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.
Sorry, missed my edit window. We might say ‘the U.K.’, ‘the U.S.’ or ‘the USA’ or even ‘the USSR’ but it wouldn’t be written on an addressed envelope that way.
Anyone saying ‘the north of Ireland’ is effectively expressing their political views on the subject.
Sorry for the repetition above. I accidentally clicked on a link while scrolling up and copied/pasted stuff twice.
The ‘King John and the Barons’ story reminds me of the difference perspective can make. As a mother of two teenagers and one adult, I now tend to view the ‘Cinderella’ story as that of a teenager who hated having to do her chores and grossly exaggerated to anyone who’d listen about how much she had to do, how nice she was and how evil her stepmother and stepsisters were.
As long as they don’t wish that the goblins would come and take away their baby brother, right now, right?
@ashara
На means on and В means in. As in to say on the boarder. Я на yкраинy/я в yкраине.
@ EJ – I’ve read extracts from other sagas, but Njal’s is the first I’ve read all through. I love it. “What is that blood on your axe?” is a pretty unbeatable line I think.
The UK, the USA and the UAE have a ‘the’ because the U abbreviates a distinguishing adjective. There are lots of kingdoms, states and emirates in the world, but these are the specific ones.
The tendency to drop the “the” and talk about Youkay I think is by analogy with dropping “the” from countries’ proper names. That kind of thing happens in language change all the time.
@bluecat:
Njal’s Saga is my favourite of the icelandic sagas. I love the way that it describes the characters without passing judgment on them: Gunnarr is both a killer and also a hero, for example, and the story doesn’t feel that it needs to come down morally on either side.
Eigil’s Saga is set much earlier and tells the story of the first colonists of Iceland. Eigil Skallagrimmson himself is a complex man in the way that only Vikings can be complex, and the saga paints him very fully. He’s not nearly as sympathetic as Njal – inasmuch as someone as reserved as Njal can be said to be sympathetic – but has a certain savage panache which carries through. Plus it features Harald Finehair, who’s my favourite Viking king.
I seem to recall that vikings REALLY loved their lawsuits and who-killed-whom feuding things.
They even got one form of undead that was rules-lawyered back to death!
re: “The Ukraine”
I’ve heard many people say “The Gambia” when talking about the country of Gambia in English. I’ve never been able to understand why people would say The Gambia and not just Gambia, or what it’s supposed to even mean. Anyone?
EDIT: OK, I’ve looked it up on wikipedia and I can see that the official English name for the country is “Republic of the Gambia”. But I still don’t understand why.
I like everyone’s take on Andrea but there’s one more thing I thought MRAs hate that men are seen as rapists and whatever, why is Andrea and the rest of them immediately accusing of immigrants of being rapists and such?
Well it comes to show men’s rights activists just prove once again that they’re hypocrites and don’t care about men at all and in fact are actual white male supremacists who are mangry that women and minorities are not under their thumbs anymore.
And also no one in America and Canada except for natives have any right to complain about immigration, these places are built on immigration.
@Imaginary Petal:
It’s because the country is long and thin and lies along the valley of the Gambia river. The country and the river are virtually synonyms. In English one refers to a river as “The”, for example “The Murray” or “The Thames”, and so this term of reference became applied to it during the colonial person.
It’s entirely surrounded by Senegal and they used to be one country: “Senegambia.”
@EJ
You’ve changed my life! :p
I know as much about languages as I do about calculus (by which I mean dick all), but I’m still gonna butt in to say I’m impressed that EJ’s heard of the Murray. Shit, most locals haven’t, and it takes up a quarter of the bloody country. =P
Dude, the Murray-Darling is one of the most interesting river systems in the world. It offers us not only unique insights into water management given recent Australian climate conditions, but also manages to teach us a great deal of river geology. How could anyone not be interested in it?
@EJ
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/e/e9/Nelson_Ha-Ha.jpg
Haw haw, you know about rivers!
Kularanini,
No. There’s no reason to think JB is mentally ill. She’s spouting the usual anti-feminist crap. That’s all. And we don’t do internet diagnoses here. Please refer to the comment policy.
The few things I know about rivers….
There is/was a River Meander, which is where we get the general term for bends in rivers (presumably it was itself quite bendy)
Most big rivers in England are named for the local word for river (Avon, Ouse etc.)
Humber isn’t the name of the river, that’s the word for estuary. The river is The Hull and the town is actually called Kingston (as the real name of the town is Kingston upon Hull you’d think more people would know that)
The Thames full name is Thameisis (it’s called the Isis in Oxford)
Not as impressive as The Gambia thing admittedly.
Now what I’d like to know is when does a stream become a brook become a river?
@ Imaginary Petal – posted about this upthread – it’s basically us Brits confusing a country with a geographical feature.
@ EJ – always a pleasure to meet someone who has a favourite Viking king! I like Ivar the Boneless. I’m sure we wouldn’t have got along in person, but what a moniker!
(There was a meme going round a while ago about Viking cats, and I guess Ragnar Furrybritches and Harald Bluefang would be suitable names).
The poet Tony Harrison has a love poem with the lines “Let me be the Gambia/In your Senegal.”
It took a look at the atlas to pick the bones out of that one.
Sadly I don’t know nearly as much about rivers as I’d like to. I’d love to learn more about the Danube, for example, and the Mekong.
I’ve been on and along the Mekong, but not the Danube.
One of these days I’m planning to walk the length of the Severn.
If anyone wants to read fiction about a river, one of my favorite scary stories is The Willows by Algernon Blackwood.
@ bluecat
I must be the only person here who on hearing the words ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ first thought is of Jordan.
@bluecat
Oops, sorry. I should’ve read the thread more carefully!
@Alan:
I did not know that. Cool. So Northumbria is the area north of the estuary then, not the river?
I’m not that much of an expert, but I believe that there’s no formal definitions about which word to use, unlike (say) valleys or glaciers where terminology is thankfully more precise.
River science needs a Mike Brown.
@bluecat:
Ivarr was cool; the Great Danish Army is one of these things that are fascinating to read about but I’m very glad that I wasn’t anywhere near. Have you read the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle? It’s one of my favourite primary sources.
@WWTH:
Good call. In many ways that story virtually invented modern horror fiction, and holds up really well today.
@ EJ
Hmm, that would make sense. But wonder how Cumbria fits in?
(Says a lot about this site that I’d rather hear from someone here than trust google)
My favourite Scandanavian king is Harald Bluetooth; because of the phone thing.
ETA: providing his name to the system, not inventing it.