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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.
Also, the first ten amendments are called the Bill Of Rights. The story there is basically that during the constitutional convention, a number of members essentially said that they liked the overall structure but thought it left too much room for a future government to oppress the people and signed off on it on the condition that a set of restrictions were added to protect individual freedoms. Since the rest of the delegates hadn’t included those protections because they figured a democratically-elected government would protect them anyway, the amendments were swiftly passed afterwards.
The 13th amendment outlawed slavery, the 18th amendment prohibited alcoholic beverages (this ended poorly and it is the only amendment repealed to date) and the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote.
Man, where’s Arash Tango Drinker when we need* him?
*Want to laugh at.
@ guy
A typo in the thirteenth amendment leaves slavery open as a legal punishment (the comma was meant to go before ‘nor’ not ‘except’).
Whoa, that is just hilarious. I’m listening to it right now, wow, isn’t this indicative of the new (old?) right. Confront them on issue like you would anything else and they can’t bring an arugment to the table.
Like would it be considered the new right because religion doesn’t necessarily play as much a role for them, or would it more in like of old in political dogma?
@SFHC
I never got that friend request by the way. Not sure if I’m doing something wrong but I can’t find it. 🙁
@dhag
Yeah, I think they removed the ability to send one-way reqs on the 3DS, presumably due to the stalkers… Which does mean I can risk posting mine for a few minutes when you’re ready.
Uh, important security note: when someone is subscribed to a thread then when a comment is posted they get an email containing its full text and retain the original text even if it is later edited. I would strongly advise against posting private information on the theory it can be removed by editing.
If her argument is correct, I shouldn’t take her argument seriously. If her point is well made, I shouldn’t trust anything she says. If what she says is true, everything she says is false. If she wins this argument, she loses this argument.
There is a bit of an “all Cretans are liars” paradox going on isn’t there?
Alan:
They add a nice crunch to soup, though.
@ moggie
I don’t care if it takes 20 years for the opportunity to arise to use it, but I’ll definitely stealing that! 🙂
@PI:
My word, it’s like a Minecraft LARP. I kept expecting creepers.
@Lady Mondegreen
True, but it’s a far cry from William F. Buckley.
Not that he wasn’t any less full of shit but, goddamn, at least he was eloquent. I could get why people would quote him – but people like O’Rourke? It’s a step up from Penn Gillette, I guess, but not by much. It’s like they’re standards are so low that it almost reaches the earth’s core.
We’re talking about the guy who said a liberal is just a “conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet.” Of course, P.J., because it isn’t like many right-wingers are just paranoid assholes who’ve likely never been mugged, but are still scared about it happening ’cause FOX News continually equates blackness with criminality.
I’ve had my place broken into, with many possessions stolen, a few times and I’ve yet to vote for a single Republican or Libertarian presidential candidate.
@Alan @EJ – And then there’s the fact that many of those who would assert that women / “the poor” / whatever group is their bugaboo are constitutionally incapable of the same accomplishments as men / “the higher classes” / whatever group is theirs and that any policies beneficial to the former either are fruitless money sucks or act to elevate them to (or, in the most patriarchal cases, “force them to attempt”) ill-fitting roles at the expense of those (in the latter group) who would be better suited.
@Imaginary Petal
I’m going to have to check that out. It’s precisely what I was talking about over here.
This is itself a black and white model of a person but…
A big chunk of what they do involves:
*Qualitative characterizations as emotional impressions (and they can’t describe what is connected to the emotions)
*Use of those characterizations in “dog-whistle politics”
*Black and white thinking (which only works IF you can functionally reason and logic an accurate spectrum between the poles to get to reality and you are already “in the ball park”)
*Assumptions that they are already right (so they don’t functionally think about what to do if they are wrong)
*Automatic knee-jerk assumptions that because they are right the other side must be wrong so the pattern-detection goes into overdrive and lands on almost anything with even tiny structural similarities
*Group conflict behavior (because if you can’t be correct you can try to win anyway)
*Excessive need for an authority (because “human flocking” in a political context needs a couple of “lead birds”.
I need to functionally organize that social conflict resource soon. I’ve been brain storming and since I did not get a lot of input I’m a little paranoid (I have that pattern detection bug too, I just have extremely high standards).
Hang on, PJ O’Rourke is actually right-wing? All these years I thought he was doing an over-the-top comedy schtick, like a less funny Stephen Colbert.
I’m not joking.
