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.
@ EJ I was reading the Anglo Saxon chronicle when I first met my husband.
He saw it in my bag and started quoting The Battle of Maldon.
In the original.
Accurately.
@ Alan
(Missed the editing window, sorry) – the one I like is The Water of Ae, in Dumfriesshire. Which means The Water of Water.
@ bluecat
I like the fact that there used to be just one actual lake in the Lake District; but then they reclassified it so now there are none. That’s the sort of contrarianism I admire in a local authority.
@bluecat:
Wow.
If by any chance you ever get tired of that man, could you give him my number please?
🙂
You’ll appreciate, there wasn’t much I could do after that but marry him.
@EJ
sorry to ask a sort of rude or has a blindly obvious answer question, but he did that after you were already engaged in conversation right? he didn’t just walk up to you and quote it right? sorry for being kind of dense.
@WeirwoodTreeHugger
I hear you, and I apologize if I was inappropriate. I’m not trying to diagnose anyone. I’m just constantly perplexed and fascinated when I read/hear these things.
What is the root of all their anger and hateful beliefs; how do they come to be? They are usually so confident that they’re speaking from a place of logic, but their arguments are usually completely nonsensical or conjecture. Judgy Bitch is also really odd to me in the sense of how does a women become a misogynist like that? Does she believe what she’s saying or is she just tallying up hits by being offensive and angry?
I always walk away from these posts with many questions.
Kularanini:
A. Queen bee-ism.
B. Lobster in a bucket syndrome.
As neither of these are psychiatric terms of art, I don’t hesitate to post them.
Hardie sounds just like Ann Coulter. You can never tell whether Coulter is just grifting or if she really believes what she spews from her mouth.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ann-coulter-women-should-not-have-right-vote-they-can-still-write-books
Not quite; I did too, although before that, I thought of the alpine Gauls. And organic chemistry.
I’m still trying to figure out how to break it to my TERFish aquaintances, though, that “cis” is not a term of insult to non-trans people, and that if they’d only taken some bloody Latin at some bloody point, they’d realize that immediately.
@ Alan,
Cumbria comes from Cymbric – it’s one of those places in the west of the island where the language remained mostly Brythonic rather than Anglo-Saxon influence. Linguistically, it’s related to Welsh and Cornish, and was a separate British kingdom. There’s Norse influence in the mediaeval dialect, because a lot of Norse settlers lived there.
Northumbria comes from Bede, actually he had to explain what he meant in his Ecclesiastical History because it was a relatively new kingdom. Northumbria is the result of the combination of two earlier kingdoms, Deira and Bernicia, and incorporated the British kingdom of Elmet. It generally referred to the land north of the Humber.
The river Hull, like the Ouse and Ancolme are tributaries of the Humber estuary, although, those of us who actually live on the Humber bank do refer to the Humber as the River Humber.
@Bina
I thought chemistry when I first heard cis and trans too.
Ah good, that means Judgy Fuck won’t be voting then and thus can never bring about the changes to society she so desires. UNLESS SHE’S A MONSTROUS HYPOCRITE OF COURSE BUT THERE’S NO WAY THAT’S TRUE HAHA
@Cyberwulf
NO WAY THAT CANNOT BE TRUE SHE IS A SCHOLAR HA HA HA!
@Snowberry
The only difference on the ground is how often they praise Jesus, though; on a policy level, there’s no meaningful distinction.
Gonna have to disagree strongly on that one. There hasn’t been a Republican presidential hopeful in my lifetime who wasn’t a horrible excuse for a human being.
@Alan
And on the other side as well; I’ve read anti-union stuff from the 1840s that I could slap an ALEC (A Stateside corporate body devoted to corrupting the political process, for those not familiar) logo on it and say it was their latest circular and I don’t think anyone would notice.
But they were united under one king… or something. I know that a lot of the borderers were really, really pissed off about it, though, because it meant they couldn’t get away with their traditional lifestyle anymore.
@Valentine
Fucking this. Also the reason why people here are still pissing themselves over 9/11 a decade and a half later. I want to start flipping tables everytime anyone mentions it.
AFAIK, there wasn’t a country there beforehand; there were a whole bunch of nations, who controlled some or all of one or more islands in what’s now the Philippines, and have stayed as one country since independence mostly because it’s the only way to get the UN to take them seriously. So there isn’t any original name that ‘Philippines’ replaced, because there wasn’t any prior conception of that particular cluster of islands being a unit.
