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.
@ohlmann actually that is very true. My oldest brother was born 1979 in khabarovsk and he still very pro-Russia and putin X( he lives in kerch now and says putin did a good thing to annex crimea. Never mind if you asked him in 2012 he would say he is ukranian. I am 13 years younger than him but it’s a big difference in politics
@ valentine
Hi, you can perhaps clear something up for me. There’s a tendency in the UK to refer to The Ukraine, but I’ve heard that’s incorrect and one shouldn’t use ‘The’. Is that right? Cheers.
Ukraine means similar to border land so technically you could say ‘the Ukraine’ to mean ‘the border’. But since there is no equivalent to ‘the’ in ukranian or Russian either way is okay. But to be honest I think to say the Ukraine is the old fashioned way and Ukraine is the correct name considering it is a country not a boarder xD better to drop the ‘the’
@Valentine OMG…She told him about the ROUTINE DOG SEX that we ALL have!! Seriously, no one is supposed to think this is some kind of real confession, right? I’m honestly, genuinely offended that anyone would bring even the idea of someone DYING OF CANCER into something that is so clearly a (REALLY BAD) joke.
it is a joke, right?
@kindageeky
It’s literally then worst article I’ve read in ages. And I read it at breakfast :'(
And wouldn’t it be great if it was a joke? But then I remember these guys have no humour bone. It’s like he thinks just cos she ‘is dying’ (if there is any chance she even exist) she’s going to make some kind of confession about how evil women are and to a sick pua of all people. Definitely not a GIANT LIE.
I couldn’t get through it all, and I’m pretty hardened to this crap. Maybe David will distill it for us? Although, really, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
It’s clearly not at all true…that’s why I thought it had to be tongue in cheek. I mean, no one can expect an audience to believe that a dying friend confessed that women…ALL women…or, I’m sorry, all HOT women…have sex with dogs all the on the regular. Like this is the big secret that she had to confess before she died…
LOL wut?
How do you distill pure shit any way? I didn’t finish it either. Probably better that way…
I was told once that if you say the Ukraine then it implies that you think it’s part of Russia rather than an independent country. Is that the case or am I misinformed?
@Dave Futrelle: seventh-day adventist men were also conscientious objectors but many enlisted to serve in non-combat (mostly medic) roles…. Desmond Dross is a famous SDA objector who saved his platoon and was awarded a medal of honor for it.
@Ej the argument doesn’t make so much sense really since its just Украина because we have no ‘the’. But before in the soviet times Russian would say that it was not so much part but just a boarder of the union. To say я на Украина not я и Украина. So you’re correct in a sort of way. To say ‘the Ukraine’ is like an old fashioned way to say that it is not really a country but just an edge. ‘The’ sort of makes it an insult.
Thanks, Valentine. Always good to know these things in order to avoid giving offence where it isn’t desired.
Нана тне idea of saying ‘the’ just seems silly to me but I’m a millennial (oh no!) someone older might be offended. Until recently I just thought when I heard it that was the English way, my mum explained it to me. XD
@ Alan
aha – yes, of course. Clauses (technically) not articles. The reference I had in mind was a meme going round referencing “Article 61” – which doesn’t exist – of something called “Magna Carter” (which must mean a large waggoner, though if it had been Magners Carter he’d at least have a waggonload of cider).
And yeah, although it was innovative in its time, Magna Carta was a bit of a mixed achievement.
On pitch (as a verb) the Online Etymology Dictionary has this:
Pitched tents, and pitched battlefields too, would have had stakes driven into the ground.
I can’t find confirmation but I’d bet it’s connected also to pitch in music, as “pricking out a song” meant marking out the notes on the stave up until at least Pepys.
I’ve been reading Njal’s Saga recently and 10th century Iceland obviously had a kind of jury system, in that every time someone is killed – which is a lot of times – a posse is formed to look the corpse over and declare which wounds were made by which person with which weapons, and if possible which wound caused death. This was all a prelude to the real fun of negotiating the blood money deals.
On “the” in the names of countries, it’s old fashioned usage and seems to be dropping out. I believe it came about when a country was considered to be identical with a geographic feature rather than seen as a political entity: The Ukraine, The Gambia, The Ivory Coast and – long before my time – The Barbados, by analogy with the Sahara, the Himalayas, etc.
Rather patronising – hey, chaps, you might THINK you live in a country, but we Anglophones know better! (Not as bad as naming a country after a foreigner whose name the locals couldn’t even pronounce, like “The Gilbert Islands”, or after a king who never went near the place and whose name the locals couldn’t pronounce, like “The Philippines”, mind you).
