Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield may not have mastered the fine art of public relations in the real world, but amongst those who live in imaginary worlds of their own making she is something of a PR genius.
Bloomfield, A Voice for Men’s “Director of Social Media,” was recently booted from Twitter (again) for “targeted abuse” — evidently her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti, which included making up inflammatory fake quotations and attributing them to her.
Bloomfield, who once claimed (apparently at least semi-seriously) that a previous Twitter suspension was punishment for her posting a picture of a wedding cake, has responded with a petulant note to Twitter and a similarly petulant open letter to the world, insisting that she’s an innocent woman who’s been railroaded by an evil feminist cabal.
She is, of course, full of it, but she’s picked up support from several online publications popular with the reality-challenged: Alex Jones’ loopy conspiracy megasite Infowars.com, GamerGate propaganda hub The Ralph Retort, and right-wing garbage site The Gateway Pundit. She’s got her Twitter followers in a tizzy, and they are filling up my Twitter timeline with their usual brand of nonsense.
Bloomfield claims, in a Facebook posting that’s been uncritically reposted by her supporters in the imaginary-world media, that she’s a blameless victim of a “harassment campaign” inspired by, well, me.
No, really. Here’s what she wrote, apparently with a straight face:
My most recent suspension is the result of me tweeting the actual words of Guardian journalist Jessica Valenti back to her. Prompted by @davidfutrelle, a harassment campaign to report me for spam/abuse was undertaken by users who appear to be under the impression that I made up the Valenti quotes and falsely attributed them to her. This is not true.
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to make this claim, given that Bloomfield has not only made up numerous false and inflammatory quotes she claimed were written by Valenti, but has also gone on to publicly gloat that her falsehoods were causing Valenti distress. The fake quotes were merely one egregious episode in an months-long campaign of targeted abuse directed at Valenti.
Here’s a screenshot of four fake Valenti quotes that Bloomfield tweeted last August. (I have helpfully labeled the ones that are fake; see here for details.)
More recently, Bloomfield Tweeted yet another fake Valenti quote that has been making the rounds in Men’s Rights circles for months. (The red scrawls on the screenshot are mine.)
See here for more details.
Though none of these quotes sound even remotely like anything that Valenti would ever say, many of Bloomfield’s followers had no trouble believing they were real, and in both instances the fake quotes inspired harassment and abuse directed at Valenti.
Back in August, Bloomfield seemed proud as punch that her fake quotes were causing difficulties for Valenti. In a posting on her blog (which I’ve archived here), Bloomfield gleefully wrote:
And she added, for good measure:
It’s not clear to me how Valenti having to deal with harassment caused by Bloomfield libeling her is an example of Valenti “having to own her shit,” given that the shit in question is not actually hers.
Bloomfield also pulled a similar stunt with a screenshot of an obviously fake Tweet ostensibly from GamerGate boogeywoman Anita Sarkeesian; it, too, inspired harassment against Bloomfield’s target.
Bloomfield has helped to inspire and direct campaigns of harassment against other women as well, including one school teacher she accused, with absolutely no evidence, of trying to shut down AVFM’s conference with death threats. She has also repeatedly libeled me. In all of these cases she used Twitter essentially as an amplifier of hate.
These tactics are pretty much the definition of “targeted abuse.” And “targeted abuse” is what Twitter gave as the reason for her most recent suspension, according to a screenshot that Bloomfield has herself posted on her blog.
But Bloomfield is attempting to convince the world that she’s been suspended for quoting Valenti accurately. In her posts on her suspension, she refers to one instance in which she did indeed quote Valenti more or less accurately – as if that somehow makes up for her fake quotes.
I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that Bloomfield announcing that not everything she’s said about Valenti is a malicious lie wouldn’t be much of a defense against a libel case.
But, of course, amongst her reality-challenged fans, Bloomfield’s spin has carried the day. Indeed, the headline on the Infowars post detailing Bloomfield’s imaginary victimization declares baldly that:
It seems rather telling that the theInfowars “reporter” who wrote that post touts his Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University in his Infowars bio. In this case, though, he merely repeated and amplified Bloomfield’s own fictions.
Speaking of which, Bloomfield also claims that “[m]y account has never tweeted abuse.” This is also patent bullshit.
Her peculiar wording may be a way to elide the fact that she used the official Twitter account for A Voice for Men’s conference last summer to call a bunch of people “whores.”
