By David Futrelle
Attention-seeking alt-lite antifeminist Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield has managed to get the attention of Vice News for the second time in four years, starring in a recent Vice video (embedded below) as “the woman against women voting.”
It’s a familiar role for her, as she’s been going on about the evils of the 19th Amendment for as long as I’ve known about her. Her argument is a simple, if ridiculous one: If women aren’t subject to the draft — if they aren’t at risk for being forced into combat for their country — they shouldn’t have a say in how the country is run.
Never mind that no man, in the United States at least, is subject to the draft right now. There is no draft, and hasn’t been since 1973, making draft registration (required of all 18-year-old males) largely meaningless. Were the draft reinstated, a highly unlikely development, it would almost certainly be extended to women as well.
Also, as we all well know, there are a lot of ways other than war that the government affects our lives, and it kind of seems like women would have an equal right to have a say in them, but never mind, because Bloomfield’s argument isn’t really based on logic; it’s an extension of her what appears to be her own deeply embedded internalized misogyny.
Bloomfield — real name Andrea Hardie — returned to the women-shouldn’t-vote theme on her blog JudgyBitch yesterday. In a post clearly meant as a backhanded slap at the Parkland students speaking out so eloquently for gun control, Bloomfield extended her “no draft, no vote” argument to high school students, declaring in a headline that “[t]he reason we don’t listen to 16-year-olds is the same reason we shouldn’t listen to women.”
Attempting to rebut a CNN opinion piece arguing that “Parkland students show why 16-year-olds should be able to vote,” Bloomfield mocks the idea that
16 year olds are brilliant analysts of constitutional amendments and no one is more qualified to parse the intentions of the Founding Fathers of the world’s most successful nation better than kids who also eat Tide Pods and think $300 Supreme Hoodies are a wise choice.
Huh. If dumb decisions by some members of a certain demographic were enough to disqualify everyone in that demographic from voting, surely the election of Donald Trump should disqualify all Americans who were of voting age in 2016 from ever voting again.
Bloomfield continues:
16 year olds should vote!
Yeah, okay. Great idea, on one condition: if 16 year olds can vote, then 16 year olds can be drafted.
Old enough to vote? Then you are old enough to die. Voting has consequences, and only the people paying those consequences have a right to choose them. …
16 year olds should not vote, unless we are going to draft them., That means only boys should vote, because we can’t draft women at all. Pregnancy will always exempt women from the draft.
Of course there are plenty of medical conditions that have gotten men exempted from the draft as well. Trump famously escaped the draft because his doctor told the draft board that the future terrible president had bone spurs. Should all men with (possibly imaginary) bone spurs also be denied the vote? Should they also be banned from the presidency?
There are ironies galore in Bloomfield’s stance here, but the biggest irony is about as basic as it gets: the woman here arguing that “we shouldn’t listen to women” on political issues spends much of her life loudly expressing her political views … and trying to get people to listen to her.
The Vice video reveals another rather astonishing bit of hypocrisy on Bloomfield’s part. Skip ahead in the video to 2;46, the point in the video when we are introduced to a fellow named Leo Oja, identified as “Janet’s Husband.”
Wait, what? I thought she was happily married to someone named Tim.
A quick bit of Googling reveals that Mr. Oja is a martial arts instructor specializing in Combat Hapkido.
Well that’s … interesting. A couple years back, you see, Bloomfield started posting excited reports about her new passion for martial art training, starting with Krav Maga and moving on to, you guessed it, Hapkido. Her posts on martial arts and the alleged beauty of violence grew stranger and more rhapsodic.
The strangest of these posts began with her announcing that “I am a troubled and haunted woman of late” before going on to describe her immersion in martial arts in almost religious terms.
The past year has seen some fairly momentous changes for me. Momentous in terms of my rather quiet, small life. … It begins with martial arts. … this was an utterly transformative experience for me, and it continues to be.
Apparently.
She went on to explain what was making her so troubled.
I am training 5 days a week now, and often for 5 or more hours a session. …
My husband refuses to join me. He wants nothing to do with this. There is no part of his being that relishes or enjoys violence, and he does not want to learn the brutality and savagery that sets my blood on fire. … He is not fine with it.
She concluded by announcing that she would be writing a book with her Hapkido instructor.
The book never happened. But something else did: Bloomfield left her college professor husband to marry the aforementioned Hapkido instructor. Or maybe her husband divorced her. I don’t know the details, and I don’t really care.
