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.
@Lumipuna
No. And yes.
That is to say, don’t listen to women.
But do listen to this one woman, the one who calls herself Judgy Bitch, the one who is the sole voice of reason among all womankind. Or at least that seems to be her self-description. I don’t know if she ever actually said that — and I’m not going to pore over her “writing” to see if she did — but my take is that she implies it in every line.
Life turned out to be more complicated than her ideology would allow. She should check herself before she wrecks herself. Cognitive dissonance much?
Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?
Most modern countries at least give lip service to the principle that war is a regrettable last resort. But if you tie the vote to the draft, you essentially advertise that your country is a war machine, that war is the most important thing that it does, and that it will be frequent. Maybe John Bolton would agree with that, but is that a good look for a civilised country?
I already said this on Twitter a few weeks back, but I find it hilarious that a person who argues women should not be allowed to vote, or receive tertiary education, has “The radical notion that women are adults” as her blog’s tagline. I’m starting to suspect she’s not actually real; how does one person not simply explode from all that irony and contradiction?
Nobody tell her that traditionally, citizenship and suffrage were tied to property ownership, not the draft.
Also, I am extremely happy to see Handsome :Punkle Stan: Jack back here 🙂
Jack’s back; that’s whack.
Pssst, Alan, whack is a bad thing. I think. Unless the kids have redefined it again.
(Anyone who popularises a new definition of whack without telling me is a cop.)
@Fierce, Bad Rabbit,
Exactly as you said. I have nowhere near the experience you do, but I did Tae Kwon Do for years and got to basic black belt level. The whole time, the emphasis was on self-control; even when it came to self-defence methods, the idea was to incapacitate and then run, whenever possible.
Judgy is right that martial arts training is transformative – it absolutely is, but not in the way she means.
I’m a bit worried about her Hapkido club, tbh.
So this for me put the turdblossom cherry on the Judgy one’s cake of appalling:
The Parkland students she’s taking a pop at have not died but they did see their classmates (some younger than 16) and teachers shot in front of their eyes. And die.
And as a result they know, probably better than most of us, that it could have been them dying, instead of settling down to that day’s classes.
Kind of why they are protesting.
And: nobody’s too young to die, in fact.
Does she not know that?
@bluecat
Forgive me for paraphrasing something wonderful into something awful.
Of course she does. But bigots are so small that they only have room for one thought/feeling at a time.
@ EJ
Gah, I can’t keep up. I’ll have to get a refresher course from my goddaughters; or as I of course call them, me galdem.
ETA: it’s nice to see jack back however it’s called.
I live in Taiwan, which is in the process of changing from a draft-based system to a volunteer army, at the request of the military, which realises modern combat is best fought by professionals, rather than untrained conscripts.
Like everything here, the switch is being done in a half-assed manner. It’s gone from a year (already reduced from two) that my oldest son had to serve to four months for my two youngest (the youngest wasn’t supposed to have to serve at all, except while the Navy and Air Force were okay-you got taught a trade which could be useful in civilian life- the Army couldn’t get enough enlisted men- nobody wanted to join.)
I asked my 2nd son what he learned while he was serving- he replied that they didn’t let the recruits play with guns for fear they’d get hurt-they just did push-ups and running if the weather was nice; stayed in the barracks and played with their smartphones if it was raining.
Question- should they be allowed to vote?
Y’know, I’d have no problem with requiring some form of service from everyone. If you want to join the military, that counts. If you want to join the Volunteers of America for 18 months instead, that’s fine. If you have challenges that exempt you from some forms of service, we can find other things you can do to help.
But that’s not a requirement to vote. Voting is a duty, not a privilege. So now we have two duties, side by side, neither dependent on the other.
Maybe speaking out is a duty, as well. Maybe everyone should be required to turn in 500 or 1000 words a year on where we are as a country, and where we need to be. Again, not as a requirement to volunteer or vote, but as a separate duty.
If nothing else it would amplify the signal in the signal-to-noise ratio, she said, hopefully.
Is anyone else having issues with pop-up ads on mobile lately? I couldn’t even read the MGTOW meme article on mobile because it kept bouncing me over to ads that hijacked my speaker and said “congratulations!” and similar crap. I’ve run anti-malware, and my phone seems to be clean.
