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.
I’m going to take a moment to bask in how great Policy of Madness’s posts above were. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of hers, but it’s still inspiring to see her write so clearly and passionately.
We’re very fortunate to have you, PoM.
@Axecalibur:
I absolutely agree. The thing I’ve noticed is that they usually aren’t actually that interested in science. They love the idea of science when it’s a stick they can use to beat less privileged people with, but I have yet to find a single Rational Man Thinking Rationally who really wants to discuss the Oberth Effect with me.
Some really great responses to dust bunny on this thread. I only wish I had something useful to add, but I just wanted to express my appreciation – especially to PoM and to Kimstu (for the heads-up re possible underlying adversarial competition techniques, whether consciously or unconsciously adopted, which kind of rings true to me but maybe that’s just my history talking, peoples MMV of course) – but appreciation to everybody really.
@the other EJ
Thank you! 😀
I’ll say something else here that didn’t occur to me last night when I was tired: even young children and non-human primates recognize that 1) life isn’t fair, but 2) it ought to be. We as a society claim that acknowledging that life isn’t fair is a mark of maturity, and only children claim otherwise. I would argue differently: that “acknowledging that life isn’t fair” is actually a loss and not a gain. It’s not a gain of wisdom; it’s the loss of the willingness to pursue the countervailing “ought.” It’s the loss of the ability to say “things shouldn’t be this way,” because that statement implies some responsibility to change them and our culture says that adults don’t care about that.
But note: ours is a multivariate culture, but this more, like so many others, comes from the dominant white male culture. The privileged culture, in other words. Those on top of the heap don’t feel the same urgency toward fairness that those closer to the bottom have, because the unfairness benefits them. If you reward two capuchin monkeys unequally for the same trick, it’s the one who gets the cucumber who flings it back in your face. The one who got the grape is perfectly content with the arrangement.
Capuchin monkeys don’t like cucumbers?
*horrified*
But cucumbers are the best food! Everyone knows this.
Thank you for encapsulating why I get so disappointed and also fucking annoyed with people coughincludingmyformerlyleftwingsiblingscough who think it’s somehow juvenile or naive to be left-wing.
@EJ (the other) – you meant to say “grapes are the best food”, right? Yes, I’m sure you did.
What an amazing thread this is. I’ve not participated much but am grateful for everyone’s contributions. Thanks especially to PoM (seconding EJ’s praise) – exceptional, and Axecalibur for the defence of the social sciences. Yay 🙂 😀 XD
@BoogerGhost
Right down to the Relena hate sites *sigh*. I’ve gotten a lot better about not talking gender-based shit and not taking it from anyone else, but it’s still an active struggle not to try to be what guys expect from a Cool Girl. My partner’s friends and brother are really, really sexist–one of them is even part of a Father’s Rights thing and another regurgitates MRA talking points like it’s a fucking contest–so it makes it even more difficult. My anxiety goes through the roof around them.
I used to be shy and painfully awkward and have my nose in a book or a video game more than I’d be out in the real world, but I was really lonely that way. My gaming habit gave me access to becoming a Cool Girl, so I did it. Being the Cool Girl was both a way of getting validation and an over-compensation for my social awkwardness. It also gave me a (VERY) false sense of security around men, which ended horribly more than once. It turns out that Cool Girls still get raped, and people believe them even less because they usually hang out with mostly guys and have to be cavalier about sex to keep their “cool” status.
I’m back to books and video games now (learning programming so I can even make them!) and working to unravel the mess that is my relationship with my own gender. I’m also extremely embarrassed of my past and only said anything because I didn’t want to leave BoogerGhost flapping in the wind on her own. Also, the Relena hate site thing was uncanny. I will say that I defended Sakuya from Tenchi Muyo on a different hate site, though. Like, aggressively. I was a weird kid. Not much has changed.
Great posts from everyone.
@ dust bunny – the only thing to add is, care for yourself. It can be exhausting and demoralising attempting what you are aiming for.
@ PoM – seconded all the comments about your posts, and especially:
which deserves to be engraved in gold lettering a foot high.
http://render.fineartamerica.com/images/rendered/default/canvas-print/10.000/6.625/black/break/images-medium-5/closeup-monkey-eating-cucumber-nila-newsom.jpg
no cucumbers?
😮
awwww
@ the “life isn’t fair” thing. My reaction to that is usually, “That’s true with regards to what circumstances one is born into. So why go out of our way to make it even less so? I thought ‘life isn’t fair’ was a complaint, not an instruction manual.”
@PoM Yes! 🙂
Capuchin monkeys like cucumber just fine. You can train a capuchin indefinitely on cucumber pieces. If everyone playing the game gets cukes, the monkeys are happy enough.
But they like grapes infinitely more. A marshmallow is like God’s own manna to them, but researchers don’t give them marshmallows anymore, because obviously it’s horribly unhealthy for them. Grapes are almost as good to the capuchins, though.
You can watch the relevant event here:
@ POM
That’s a fascinating experiment but I have to be honest it’s making my blood boil a bit; it’s just so cruel.
I know monkeys are really bright but it’s so unfair that one of them is being punished for reasons that it can’t possibly understand, and people are laughing. It’s not even science, it’s entertainment. The comments policy stops me from going any further in regard to the people involved in that video.
