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.
@Auntie
No, thank you ?
That sounds like some simplistic nonsense. And, even if it were true, breaking and entering is correlated and ice cream sales. Methinks there’s a more nuanced explanation.
Googled BDU, saw it stood for Battle Dress Uniform, expected something like this:
http://img.gaming.gentside.com/zelda-hyrule-warriors/zelda-hyrule_1173_w460.jpg
Severely disappointed 🙁
@Alan Robertshaw
Thanks for bringing up the BBC programme -I had a look. Buchanan’s approach was to deny women face any harassment (how would he know?) while going off on tangents that weren’t relevant to the discussion. He sounds so much like an automation whenever he’s interviewed, repeating rehearsed slogans rather than engaging with the debate. He won’t get far like that.
POM:
Initially, they will assert that in a war situation women wouldn’t be conscripted anyway, certainly not into combat roles against their will, because gynocentrism and also everyone secretly knows women aren’t much useful in combat.
After a while, the Selective Service issue will be quietly forgotten. Then it will be all “we fought the historical wars for you” and “men are culturally assigned with most of the hard dangerous work like military and coal mining and construction”
As the history of the Great Patriotic War shows, women are exempt from the draft until they aren’t. Women don’t get sent into combat, unless they are. And governments don’t draft children as young as 13 — unless they do.
Well, I don’t know who that picture is off. But the mystery man does look a little Canadian. He looks like what a moose perhaps left behind after eating at a Tim Horton’s. And you don’t get more Canadian than that.
Wow. Lesbians or bi woman who marry other woman don’t exist, apparently. Or we don’t have “skin in the game” based off the fact we don’t have “important men” in our life. Would having a brother or dad qualify me for this? A grandfather?
FeMRAs baffle me even more so than maMRAs.
The text of the novel did explicitly state that Federal Service need not be military… Buuttt on the same breath where the recruiter exposited that, he listed a couple example non-military FS jobs, and they were all horrifying. The standout was two solid years field testing environment suits on Pluto. I was quite certain as I read it that the intended message was that you technically didn’t have to sign up for the military, but they’d stick you with the most gratuitously shitty makework they could possibly come up with if you DARED demand your voting rights as a conscientious objector.
@Joekster
I, too, believe in a well-funded and -organized public education system with a strong history and civics component. Surely that’s what you mean, right?
That’s because even in ‘good’ schools in the U.S., history is taught appallingly badly, and civics not at all. If we didn’t let racist shitheads who worship willful ignorance run the whole show, you wouldn’t have had that problem.
Does anyone need or want a happy story?
Behold! Katie’s brand new prophet!
At the tender age of 11, this girl is indoctrinated properly into the feminist hive mind and is committing advanced level misandries. All hail Katie!
http://www.scarymommy.com/fifth-grade-girl-rules-boundaries-boy-viral/?utm_source=FB
Although this is going viral apparently and I’m legit concerned this kid will get the wrath of the manosphere. It is kind of like the middle school version of elevatorgate.
@WWTH
But Zoe, you need to learn to get along with your classma-
She’s awesome
That is awesome, wwth. Zoe is my hero.
(I am scared for her for exactly the same reason, though. Twitter ain’t afraid of turning all that hate on a child. At least it’s unlikely that she has a twitter account of her own.)
This is the best thing ever.
I really, really hope the manuresphere never notices though… They definitely aren’t above going after a kid.
Well, the person who shared the note is a friend of Zoe’s teacher – so I feel like there’s little danger of her receiving any direct harassment. Hopefully at worst the manosphere will just froth and gnash their teeth about the incident.
Zoë! The name means “life” in Greek — and she’s certainly lively. Plus she’s got that cool umlaut thing going on.
I have a feeling that this girl is in Katie’s special training program.
So she’s saying single, childless women should trick innocent, unsuspecting men into getting them pregnant until a son is… begat?
Gotta run, got a few hundred condoms that need poking and match.com profile to create! /s
Katie’s Corps. It’s like the Navy Seals of feminism.
@PocketNerd
“If I may be so bold as to offer an answer to a question directed at someone else”
But of course…it is indeed the comments section of a blog, after all….
“The United States is unlikely to reinstate conscription for a number of reasons, both practical and political.”
That does not pertain to the question that I asked, as you are saying something different than what David said in his post. “Unlikely” – at least to a historian, anyway — is not the same as a chance that “rounds down to zero percent”. Discussing the somewhat different, though, related matter that you raise – reasons why imposing a military draft is unlikely in the United States in the near (next decade or two) future – is in my opinion *also* worthy of discussion. I think you are right about the conclusion, but your evidence is severely flawed because of the extreme and overly-sweeping claims that you make. You say, in part, regarding *that* matter:
“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, have fewer discipline and morale problems than those recruited involuntarily.”
No.
You are wrong about this – at least in part. Historical evidence indicates no such thing, at least not about World War II.
At best, you are overstating your case. You mention “…since World War II” Well, the performance of draftees in World War II combat units has received extensive and thorough scholarly attention. You mention “troop data” I am not quite certain what you mean by that term exactly…like the data from Stouffer’s study? Marshall’s interviews? What? Whatever it is, if you want to argue that evidence from the U.S. Army’s performance in World War II shows the clearly superior “performance in the field”, etc. of volunteers over draftees, then how do you account for the argument and evidence in works like John Sloan Brown’s Draftee Division: The 88th Infantry Division in World War II (University of Kentucky Press, 1986)? As I am sure you know, the 88th was the first infantry division composed of entirely draftees that was deployed to the European Theater of Operations. Sloan chose it as a case study, he says, in order to help get at the long-standing question in American military history of whether draftees/conscripts ever CAN be as effective as volunteers. (And, yes, it’s a case study, I know, so one must accept that caveat, but like a good scholarly historian Sloan addresses the question of whether the 88th was representative of draftee infantry divisions). Sloan assesses the division’s training and it combat performance; one could look, for instance, at his analysis of the 88th’s performance in the Allied offensive against the Gustav Line (operation DIADEM) and pursuit into the Liri Valley in late May 1944; contemporary reports, e.g. the after action reports, etc., records from the Corps and Army level, etc. that Sloan cites credit it highly. That is just one example. Certainly you can disagree with Sloan’s contention that the case of the 88th was relatively representative of the experience of Army draftees in combat units in the ETO in World War II. You have made such an absolute and extremely-worded claim, however, that one would not even need to accept the case of the 88th being representative to disprove your sweeping claim. When you speak of volunteers performing better in the field, achieving higher rank, and having fewer discipline and morale problems, I wonder whether you are perhaps thinking of the U.S. Army of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Army reports from *that* period would, overall, substantiate those claims. Yet that is not what you said. Rather, you made a much broader statement that is indefensible.
Why is this important? If I agree with you and others that Angela Hardie is more wrong about more things (much, much more wrong) than David and any of the commenters here, and if I agree with David and most of the readers of this blog that Hardie’s ideas are reprehensible, why would I not just let this go? I don’t let it go, and instead prefer to offer the evidence and correction I attempt to offer above, because military affairs is a subject area in which MRA types and other modern misogynists have a lot of interest and CLAIM (quite wrongly) to know more about than progressives. I think it important, therefore, that a blog like this one that seeks to challenge these people be very accurate about matters of military history and military art and science. I am fallible and do not claim to know everything in this world. I defer to the knowledge of better minds than me about many things, but I do seek to keep myself informed on matters of military history and have spent, well, some time throughout my life in various endeavors related to its study.
There are other elements of your post to which I would like to respond later, if the moderators will allow it.
I’m just going to leave this here.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/3d7db2d8ba7c931513303dc5d0c96278/tumblr_inline_n5zmavcOX11qmlfbh.jpg
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants,
No apology necessary; goodness, in discussions such as these it is rarely easy for any of us to be completely on target about complex historical issues!
“It’s also equally true that there has never been an officially codified link between the two” [i.e., voting and military service]
You are right, and indeed I think by framing it precisely that way you are making a very prescient and relevant point — that in fact exposes Hardie’s contentions as not only objectionable but ahistorical.
I think you also make a very interesting and quite telling observation that even holders of power who exerted the most strenuous efforts to keep others from voting (e.g. state and local governments in the Jim Crow era South) came up with just about everything else, spurious “literacy” tests, etc. other than requiring prior military service as a qualification to vote. Perhaps the reason why they would not is obvious…if they did, many of the people they DID want to vote (conservative White males) would not be able to vote.
Though not as relevant to the present discussion, I think it is interesting to note that in some cases in American history, military service *has* been tied legally to *not* having the right to vote; I am thinking of course military service to the Confederacy during the Civil War and the various laws that, for a while, disenfranchised many former Confederate soldiers during the Reconstruction period.
By the way, someone called me Pavlov. It’s Pavlov’s House, not just Pavlov.
It means something….and since we have many on here who are interested in military affairs they will recognize the reference….(to another great infantry division, the 13th Guards Rifle Division from another great army full of conscripts…..)
How about women who have male relatives, say fathers: SKIN IN THE GAME!
Fingie found a box-like object.
[CW : both links lead to RoK, and the second article contains the usual “what about the menz” flavor of rape apologetics]
Today from the fever swamps of RoK, the two things that pissed me of the most.
Some (allegedly French) douchebag is using my country to promote some of the most ignorant fear-mongering bullshit I’ve seen in a long while. Apparently there’s a civil war against THE MUSLIMS going on here, or something. Guess I didn’t get the memo. Bonus points for following on Fox News’ hilarious “no-go zones” bullshit. By the way, the apartment I’m renting starting next week is smack in the middle of one such area.
Another douchebag is attacking Laurie Penny, one of the most awesome journalists ever, because she doesn’t protest outside prisons every day, or something. Featuring such mind-boggling ignorance as “most real rape victims are male”.
[CW : both links lead to RoK, and the second article contains the usual “what about the menz” flavor of rape apologetics]
@Kat
Thanks! Glad you like my avatar. Incidentally, some of the faces Amy makes in Mean Girls remind be of JB’s strange faces that she makes when I guess her brain is trying from trying to make a non-stupid argument? She’s a cool(scary) mom!
http://i1064.photobucket.com/albums/u375/erica_cross2/FGHDFHG_zpsgpyr1ujy.jpg
http://i1064.photobucket.com/albums/u375/erica_cross2/janet_zps8jlauwsy.jpg
D’aww, Fingie!