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Several weeks ago, antifeminist attention-seeker and Twitter scofflaw Andrea Hardie — perhaps better known under her aliases Janet Bloomfield and JudgyBitch — launched a crusade of sorts against female suffrage.
Though Hardie seems to believe most of the nonsense she regularly spews, her campaign is so patently a publicity stunt that few people have even bothered to respond to it. Sure, I wrote a post on it, but then again that’s sort of my job.
On Twitter — which she has not-so-sneakily returned to under her real name after being banned for targeted harassment — Hardie has been trying to make the hashtag #WhyWomenShouldNotVote happen.
It’s not going to happen. Even with the presidential primaries dominating the news in the US, and talk of politics and voting in the air, Hardie’s hashtag steadfastly refuses to trend. Indeed, she seems to be writing half the tweets herself.
With millions of Americans in 12 states going to the polls today to vote in the Super Tuesday primaries. I thought I’d take a look at what Hardie has been saying to try to convince the world that half of these voters shouldn’t be voting at all.
So here are The 19 Dumbest Reasons Andrea Hardie Thinks Women Shouldn’t be Allowed to Vote. Prepare yourself for internalized misogyny, blatant racism and xenophobia, rape jokes, and a lot of truly bizarre logic. And I think I might have caught a whiff of desperation as well.
1) Because women are inferior to, and envious of, men
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/704110796196945920
2) Because (white) women are wreckers, not builders
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/703220649171537920
3) Because western women will need men to protect them from the refugees they’ve welcomed into their countries
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/704498299160666113
4) Because women don’t want to shoot refugees
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/704308224909037569
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/703950068672569344
5) Because a Muslim woman in Moscow beheaded a child
Despite supporting the mass murder of migrants, Hardie believes that a horrific murder carried out by an Uzbecki woman in Moscow is an indication that all migrants should be excluded from “Western” countries. Oh, and the fact that women generally disagree with her on this means that they shouldn’t vote.
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/704296245846790145
Huh. Less than two weeks ago, an Uber driver went on a shooting spree in and around Kalamazoo, Michigan, killing six and seriously injuring two others. The alleged shooter: a white, native-born man. Should we therefore deport all white, native-born men from the US? And should we ban everyone who doesn’t agree with this draconian solution from voting?
6) Because a black guy in France slapped a woman who turned down his sexual advances
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/703254696132222981
It seems a little curious that Hardie is getting so worked up about the sexual misbehavior of the man in question.
Generally speaking, her response to allegations of sexual violence, no matter how convincing the evidence, is to blame the victims. She is, after all, the woman whose response after two of the Steubenville rapists had been found guilty was to spew forth an angry tirade attacking the victim as “a stupid, drunk, helmet-chasing whore.”
Oh, and she also argued that Jimmy Savile’s underage victims were the ones exploiting him.
Perhaps Hardie’s real objection to the alleged refugee mentioned in her Tweet was not the violence he directed at a woman but, you know, the fact that he’s a Muslim refugee?
Or at least that she thinks he is? The video in question has been making the rounds on assorted right-wing websites catering to immigrant haters and other racists, but none of them link to any news stories about the actual incident. One poster on Reddit says it’s actually a video of an incident that took place in France in 2010. Beyond that I could find no info about the woman or the men who assaulted her.
7) Because some women wear burkas
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/704098451232047104
8) Because native-born Norwegian men don’t commit any rapes, at least if you ignore all the rapes they do commit
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/702628912564723712
The police officer making this claim is only talking about literal stranger-in-the-bushes outdoor rapes, not the rapes in which the rapist and victim know one another. That is, most rapes, which apparently aren’t rapes to Hardie.
9) Because some black men who might possibly have been raised by single mothers are criminals
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/703304277146669056
10) Because women turned Gawker into a pussy-beggar?
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/704106096437420032
11) Because women don’t need to be able to vote in order to influence politics
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/703251681560109060
This is a bit of a weird argument for her to make, given that all of her reasons that women shouldn’t vote would also seem to apply to women having any influence over politics.
