Tag: anti-feminism

Lying as PR: AVFM's Janet Bloomfield libels Jessica Valenti — then brags about it

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date August 4, 2014
470 Comments on Lying as PR: AVFM's Janet Bloomfield libels Jessica Valenti — then brags about it

Janet Bloomfield, self-acknowledged liar

A Voice for Men’s “social media director” Janet Bloomfield is proving to be quite the innovator in the world of public relations. You may recall her cheeky approach to publicizing the recent AVFM conference, which involved awarding herself “whore points” for calling critics of AVFM “whores.”

Now she’s moved on to straight-up libel, making up fake quotes in order to make feminist writer Jessica Valenti look bad, and then bragging about it on her blog.

This whole sordid episode began several days ago when Valenti, on vacation, decided to send a message to “all the misogynist whiners in my feed today” in the form of a photo of her on a beach wearing a t-shirt saying “I bathe in male tears.”

The AVFM social media attack squad seized on this at once, with Bloomfield telling her followers, wrongly, that the picture had been posted in response to a question about male suicide. When Valenti corrected her on this point, Bloomfield offered a half-assed apology (“My bad”).

Then Bloomfield, demonstrating just how insincere her apology had been, decided to up the ante, concocting four “quotes” from thin air and attributing them to Valenti.

[EDIT: JB’s Twitter account was suspended, so here’s a screenshot of the tweets; I’ll keep the original links up in case she’s ever unsuspended, though that seems unlikely.]

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495366752168329216

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367262187302913

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495367996337295360

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495374177013346304

Naturally, as you’ll see if you follow any of these Tweets back to their original context on Twitter, many of Bloomfield’s fans assumed that these quotes were real.

Needless to say, some responded to Bloomfield’s dirty tricks with all-too predictable harassment of her target:

https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559012449267713

https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/495559068841680896

After brazenly libeling Valenti, Bloomfield went on to boast about it on her blog. In a post with the smug title “Jessica Valenti is not having a good day,” she wrote:

Now, these fake quotes may have been “utterly plausible” only to those who are ignorant of Valenti’s work, but in the hothouse world of the Men’s Rights movement there are people who would probably believe that Valenti eats babies. As I noted, JB’s followers had no trouble believing them.

Later in the post Bloomfield added, with more than a hint of maliciousness:

It’s not clear how having made-up quotes attributed to you counts as “owning your shit,” but I guess I just don’t understand Bloomfield’s higher morality.

Needless to say, in the real world, deliberately publishing false information about someone in order to harm their reputation is libel.

When confronted with this on Twitter, Bloomfield offered some inventive excuses:

@JudgyBitch1 @JessicaValenti JB, "I didn't like her shirt so I lied about her maliciously to harm her" isn't an acceptable defense for libel

— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014

Later on she attempted to prove that her libelous fake Valenti quotes didn’t matter … by making up things about me:

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/495684048237633536

As I noted,

@Alzael1 @virtuarat @JudgyBitch1 I'm pretty sure that "well, I lied about David Futrelle too" is not an acceptable libel defense either.

— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) August 2, 2014

Of course, I’m no lawyer. I can only hope that some people who are lawyers are taking a good hard look at Bloomfield’s lies.

I would encourage you all to screenshot or otherwise archive Bloomfield’s self-incriminatory blog post, as well as her tweets, just in case she decides to talk to a lawyer and take them all down.

At this point, I think it’s probably safe to assume that anything and everything anyone from AVFM says should be taken not with a grain but with an entire shaker of salt.

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In which I get an email from Women Against Feminism [CORRECTION: THE EMAIL WAS FROM A COPYCAT SITE]

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 31, 2014
155 Comments on In which I get an email from Women Against Feminism [CORRECTION: THE EMAIL WAS FROM A COPYCAT SITE]

Type type type

CORRECTION: THIS NOTE WAS NOT FROM THE OFFICIAL “WOMEN AGAINST FEMINISM” PAGE; IT WAS FROM A COPYCAT SITE. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO IGNORE IT OR AT LEAST TO LAUGH AT IT FOR THE CORRECT REASON. SORRY!

Just posted this on Confused Cats Against Feminism, but it was too good not to post here as well:

So I just got this curiously impersonal email from the admin at Women Against Feminism. (Gosh! Could it be a form letter?)

Hi David Futrelle,

I wanted to say thanks for writing the article about Women Against Feminism.

Whilst it’s clear that we don’t agree on all points, hearing both sides of the argument will get more people thinking about what they believe in and which set of points they feel aligned with more closely.

This can only be a positive step forward, not only for women, but for society as a whole.

To help get more people thinking about what they really believe, I was wondering if you could make add a link to our new website in your article?