Had a conversation with an 8 year old girl today:
Girl: Can you help me with this question?
Me: Aww, no I can’t. Our time is up and we have to go home.
Girl: But can you stay a little longer?
Me: I really can’t. My wife is making dinner and I have to be there.
Girl: Is she good at cooking?
Me: Yeah, she’s great at it.
Girl: Does she cook for you every day?
Me: No. Sometimes she cooks, and sometimes I cook.
Girl: If I was a man, I would never cook. I would just sit on the couch all the time and watch TV, like my dad.
Whoa. Shit got real.
@Alan
The people laughing are in the audience at a TED talk. There are longer videos of the whole talk, but I didn’t link them because the dude giving the talk says some things that are … let’s say problematic. He’s the one doing the narration. Immediately after this he follows up with the explanation, “You’re looking at the Occupy movement right there” (or something similar) which is such obviously dismissive bullshit that I literally can’t watch it without raging. Of course the audience lols at that, too. I like this short bit because it cuts out the dude as much as possible.
The capuchin economics experiments, however, are interesting. The monkeys live in a communal group, as similar to a natural environment as can be replicated in captivity, and they opt into the experiments. They are given the option to enter the experimental chambers and aren’t forced to do it, but choose to. One of the experiments involved teaching the monkeys how to use money, and resulted in an unexpected demonstration of exchanging money for sex when some tokens got out of the experimenters’ control.
@ POM
Weeeelllll, I suppose that’s a bit better. I am now imagining one of the monkeys saying “Hey, I only signed up for this because I was lead to believe there’d be grapes!”
If that guy is an academic I’d like to do a meta experiment. Basically pay him less than equally qualified colleagues and constantly pass him over for promotion whilst elevating others. See how quickly he catches on.
@Alan
You’re welcome to watch the whole TED talk if you want to learn more about where the guy was going. The point he was making is not horrendous, it’s just the casual privilege he displays while making that point that irritates me.
I mean, you can definitely make the connection between Occupy’s objections to inequality and the monkey’s objections, but there are better ways to do it than to make a hilarious joke out of it.
Seconding EJ, Policy of Madness, I never get tired of reading your insights. When I was just lurking here, your posts taught me so much about feminism.
@Axecalibur
It’s gotten to the point where if a youtube channel says something along the lines of ‘I use rational arguments and analyze with science’, that’s usually a sign that their videos were be biased anti-feminist bullshit.
Oh and I swear that a big portion of his subscribers unconsciously believe that he’s right simply by virtue of having a British accent.
@Boogerghost
Having hung out with similar groups, I’ve felt that exact same way (although the reasons were different). Especially how guys would treat the one or two girls in the group. And when the ‘cool girl’ would go along with something that seemed misogynistic I’d get very confused and be like “wait, what? this is an ok thing to do/say!?” (naturally I’d made my own sexist mistakes in assuming that because a woman does a behavior, that means all women have that behavior).
And omg, Yuna’s awesome! I love her evolution from a character who just goes with what she thinks people expect of her, to eventually finding her own path (Tidus’s rebelliousness rubs off on her, while her selflessness rubs off on him, and by the end the two have switched places, it’s adorable!). I loved that FFX was basically her story told through the eyes of the token love interest AKA Tidus (who gets way too much crap for committing the horrible crime of showing emotion).
@Imaginary Petal
That makes me sad. Both because dad sits around on his butt and doesn’t help out and because daughter now thinks she’s going to have to do all the cooking just because she’s a girl. 🙁
@kupo
Yeah. What can you even say in response to something like that? Sigh.
Oddly, Andrea here is apparently attracted to men with low-quality sperm
(Sperm Competition in Humans: Mate Guarding Behavior Negatively Correlates with Ejaculate Quality)
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0108099
By the way, that is not to make judgments about people with low sperm counts, that’s just poking a hole in MRAs’ supposed lionizing of science and rationality.
I poke holes in their stuff USING science and rationality. It’s fun.
It’s pretty obvious that she was advised as a child, since now she seems to think that if you abuse it means you love. I feel bad for her a bit, but I wish she’d work out her issues in therapy instead of spreading her toxic views on relationships via her YouTube channel.
Not to mention the absolute irony that stupidly large numbers of stereotypically masculine jobs and behaviors make men’s sperm count plunge. For example:
– construction (exposure to asphalt, crude oil, roofing tar, heavy metals, aromatic solvents, and other chemicals)
– lawn work (exposure to herbicides and pesticides, particularly those that act as synthetic estrogens)
– excessive tobacco and alcohol consumption, which occurs far more often among men
– joining the military, which puts you at the risk of removal from the gene pool by either being killed or having your genitals blown off – c.f. the recent article on a penis transplant in the NYT; there’s talk of using this procedure on male veterans who have been mutilated by bombs)
Whoa, it’s “rare” for wealthy/middle class white males to possess empathy or care about anything other than themselves. A wholesale condemnation of an entire group in other words. Perhaps we should be put in some sort of camp…
Awww, poor Bryce. No soul is more capable of being bruised than the soul of the highly privileged.