12) Because women want to be cattle
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/701766288050417666
13) Because the suffragettes didn’t suffer enough
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/702909675516329984
14) Because of the actions of fictional women on the show “Single Ladies”
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/701836204275322881
15) Because most women expect men to ask them out
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/701830281519562752
16) Because mothers worry when their sons go to war
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/702608508068438018
17) Because Twitter is asking Anita Sarkeesian for advice on how to design effective tools against harassment
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/701861916617138177
18) Because she thinks the author of a book about rape isn’t hot enough to be raped
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/702496789841186816
Harding is in fact a rape survivor.
19) Because if women have choices they ruin everything
https://twitter.com/AndreaHardie/status/702541768680726529
Well, that’s enough of that.
Paul McCartney’s suffragette-mentioning song “Jet” doesn’t make much more sense than Hardie’s tweets, but it’s vastly more entertaining. So here it is.
Oh, a P.J. O’Rourke quote? ‘Cause no one is more trustworthy than a shill for the CATO Institute!
I still remember, before I hated the show, watching an episode of Real Time where his argument for every issue involved using his kid as a shield. It was bad enough when he used it to excuse irresponsible consumption of a finite resource, but the fact he dismisses the reproductive rights of women because…he couldn’t imagine his son getting aborted, so it’s wrong?
How the fuck was this guy ever considered an intellectual titan? Almost everything that comes from his mouth is either wholly insipid or incoherent, yet I see people still quote him. It’s absolutely astonishing.
With women now allowed into combat roles, there is no longer a reason to require draft registration from men but not women. Two outcomes are possible:
1. Women will be required to register as well.
2. Draft registration will be mothballed.
All the feminists of my acquaintance would prefer option 2, but most will begrudgingly take 1.
HOWEVER. This brings up something interesting, because the Equal Rights Amendment failed largely because too many feminists were dead-set against expanding the draft, and option 1 seemed far more likely to occur than 2. Well, that is no longer a barrier, because draft registration changes are going to occur regardless. It may be time to introduce a new ERA.
People act and vote against their apparent self-interest all the time. Steven Lukes presented a theory for why this might be true in Power: a Radical View. The short version is that they are tricked by those in power (or who want to be in power) into believing that this in/action is, in fact, in their best interests, and only those of us on the outside can see objectively that it is not.
I think we need to be careful about applying that view. If we believe that every person is the highest and best expert on their own life (which I do), then they are actually getting something out of what they’re doing (or out of the status quo) that is more desirable than the perceived alternatives. We can’t always know the reasons that go into the calculus, but that doesn’t mean the reasons are necessarily bad ones, or that we have a better view from out here than they have from the first-person perspective.
That’s a long way of saying that it might not actually be against JB’s interests to push other women under the bus. I can easily think of a scenario where she is better off doing it: she gets warm fuzzies and validation from a bunch of strangers who think she is brilliant, she gets to think she is the only smart person in the room regardless of whether or not that is true, and she is in zero danger of actually (for instance) losing her right to vote or her right to speak in public. She is essentially free-riding on that last one, counting on other people to maintain certain standards in her life while benefiting from talking smack about those standards. Maybe y’all can help me out here, but I’m not seeing a down side for her. Sure there would be down sides if what she advocated actually came true, but that’s never going to happen so she never has to face any such consequences.
Talk about self hatred. You’d think she’d just go ahead and have a sex change if she hates women so much. Really leaves you wondering how such deep brainwashing came about. Were her parents that terrible? Was it someone later in life? That or she’s mentally ill; no normal person does this on their own.
For the hell of it, I kinda want her to go on the Dr. Phil show and have him psychoanalyze her… I imagine it would be a pretty amusing episode. lol
@SCH
Read the comments policy. You should have already read it. But you should definitely read it now.
I thought we pretty much settled the suffrage question a while ago. My question is: what’s the next old political debate that will be revived for attention? Will people suddenly be against the direct election of Senators? Internal improvements? Should we go to war with Spain again?
Pretty off-topic, but I saw this video on tumblr, and it’s so soothing and awesome I had to share:
https://youtu.be/nCKkHqlx9dE
@Policy of Madness
If that is the case, I wonder what she would do if votes were actually taken away from women? Would she go back on her words?
@SJA
It doesn’t matter, because that won’t happen. She’s free to rail on that all she likes without any danger of anything negative happening to her along those lines. To say she’s acting against her interests on the grounds that something bad would happen to her if she got her wish ignores the fact that in reality it won’t.