What makes this worth mentioning is Bloomfield/Hardie’s incredible hypocrisy here. As JudgyBitch, she has repeatedly directed her famed judginess at divorced and divorcing women, depicting them as lazy, ungrateful golddiggers happy to tear families apart in hopes of scoring sweet, sweet child support money and possibly even sweeter alimony. “It’s almost like the whole alimony thing is a giant scam orchestrated by gold digging women who do not want to do the work of marriage,” she wrote in one post, “but who wish to continue to fleece the men foolish enough to marry them.”
Even more disturbingly, she has regularly cast aspersions on pretty much any woman who charges her husband with child abuse or domestic violence when filing for divorce. When, during the messy divorce of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, reports circulated in the media suggesting that Pitt had been abusive to their adopted children. Bloomfield wrote with obvious sympathy that Pitt “probably understands, this morning, why some women end up dead when they ask for a divorce.”
In a thoroughly repulsive post titled “I kind of hope Johnny Depp DID punch Amber Heard – I’m guessing she begged for it,” she went after Heard, who had just filed for divorce from Depp, declaring that her charges of domestic violence “smell[ed] like gold digger bullshit,” adding “why the fuck shouldn’t [Depp] hit Amber, if she asked for it?”
Alongside these overheated excoriations of divorced and divorcing women (and the domestic violence apologias), Bloomfield also wrote glowingly about her own marriage and how much she loved submitting to the authority of her husband and fulfilling her marital “obligations,” including cooking, cleaning, and sex.
“My sphere of decision-making is domestic,” she explained.
I am extremely happy to live the life I do, and I feel no resentment or lack of fulfilment because I don’t make decisions in the larger world outside my home. Quite the opposite: I’m very grateful I don’t have to do that. I understand what a privilege and luxury it is.
Guess what? The happiest couples are ones in traditional, conventional, patriarchal marriages. Women and children are physically safest under the care of a husband and father. Women who restrict their participation in the broader culture report themselves to be the happiest in the world.
I guess not always, huh?
“[W]e are dedicated to keeping our family life and our marriage intact,” she wrote in another post. “Divorce is not an option.”
Apparently it was.
You might think a development as momentous as this might cause here to reconsider some of her old dogmas. Apparently not. I don’t think she’s ever even mentioned it on her blog.
I’ve never before laughed when a couple divorced — but I’m gonna make an exception here for the better-than-thou woman who no doubt started her new relationship with adultery.
Hahahahahahaha!
No wonder she didn’t care about embarrassing her professor-husband in their tiny college town with her Nazi views. He probably deserves much better. Has she divorced her children? Because she embarrassed them a lot more.
Remind me again why she’s “Judgy” Bitch?
I’d rename myself “Hypocriteonahighhorse” if I was her
By that logic, older men shouldn’t vote or run for office either because they’re not going to be drafted. Rich men shouldn’t vote or run for office because they always get out of the draft. Actually, I just might be persuaded to give up my voting rights if there was a rule that rich men have no say in running the country.
So she left her beta bux husband for an alpha male? I sure hope the manosphere has disavowed her for this. Although I guess not or we would’ve heard about it by now. I’m also going to have to assume that she’s given her ex husband whatever level of custody of the kids that he wants and is not asking for child support if she’s the primary custody holder. Right? Right?
Wait wait wait
JudgyBitch
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield
Andrea “Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield” Hardie
I guess it makes sense. It must take an awful lot of layers of self-deception to keep up the sort of ridiculous hypocrisy she’s all up ons.
Is that a $300 hoodie he’s wearing? Also, if the amount of money dropped on clothing is some kind of indicator of whether someone should vote, should rich, white, male CEOs nott be allowed to vote? Their Italian leather shoes alone are worth a pretty penny.
Hey
Where ya goin’ tonight
Now that you chose the wrong end of a fight
Hey
Where ya gonna go
When you’ve cast away everyone you dared to know
Hey
What’s the damage done
When you stand opposed to those who stand as one
And hey
What are you gonna do
When someone decides that your use to them is null and you’re through
Were I more hospitable, I might lament
But over your acts and words there’s a most cloying scent
Of someone with every chance to turn back
But who, with their words only chooses to turn to the ones most abused and attack
What do you lack?
A pedestrian sense of empathy
And acknowledging that there is more of humanity than you choose to see
What do you decree?
Somehow becoming flexible enough to backstab
Yourself while tearing at a wound too fresh for a scab
Will you repent?
Or will you get bent?