We’re trying to create a centrally located hub where the discussion about Women and Feminism can flourish, with everyone getting a chance to share their opinions, and we believe that a website is the best place to do it.

Would you be able to help facilitate that conversation by adding a link to the site?

The URL is http://womenagainstfeminism.com

Once again, thanks for furthering the discussion about women and feminism through your article. Even though we don’t agree on all the same points, we really appreciate getting these concepts heard and empowering people to make up their own mind.

Many thanks,

[name and email redacted]

So I wrote back:

There already is a central hub for this discussion: http://confusedcatsagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/

Could you redirect all of your traffic there? Thanks!

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Confused Dudes Confused by Confused Cats Against Feminism

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 30, 2014
306 Comments on Confused Dudes Confused by Confused Cats Against Feminism

Sweetie Pie Jonus pities the fools.

Oh dear. Some very confused dudes on the A Voice for Men Forums are angry at the Huffington Post for suggesting that Confused Cats Against Feminism might just be a parody of Women Against Feminism.

A guy calling himself Humansplaining w/ Jarred starts off the thread — titled “HuffPo tries – and fails – to politicize ‘Cats Against Feminism'” — with this little rant. (I’ve bolded some of the especially silly stuff.)

So, being that ‘Women Against Feminism’ is an internet phenomenon, through Tumblr as well as Twitter, the internet inevitably took this thread in the direction it takes EVERYTHING nowadays – cats.

If you read through all the ‘Cats Against Feminism’ memes, you’ll notice that they pretty much all revolve around, well…CATS. Go figure, huh? References to food, tuna, shedding, and biting predominate these posts. The references to ‘Feminism’ are basically incidental, since this is just piggy-backing on the viral success of ‘Women Against Feminism’. Those posting these memes never really express whether they are in favor of, or against Feminism. It’s clearly not meant to appeal to EITHER side of the issue. Rather, it’s simply a silly meme meant to produce a few chuckles for ANYONE that happens to run across them. Just like every other stupid cat meme on the internet, of which there must literally be TRILLIONS.

But HuffPo apparently sees things differently …

You know what? I think those CATS are smarter than the people at Huffpo that produced this article. THEY think that Feminism is a stupid and pointless human concept, and they wish you’d stop talking about it and fighting amongst each other, because they need you to FEED them!
Seriously HuffPo, learn to take a joke, and give the ideology a rest for 5 FUCKING SECONDS already.

Because the cats are laughing at YOU now…

AVFM forum dudes, I hate to break it to you, but the cats aren’t laughing at the Huffington Post. They’re laughing at you.

Maybe I need to start up a new blog: Confused Cats Confused by Confused Cats Against Feminism.

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Belated Award Ceremony for that "Design a Commemorative Plate for A Voice for Men" contest with REAL PRIZE

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 25, 2014
53 Comments on Belated Award Ceremony for that "Design a Commemorative Plate for A Voice for Men" contest with REAL PRIZE

As you can tell, I too am a graphics wiz!

Hey, remember that contest we had in which we designed commemorative plates for A Voice for Men? Well, TA DA! Today I announce the winner! Who will win an actual real you-can-put-liquids-in-it coffee mug with the words “MALE TEARS” on it.

First let me say that there were many, many fine entries, all of them living up to the incredibly high standards set by Men’s Rights graphic artists.

But I can only award the prize to one person, because those are the rules I made up for the contest, so without further ado, the MALE TEARS mug goes to … drumroll … Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III, for his highly conceptual commemorative plate honoring A Voice for Men’s commemorative coin, which is what inspired this whole contest in the first place:

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Cats respond to #WomenAgainstFeminism with new blog: Confused Cats Against Feminism

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 24, 2014
233 Comments on Cats respond to #WomenAgainstFeminism with new blog: Confused Cats Against Feminism

You can't argue with that! — You can’t argue with that!

So two of the females in my household have decided, sadly, that they want to get in on this whole Women Against Feminism thing. Yes, that’s right: they want to publicly declare their opposition to feminism.

Against my better judgment, I agreed to take pictures of them with signs spelling out their objections. None of their arguments make much sense to me, but, hey, they’re entitled to make their case on the internet if that’s what they want.

There’s just one little complication: the two antifeminist females in my household are not, you know, human females. They’re cats. Not being, strictly speaking, women, they can’t really post their pics to the Women Against Feminism blog.

So in the interest of free speech and fair play, I’ve set up a Tumblr blog where my cats, and other cats who share their beliefs, can take their stand against feminism – no matter how ridiculous their arguments are.

I present to you: Confused Cats Against Feminism.

You can see the first post there now, featuring my own adorably furry traitors to their gender.