I used to be one of her little groupies, Im almost guaranteeing her hatred and MGTOW hatred comes from the same place, rejection from women. She had to fight all of her life to win the approval of her horrible, abusive mother, and she had to learn to be tough. If you look at her talk, her speech and mannerisms are very hard, and she has to visibly force herself to move and speak softly. She’s likely felt alienated from pink, frilly, – and often catty – female culture. My theory is that some woman or women have been very shitty to her, and she probably didnt know how to defend herself, or play the petty games that they were playing and ended up getting very hurt. So instead of going against the culture that teaches women to be catty and competitive, she went against women themselves. It makes sense really. When shes not constantly bragging about how shes doing femininity the correct way, she’s mocking the “Girly” aspects of feminine culture. (Suck it up, buttercup!) She probably does want a world where women have no choice but to stay home and raise children, because then she’s protected from the outside world and all the shitty women who live there. And once those hairy feminists are forced back into the kitchen, SHE’LL be the one who’s clearly superior, because she can use pieces of cardboard to fold clothes perfectly and didnt need an epidural during childbirth. Thats her whole deal, I think, not offending feminists, but getting back at women who hurt her. It hurts being rejected and alienated by other women, I know, ive been there. Im just glad I stepped away from her and people like her, because it’s all a bunch of toxic bullshit. People like her take the easy way out, instead of working on themselves. And the absolute easiest thing that you can do in this world is hate women, so she’ll always have bitter assholes om her side. Anyways im off my soapbox now.
Following from what Policy of Madness said people do not always vote or hold beliefs in their own interests. Many of us here hold beliefs that are altruistic in some fashion, we believe in things that would help people we know, that would be good for society in general yet detrimental to us or that would be good for animals.
It is often the case that we jump to the conclusion that our opponents believe things out of self interest because it seems simpler than understanding that they genuinely believe objectionable garbage would be better for all.
You see this kind of attitude among the antifeminists documented on this blog as they contort themselves into knots explaining what feminists of all genders are getting out of promoting it, never once considering that it might be an earnest and reasoned belief in what is right.
Though it’s always possible that Hardie is genuine in her beliefs, in this case I find it very unlikely .
You know Judgy your statements would have a little bit more bite to them if you didn’t at one time fantasize about murdering someone with a crossbow and in one of the more brutal ways to die. Anyone remember exactly what is was that she wanted to do to anyone all I remember is the part where she would shoot them in the neck and let them bleed out.
@Micharion – I believe she threatened David? During that time he was being accused of doxxing some blowhard or other? I could be conflating the two, because her threat was basically the same as that blowhard’s whose name I can’t immediately recall – a pro-active “Defend my home and my family with violent force” threat.
@Mikkay – thank you for posting, I always appreciate hearing from people who have been “on the other side” so to speak.
Edited: Sorry, I was indeed conflating Judgy with another ‘defend-my-home-with-extreme-prejudice’ person, but I did find the link to David’s write-up on her crossbow fundraiser. Basically it was a generic threat to generic feminists who might (for unknown reasons) show up at her doorstep. She wanted to shoot them in the face. http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/07/18/mra-judgybitch-give-me-money-for-a-crossbow-so-i-can-shoot-feminists-in-the-face/
@Mortarius
You and Policy of Madness have an extremely good point. It is very hard for us, as feminists, to see why a lot of anti-feminists do what they do and say what they say. To us, what we believe (women are human beings that are equal to men and deserve the same rights) is entirely logical and will benefit all of society. It’s clear as day.
With anti-feminists though, it’s likely the same thing but in reverse. To them, their beliefs are rational and it is clear (at least to them) why they would benefit society. (Ignoring the fact that 99.9% of their beliefs are based on falsehoods and straight-up lies about the “true nature of women”)
This is why it is so hard for MRAs and feminists to understand each other, and why we get so frustrated with them. Not just angry, but also frustrated and confused. What they are saying is obviously awful, and we can’t understand how someone could be so blind as to oppose the rights of half of the population. It is confusing (at least to me) how someone could genuinely believe that. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are not being willfully ignorant. To us, it is very hard to understand how anyone could possibly think what they are saying is justice.