@Ledasmom
@EJ
Egil’s Saga is definitely worth a read.
@ Overly Long Name
“sorry to ask a sort of rude or has a blindly obvious answer question, but he did that after you were already engaged in conversation right? he didn’t just walk up to you and quote it right? sorry for being kind of dense.”
Hi there,
We were working together, so we’d already had quite a few conversations by then. The Anglo-Saxon thing was in the canteen at work. We’d known each other at least a few weeks by then. IIRC he’d said something like “may I join you?” and “what are you reading?” or words to that effect.
(Another time was when I quoted from Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, by Viv Stanshall, and found out not only that he recognised the quote, but had known Stanshall at school, and they’d played briefly in the same band, before Stanshall went on to become quite famous to not many people with the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band).
It was a 12 week work contract, and when it ended we decided to stay in touch, and that turned into a date, and there we are…
We played a bit from Sir Henry at our wedding.
Re cis and trans – I thought Alps.
@Alan:
Of course, over here, Humber and Kingston are completely unrelated. The Humber River flows through the Western side of Toronto, while Kingston (Ontario) is a considerable distance eastward. As in, 260km or so. (The Don River flows through the Eastern side of Toronto, and the core of Toronto was built between the two rivers.)
It’s kind of amusing just how many Ontario place names are English place names. London, Stratford (which is on the Avon River in Ontario as well, and naturally hosts a theatre company), Cambridge, Peterborough, Windsor, Waterloo…
Oh, look, there’s even a Wikipedia page for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locations_in_Canada_with_an_English_name#Ontario
Someone once explained to me why they found “cis” offensive. Because it feels like an outsider sticking a label on them which they have never self-identified as, apparently.
@Snowberry:
… The sound you hear is that of a large number of irony meters exploding, and just about every minority in existence going ‘Now you know what it feels like’.
Of course, the reason why we* never labeled ourselves as cis or anything equivalent is because we are viewed in society as the default. So default that we don’t even need a term for it.
Yeah, I’m not really crying over being called cis personally.
I don’t give a shit if other cis people want to go by a different label that means the equivalent thing, but throwing a tantrum over not being automatically viewed as the default gender identity in some circles is really icky.
* By “we” I mean myself and other cis people. Not trying to imply everyone commenting our reading is part of that we.
Ugh, I still cannot believe that this woman apparently lives in my city. I keep hoping I never run into her because I don’t want to scream at her in public.
@dalillama
I spoke to my watchkeeper this evening (he’s filipino) and he said that in tagalog they refer to the Philippines as Pinoy. And if not that then Philipinas. But I think Pinoy is probably the best use.
@WWTH,
I hear you. I mean, giving the percentages, I can see why cis is seen as the default, but that’s hardly a reason to get pissed off at people findign a term for it.
Bringing the matter of transpeople and the unfortunate nationality of the main subject of this thread together, let’s have some good news though, shall we?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/transgender-judge-kael-mckenzie-manitoba-appointment-1.3446720
@ Valentine
Yup. The demonym Pinoy is derived from the name Philippines, though. Also, by no means all residents apply it to themselves. It appears to be most commonly used by expatriates and descendants of same.
In addition to everything you said about why the draft argument is stupid, JB is Canadian. We have never had a permanent conscription law. We’ve implemented temporary conscription twice, and that was over 70 years ago.
I know, Germany is a whole 2.5% muslim! They’re basically Saudi Arabia! Fucking white nationalists…
Oh dear, that shoe sure pinches on the other foot, eh?
Ironically, a lot of these are the same people who will rant and rave about trans people being “hetronormative”, apparently. They seem to have gotten their messed-up ideas about trans folks from the sort of people who used to prescribe sex changes as a “cure” for homosexuality. They have a lot of difficulty wrapping their heads around the fact that someone can be L, G, or B, as well as T. Or even — heavens! — a total ace, who simply feels more at home in a gender other than the one assigned them at birth.
Yeah, their lack of capacity for comprehending irony is…interesting. And all the more ironic to me, as I’m about as cis and het as it gets. I feel incredibly uncomfortable about having to educate them on this, because their density is in direct proportion to their propensity to make convoluted arguments about things they don’t understand and don’t want to. Mostly, I just give up and walk away shaking my head.
More comprehensive sex ed is clearly needed in this area, too.