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.
Thank you for sharing that, Carayak. I had quite an emotionally difficult family life growing up, so… yeah. Hugs and feelings of solidarity, and if you ever need someone to talk to and there’s nobody else, please say hi.
Gosh. I manage not to cheat on my husband and I know he’d never hit me. I thought that’s how marriage works. Thank you, Andrea Hardie, for showing me the light!
(extra-scornful sarcasm alert)
@Carayak – jesus christ. I just hope that you’re doing ok now (and the parrot, too).
@Ohlmann – nope, you’re definitely not the only one thinking this.
As people have already said above, this latest from Judgy is just excruciatingly embarrassing. If it weren’t for the normalising of abuse, it would be almost funny, the lengths she’ll go to (“I know! Blackface! Next week, Domestic Violence is Great!!”).
If my wife wrote anything like this, I’d be heartbroken, and deeply offended. How awful to think that the only reason someone respects your relationship is because they’re afraid (without any evidence) you’ll beat them. Gross.
The problem is she is assuming that men/her husband will always act rationally and follow set rules. That it will always be clear what will provoke and what the severity of actions will be.
For example in a workplace environment: I have a coworker (Person A) who has openly stated in meetings that everything presented must be backed up by facts and hard P&L related numbers, otherwise it is useless to present at any meeting. You will not be surprised to hear that Person A does not believe people and morale is important in a business decision.
Literally in the same meeting Person A said that, they got angry when Person B asked them to back up a statement they said. Person A refused, said they were being disrespected and then went on a campaign after the meeting to remove the question asker from any authority not directly related to their job because they were disrespected. Like Person A got the CEO to remove Person B from handling office events (which Person B universally was lauded as doing a great job). Thankfully after a disastrous next event that Person A handled (that event got more complaints than all previous combined over multiple years), Person B got the job back.
That was not physical abuse. But basically I am trying to say that it is very difficult to find what would provoke someone and the actions they will take when provoked. That even following their rules could get you into trouble. If you are in an abusive relationship, just get out. Rules won’t fix it.
I’m sure the “equal rights, equal lefts” crowd is eating this up. Blech.
The only woman I ever knew who fit this profile was my Ex Friend from Hell, and she turned out to be just like Judgy Bitch, a secret she hid under a charming exterior for many years.
Forgot to add this in my previous comment: I am in a polyamorous BDSM relationship and I can promise you that there’s a HUUUGGGEEE difference between what my partners and I do and goddamn domestic abuse. Of course, I probably don’t need to tell anyone on this site that since I’m sure most – if not all – of you are actually decent human beings
Is there an term for woman who actively works against Women, because this woman deserves the label. she seems to go the extra mile to undermine woman’s rights and any gains that they have made. This makes her extra despicable in my opinion
The worst part of this (OK maybe it’s not, but it seems like it):
What if, perish the thought, something actually happens to her? The proper authorities are not gonna look on this bullshit in the best possible manner. Either:
A)it really was an accident, but nobody’s gonna believe it. After all…
I’m pretty sure that was the set up to Gone Girl
Or B)Tim really is an awful, violent person, but hey, she’s literally asking for it. Remember, the Jeb Goblin (don’t know his name beyond initials, don’t feel like looking it up, doesn’t deserve that effort) trial wasn’t long ago. In Canada. There ain’t a worse victim than Andrea
Nothing good can come of this
Thanks for elaborating on this. It is really hard to consume content made by people who do not understand what violence is. I is just incredible how this concept is misunderstood. As a dominatrix, I can connect to the use of force, percussion and pain in a therapeutic way. Also the use of kidnapping, confinement and other methodologies for psychologically removing someone from a certain space. These are all good activities that can be negotiated with a partner in order to jolt them out of old habits. The uses for this are endless really. But never is it actual violence.
Violence takes something away from someone else and the spectrum of it is very large. A lot of the habits of people who subscribe to toxic masculinity are violent because they “take away” something from someone else to make themselves feel stronger. If someone steps into your space and continues to do so after you have told them to fuck off, they are taking away your sense of security to feel more powerful themselves. Toxic masculinity runs on that 24/7. It is emotionally expensive for everyone and it is violence. Of course one could wield enormous amounts of power by coaching, helping, guiding and healing… but these options are not available to the lowest common denominator in our emerging mediocracy.
What JudgyBitch is proposing is non-consensual therapy manipulation! She wants therapy. She suggest manipulating someone into giving it to her. If successful, she could find herself injured. For sure, she will injure the well-being of the guy she purposefully triggers into ‘slapping her around’. Which can only intensify once she decides to refer to him as an abuser (remember this is all manipulated and not properly negotiated so everything will go wrong). How is that not 100% abusive?
Stay away from assholes like that.
I have passed the article along to my spouse who has been studying violence for 35 years. All the stuff I find on this amazing blog and forward to him just boggle the mind.