But the fact is she used her now-suspended @JudgyBitch1 Twitter account to post stuff much worse than this. In addition to abusive tweets directed at Valenti (like this salacious one), she also told one rape survivor [TRIGGER WARNING]
Bloomfield’s attempts to portray herself as the innocent victim of a witchhunt are especially ironic, given how carefully she’s cultivated her “mean girl” image. She attacks feminists – mostly women – with the malicious glee of a born bully, and mocks those who point out her lies and cruelty, using this picture as the profile pic for one of her Twitter accounts.
On her blog, which is often worse than her Twitter account ever was, she blamed the underage victims of Jimmy Savile’s sexual predations for exploiting him, and declared the 16-year-old victim of gang rape in Steubenville a “dumb whore.”
The woman who calls herself “Judgy Bitch” now finds herself being judged for her vindictive, bullying behavior, and doesn’t much like it.
NOTE: If anyone has screenshots of other abusive tweets from JB that I have missed, please email me with them or post them in the comments below; I may want to add more to the post or use them for a followup post.
It’s your prerogative to choose not to describe yourself in such terms. It’s my prerogative to call myself mad, sometimes crazy, and to not want to be called deficient.
For some people “mad” is an identity, like certain ethnic or sexual slurs, terms that have been wielded as insults but reclaimed. You’re not required to reclaim it for yourself but you’re also not allowed to tell me that it’s unacceptable that I have done so.
I describe her actions as morally reprehensible. Her motivations are irrelevant.
Thank you for expressing what I was thinking!
Also, I have a problem with ‘deficit’, because it implicitly states that there is a lack of something. Just because I have a mental illness does not mean I am lacking, just different.
Thank you, AltoFronto. I believe that healing is not something that one usually does alone, though. When I look at all the people who came into my life at just the right time, I am amazed and grateful that they have been there for me. Whether it was a kind word or some other loving act, the folk who have meant so much to me are the ones who helped me find my way…and they still do. I still sometimes wake up in a sweat, terrified that I have passed on what my mother did to me to my own kids. And, in some ways, I have. To the extent that I was still in her emotional clutches, I did hurt the ones I love so much.
But, like so many others who have been hurt, I keep trying to be awake and act on what is good and true in myself. And I can do that only because I am loved. Because I have been honest and open with my kids, they have forgiven me and have taught me to forgive myself. No one grows up without some scars.
I am a parent, and I wholeheartedly think that’s part of good parenting*.
(*To the best of one’s ability, anyway. The latent anthropologist in me’s willing to concede that there have been multitude wonderful parents throughout history who haven’t done exactly that – at least universally – because it just wasn’t part of their cultural toolbox.)
But JB?
No.
I honestly can’t see how someone who gets her kicks through libel and bullying could compartmentalize those aspects of her personality enough for it to not spill onto her kids, at least in practice (if not discussion). At the very least, her kids would see that lying and abuse are a-ok ways to conduct public discourse.
What you said, cassandrakitty. 🙂
Ms Bloomfield reminds me of a plot point from “Handmaid’s Tale”. The Republic of Gilead had a cadre of women serving the regime willingly, and used them to supervise the Handmaids. Kapos, if you will. The parallels aren’t exact, but she seems entirely enthusiastic about enforcing social and cultural patterns that are not actually in her best interests.
I think many of us are uncomfortable with the idea that some people deliberately do things that they know are harmful to other people. I do believe that nobody is a villain in hir own eyes, but that doesn’t mean that nobody is a villain.
Thus Spake Zarakirbywarp:
Exactly. I dealt with a lot of gamergaters who used exactly these techniques: “Reasonable” discussion that’s really just an endless regression of denials, erasure, and stonewalling. And when pinned, resort to escape hatches like “links aren’t evidence,” “I’ve never seen that problem” and the ever-popular “feelings aren’t facts.” (Or just disappear and start again with a new sock puppet.)
It’s not much different from a toddler asking “Why?” and then responding to each explanation with another “Why?” He’s not interested in the actual answers, he just wants to see how long you’ll keep answering.
@samantha, yes, no, and I have no idea how it got in there. They got it out successfully. Apparently the animal was unharmed, although I have no idea precisely what that term means when applied to animals.
@ Citizen Justin – no need to apologise on my account, I was only wondering aloud whether or not I should be trying to phase d*ck out of my own vocabulary in that context. Although sometimes it seems like the best short-hand for that particular toxic masculinity trait that can be found in manospherians everywhere. You know, the superciliousness that comes with being invested in male supremacy.
When proving and maintaining one’s hyper-masculinity becomes one’s raison d’etre, one might as well just turn into a giant sentient penis. 😛
@ Samantha – I agree, it often takes another person to lend perspective on things and offer reassurance along the way, and I’m so glad you have those good people in your life now. 🙂 And you’re obviously a good person yourself, because you have taken so much care over yourself and your loved ones. Keep on being brilliant. 🙂
@Anarchonist
Thank you for your analysis. I have my own troubles with empathy, and your post has helped me. Thanks.
One problem we have to deal with is that nobody can precisely define mental illness so as to differentiate it from character defects. It was not so long ago that homosexuality was officially defined as a mental illness. When I was young, you could almost have defined mental illness as “the failure to adapt enthusiastically and joyfully to the unreasonable demands of society.” Having been (among other things) married to a severely mentally ill person for fifteen years, I understand how the burden of stigma multiplies the burden of the disease itself and I am in favor of doing everything possible to eliminate that stigma. However, I think we tend to go too far in attributing all bad behavior to willful expression of an evil nature.
I think we all recognize that personality and character are a result of the interplay between inborn characteristics and the complex influences of parents, other adults, peers, and society as a whole. One example that we would all probably recognize is that when parents allow children to get what they want by throwing tantrums, they will tend to try to use tantrums with others, which tends to make them disliked by those others, which then has further consequences. Some such children will tend to always follow the same self-destructive path and some will realize that they are going down the wrong path and change their ways.
For most of us, almost inevitably, parents and/or peers and/or society as a whole will try to mold us in ways that are in conflict with our inborn natures, and a lot of us suffer some degree of damage in the process. Adolescence tends to be a particularly difficult period — it is my impression that many if not most adolescents feel that they are unattractive and unlovable at least part of that time. I know I felt that most of my classmates, and particularly the girls, despised me, only to find through class reunions that I was generally well-liked (in spite of being a fairly arrogant jerk) and that there were a number of girls who would have been interested in dating me if I hadn’t been far too shy to ask (or so some of them told my wife at our 40th). But adolescence is an intense time of life, and whatever scars are left can be very long-lasting.
In my own case, my greatest influence was my father, who was a totally unabashed SJW. (His NY Times obit calls him “Champion of the Underdog.”) He worked for Huey Long’s “Share Our National Wealth” campaign and tried to get publicity by opening tear gas canisters into the ventilating system of the New York Stock Exchange, which he considered the primary culprit in causing the Great Depression and the great misery it brought to millions of ordinary people. Unfortunately he greatly underestimated his own intelligence and overestimated mine, and his expectations of me, which I internalized, were so excessive that nothing I can ever do will seem like a success to me. I think I managed to keep from inflicting the same wound on my own children, but undoubtedly I made my share of other damaging mistakes.
Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — there is no “X causes Y” that explains how the interplay between nature and nurture will work out. When my first wife became pregnant with our second child, her therapist was shocked when I refused to try to pressure her into having an abortion. (She wouldn’t have considered one anyway.) He told me that it was a miracle that our son (then 5) wasn’t already showing signs of severe disturbance — but he was in fact one of the most well-balanced children I’ve ever known, much more so than either his mother or I. It wasn’t our doing — that was just how he was. I have been told that children often think they must be to blame for a parent’s dysfunctional behavior — he never did. One abused child becomes an abusive parent; another leans over backward to not be abusive. It has to be that presently unpredictable interaction between nature and nurture.
When I look at JB — taking her at face value for a moment — I see a great deal of anger. That is hardly unusual, but what is unusual is that it seems to be almost all directed at other women. Many women are angry at men, very often with a lot of justification, but even with that justification — even women who have suffered multiple rapes — very few women seem to me to be as intensely angry as JB is. Thus one might speculate that there is something in her past — it would be futile to speculate what it is — that has caused her to have a particularly intense anger toward women. She also seems to have an intense craving for approval from men, but that is not unusual — society does try to make women crave for approval from men, to a greater extent than the reverse — and one might argue that her attacks on women are just an over-the-top tactic for gaining that approval. In any case, it would seem that — just as Roosh V has too much invested in being king of the PUAs to change his ways — Judy Bloomfield (whoever she really is) has too much invested in being JudgyBitch to take a good hard look at herself and start trying to figure out why she has all that anger. Too bad. I tend to not believe that people are irredeemably evil — just unwilling to go through the ordeal of self-inspection and change.
tl;dr: most people seem to have some scars from childhood and adolescence; JB’s raging anger against other women suggest that she has some issues of that kind.
