With election day here in the US less than two months away, Andrea Hardie has decided that maybe it would be ok if some women were allowed to vote after all.
Hardie — the oft-suspended antifeminist Twitter activist known online as Janet Bloomfield and/or JudgyBitch — has long been a vocal opponent of women’s suffrage, on the grounds that women tend to vote for politicians who support things she thinks are bad, like economic stimulus packages and other manifestations of “Big Daddy government.”
But she’s been making some concessions on this front. Some months back, evidently taking her inspiration from Starship Troopers, she decided it would be ok for women to vote if they were to join the military — or get themselves elected to public office.
Now she’s decided that maybe it would be ok if women like her were allowed to vote too.
In a post on her terrible blog, she declares that
I have already argued that women should be allowed to earn the right to vote, either by joining the military or by being voted into leadership positions by male voters. I think I will now expand my exemptions to some other women with ‘skin in the game’.
Wives of men and mothers of sons.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Hardie falls into both of those categories, as she has regularly reminded her readers.
But ladies like her are still ladies. Why should we let them vote?
Women who are legally married to a man, who by definition is subject to the draft, have skin the game. They have a right to make leadership decisions that could result in their husband’s death. Needless to say, the right to vote is surrendered upon divorce. It can only be regained by remarriage, to a man.
Huh. Never mind that, in the US and Canada at least, there is no draft, and the chances of a draft being reinstated in the forseeable future can be rounded down to zero percent.
And never mind that all women living in a country have “skin in the game” by virtue of, you know, living in that country.
Let’s just accept her premise for a moment and work out the technicalities. Like, for example: would these women be stripped of the vote once their husbands are no longer of draft age? NOPE!
The ages of the men involved don’t really matter. In the US, the draft currently sits at 18-25 years of age, but in war time, draft ages can and do change. Men up to the age of 45 were drafted in WWII, and all men up to age 65 had to register. Men in Ukraine are currently subject to the draft up to age 50. All societies will prefer to draft men of all ages before they will draft women.
That’s quite an assumption, given that there are a lot more young women serving in the military than there are old men.
The second group is mothers of sons. They, too, have skin in the game. Once a woman has given birth to a son, she earns the right to vote on the grounds that her son can be drafted and she has a right to participate in leadership decisions that could lead to his death. The only circumstance under which this right can be revoked is if she surrenders legal custody of the boy. His adoptive mother, if there is one, earns the vote.
What if … oh never mind, it’s pointless to try to discuss this as if actual logic is involved in anything that Hardie argues.
Or facts, as her next “argument” shows:
The truly sobering thought is that even if women’s suffrage were repealed, I doubt many women would care, beyond the initial shock of ‘Muh rights! Muh rights!’ If the 19th were repealed, I sincerely doubt very many women would take any of the paths listed above for the purpose of gaining the right to vote. Women will do all of the above, but based on their personal feelings and preferences, and not because they are vitally, deeply, profoundly invested in the idea of suffrage.
It’s always seemed to me just a teensy bit strange how invested Hardie is in the whole anti-suffrage thing, because all the (admittedly halfassed) arguments she musters against women voting would seem also to apply equally to women trying to influence politics in ways other than voting. Like, for example, writing blogs and tweeting tweets and putting up videos on YouTube in order to push your political agenda — all of which Hardie herself does, of course.
And even if we accept her bizarre notion that the only women who have “skin in the game” are women in the military, elected officials, wives of men and mothers of boys, wouldn’t this exemption only apply to those women trying to influence politics in the countries in which they live?
Following Hardie’s logic to its conclusion, Canadian women like her shouldn’t have the right to publicly campaign for political candidates in the US. No skin in the game!
But who is this dude staring out from the header on her Facebook page?
He looks vaguely familiar. He doesn’t look very Canadian.
(More on the army perception thing, in a webcomic made by friends of friends of mine. Which, by the way, is recommended to anyone who likes tabletop games, or might enjoy reading about tabletop games geeks, with occasional general geekery.)
But don’t they also claim that women are a bunch of mushy-headed bleeding hearts who don’t understand manly things like war?
I swear it’s almost as though they don’t have a coherent philosophy.
@ tim
This is probably an angle that Joek wasn’t going for but naturalised citizens and born citizens could be put through exactly the same testing to qualify for voting by resolving the discrepancy the other way. The tests only exist as part of a system to marginalize immigrants so why keep them?
