaths due to starvation, rampant disease, lack of meducal care, lack of clean water, lack of heat in winter — don’t somehow magically leave women unaffected, and in fact, on the contrary, more heavily befall civilians. And, lest we forget, regardless of who is victorious, women and girls invariably find themselves on the receiving end of rape and sexual exploitation (which we all know is a feminist lie, but kind white men are still willing to lay down their lives to protect us whores from Islamofascist rape, which doesn’t exist).
In other words, the idea that a war is characterized by half the population fighting and the other laying about is so ludicrous, it’s an embarrassment to anyone over the age of, you know, five.
@ amused
Just to be nerdy, that’s the actual definition of “pitched battle” (i.e. a battle by mutual appointment at a predetermined location)
She’s just butthurt because she flew all the way LA to appear on some talk show, then they didn’t screen her bit. So much for her fifteen minutes of fame.
She wants to be a public figure, but won’t be so she’s settling for internet notoriety instead.
Hello.
Displaying humanity, soon a crime.
And for our dear PUA friends, the next bro-tip for picking-up european women is this opener : “Hey, lady, i am a migrant !” 97% success !
> Alan
Actually, France entered in NATO under Sarkozy regime, just because he wanna be see as a friend by that era american governement (bet this was Bush II). It had been done even if there was not a majority of french people agreeing with that. On a side note, Sarkozy pretends to be a Gaullist (and many other things), while it was De Gaulle who refused that France be part of NATO. And yet, politicians wonder why they are not liked and/or believed…
Have a nice day.
@ occasional reader
Ah, my understanding was France never actually left NATO, even when De Gaulle had his little tantrum. He just refused to commit any forces. Then when things calmed down there were a series of “secret” accords (that you can read in a lot of books) specifying under what circumstances French forces might join in, but the nuclear arsenal wasn’t included in that. Realpolitik eh?
@Amused:
I could not agree more.
The Lancet did a famous study which concluded that deaths resulting from the British/American invasion of Iraq in 2003 could have reached seven figures. The overwhelming majority of these deaths were due to the breakdown of infrastructure which lead to a lack of electricity, clean water and medical supplies. Tragically, this same breakdown also means that we will probably never know the full casualty count.
Misogynists might believe that only men and boys died like that, and militarists might believe that only uniformed casualties count, but neither is the case.
Completely off topic but has anyone else seen the disgusting article on Rok where the dude tells ‘truths’ about the ‘nature’ of women from his ‘friend’ dying of cancer. It’s put in quotes as if she said it but it’s odd how she sounds exactly like a pua/mra dickbag. There’s no level they will not drop to.
@ Amused & EJ
Nothing new about all this. More French civilians were killed by allied bombing during Overlord than British civilians were killed by German bombing during the Blitz.
@amused
I think this attitude comes from the fact that for the Americans ww1 was not something on their doorstep and then when it did come in the form of pearl harbour in ww2 they won’t shut the fuck up about it
Never mind for the UK and mainland Europe in blitz and bombings ‘pearl harbour’ was almost a daily reality on top of enemy occupation and then other things you mentioned. It’s very easy for someone like judgy to beleive the way she does when the people in her family did not have first hand experience of occupation and real war. They idolise it, they think it’s manly, heroic and a nantional pride rather than a sickening, confusing, inescapable horror that scars your country forever. If she’d had mothers or grandmothers to share with her the truth then maybe she’d value her vote a lot higher.
I’ll comment properly later. I should have known that THING would be back on twitter, spouting her idiocy.
The War of 1812 must be very confusing to her.
Alan Robertshaw:
Is that usage related to the usage of “pitch” in “pitch a tent”, do you know? Or to “pitch” in the sports sense, or are they all related?
Note that a disgusting, non-zero, amount of french older people say variations about “we were not that bad off in 1940” and “we need a good war to teach things to youngsters”. (the Algeria independance war is also often substitued to WWII depending on the generation)
Certainly not the majority, but it remind that even people who actually have survived a war, either as a soldier or a civilian, can have forgotten it completely and spout insanity similar to judgyBitch.
I know I am super late to the party but I just discovered this website a week ago and have had the best. Time. Ever. I honestly have not laughed so hard in forever. Just before I started writing this, one of my work colleague asked, with serious concern, if I was okay because I have been giggling non stop for the last ten minutes. Thank you, David, and all of you who comment on the posts, for making me less sad about living in this world.
@ ledasmom
Ooh dunno; but that would make sense wouldn’t it?
We talk about the field of battle and also sports fields, so I wonder if there’s a similar connection with ‘pitch’ and if so which came first.
That’s my weekend homework sorted. 🙂