So… I… er, I read a little of JB’s blog. Yeah. That was fun. She’s apparently working on a new book, which the linked post eventually gets around to. After a huge rant against publishers that seems oddly specific to her own personal experiences. I’m just gonna put her description of the story here:
I’m secretly hoping she actually writes this one. Partly because I think it’d be pretty revealing concerning her ideology, and partly because I think her having to write a 3-dimensional, sympathetic main character is going to force her to realize that real feminists couldn’t possibly be the flat monsters she imagines them to be. Unless it turns into revenge porn. Not literal porn, but you know what I mean. Like food porn. With revenge.
Apparently she originally wanted the main character to be the fine, upstanding, morally courageous and strong father figure, but she was convinced to do it from the daughter’s perspective instead. Because obviously the guy must be all things good, and the gal must be the embodiment of wickedness. I wonder if she’ll make the corrupt government run by women and their male servants as well…
Kind of sounds like she wishes she could be more like the “feminist” character she’s writing about, no?
She gets Darwin wrong too, see for example http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/six-things-darwin-never-said
Also, Darwin would never have boiled down “fittest” to “strongest” because he was smart enough to realise that being strong isn’t always the attribute that gives the edge.
I had to go and take a look. So she rants on and on and on about how she knows more about what readers want than publishers do, and how keeping to rules crimps creativity blah blah and then I read the first two lines of her novel and she’s started it with the main character waking up! The biggest cliche of all time!
We should play cliche bingo. See how many she gets into one chapter.
Sadly, it would require someone to sacrifice $0.99 to read the rest of the chapter, and that’s a sacrifice too far.
That’s kind of ballsy, asking someone to pay money to read a portion of an unfinished work. The visible writing is about on-par for the Pit of Voles, which is appropriate given that she is “publishing” it as she writes it, which is exactly how most fanfiction is presented.
@bodycrimes:
If I were less moral, I would totally buy the whole novel just so I could reproduce it here and let everyone fisk it. It seems like it could work out to be a marvelous train wreck. Especially since, given her blog post and despite the fact that she whines so much about spelling and grammar checkers, she can in fact write. Utterly broken fanfic has it’s charm, of course, but I feel like it’d be more fun when you can read the thing (even if you can’t comprehend it’s existence).
@kirbywarp – I’d be happy to post the legal 10%. Only problem is, I’d have to give the woman money! And somehow, I can’t get past that roadblock…
I have a feeling it will go down in history with The Eye of Argon.
Jericho? A literally-faux-Darwinian city? That’s… huh. I don’t know how I feel about that. I wonder if JB’s gonna mirror the bible story and have the story burned to the ground by outside forces, with Lowin taking the role of the prostitute who gets saved because she protected spies.
Was JB even particularly religious?
I’m hoping it will reach My Immortal levels of infamy.
Fruitloopsie, I know you were expressing support of Samantha, and agree with that aspect of your post–her ability to forgive her mother is impressive.
But I dislike a broader statement that forgiveness is somehow always desirable. How someone decides to go about surviving and working through their abuse is very much their decision. Refusing to forgive is just as valid an option as forgiveness is, so long as the end result is that the abuse survivor can use that tactic to get clear of the bad times.
Sometimes forgiveness is awesome; other times, it’s just a form of denial. Sometimes refusing to forgive is healthy and justified; other times, it’s a form of obsession. It’s a complicated issue, and I’m uncomfortable with platitudes (like the ‘drinking poison’ one) that seem to take a one-size-fits-all approach.
********
On the discussion of sea lions, my personal favorite tactic is to turn it right back around on them: “Why do you think that question is significant? What would the likely answers signify?” Either they will try to deflect, which will be obvious, or they will be forced to acknowledge the bad faith behind the question–either of which gets you as clear as you likely are to get from the trap.
@cassandrakitty:
I don’t think anything can reach My Immortal’s “black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots,” “black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow.”
I hope I’m proven wrong. >: D
Damn! Someone is going to have to subscribe, so we can discover if the protagonist will ever redeemed by shedding her false feminazi beliefs, or if she’s doomed to die horribly, in a very obviously symbolic way.
Oh please let her finish it. I will ask, nay, demand that you all help me spork it.
Because nothing says sexy like looking as if you have pinkeye.