This always baffled me, since MRAs are always going on about how “childlike” females are with their stunted ladybrains. She’s going on herself about how they can’t handle the right to vote! Nobody believes that’s what this awful person really stands for.
The reason civilian rights aren’t predicated on military connections is because most countries consider civilians to be in control of the military, and not the other way around.
Connecting voting to drafts is also silly, because where do you start, people who aren’t drafted, don’t have a hand in its creation. it’s basically taking someone’s rights away, then saying it’s justified that by not having those same rights, you’ve somehow done it to yourself.
Hers a weird coincidence. I just flicked onto the BBC TV news, something I hardly ever do, and lo and behold there Mike Buchanan (the Justice for Men and Boys Party bloke). He was part of a bit about that Nottingham Police initiative to record misogynistic incidents as hate crime. They also had the woman who had drawn up the initiative and a woman who trained the police about such incidents.
I won’t give any spoilers. I bet you can guess what Mike identified as the real problem though. 🙂
It may be someone techno literate can get the clip from Iplayer later. It was the Victoria Derbyshire programme and the feature started about 10:20 a.m.
Here’s a weird coincidence. I just flicked onto the BBC TV news, something I hardly ever do, and lo and behold there’s Mike Buchanan (the Justice for Men and Boys Party bloke). He was part of a bit about that Nottingham Police initiative to record misogynistic incidents as hate crime. They also had the woman who had drawn up the initiative and a woman who trained the police about such incidents.
I won’t give any spoilers. I bet you can guess what Mike identified as the real problem though. 🙂
It may be someone techno literate can get the clip from Iplayer later. It was the Victoria Derbyshire programme and the feature started about 10:20 a.m.
@calmdown
Ha, ha — good catch!
Your Amy Poehler avatar is compellingly fierce.
That Mike Buchanan thing:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07w9d7n/victoria-derbyshire-19092016
Starts at 1:18:00 (although there’s an interesting lead up for a few minutes beforehand). This is iPlayer so might only work in UK.
On a side note, I read a synopsis of the notorious Neo-Nazi power fantasy The Turner Diaries yesterday. I’m still reeling from it. There’s a whole sequence involving the mass execution of white women who’ve slept with non-Aryan men that’s disturbingly close to some MRA babblings out there.
Re: voter literacy, my fantasy is to take all those TVs in airports, hotels, bars, and hospitals that are currently spewing useless Fox and CNN propaganda feeds, and have them display nonpartisan educational slides about history and democracy. There’s a captive audience in those places. That would be a good opportunity to improve civic literacy, instead of dumbing voters down and making them anxious.
Of course, there’s no profit in educating viewers, so it will have to remain a fantasy. *sigh*
As for the draft, there’s no logical or historic connection between military service and the right to vote. In the US the draft started up in 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, but men had the right to vote long before that. In Vietnam, 18 year olds were being drafted who didn’t have the right to vote (and in fact that was one of the major drivers of protest against the war).
MRAs love to whine about the privilege women have of not being killed and maimed in war (with a curious blind spot for the countless millions of civilian women in war-torn countries who are killed, wounded, brutalized, captured, driven out of their homes, and so forth – I guess suffering only counts if you’re a soldier). But they’re curiously silent when it comes to the privileges vets enjoy when they return home: assistance with education, preference for federal jobs, favorable terms for home ownership, discounts, pensions, and a high level of respect for their service. Vets are compensated, and with good reason. But basic civil rights like voting are not, and should not, ever be used as compensation. Rights are not currency, to be withheld or granted based on good behavior.
And then there’s the fact that the “game” most of us have skin in is NOT wasting lives and money on yet another pointless war. If MRAs think conscription is unjust, then rather than petulantly take away someone else’s rights, they should use their own right to vote wisely, and turf out the chickenhawk draft-dodging politicians who are all too eager to send young kids overseas into harm’s way, knowing that they and their loved ones will never be called on to sacrifice for their country. MRAs get all salty about the draft, but then they turn around and vote for Trump and Bush/Cheney and all the rest of the pro patria mori liars who perpetuate the system. There’s a huge disconnect there.
For a group that’s all about power and dominance, they’re astonishingly terrible at figuring out who really pulls the strings in the world.
@Ghost Robot
Whew! You took one for the team. Be sure to take good care of yourself now.
@Buttercup
Sounds like a worthy project for the League of Women Voters, those stalwart promoters of democracy.