I urge you to submit pictures of your own antifeminist cats, with their own little signs.

You can submit pics on the Confused Cats Against Feminism site, post pics in the comments below, or you can email them to me here at futrelle at manboobz.com.

There’s just one rule: your cats must be genuinely confused about why they oppose feminism, and generally unclear about what feminism is.

And the ideas expressed on their signs must be their own. In other words, I don’t want any Men’s Rights Activists paying cats on Fiverr to hold their signs for them. That shit won’t fly in this litterbox!

All that said, blatant photoshopping is perfectly fine. This is the internet, after all.

And if your animal friend is something other than a cat, that’s fine too. As long as it’s possible that they might think that they’re a cat.

Also, feel free to put the word “Poland” or the Polish flag on your pictures. A lot of the women on the Women Against Feminism blog do that, for some reason.

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The Top 7 Things I Learned From a Week's Worth of Comments at A Voice for Men

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 22, 2014
144 Comments on The Top 7 Things I Learned From a Week's Worth of Comments at A Voice for Men

I have a confession to make: I don’t always read the comments on posts by Men’s Rights Activists.

I realize this might come as a shock to some of you. I mean, one of the main, er, critiques I get from MRAs is that I “cherry pick” comments from MRAs to make them look bad — never mind that it is the comments that make them look bad, not me. But the embarrassing fact is that I often don’t read the comments at all.

In my defense, I have a hard enough time making it through the posts themselves. Life is short, and MRAs are long-winded. And by the time I get to the end of a lot of MRA posts, I’ve pretty much lost my patience with their nonsense. The last thing I want to do at that moment is to read the fawning word-vomit of a bunch of irritating fucks whose comments are likely to be as bad or possibly even worse than the original post.

So today I decided to do a sort of penance for my sins — and to actually read through a week’s worth of comments on A Voice for Men to see what I could learn about the world, and (perhaps more to the point) about the sort of people who actually enjoy reading posts on that terrible site.

I tried my best to do this little experiment as scientifically as possible. But I cheated a little. I didn’t read the comments to every post. And I didn’t read every comment on the posts that I did look at. I mean, what the hell. There’s a limit to my masochism. Seriously, you try reading a week’s worth of this shit in one sitting.

Anyway, here are the Top 7 Insights I’ve learned from a week’s worth of comments at AVFM. In choosing the following, I stuck with comments that were either upvoted or unchallenged by the site’s regulars, or both.

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Alimony laws restrict men's bodies, Men's Rights Redditors claim. (Of course they do.)

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 17, 2014
111 Comments on Alimony laws restrict men's bodies, Men's Rights Redditors claim. (Of course they do.)

So over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, some of the regulars have declared war on the meme above, attempting to “rebut” it by pointing out the many ways in which men’s bodies are regulated by the state.

Trouble is, they don’t seem to quite grasp what it means to have one’s body regulated by the state.

Their examples of laws regulating men’s bodies include conscription (which does not actually exist in the United States), sodomy laws (which, where they still exist, are no longer enforced), men not having their condoms paid for by insurance, and assorted laws that apply to both men and women, including “every time a man is precluded from smoking marijuana, taking ecstasy, or injecting himself with anabolic steroids for bodybuilding purposes.”

My favorite example, cited by numerous commenters, is alimony.

How exactly is alimony a restriction on men’s bodies? Well, according to the Men’s Rightsers, it’s a restriction on

One commenter spelled out the, er, “logic” in more detail:

Never mind that alimony, which is rarely awarded, can also go to men. And never mind that by this logic, every single law that’s ever been passed, including laws against embezzlement and jaywalking, could be considered a restriction on someone’s body. Hell, by this standard, parking tickets are an assault on your body because you have to earn the money to pay them.

Then there’s one dude who contends that women’s

“reproductive rights…” have never been limited. They can fuck out an endless supply of babies without a single hindrance. Hell, men are obligated to pay for each and every one of them.

Huh. So women “fuck out babies” with no help from anyone else?

I’m thinking that this fellow might need a refresher course in basic human biology

Also, I’m pretty sure that women as well as men are obligated to shell out money to provide for their own children. I don’t see a lot of young mothers getting showered with free food and diapers when they go to the grocery store.

To their credit, the regulars in Men’s Rights didn’t reward this last fellow with any upvotes.

Interestingly, none of the commenters bothered to track down the source of the claim in the meme. It’s not hard to find. It came from a report by the Guttmacher Institute documenting the number of bills regulating “reproductive health and rights” that were introduced in state legislatures in the first quarter of 2013. That’s right: there were 694 — not 624 — bills introduced in the first quarter of 2013 alone; 93 of them passed.

