Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:
So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.
Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”
On Monday, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest installment of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series on YouTube, a half-hour examination of the ways in which video game makers use sexualized violence against women as a cheap way to spice up their narratives and appeal to straight male gamers.
Her tone was measured, her analysis clear and logical and supported by dozens of clips from a wide assortment of games.
Here’s a meme posted recently to A Voice for Men’s Facebook page. I know, a graphic suggesting that any man who enters into a relationship with a woman is bound to end up “miserable, or divorced and broke” is pretty darn misogynistic.
The creator of this graphic, who has imaginatively picked “John Galt” as his pseudonym, explained his thinking thusly in several comments on the Facebook page:
In making it I was in fact thinking of the Nash Equilibrium in Game Theory, popularized by Russell Crowe in the Movie ‘A beautiful mind’. In a society where the hypergamous instincts of many women are driven to cruel extremes by feminism It is ever more relevant to highlight to men that being shamed or encouraged to compete for something that is repeatedly demonstrated as worthless is not only important but very healthy. …
[I]t is in fact Marriage I had in mind but these days cohabitation is the same as marriage under the law. Effectively it is impossible for men to trust even a purportedly good woman simply because of the law, but then it is up to women to change that – all we can do is defend our own freedoms and rights and that is what is most important to me. Of course competing for the right to be treated like garbage is the main point and intentions mean nothing without actions…for men that action must needs be self interest first – ironically the one thing we have been trained and bred to ignore.
So, yeah, in addition to being nearly incoherent, this is pretty much misogyny turned up to 11.
But I think we can do better. Let’s consider this graphic a challenge. I invite any readers here who have graphic talent — and those completely lacking graphic talent whatsoever — to come up with a fake AVFM meme that’s MORE misogynistic than this. BONUS POINTS if you can incorporate an actual quote from an AVFMer in the graphic.
To inspire you, here are some completely unrelated gifs of tiny animals being adorable. (I found them all here.)
Goodnight, Paul! You can buy your own Misogyny Bunch pillow for only $19.19 at A Voice for Men’s Red Pill store.
Let me take a moment to ignore my regular readers and speak directly to the Men’s Rights Activists who might be reading this blog. I suspect there are a few.
What I would like to talk to you about it ironic humor. Because, here’s the thing, sometimes people say things they don’t actually believe in order to make a little fun at the way other people see them.
#FeministsAreUgly is confusing a lot of people, misogynists included. The Twitter hashtag – which took off yesterday and is still going strong, if not quite so strong, today – was originally started not by misogynistic trolls but by two feminists, @LilyBolorian and @Cheuya, who intended the hashtag to be a way for feminist women to celebrate their own beauty, whether it conformed to conventional (and generally white-centric) standards or not. As Bolorian put it,
Women responded at once by doing just that, and the hashtag was quickly flooded by feminist selfies. This being the internet, it was also flooded with comments from misogynists and trolls. Given how many of the latter were posted, many feminists on Twitter initially assumed it was just another outburst of internet misogyny; it took a little while before the feminist origins of the hashtag became widely known.
So how did the devoted antifeminists of the manosphere and the Men’s Rights movement react to the hashtag? Some responded with unabashed glee. The regulars on Roosh V’s forum reposted the selfies of some in women posting in the #FeministsAreUgly hashtage, mocking them as fat, lazy “cunts.”
Attention tiny ladies! Paul Elam wants you to know that if you attack him, he will totally punch you right back. And not in a satirical way, either. With his actual, non-satirical fists.
A Voice for Men’s maximum leader has long insisted that his notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was nothing more than misunderstood “satire.” That is, when he argued that men who are abused by women would be totally justified if they “beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall,” this was somehow a “Juvenalian” satire of some sort. There’s a famous quote from The Princess Bride that might be appropriate here.
Well, now Mr. Elam has announced to the world that every month is a potential “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” for him. Even if the “Violent Bitch” in question is less than half his size. In a post that he insists is super serious, he writes:
Janet Bloomfield’s antifeminist smear campaign continues apace. Yesterday I wrote about her disgraceful attack on feminist writer Jessica Valenti, in which Bloomfield made up offensive statements and attributed them to Valenti in a malicious attempt to malign her reputation. Bloomfield, the “social media director” for A Voice for Men, then went on to boast about this on her blog.
Now she has decided to libel me as well, declaring on Twitter
She followed this up with a post on her blog full of outright lies and weird insinuations. Her allies at A Voice for Men jumped on board the defamation train, with Paul Elam devoting at least part of one of his “radio” shows to the topic “Is David Futrelle a Perv Apologist?”
This morning, the AVFM Twitter crew was out in force peddling this bullshit, with “operations manager” Dean Esmay leading the charge in his typically addled way.
Ironically, the AVFM crowd is cribbing their attacks on me from a REAL pedophile apologist who blogs under the name theantifeminist. Indeed, Elam, Bloomfield and AVFM ally Angry Harry all linked to theantifeminist on Twitter this morning to back up their assorted smears.
The supposed case against me is based on two articles I wrote nearly twenty years ago for the magazine In These Times.
The attack on me is absurd on its face, but I think it’s worth addressing if only to show the depths of their dishonesty, and just how desperate they are to smear me.
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.
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.]
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:
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
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.
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.
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:
