So the execrable Andrea Hardie — Twitter abuser, violence-threatener, Canada-embarrasser — has been pondering a deep philosophical conundrum: “Do some women benefit from being slapped around?”
If you have even the slightest familiarity with Hardie — known on the internet as JudgyBitch and/or Janet Bloomfield — you probably won’t be shocked to discover that her answer is yes.
You might be a little surprised that she considers herself, at least hypothetically, one of these women.
“There are all kinds of reasons I don’t cheat on my husband,” she explains, “but an important one is that I assume he would beat the sh*t out of me if I ever did. And I would bloody well deserve it.”
While Hardie insists that her husband “has never hit me in any context that wasn’t erotic and consensual” or even acted in a threatening manner towards her, she tells her readers that she “very much assume[s] that he would, and further, that in certain situations, he should.”
Cheating on her husband would be one of these “certain situations.” Being “disrespectful” of him in front of other people would be another. As she explains:
There are many things I would simply never dream of doing to my husband, because I assume I would get a slap or worse, if I did. All of those things are linked to respect. To be clear: all of this comes from me. Tim has never said “Don’t ever think of doing x because I will hit you.” … I just feel that he would, and he would be perfectly justified in doing so. There are a multitude of reasons I wouldn’t be disrespectful of my husband, especially in public. The possibility of taking a well-earned beating just happens to be one of them.
But unfortunately, Hardie claims, not all women are as well-behaved as she is.
I don’t go around inviting my husband to slap me by screaming at him in public or humiliating him by flirting with other men. But lots of women do. How much of domestic violence is caused by women pushing men into hitting them because that level of domination is familiar, and in a f*cked up way, deeply erotic for the women?
Yep, she went there, conflating consensual kink with men “beating the sh*t” out of women to punish them for their “disrespect.”
“[S]ome women do benefit from being slapped around,” Hardie concludes. “Some women crave it.”
She isn’t the only MRA who has tried to erase or complicate the clear distinction between consensual BDSM and domestic abuse. Youtube bloviater Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan has suggested that many abused women “demand” their abuse, which Straughan thinks can lead to “scorching” sex. Anti-domestic-violence crusader turned domestic-violence apologist Erin Pizzey describes situations in which both partners are violent as “consensual violence.”
It’s not hard to tell the difference between violence in, say, sports and violence in real life — hitting someone in the face is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, if you’re a professional boxer in the middle of a boxing match; it’s not acceptable to just go down the street punching random people who annoy you.
So is it really that hard for Hardie and other MRAs to tell the difference between, say, consensual spanking and “beating the sh^t” out of your partner? I don’t think it is. As you may recall, Hardie made clear early in her post that she understands this distinction quite well, telling us that her husband “has never hit me in any context that wasn’t erotic and consensual.”
The point of this phony “confusion” between consensual kink and domestic violence is to support an old victim-blaming narrative in which male violence is considered an excusable response to deliberate provocation from women who, in many cases, secretly love being beaten.
“For lots of women, submission to a violent man is a bonding experience,” Hardie writes.
[I]t’s incontrovertible that many women find violence erotic and even comforting. How many women feel this way, but have no way to articulate it, and thus end up provoking violence that can easily get out of hand?
Even more perversely, Hardie goes on to suggest that, when things do get “out of hand,” the abusive men are also somehow victims of the abuse they themselves inflict on their female partners.
Sure, Hardie says, women “may provoke more violence and anger than they intend, and thus end up getting really hurt.”
But men suffer as well, she writes, from being “provoked” into inflicting “violence [that goes] well beyond what is beneficial or wanted.”
Should men be punished when they’re “provoked” into beating their partners? I doubt it will come as much of a shock to discover that Hardie says “no.”
Oh, hitting women should still be illegal, she says. But, she insists, female “provocation” should be seen as “a mitigating factor … [e]ven to the point that provocation results in dismissed charges.”
How much “provocation” would be required to dismiss charges against a man who pummeled his wife so badly that he broke her nose and knocked out some teeth? Could this be considered a justified response to her cheating on him? To her flirting with other men in public? For her being late with dinner two nights in a row?
Hardie’s “logic” here is the same logic abusers themselves use to justify their abuse, spiced up a little with disingenuous references to kink.
Men who punch women for being “disrespectful” towards them don’t deserve that respect. Neither do the women who excuse this abuse.
Yeah, let’s be really, really, really clear! Because I’m sure that Tim wouldn’t appreciate the police getting involved in their relationship just because his wife needs ATTENTION!!!!! from the alt right.
Respect for her husband?! She disrespects her husband, not to mention his career as a professor, when she drags him into her social media rants.
They live in a small college town. Students are very savvy about social media. I’m sure that some of them follow Andrea Hardie’s rants obsessively. What do you want to bet that every time she posts a rant, Tim’s students giggle when he walks in the room. What do you want to bet that his colleagues can’t keep a straight face when they encounter him.
WTF.
JB thinks a crossbow bolt to the face is a legit and very fun first response to someone you don’t want on your property. There’s few people I trust less to determine a “measured use of force.”
As a person who loves language and logic, I’m appalled at how the MRM tortures both to make some . . . sort of . . . argument?
I wonder if Amnesty International ever gets involved on behalf of symbols or thought processes.
This sentiment will not impress Andrea Hardie’s new alt-right friends.
Also, if Tim (potentially! just potentially!) would be allowed to beat the shit out of Andrea for disrespecting him, does that rule apply to their children? I don’t see why it wouldn’t. (Shudder)
I clicked through on Andrea Hardie’s post to see if she discussed parents beating the shit out of their kids. Nah, crickets.
But I did run across this gem:
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I can’t seem to find the bottom of this hole. Abuse enabler, skin flaying fanatic, and all around bad person. I don’t really have to words to describe how she rationalizes abuse to BSDM and that it’s akin to the bear necessities.
Then again my brain wishes that it’s all a master ruse. Often times, it’s not.
As a sadomasochistic switch who has been in both consensual BDSM and abusive relationships, I find her views to be sick. I will never lay a hand on someone without their consent to do so, nor will I ever again allow another person to lay a hand on me without consent.
If I want to be the sub in impact play, I tell my dominant play partner I do. I don’t destroy the chemisty, consent and trust between us by trying to provoke him into hitting me.
What a disgusting excuse for a human.
Rather than conflating domestic violence with BDSM Hardie seems to be attempting to normalize the dysfunctional responses, similar to Stockholm Syndrome, some women experience after having lived with abusive partners or having grown up in violent households.
What a nice way (not) to combine the “women don’t know what they want” trope with abuse justification.
At least, what I’m getting from her message is something like: Women secretly want men to hit them, but they don’t know how to communicate that, so they do bad things to try and provoke them to do it.
????
I need one of those “nope” gifs or something.
http://img.pandawhale.com/post-25055-NOPE-nope-anime-gif-8upz.gif
@Amy Housewine:
I’m glad to hear he isn’t a monster. I literally knew nothing about him prior to reading this post… that’s the reason I said “if we take her at her word” since she said stuff like, you know, that she’d expect him to beat the shit out of her if she disrespected him in public. Someone who would do that would be, in my opinion, a monster. If he isn’t someone who would do that to his wife… than she is either a liar, or has no fucking idea what her own husband is like… neither of which would surprise me, I guess.
I continue to be bewildered at the idea of *anyone*, MRA or feminist or anyone in between, being married to her and not quietly but hurriedly working on some kind of legal separation at this point.
UGH. Fucking.. no. Fuck. Ugh. No.
EVEN IF SOMEONE SECRETLY WANTS YOU TO HURT THEM, IF THEY DO NOT OPENLY EXPRESS IT AND NEGOTIATE BOUNDARIES YOU DO NOT DO IT. Period. End of discussion.
I cannot properly express how furious this sort of shit makes me.
Holy shit, this is unusual. She has a BA in film theory and is married to a professor.
It’s actually quite unusual for PhDs to marry people with less than an MA, and male PhDs marry more educated partners than female PhDs: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/college-graduates-marry-other-college-graduates-most-of-the-time/274654/
From what I understand, she posted the story, and then at the end went “Yeah, this was a gender-swap from another story, and doesn’t it make you just mad that wimmens can get away with doing this??!?!?!?”
So, she did post it, but it was some sort of shitty “gotcha” and not actually something that she and her husband do.
As for the story: I’m going to nth the people here who have said that even though they’re masochists, they deplore and denounce this shit, because I’m in the same boat.
If a partner of mine hit me when I wasn’t consenting because I “disrespected” them, you can bet your ass they’ll think twice about going to sleep in the same county as me.
I don’t even like the “disrespectful sub who just wants to be punished” schtick. That shit gets really annoying, really quick, and most Dom(me)s I know don’t like to play that way.
Another thing that’s occurred to me though while reading through this: JB literally thinks she’s doing right by her husband because he hasn’t hit her. It’s fucking conditioning. She’s not getting beat, so she must be doing good, because if she does bad, she’ll get beat.
And as someone who grew up in a household where I was beaten for every little “indiscretion”, real or not, this upsets the fuck out of me.
It’s like she can’t even imagine that her husband is a good person who might not want to hit her at all, even if she is “disrespectful” to him in some manner.
Shit. It’s like Judgy doesn’t know that some people talk their fucking problems out instead of just resorting to violence.
@Bryce:
That’s an excellent point.
@Bina
…Well I *was* hungry, then you had to go and mention unwashed taint of ROOSH and…*shudder* *dryheave* licking.
*dryheave*dryheave*dryheave*
Don’t say those kinds of things without some kind of declaratory warning! Please! Eating is actually kind of important to do on a regular basis for life to continue! I want to live! 😛
Please let that be the only time in history “valor” and “pimp hand” were used in the same sentence.
I’ve come to, well, disrespect the word “disrespect”. Almost every time I hear it, it involves not someone not treating another as an equal until proved otherwise, but someone not kowtowing to another as obvious superior with no demonstrated reason.
I never really considered the word until I was a teenager. At that time, I was genuinely disrespectful of authority because I wanted to be a cool rebel, but I was also just getting to know my stepfather: actions I considered neutral or didn’t consider at all became “disrespect” that needed hours of discussion.
One would think that my autism would have made at least one previous authority mention “disrespectful” behaviour. Nah. My INTENDED disrespectful behavior was noticed by my mom, bio dad, and teachers. My “disrespectful” behavior, such as saying “was that my job?” when dinnertime candles weren’t lit, meant cold dinner and hours of painful discussion.
Of course, I didn’t think it could POSSIBLY be abuse, because he made his hurt feelings just clear enough that my mom had to draw each one out of him slowly and carefully. He had PTSD. He didn’t TRY to make his emotions known. It made sense.
Even when things got weird, like him insisting on being my barber and getting an erection from giving me haircuts, that was fine. The time I was moving away from home and he was driving me and we had to share a hotel room and he asked if he could give me a hug, and I said yes, and he immediately removed his pyjamas and held me and tightened and loosened his arms and breathed heavily, and I said “that’s enough”, and he actually stopped, I counted my blessings and just never mentioned it and somehow thought it meant he couldn’t be abusing my mom.
I moved back home and the walking on eggshells drove me to drink every day, but his anger had to be drawn out like pus from a boil, so I still thought it couldn’t be abuse.
It took until he told my mom he wanted a divorce the day before Valentine’s Day, accusing her of infidelity, for me to realize. She is the exact opposite of an unfaithful person, but he was still married when he met her, and convinced her the marriage had been over for longer than it had.
