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.
Thinking about it, if there is to be a quid pro quo justification for enfranchisement then it’s much more arguable that it should be linked to tax paying. After all if you’re paying for the running of the government you should have a say in how they spend your money.
Taking that further if you were to adopt a shareholder model then the more tax you pay, the more votes you have.
If that were the case would it affect the demand for tax cuts at the top and would it also stop tax avoidance and evasion? (Use a clever accountant so you pay less tax than a shop worker, but don’t complain that they get more voting rights than you.)
Obviously not a serious suggestion but any speculative fiction writers feel free to borrow.
ETA: Women would get an extra vote because of the tax on tampons.
That would be more than just “skin in the game” — that would be BLOOD. Which most cis adult women would certainly have paid already, dozens of times over, before the age of 18 (which is currently all one has to do to “earn the franchise” here in Canada).
(And yes, I’m hoping to flush a few lurking MRAsshats here with this squicky feeeemale-trouble stuff. Ha, ha.)
Unrelated. But remarkably apropos.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1474296493-20160919.png
@Pavlov’s House – Thanks for your thoughtful response and for expanding on what I said. Sorry if it wasn’t clear – my house is noisy and chaotic and crisis-prone, like a radio station continually tuned to heavy metal, so my comments are sometimes hasty and incoherent.
It is true, as you said, that different groups have used their own military service to argue successfully for enfranchisement, but it’s also equally true that in the US there has never been an officially codified link between the two. The latter is what I meant – there’s been plenty of push from below, but even with all the attempts over the years to attach conditions to voting, from poll taxes and literacy tests to voter ID, so far neither the Constitution nor the states have explicitly made military service either a guarantee or a prerequisite for voting. Even the Selective Service isn’t tied to voter registration (though it is tied to participation in federal programs, but of course MRAs are all wealthy bootstrapped Galtians and don’t need “big daddy government” to help pay for college ‘n’ stuff).
JB is trying to subvert the argument of “if I serve in the military, I should get a voice in democracy” into “the only voices that should be heard in a democracy are the voices of the military.” That’s nonsense, and it’s insulting to service members to use the military as a fig leaf for subverting democracy and oppressing women.
I think we’re on the same page here, but always good to clarify!
@Scildfreja: Haha! Davis Aurini on a date.
“No franchising without a uterine lining”
That’s funny, considering I knew far more conservative women than I did liberal ones from my time in the military. Not everyone with a vagina is automatically a liberal feminist.
The good old “If we just disempower the right outgroup, people will start respecting our shitty opinions” trope that fuels the whole hard right.
@Alan:
Heeheehee…MISANDRY!!!
In all seriousness, though: Just imagine what this world would look like if rights and privileges were framed through a female rather than male lens. The MRAsshats think it already IS that way. They are so comically dissociated that if I were to speculate for the purposes of comparison (or jest), they would only come on here telling me that we already live in just such a gynocracy, or some such hogwash. Never mind all the men in suits at the top of the pyramid! It’s those tricksy wimminzes who really run the world, I tellz ya!
‘Tricksy Wimminzes’ should be a band name.
@NiOg: Maybe…but I read that in Gollum’s voice
My theory is it takes a lot of societal and mental energy to be a jerk to a whole class of people, especially as large as 95% of the populace (all women plus the ~45% of men who don’t naturally gravitate toward the model of a non-feminist, non-environmentalist Teddy Roosevelt), and justify the same, and the die-hard misogynists can’t help but subconsciously notice, and resent, this.
@NiOg
Tricksy Wimminzes is the opening act for Vagenda of Manocide
@Axecaliber:
“Oh, isn’t it always?”[/mournful Elam]
@Podger
Noice 🙂
OK, you win. That was perfect ?
Oh, my gracious, I am so sorry. I just woke up and the tea has not finished brewing properly— by which I mean the spoon still falls over within the cup.