By the end of the year, as the Guttmacher Institute noted in a later report:

39 states enacted 141 provisions related to reproductive health and rights. Half of these new provisions, 70 in 22 states, sought to restrict access to abortion services. …

This makes 2013 second only to 2011 in the number of new abortion restrictions enacted in a single year. To put recent trends in even sharper relief, 205 abortion restrictions were enacted over the past three years (2011–2013), but just 189 were enacted during the entire previous decade (2001–2010).

This legislative onslaught has dramatically changed the landscape for women needing abortion. … In 2000, 13 states had at least four types of major abortion restrictions and so were considered hostile to abortion rights … 27 states fell into this category by 2013. … The proportion of women living in restrictive states went from 31% to 56% … .

While the overwhelming majority of these new laws restricted reproductive health and rights, there were a few states that bucked the trends:

In sharp contrast to this barrage of abortion restrictions, a handful of states adopted measures designed to expand access to reproductive health services. Most notably, California enacted the first new state law in more than seven years designed to expand access to abortion, and five states adopted measures to expand access to comprehensive sex education, facilitate access to emergency contraception for women who have been sexually assaulted and enable patients’ partners to obtain STI treatment.

You can read the details here. Somehow I doubt that any Men’s Rights Redditors ever will.

a voice for men misogyny MRA paul elam straw feminists

How to Lose a Debate in 45 Minutes: Paul Elam fumbles his debate with Matt Binder

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 11, 2014
649 Comments on How to Lose a Debate in 45 Minutes: Paul Elam fumbles his debate with Matt Binder

So, that happened.

The debate between Matt Binder (from the Majority Report) and Paul Elam (from A Pile of Money for Paul Elam) went off yesterday. I can’t say it went off without a hitch, because it was actually quite hitch-full. Indeed, it was kind of a disaster — at least for one Paul Elam.

Paul’s the one who wanted the debate. He chose the topic, he chose the format, he controlled the venue. And he lost the debate rather spectacularly, grimly reading a succession of prepared statements while Binder shot down his arguments with common-sensical one-lines and raised issues that Elam didn’t or couldn’t address.

Binder rattled Elam early by presenting him with an unattributed quote that sounded virtually identical to Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic rants and which Elam dismissed as something that no MRA would ever say; Binder then revealed that it was a quote from Stefan Molyneux, the MRA “philosopher” who was one of the featured speakers at AVFM’s recent conference. (Indeed, it was a quote that I highlighted in my first Misogyny Theater videos on Mr. M.)

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Debate: Matt Binder of the Majority Report vs. Paul Elam of A Voice for Paul Elam

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 10, 2014
209 Comments on Debate: Matt Binder of the Majority Report vs. Paul Elam of A Voice for Paul Elam

So there’s a LIVE debate tonight between Matt Binder of the Majority Report with Sam Seder and a fellow you may have heard of by the name of Paul Elam. Since Elam evidently refused to debate on the Majority Report — for some reason he doesn’t like to debate people when he doesn’t control the venue — Matt Binder agreed to debate on A Voice for Men, with Dean Esmay as the, ahem, neutral moderator. It’s at 6 PM Eastern.

I expect some shenanigans.

Here’s the video that inspired Elam’s debate challenge:

Here’s Matt’s video accepting the challenge:

Check out Matt’s other videos on Men’s Rightsers and our dear friend Stefan Molyneux.

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MRA "philosopher" Stefan Molyneux: "If you don't have a husband … to keep the child is abusive."

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date July 7, 2014
186 Comments on MRA "philosopher" Stefan Molyneux: "If you don't have a husband … to keep the child is abusive."

Misogyny Theater takes another look at the charming philosopher-king-asshole Stefan Molyneux, who seems to be carving out quite a spot for himself in the world of the lady-haters.

In this episode, some audio excerpts from Stefan Molyneux’s frighteningly well-received talk ostensibly on circumcision at A Voice for Men’s June 2014 conference, as presented in his video “Shocking Misogynist Attacks Feminism, Defends Rape Culture.” Despite the ironic title, this is pretty much an accurate description of his talk, even a bit of an understatement.

The title of my video is a shortened version of something he says in his talk (and in my video). The full quote: “If you don’t have a husband, if you chose the wrong guy, to keep the child is abusive, almost always.”

That’s right: according to Stefan M., being a single mother is, in itself, abusive.

The audio excerpts are drawn from an hour-long talk, so naturally I did some editing. In the interests of transparency, I marked each edit with a little snipping sound.

If you just can’t get enough of this guy, see my previous Molyneux video for more exciting women-blaming.

Scissors sounds and weird background noises courtesy of FreeSFX.

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