If only their pockets were deep enough.
Re examining the text of ‘Starship Troopers’ (and not the mess of its movie adaptations) Hardie seems to have misunderstood the basic premise of the novel. Heinlein’s ‘World Federation’ does not practice conscription. ‘Federal Service’ is voluntary and need not, as I understand it, be military. It can include such basic functions as being a sanitation worker. I believe the idea Heinlein (who was something of a s**t stirrer) was trying to promulgate was that potential voters and politicians should experience the ‘sharp end’ of public service prior to enfranchisement. It is worth noting that the WF constitution in the book forbids such public servants from enfranchisement until they have retired from that post, thereby preventing a military (or sewer worker) dictatorship arising.
@ Kevin
Heinlein certainly intended that Federal Service entailed all sorts of public sector work, not just the military. It’s a fair criticism of the book (which I still love) that he doesn’t make that very clear.
And , as you say, far from conscription the Government does everything it can to put people off enrolling. To the extent that very visibly disabled veterans are used at recruiting offices (it’s made clear this is the purpose as later we find the recruiting officer with highly functional prosthetic limbs; he just doesn’t wear them at work).
It’s also made clear that even if there’s no actual real danger in the work (which there usually isn’t) they’ll put the volunteer through “the most convincing facsimile thereof” as they can.
It seems the aim isn’t so much that people ‘earn’ citizenship, just that the process weeds out people who aren’t that bothered about it.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
“As for the draft, there’s no logical or historic connection between military service and the right to vote. In the US the draft started up in 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, but men had the right to vote long before that.”
Perhaps you meant that there’s no logical or historic *exclusive* connection between *compulsory military service* and the right to vote.
There is an indirect, though consistent and clear, connection between military service and *citizenship* in the United States. Note that the connection is not casual in one direction; I am not saying (nor do I believe historical evidence indicates) citizenship has ever been dependent upon military service.
Rather, since the Revolution, Americans have pointed to the experience of war and its shared of (which Americans of both genders and many ethnic groups have shared) as connected to citizenship — and to some of the rights that have been associated with citizenship, such as voting. Throughout American history, people in marginalized groups have picked up on that, so to speak, and actively sought military service knowing that the broader society would have more difficulty justifying their marginalization *and disenfrancisement* if they had clear records of military service.
Perhaps the best-known example from American history is the experience of African-American men, especially from the American Civil War through the World Wars. Individual Black men and African-American organizations specifically sought to connect their military service and the military service of their members to citizenship — and often the specific rights tied to citizenship, such as voting. Other groups have done this as well.
Look, I agree with you, David, and all the other commentators that Angela Hardie does not know what she is talking about but it’s just not accurate to say that there is NO historic connection between military service and voting in the United States.
One could point to the experiences of African-American men in the U.S. South during the 1940s-1960s. Look for instance at the disputes of suppressing the Black vote in the 1946 Democratic Primary for the Senate seat election in Mississippi – Black WWII veterans made clear and explicit references to their recent wartime service when agitating against Sen. Theodore Bilbo’s attempt to suppress their vote. *and got a lot of Americans, white and black to agree with them on that basis*. This and later similar experiences are documented and analyzed in John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
I enjoy your comments and don’t mean to pick on you, and perhaps you meant that there’s no *causal and consistent* exclusive connection between *compulsory* military service and the right to vote in American history, but the way you stated it is inaccurate and I think these distinctions do matter.
“If MRAs think conscription is unjust, then rather than petulantly take away someone else’s rights, they should use their own right to vote wisely, and turf out the chickenhawk draft-dodging politicians who are all too eager to send young kids overseas into harm’s way, knowing that they and their loved ones will never be called on to sacrifice for their country.”
THIS, however, is an extremely good point, and articulately rendered. Thank you.
David, what is your basis for saying “…the chances of a draft being reinstated [in the United States] in the forseeable future can be rounded down to zero percent.”?
I agree that the reinstatement of Selective Service is very unlikely given the current political climate and world situation. Nevertheless you have made a pretty extreme statement and I would like to know what makes you say this. Also, what do you mean by “forseeable” future? When developing and maintaining strategic-level assets (which are not just things like missiles and shipyards, but include too such things as the infrastructure for a system to administer mass compulsory military service), why would a power (any power, not just the U.S.) concern itself with only the easily forseeable future?