Will you look back and say that the time was misspent
Running with the liars
And hiding in all the tides
Dodging in the brushes
Damning all the future brides
Nothing left to reason
In your damnable state
Not even pretending
It’s not neverending
When you fall down the well of hate
And added as a postscript
Just thought I’d let you know
While we’re dealing with a villain from a children’s show
Real life don’t work by those rules, and I’m damn sure you know why
And anyone is old enough to die
Homicide by racist cops, suicide from despair
Of living just where
The people in charge simply don’t care
Or any other way things are
Whether it be by errant car
Or fans flamed far too high
Again, all are old enough to die
It’s the same things for Abortions “Those sluts have no business getting them…but mine was completely justified!”
Phyllis Schlafly wannabe.
I hope her ex-husband feels like he’s well out of it.
Military service for enfranchisement? Oh-ho, looks like someone just watched Starship Troopers for the first time!
I’m worried about what will happen when she sees Fight Club.
Im just going to take her advice of not listening to her because wow she’s lost when it comes to the realm of Knowledge and SelfTruth..
By her reasoning no one in Canada should be allowed to vote, since there is never likely to be a draft in Canada ever again. In both WW1 and WW2 there were political crises over the question of drafting men for military service, which was highly unpopular in Quebec.
a) are any of the current batch of activist teens actually arguing that the voting age should be lowered to 16? I haven’t seen that argument…
b) “old enough to vote, old enough to die”? isn’t their whole point that THEY ARE DYING!?
Wait, wait, what’s this? Dang it! I used to follow Judgy’s rambling descent into incoherence and delusions of literary grandeur pretty regularly… She was my favorite garbage person after Heartiste… And the moment I look away this happens?! Aw.
Thanks David. This is a vision so magnificently duplicitous I may need to savor it in installments.
No, wait, I think they both rate below Theo Beale. Not that it’s important. I do kind of wonder what happened with Judgy’s kids. That seems like a glaring omission in her current life plan. What about the children, Judgy?
You know “savagery and brutality” are words I think of as usually being reserved for the mortal combat school of martial arts.
I’m mostly a total pacifist, my solution is: stop having wars.
I understand the need for defense.
With that said,
Those who run down women in the military are disrespecting them, as well as being illogical, because ‘the military’ would not function without them.
“The Military” could not function without enlisted women in all types of work and you know it.
And if it got down to it, “drafting” people again, you know they would not hesitate to draft women if they thought that would work in their favor.
Cribbed from Chang’s Hapkido Academy:
“Hap: mind and body coordination
Ki: inner energy created and manifested through mind and body coordination.
Do: the self-controlled and disciplined life necessary to create Hap and Ki.”
In other words, maybe start over with a white belt, dear, you don’t have much of a grasp of the situation.
-Signed, a black belt of the Wol Ge Kwan school who’s more embarrassed over this association than over Chuck Norris.
@Z&T
You know one of the things I think about is how the christian right is all about offending Muslims (or at least straw Muslims) and how they are better for women and lgbtq+ people then them, but when they have a golden opportunity to piss off the actual Islamic terrorists by allowing women and lgbtq+ people to serve just like cis het men they go for the option that discriminates against the most innocent people.
IDK, Don Jr.’s is a pretty good chuckle so far.
So 16yo kids can’t be drafted. In most places, they can quit school, get emancipated, and work full time. Goddamn 12 year olds can be married off in some places! But, totally, the nonexistent draft is how we need to draw that line ?
Plus, according to MRAs, teenage girls are no different mentally than adult women and can consent to sex and marriage because biotruths and a misreading of Lolita. Teenage girls who get drunk at a party and are raped had it coming and any pregnancies or bullying and revenge porn are just consequences they need to deal with.
According to racists, black boys carrying toy guns or Skittles and iced tea are not children but scary adults/monsters and it’s perfectly sensible to be threatened enough by them to shoot them dead with no legal consequences. If they didn’t want to be murdered, they shouldn’t look so scary!
So it’s kind of ridiculous that reactionaries should pretend that kids who aren’t cishet, white, male, and rich are capable of being responsible adults and should make great choices 100% of the time or else they don’t deserve any empathy but yet when kids are being portrayed positively for something they don’t approve of, all of a sudden they’re silly little children who aren’t capable of even forming their own opinions, let alone voting.
Ah the famous draft. The alt-right always plans to make things worse for everyone, instead of better for everyone.
Men are subjected to draft, while women aren’t: let’s make women subjected to draft too, instead of, you know, abolish it altogether.
Caught just a few seconds of that video. Judgy Janet — a Trump fanatic who adores violence and loves everything that is wrongheaded about the USA — has the most amusing Canadian accent.
Sorry, Canada, for laughing so hard. But there’s an idiot in the White House, and so this American wants to find a reason to mock another country — for a change.
If a woman argues that you shouldn’t listen to women, can you accept that even in theory? it’s a logical paradox.
Also, wasn’t the US draft registration recently extended to women?