Complicated when we’re basically translating a name from languages which don’t have any articles at all – like Russian and Ukrainian.
There is no selective service in Canada. Why doesn’t Hardie want Canadian men to vote?
Also, I tend to be a pacifist, but if you want to see if I’d ever take up arms, your best bet is to take away my right to vote.
Njal’s Saga is amazing. You have good taste, bluecat. Have you read Eigil’s Saga?
The United Kingdom 😉
Edit also I work with many Filipinos and I find they just swap their p’s and f’s about in the pronunciation. So coffee time becomes ‘kopi na’. Not that it’s any exuse for naming someone’s country for them but they never seem to call it anything other than the Philippines when I ask them
@ valentine
Which of course is abbreviated to “UK”. 🙂
@alan but ‘the’ Uk right? 😉
@ valentine
Yup. I’d never thought about the oddness of the abbreviation though until you put that.
There’s a weird one in Cornwall. You can say ‘Scilly’ or ‘Isles of Scilly’ but you’re not suppose say ‘The Scilly Isles’ (although everybody does)
She is….different. Possibly one of the least intelligent individuals I have ever witnessed. Or it could be something else entirely.
Honestly, sometimes I’m hesitant to poke fun at some of these people, because their reasoning is so devoid of rational and logical thought that they must be suffering from some debilitating mental illness.
I’m not even joking.
Honestly, they live in the same reality as us but they way they observe, interact and interpret that reality is too incoherent to be of sound mind. With their hypocrisies, absent self-awareness, the lines they connect, the conjecture, paranoia, baseless assumptions predictions and desire to express it all loudly and proudly with hysterical overreactions (sometimes violent fantasies) to dissenting opinions…some integral part of their brain has to be shut-off, right?
Just look at how Dave runs this site and compare it to how the most prominent voices in the misogyny movement express themselves and react. Dave never misquotes anyone, because he takes what they say word for word and posts it, in proper context, with some pretty calm observations and musings. He doesn’t need to add much to it, because the quotes are usually so evidently toxic, they don’t need much more.
But the way his opponents respond to their own words being reprinted, in proper context…is rage, misquotes, aggression, petty insults and lies. Seriously, what? Also, they’re entire movement is based on hatred, paranoia and devaluing/subjugating 50% of the human race. That right there is the biggest tip-off.
Or maybe they’re just douche bags who received a disproportionate amount validation for their skills and accomplishments when they were young. So now when things go wrong in their life, they can’t recognize their own shortcomings and blame everyone else for keeping them down, instead of recognizing that they’re not ‘special’ and taking some fucking responsibility.
@alan
@alan suppose the isles of scilly (silly?) Makes more sense because there are more than one. Like the British island. And like the Philippines because there are more than one ‘Philippine’ island. But The United Kingdom! Oh boy! So important! Much king! Very ruler! Wow! 😉 I’m kidding of course…a bit anyway 😀
@ valentine
Yeah, as there were at least two kingdoms that got united maybe it should be ‘United Kingdoms’? Then all the rest of the full title would make sense.
As for Scilly, it used to be just the one island. It only needs sea level to drop a few feet and it would be again. You can still see all the old walls from when it was above land just under the surface of the sea.
I always thought we dropped the ‘The’ when the country (re)achieved independence. Hence, when the USSR no longer existed, neither did The Ukraine. Although it never applied to all countries. There is a county in England that locals call ‘The Wirral’, despite its name being ‘Wirral’.
@Valentine what is the difference between я на Ук
I always thought we dropped the ‘The’ when the country (re)achieved independence. Hence, when the USSR no longer existed, neither did The Ukraine. Although it never applied to all countries. There is a county in England that locals call ‘The Wirral’, despite its name being ‘Wirral’.
@Valentine what is the difference between я на Украина and я и Украина? Is it translatable or is it just with/without the ‘The’. Is there any way to distinguish between ‘a’ and ‘the’ ?
This reminds me of how French uses ‘one’ for ‘a’, and that, despite English often having many different words to choose from which mean the same thing, it also has words which mean more than one thing, depending on context. Heck, even the emphasis given to certain words can change its context. I suspect that to be true in all languages, though.
The UK is short for ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. We also say the USA.
Hardy’s proposal would mean id be one of the few to vote in Canada: as a US citizen I’m subject to selective service *and* I’m also a Canadian citizen. Also white and male.
I don’t think she likes my politics though.
Female MRAs always seem to get so wound up by male feminists. There’s one in a munch I go to who’s delightfully easy to provoke in that regard. I try not to for the sake of civility, but it’s really tempting.