For them, either the feeling is mutual (although “justice” for them means something entirely different) or they just don’t care about justice.
@PI – That was a fascinating video. Thanks for sharing!
@Mikkay – Thanks for posting. It does sound like she’s got more than a little Serena Joy in her, as Hippodameia wrote.
@dreemr I am pretty sure the threat wasn’t directed at anyone in particular and was a ‘Hey, don’t think about knocking on my door or you will die horribly,’ sort of thing. Granted I may be wrong on the crossbow part and may be confusing it with a bow that she had recently purchased by donations to her from here groupies.
1. Does Hardie understand that she’s not a citizen of the US and therefore has no say in our politics and elections? Because it’s not always clear that she does understand that.
2. That PJ O’Rourke quote is literally “Freedom is slavery”.
Everytime I see an antifeminist woman saying she doesn’t need feminism, women shouldn’t vote, etc., I feel like telling her to put her money where her big, idiotic mouth is. They can give back all their diplomas, driver’s licences, voter registration cards, social insurance cards, passports, any credit cards not in their husbands’ names, and basically anything else a feminist won them the right to possess. Because hey, if they don’t need feminism, they should practice what they preach and see how far they get without it, right?
Oh, and speaking of preaching, this is what I think of every time I hear Judgy opening her mouth:
@Snork Maiden
One thing that needs to be debunked is this whole notion MRA’s have that feminists “send men to die”, when the fact they are ignorant of is that feminism has been trying to end the draft since it’s inception.
Feminists have always historically been opposed to conscription and one of their first major initiatives were to found the Women’s Peace Party (WPP) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) that is still active today. They held antiwar seminars and marches that had turnouts in the thousands.There were also many other prominent feminists who spoke out against conscription such as Margaret Sanger, Julia Ward Howe, Helena Swanwick, Margaret Ashton, Catherine Marshall, Maude Royden, Kathleen Courtney, Chrystal Macmillan and Sylvia Pankhurst and wrote antiwar philosophical literature (in a time where a woman publishing was considered scandalously immodest) and faced violent opposition from the institution. Then of course there was the class action suit before the Supreme court that NOW sponsored to end the draft in 1980, and the many feminists who protested the Veitnam draft.
The “White Feather Movement” they love to bring up again and again was a war propaganda thing started by a general in the military who basically appropriated about 30 volunteers from the Women’s Auxiliary and ordered them to do it. Yeah it was a huge scandal, but so is the Westboro Baptist Church and they are hardly representative.
@mugwump
There are right-wingers who complain about that still, yes.
Hell, the Right has always been against those. Every damn time anybody’s proposed infrastructure in the US, conservatives lose their shit and shriek about socialist slavery. Look at the PJ Orourke quote above, frex.
@weirwoodtreehugger
Re #4.
Not only does JB think that 75% of German are women, but she didn’t even bother checking the original statement. The quoted politician Frauke Petry is a woman.
About number 3:
Turn to men to save us from whom? They always to do this. To them are the “men” they talk about simply “Males that are not trying to rape us”? If so, what are the _____ the “men” are protecting us from?
And the picture she posted with that tweet is amaaaazing.
Also… If society collapses, men won’t be voting either. Checkmate anti-feminists!
@Mikkay
I’m glad that you posted! It’s good to get information from a former follower of Andrea Hardie’s. And that’s terrific that you’ve done work on yourself.
It makes sense that she had a poor relationship with her mother. That is a tragedy.
But she’s a grown-up now. It’s a shame that she doesn’t step up to the plate.
Something that Andrea Hardie seems to ignore is the fact that everyone gets hurt in this life. Some people are hurt much worse than she ever was. But being hurt doesn’t give any of us the right to be jerks to others.
That is some seriously disturbing self-hatred there.
I understand having self-esteem issues. Well, maybe I don’t *understand* it, but I know that it happens and I can certainly think of lots of reasons why it might be.
But this is a different and more troubling beast.
It’s just this grotesque, self-hatred diarrhea theater, and mostly I just feel like looking away while feeling deeply ashamed for her.
It’s like one woman, one cup.
@NickNameNick
In the land of ingrown butt hairs, a great big ass pimple is king.