Given that I have commented here in the past, I hope this disclaimer is no longer necessary but just in case: no, I don’t like MRA’s, no I don’t agree with Angela Hardie, etc. etc. I am not even necessarily disagreeing with you. Rather I think you are delving into an area and making some statements that would benefit from clarification.
Even your “comments policy” is a funny read!
Re. this horrid “Janet” person:
Seems to me she has simply carved-out her niche as another of those “tokens” that conservatives love to hold up as an example to the rest of us – an example of what women *should* be and how they *should* think. She’s no different than Allen Keyes and the Log Cabin Republicans (though I do think some of these folks are just greedy and like “trickle-down” policies – even though other policies hurt the LGBT community). Keyes, on the other hand, likes being singled-out as a guy who’s “their guy” (their “black” guy – what did Trump say? “Where’s my African-American?”). Keyes wants to be “special”. So does this JudgyBitch. She’s certainly making money this way. I think it’s just as Andy Kaufman adopted a personae that suited the moment that would make his shtick work – she just hit on something and had the sense to recognize that it resonated with a certain portion of the populace. No woman would really think this way, would they? (I wish I were sarcastic here)
Then again… Maybe she’s real. How many of us doubted the ineptitude of “Dubya” the first time we heard a campaign speech believing it had to be a joke? That was quickly followed up by Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, et al. Now we have the prize bull, center ring, in Trump.
But whether they are true to their words or only mouthing them for a pay-check, we still have to have the reality of an America so perfectly portrayed in the satire “Idiocracy”. And millions of them are armed to the teeth!!!
I have come to my 60th year with the frightening possibility dawning on me that maybe I, too, suffer from Dunning-Krueger effect and have simply been wandering among the millions of other sufferers with an over-inflated belief in my own abilities. Next, I suppose, will be the gut-punch realization that the Democratic Party is bought and paid-for.
Good mornin’, America – how are ya?
Poor little Janet with her mushy lady brain. She’s obviously very confused and misguided and deserves our pity and maybe a nice pair of shoes and a glass of wine or chocolates.
@ joekster
I live on the US / Mexico border and you’re right: the citizenship test is no joke. Also a lot of people don’t know how expensive it is. The process can cost around $800. To just apply for a green card or visa (can’t remember which) is around $300.
@Penny PSmith huh, I actually had just started reading that webcomic a couple of weeks ago 🙂
As far as having ‘skin in the game’ goes, or ‘earning the franchise’ – shouldn’t the logical outcome of this idea be that people who do not or are not allowed to vote be free of all regulation by such a government? Our elected representatives and legislators do more than vote up or down on wars.
I may be wording it badly, but even people who are not in the military, or were in the military, or have family in the military are still effected by all the legislation being produced. That is to say, we all have ‘skin in the game’ of society as Buttercup Q Skullpants noted.
Thus Spake ZaraPavlov’s House:
If I may be so bold as to offer an answer to a question directed at somebody else… The United States is unlikely to reinstate conscription for a number of reasons, both practical and political.
On the practical side, current US military doctrine flatly states that volunteers are better than conscripts. Troop data from every military action from World War II to today indicate those who choose to join the military perform better in the field, achieve higher rank, and have fewer discipline and morale problems than those recruited involuntarily. You might think “Well, even a shabby conscript is better than nobody,” but that’s not actually true; training and equipping a modern warfighter is extremely costly in time, money, and materiel. Frankly, it’s better for everybody if that effort and expense is reserved for those who want to be there.
On the political side, re-instituting conscription would create a serious political burden for the pro-war lobby. Ending the draft was platform of Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign — not because Nixon was a bleeding-heart anti-war hippie, but because it would be an effective way to undercut the growing anti-war movement. War is a damned sight less popular when you, your siblings, your children, or your friends can be dragged off to fight and die. This is the opposite of what the military-industrial complex wants: They like the US nice and hawkish so we’re always eager to dump a few hundred billion dollars on drone-striking, bombing, or invading our national boogeyman du jour. With a very few exceptions, even the fringiest right-wing politicians in Washington aren’t talking about bringing back conscription; even the angriest, most xenophobic hawks in their base don’t want to see their grandchildren dragged off to die. In fact, I’d wager if there were ever a real political movement to reinstate the draft, the defense lobby would be overwhelmingly against it. (And the defense lobby is an enemy you don’t want to make on Capitol Hill.)
@Penny Psmith: Thanks for the link! I may have a new webcomic to add to my regular reading list. 😀