@tim guegan
I was just gonna say, isn’t Hardie Canadian? If so, what does she give two craps about the US draft for?
And yeah, it really should go without saying at this point, but the reason that people are listening to these kids in particular on the whole gun issue is that they’ve borne witness to the harrowing capacity of these firearms to destroy human beings. After Parkland, I noticed that Bowling for Columbine was on Netflix, so I rewatched it for the first time in years and despite what you may think of Michael Moore, that film still packs a visceral punch given how little has changed in the 16 years since its release. The excuse-making remains the same, the scapegoats remain the same, the societal ills remain the same, and the NRA still has the gall to put rallies on in the wake of tragedies.
There were two scenes in particular that I found poignant. One was visiting the pair of Columbine survivors and seeing the toll that the shooting had taken on them. Richard Castaldo had been paralyzed by his wounds and Mark Taylor had a bullet lodged dangerously close to his aorta. One thing I’ve always found distasteful about the conversation around mass shootings is the gamification of the death toll; shooters that only kill in single digits are talked about as “failures” compared to those who manage to slay dozens, while the injured are just forgotten about wholesale. Human bodies are remarkably resilient and will do incredible things to keep the brain alive, but there are plenty of people that have to carry with them the physical scars as well as emotional ones.
And watching the Principal of Buell Elementary break down, then hearing Charlton Heston howls “From My Cold Dead Hands” kinda hammers home the difference between the two sides of the debate.
I’ve never actually introduced myself, have I? I’m kidvelociraptor ? I’m a queer cis female, & I’m physically disabled from a spinal cord injury, so I do online sex work.
I too can’t help but feel a certain amount of schadenfreude that J. Bitch has now been forced to realize that yeah, divorce is actually complicated, & there are no easy answers in life. …& of course it’s the typical problem where conservatives can’t feel any empathy for people in a certain situation until it happens to THEM.
Altho it seems like she’s just become even more of a hypocrite, instead of being brave enough to admit she was wrong ?
Hello kidvelociraptor!
Hardie cares about the US more than Canada, because it’s US Patreon donations that pay her bills. I suspect.
@Jack, no issues here. That sounds awful, though.
@Kidvelociraptor, hello!
@Alan
Missed you too. You should pop over to the Discord thing. Be lovely to have you there. And Cambridge Analytica have probably already stolen all your personal data, so you don’t have to worry about the spyware.
@Jack
I had that problem a while back but not recently. I installed the ad block browser on my phone when it got really bad, but haven’t needed to use it in a while. I did upgrade my phone so maybe the newer OS has a better browser version available? Not sure.
So, JB’s (ex) husband doesn’t relish or enjoy violence the way she does? Maybe he knows more about the subject than she does. In my experience, people who seem to relish violence have rarely been on the receiving end of it. Like the old cliche, these types can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
Hi, kidvelociraptor.
@galanx
Four months’ service doesn’t sem like it’s worth the administrative & bureaucratic effort.
@Alan I have been thinking of going back to Discord that more of my friends are on there now TBH.
Hi there kidvelociraptor.
Great name!
@galanx
Oh, that’s interesting. My brother-in-law had to serve in the Taiwanese Army, and it sounded like a lot of BS. Funny enough, when my in-laws heard I was in the U.S. Army they were concerned because over there the army isn’t considered a career, but only something children do, and only immature man-children who can’t cope with real life stay in past their required time. They felt better when they realized I make way more than the average worker with loads of benefits and got money for my Master’s. I feel like that’s one of the best parts of volunteer armies is that it incentivizes the government to give service members a reason to serve other than “ya gotta.” I’m not surprised that the push for that actually came from the military.
@Katamount
The only bit my brain retained of BFC was the interview with Marilyn Manson (Disclaimer: I barely knew who he was at this point; he made screamy music and I once listened to a mum tell off her teenage daughter for wearing his tshirt to Ikea (no, I wasn’t aware of a dress code either, I assume we were in a final straw scenario)). Anyway, Moore asked all the famous people he interviewed what they wanted to tell the kids. A variety of answers, but Manson said “I don’t want to tell them anything, I want to listen to them”. So I have a weirdly positive view of Manson, despite knowing next to nothing about him.