@mockingbird
@EJ
And here’s the rub, of course: arch-conservatives aren’t actually that short-sighted; they just have an idea of their own interest that includes having people that they can push around/hurt/abuse without repercussions. This is, IMO, why it’s so hard to find common ground with them: Because they’re horrible people who want horrible things, and I’m not, and don’t.
@Alan Robertshaw
That’s not a typo.
@NickNameNick
30 years ago, O’Rourke was actually pretty funny, and could turn a clever phrase that made me chuckle even if I disagreed (Also, he wasn’t nearly as much of a total asshole about absolutely everything. 17 years ago, O’Rourke was starting to rest on his laurels, and his quality suffered for it. 16 years ago, O’Rourke followed the rest of the Republicans straight off the cliff of warmongering, islamophobia, and naked fascism in the wake of 9/11, and he’s been a total hack ever since. (So, much to my annoyance, has Harry Turtledove; his politics haven’t changed, but his stories have gotten so tediously similar I just can’t be bothered anymore).
Wow, shows how much I know. I’ve only heard PJ O’Rourke on NPR’s “Wait wait don’t tell me”* and thought he was fairly funny there. Of course there are always two other people there as well as the host, which means that he isn’t heard from a lot, plus he’s on maybe one episode a month…
* (It’s the NPR version of BBC Radio Four’s “News Quiz”)
I used to check in with JudgyBitch from time to time, in the interest of familiarizing myself with all viewpoints and due to the fact that she is one of the clearest communicators of her corner of the Internet. (The phrase “damning with faint praise” was invented for that sentence.)
Among a lot of questionable conclusions, she had one consistent point that I thought was valuable: our system shortchanges men too. I oppose conscription (generally, and the policy that requires it only of men), I oppose unequal parenting policies, I oppose the high incarceration rate of men, I support birth control options for men, etc. I see these positions as part and parcel of my feminism; obviously we have differences there but at least I recognized some common ground.
But it appears her concern for men excludes Muslim men? Or just Muslim men who are refugees?
@Brony
The starting point for this whole discussion was that Sargon claims there’s this giant group of influential “regressive leftist”, including Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Sam Seder and the whole Majority FM crew, The New York Times, Salon, etc etc etc, but he doesn’t specify what exactly they do or say that makes them “regressive”. On the other hand, Michael started by acknowledging that you can always find internet randos who will say all sorts of fucked up shit, but he rejects the idea that all these well known and influential journalists are in any way similar to some guy on Twitter saying weird things.
Now, right at the start of the discussion Michael makes this point that Twitter eggs say all sorts of stupid stuff, and Sargon immediately interrupts with the gotcha attempt: SO YOU ADMIT THERE’S A REGRESSIVE LEFT! AAAHA!! Like an idiot.
When repeatedly asked to define his terms, explain what “regressive left” means and give examples of these specific journalists engaging in “regressive” behavior, the only “concrete” example Sargon ever gave was that “someone” allegedly called Maajid Nawaz a “porch monkey” for criticizing muslims. Not Glenn Greenwald, not Michael Brooks, not Ezra Klein, not the NYT, not Salon, but “someone”. Presumably this happened “somewhere”. Sigh.
God, I wish…
I suppose, being most familiar with his latter-day work, it’s difficult to see him in any other light. But I’ve seen that happen before with people I am familiar with – namely Dennis Miller.
Loved the guy back when he was on Saturday Night Live, watching them as reruns on Comedy Central, and then he slowly devolved into the Islamophobic and nationalistic piece of shit he is now. I can’t stand him now. Plenty of ostensibly left-wing individuals, either showing their true colors or going through a genuine change in opinion (I can never tell anymore with how dishonest people are these days), end up conservative.
It’s a “broken clock is right at least twice a day” thing – he does manage to say one or two clever things, but everything is inane verbal diarrhea and it becomes more apparent as he continues to talk.
@guy
Thanks for the warning!
@SFHC
You could message me on Skype where I use the same handle as here, if you’d feel comfortable with that. That’s my best idea so far. :/
I can really get behind this idea.
Recently during an election I asked my brother & his friends who would they be voting for & why mainly because they are way more into politics than me & I trusted in their opinions.
They then listed the parties, but it was their reasons for voting for them that I found strange considering they were both very active with the socialist party.
It was very much based on what the party would do FOR THEM & what the other parties WOULD TAKE from them (e.g. if this party got into power I would be £100 per week worst off)
I asked why they weren’t voting for the party that would benefit the MAJORITY OF THE COUNTRY even if they are worst off. They said nearly all people base their votes on personal reasons close to home & gave me a weird look.