The next day, he had the gall to wish her Happy Valentine’s Day. The day after, I texted him a message regarding suspicions of infidelity and their relation to guilty consciousnesses, stating that I would not attend his funeral if it was held after that point. It was the most hurtful thing I could think of, and the nearest response to the hurt he dealt my mother. (He continually referred to me as his daughter, and the closest he got to molesting me was that weird hug, so it probably was a good hurt.)
I never intended to speak to him again, but there was a whole deal with moving out of the house which was supposed to be passed down. His brother’s son by HIS ex-wife (brother’s ex-wife: my ex-step-ex-cousin?) helped me and my mom, and opened up to me about his own dad (my ex-step-uncle)’s physical abuse against his mom, and how proud he was of the time he finally felt he was strong enough to get in the way.
Then my ex-stepdad called us both to talk about the handling of a very important, monetarily not so major, and INCREDIBLY heavy family object. I told him, through a certain amount of tears, that my mother didn’t want his hands on it, although the hands of his hired help and others present were ok.
I thought the teariness had made me look weak, but was later told (through my mom, who heard it from the one whose father in that family WAS physically abusive) that I had “scolded him pretty good”.
Not what I was hoping, but better than I thought I did. That “not showing up at his funeral” thing is still in the air, and it seems that I have finally shown him the respect he deserves.
I remain grateful that he was not like his physically violent brother, or his several other brothers who probably held similar attitudes, but maybe it would be better if his abuse of my mother and myself were more obvious. One time of him “really” hurting my mom was enough to convince me to cut him out of my mind’s heart. The many times I saw people grow close to him, but suddenly get cut away at the smallest slight, were a good object-lesson.
(This even happened with a pet: a parrot my stepdad, and the rest of us, bonded with closely. I was left to birdsit one weekend, but freaked him [the bird] out with some of my body language, so he bit and wouldn’t let go. He could have legitimately bitten off one of my fingers, but the bird’s stressed reaction to MY behavior got him sent to a bird exchange, where I know for a fact my stepdad continued to visit him for some time. I could only come see him once, and can’t not cry about it at this time.)
Anyway, uh, overshare maybe. “Disrespect” can be a frustrating word. I hope the parrot is OK.
Deep down I wonder if this is a cry for help…like when people put a small black dot on their palm to indicate they are being abused and need help to escape.
This might be “JudgyBitch”s black dot.
At first I’ll admit that I felt sorry for her, because this is such a depressing way to view relationships. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that she doesn’t really believe any of this shit, and simply craves the attention. Which is awful, because here you have somebody telling men they are justified in hitting women, and women that they deserve to get hit for transgressing in some way.
Also, I’m aware that if it’s attention she craves then we’re allowing her to enjoy it, but pointing out the stupid stuff she says is just too fun.
@Carayak
My heart goes out to you, the parrot, and all involved.
I have some firsthand understanding of this type of complex situation — limited of course to my own experience.
Best wishes to all involved.
http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/046/814/1dc.gif
@Rosie
I had never heard of the Black Dot campaign before. Now I’m sad that it didn’t work out, but I do believe the domestic violence expert. Anyone who wants to leave an abusive situation needs, first and foremost, a safety plan. Call your local or national domestic abuse hotline:
1-800-799-SAFE (7233) (in the United States)
http://www.thehotline.org
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/black-dot-domestic-violence-campaign-shut-down-after-critics-claim-it-might-do-more-harm-than-good-10515355.html
@Carayak Thank you for sharing that, it can’t have been easy. I’m glad that, by the sounds of it, you don’t have to deal with your stepdad much any more. I think your story illustrates exactly why ‘disrespect’ is such a weighted term, and seems to be more about displaying power than anything else.
For what it’s worth, you couldn’t have done anything to make him treat you better, because it was always his problem and not yours.
I hope that parrot is okay too.
Am I the only one who get the feeling she have absolutely 0 idea what BDSM is about ?
Good grief, how does she treat her kids?