It looks to me like she is suffering from identification with the aggressor.
During a particularly fraught period in our family’s history my sister who is 12 years younger than me dated an awful older man, one day she came home with a black eye and gave my mum all the usual “walked into a door” excuses. My mum was beside herself, but didn’t tell me until long after the fact because she knew I’d have jumped on the first train going south, travelled the 350 miles to Plymouth and beaten him until he couldn’t stand up. She basically didn’t want me to go to prison, now two wrongs don’t make a right but something like that would have tripped my “protective sister” switch so hard. Does this woman not have brothers or sisters who might care if she was beaten?
Fortunately our story had a happy ending, my sister cut the loser loose not too long after (I think he hit her to try and stop this) and has been in an eleven year relationship with the kindest, most gentle man I have ever met for the past eleven years.
Psyker,
I usually go with The Cool Girl. Now, the Cool Girl is no more cool than the Nice Guy is nice, but that’s how she’s positioning herself. As the woman who’s not like those other uppity, no fun women. The Cool Girl thinks misogyny is funny, she’s too cool for feminism. She thinks other women are too much drama. Etc. Etc.
It seems like the “BDSM and Abuse are the same thing” idea are not so uncommon in the anti-fem community.
I recently finished a video critiquing a Sargon of Akkad video in which he used Camille Paglia as an example of a “feminist” who had some good ideas about life.
Here’s Camille talking about BDSM and Abuse.
“Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized.”
What the actual fuck…
I can see why the casual observer could conflait kink with “women (or men) want to be punished” cause we use language like that in many kink settings. Sincerrely enough that sometimes we can get confused in our own minds when we are with partners we trust – and can cross lines and have to step back and say “ok, that was wrong, let’s try again”.
But she is not a casual observer. She is making this conflation deliberately. She is justifying things likely done to her in her past (a father, mother, boyfriend, possibly), or just justifying how she sees her reality. And that’s where it’s terribly sad. I would hazard a guess that someone who has never been beaten by a man, would not come to a pre-defense of “but he might, if i did X or Y”. The justification seems (without trying to psychoanalyze her, specifically… just women who justify this, generally) all about trying to understand why THEY feel that way, and then pushing it off into the world to make their experiences more normal.
and it’s uber sad.
@Mike Hisandry. Exactly.
Sometimes I go get my husband a sandwich, and he knows it’s because I love him. It’s not because I’m scared of him and need to show submission, not because he orders me to. I do it for the same reason he sometimes gets me a sandwich – we know the person we love is hungry and we want to do something for them. Because we love each other.
I’m never sure whether MRAs reject equal relationships, or are too intrinsically selfish to have realised they exist. They wouldn’t bring a sandwich to a starving friend if the couldn’t get something out of it.
@Michael
I keep saying it, they’re just the rebranded reich wing, and all attempts of their edginess was to hide the fact that they believe all the things the religious right believes, up to and including the pseudoscience.
Feudalists, fascists, oppressors of others, you name it, they feel like they deserve to put their heel where they want and no on can tell them otherwise.
Holy shit! Ok ignoring for a minute that JB is clearly a nutcase who needs help, let’s say for the sake of argument that her husband is a decent guy who would never hit a woman for any reason. Is she going to try to force the guy to hit her if she breaks a plate or something?
@Michael
Euch, that Camille Paglia quote…
Sometimes I wonder if people like that are conflating their own fantasies with the real life situation and then don’t have the empathy to realise it’s completely not the same thing. Like the way the Gor novels are obviously one man’s rather cheesy Dom fantasies, but then he has to try and dignify them by making them a full fledged fascist-lite ideology about women naturally being submissive and violence as a male virtue, and therefore ends up justifying vile behaviour in the real world as being part of the natural relationship between sexes.
@Hugbees – Um, while being a person with mental health issues who has no problem with referring to myself that way, I think you’d better have a look at the comments policy as its caused some hurt in the past.
Otherwise I agree. I’m completely baffled as to how such a relationship can work. If she only behaves because he’d hit her otherwise, but he’s never hit her, is she saying it’s because she behaves perfectly all the time. I can’t believe it’s because she’s a naturally docile sweet-tempered person – surely she’s threatened to nail his head to her car roof at least once. She seems to have done it to everyone on Twitter.
Huggbees, terms like “nutcase” are ableist and violate the comments policy here.
@Michael, gotta love the random classism that Paglia throws in there, because why not, right?
It’s really sad to hear JB tout this kind of rhetoric, when she’s related stories of the violence between her own parents, in her earlier blog posts. Though perhaps not surprising as she always identifies and defends her father, despite his physical abuse towards his children.
Thing is, I don’t believe for a moment she’s afraid of her husband hitting her, if she were why would she humiliate him on a weekly basis with her online fishwife routine?
Re:Camille Paglia,
I do wonder if she did any research before making those overblown statements? My guess is she didn’t.