BUT one thing to point out is it is a lot easier for me to do this as I earn probably about twice what they do.
I have a flat, car, disposable income to live very comfortably for myself, no kids.
I can afford to give up some comforts if it genuinely brought people who were homeless, starving etc closer to equal status.
I get to a certain degree why people further down the ladder have to be more “selfish”.
P.S.
Thanks “kupo” for blockquotes
Honestly, I don’t think she would. She lives a fairly privileged life where, frankly, her vote in such a situation would probably be viewed as a chore, rather than an opportunity. And by speaking out against suffrage, she would be rewarded in the same way anti-suffragettes in the 19-teens were: positive attention from men.
Sure, she wouldn’t be equal to a man, but she WOULD be exalted above other women by those men.
********
I agree with Dalillama’s breakdown of O’Rourke’s career. It’s worth noting that back in the 80s, being a libertarian genuinely did mean that you were taking potshots at both sides, because you were probably the only one in the room advocating for, say, same-sex marriage rights (even if you preferred just eliminating the government benefits of marriage) or marijuana legalization.
Now that many of the libertarian positions that actually made sense have gone mainstream, what’s left is the pro-kyriarchy bullshit.
In addition, there’s the fact that he was routinely writing for Rolling Stone magazine, which of course meant he was constantly running into counter-culture advocates; it’s harder to be completely lacking in self-awareness when you’re in regular contact with opposing viewpoints. And Parliament of Whores was not only a reasonably well-written book, it was full of a considerable respect even for his opponents. He took care to describe politicians with a certain degree of empathy and humanity. He was, IMNSHO, still wrong, but he wasn’t indefensibly so, nor was he just belittling the opposition.
Dennis Miller on the other hand…
I disagree with NickNameNick on this one. His transformation wasn’t slow. It was so hard and fast it gave me whiplash. He literally did a 180 mid-season of his show; it’s documented in whichever of his Rants books came out shortly after 9/11. He went from being an across-the-board liberal to being a die-hard conservative overnight.
And it was utterly craven. He claimed at the time that it was a rebuke to the perceived weakness of the Democratic Party’s response. I could understand that if he’d become either a hawkish Democrat or a reluctant Republican, forced to support the party because he felt the single issue they were right on was more important than all the others. That would’ve been wrong, IMNSHO, but it would’ve been internally consistent. And he could’ve been the GOP gadfly, needling them from inside even as he supported their party.
But there’s no logical path that makes the sentence, “Bush is taking the right path against terrorists, therefore anti-feminism is awesome and the capital gains tax is evil incarnate.”
So my conclusion is that he made a tactical decision. Immediately after 9/11, there was a massive surge in popularity for the Republicans, and there were endless news stories about “The Death of Irony”–the notion that we could no longer afford to mock traditions, because that was giving too much ground to ‘the enemy’, or something like that. Of course, it was bullshit, but I think Miller bought into it, and decided based on that to switch teams before he could suffer being attacked. In short, he buckled like a coward and sold out.
Unfortunately for him, his new target audience tended to not follow his trademark schtick of putting fifteen obscure references in a single run-on sentence. So he wound up doing color commentary for the NFL.
You’d think this would be an existential crisis for MRAs. They want to use violence against women who refuse their sexual advances. They write fantasies about it. Or are rapists themselves. If the man was white, he’d be a hero to them right now. But this man…was a black guy! And a Muslim! That makes it worse because MRAs can’t support a black man touching pure, innocent white women (the same white women who are also “hypergamous” sluts and homewreckers, in their POV).
(I hope I don’t seem insensitive to sexual assault survivors. I just refuse to believe that MRAs care about sexual assault against women. They’ve clearly shown they don’t care when it’s white men committing the assault. I especially don’t buy the anger coming from a hypocrite who shames mothers for crying over their dead military sons. Seriously, WTF?)
@NickNameNick
It also assumes that no black person has ever been mugged once in their life. Black people are very familiar with violence at the hands of police officers, but still vote Democrat in large numbers. Funny how victims of real violence don’t all conform to his reactionary worldview.
@freemage
Oh wow. I forgot all about the “death of irony” think pieces at that time. If I recall, there was one that seriously asked if it was still possible to laugh at Seinfeld–or any snarky, ironic humor–post 9/11.
Anyway. I know Rourke just from NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. He’s generally unfunny and sometimes cringeworthy even there, imho.