Just a note to any lurking MRAs or MRA-adjacent folks:
Many feminists (myself included) actually see no need for a draft at all and think we’d be better off without. You can look at Pocket Nerd’s awesome response to Pavlov if you want more information on the practicalities of it, but from a moral standpoint: I think it’s morally wrong to drag anyone off to fight in a war against their will. I think it’s morally wrong to force anyone to fight (and most likely die) against their will for whatever reason.
If people want to be soldiers or serve in the military in other ways, then that’s great! Go, fight for your country if that’s what you want to do! However, if you don’t want to, you shouldn’t be forced to, especially if you’ll be penalized for not doing so.
But if we must have one for whatever reason, then yes, it should include men, women, and non-binary people.
______________________________________
As for Miss Hardie, I would ask if she’s picked up a history book, but since I doubt that:
During the Vietnam war, there was a draft. Many people were of the “Make Love, not War” persuasion, and among their number were a lot of feminists. In fact, self-described feminists were constantly in protest marches and the like. But, they did something even more to help men who were drafted.
You know what some of those mean ol’ “man-hating” feminists did? They helped men dodge the draft by smuggling them into other countries. They helped men who wanted to not fight get into Canada and Mexico to avoid being drug off by the army.
But, we’re the ones who hate men and want them to get shipped off to war to die for our amusement, right?
How will American MRAs react when the Selective Service is extended to women? Will they still harp on this in a we-hunted-the-mammoth way, or will they quietly pretend they never cared at all? Inquiring minds want to know.
@Podger
Literally no problem, Auntie! Put a smile on my face 🙂
Speaking of which, I have a habit of shortening people’s nyms (and names). Is just “Podger” OK? Or should I use the whole thing?
POM,
I’m pretty sure they’ll say that it doesn’t matter because things won’t be equal until a bunch of women die combat deaths to make up for past male combat deaths.
I’ve already heard this argument from MRAs before.
Hey, speaking of Heinlein, as we were, the old man was fond of pointing out that major wars were “always” able to be correlated to a population ratio where men strongly outnumbered women and young men outnumbered old men. I feel if this bore out, we’d see more on the subject, but all I can see is a Slate article referring to a paper regarding individual acts of violent crime (I have definitely heard that a major gender imbalance in either direction is bad news). Mammotheers, a good debunk, please?
Oh, fun! I peek back into Mammoth for the first time in forever on a JB post day.
Under this cunning plan to encourage conventional marriage and the production of sons, what if you’re married to or the mother of an actual man in uniform? Do you get a special platinum member voter ID? An express lane at the polls? Since we’re tying rights to happenstance biology and birth, I want a good explanation of the tiers of privilege that increased service brings.
@ PoM:
I have my money on them bemoaning how horribly degraded the services will be with greater female enrollment. Standards will be lowered! Barracks converted to womens’ uses! Women will take all the good military jobs! Horrors!
Axecalibrrrr, you may certainly call me whatever feels right to you, and thank you very kindly for asking.
You are quite right. AND these terrible, entitled women will, for some reason, expect men not to rape them, when they are RIGHT THERE, asking for it in their sexy baggy BDU’s that show that they have bifurcated legs.
One of my grandfathers, who was conscripted in Canada during WWII, caught an ear infection during basic training and wasn’t fit to be sent overseas. The base commanders, looking around for something to do with him, promoted him to staff sergeant and put him in charge of the base payroll for the duration of his tour of duty. (He’d been a banker before conscription.)
So, yeah, drafted =/= sent off to fight. And never has. The military always needs a lot of people who never get sent to the front lines, like accountants and teachers. (My other grandfather spent WWII teaching bomber crews how to perform navigation as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.)
Granted, the rules for conscription in Canada were changed in WWII to keep conscripts at home as much as possible rather than sending them overseas, as a result of lessons learned from the crisis and riots caused by conscription in WWI…
Thus Spake ZaraPolicy of Madness:
I’ve had this conversation with MRAs, and you can’t win. It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall — his position is whatever is convenient for blaming women at that moment. An MRA will, completely without irony, complain about women “forcing” men to go to war in one breath, and in the next breath whine about women in uniform “weakening” the military.