F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  Putnam editors woefully admitted they knew women “cared nothing for logic,” appealing instead to women’s “sense of justice and tender hearts” to cease abusing their newly won rights. Namely, Putnam wanted women to stop accusing their husbands of domestic violence and sending them to jail. How else, implored the magazine, did women expect “domestic discipline to be preserved”? The article went on for too many more pages, but it essentially boiled down to this: if the law declared that husbands must provide for their wives, and women benefitted, then men should be able to do whatever they wanted to ensure their wives stayed good and trouble-free. Punishing them for punishing their wives, then, was just plain unfair.

  It’s easy, and altogether desirable for our own sanity, to dismiss these loopy arguments as anachronistic. But modernize the slang and it all sounds alarmingly similar to the men’s rights rhetoric of today. Men’s activists carry signs that read things like “Our brothers and sons need protection from abusive wives” and claim that men are more likely to be raped and more likely to be attacked at night—full stop. Under the blanket of encompassing equality, all rational argument is smothered. It doesn’t matter if statistics state that most attackers are men; it only matters that no situation is, technically, unique to women.

  In March 2015, #LetsTalkMen billboards appeared in downtown Toronto with this misleading, half-true assertion: “Half of domestic violence victims are men; no domestic violence shelters are dedicated to us.” The massive signs depicted a hunched-over Fabio character, fingers plugged into his ears, shrinking from a looming, screaming vampire-esque woman. (What a supernatural nag!) A Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) logo branded the corner, showily using both the male and female gender signs. Critics have long regarded the CAFE as a men’s rights group in disguise, and not a very good disguise (see aforementioned billboards). Tellingly, its advocacy is centered entirely on men’s rights, and its mandate states it focuses on men and boys because “investment and support for educational and social programs stands at a level that is far from equal to the seriousness of the problem.”

  This style of rhetoric owes much to the first wave of the modern men’s rights movement, which started in the 1970s. Activists during this time focused on the rights of divorced dads and the demasculinization of all things sacred and manly. MRAs wanted to preserve traditional roles for women and cringed at the idea of women with autonomy, women in universities, and women doing anything other than making babies, assembling sandwiches, and fetching cold brewskies. MRAs fed into men’s resentment, often pushing it into violence.

  We saw the first terrible glimpse of this in 1989, when, decades before cultivating UCSB shooter Elliot Rodger, the men’s rights movement helped form another mass murderer: Marc Lépine. The self-proclaimed MRA used the movement’s propaganda to write his own manifesto, complete with the line “I hate feminists!” Fueled by a burning bitterness toward high-achieving women, Lépine stormed an engineering class at the École Polytechnique in Montreal and murdered fourteen young women before killing himself. A shocked nation dubbed the tragedy the “Montreal Massacre” and quickly worked to explain it: Lépine was mentally ill. Gun control was too lax. It was a violent act, but not at all symptomatic of a larger culture of violence against women.

  Feminists knew better. Anti-woman sentiment had been poisoning the air for years. The murders weren’t isolated. They were just another version of ingrained violence against women. This could happen again, they warned. And it has. Lépine’s messaging has lived on, repeating itself in mass-market MRA screeds and informing other murderers: men who kill their wives, men who kill women they don’t know, and men who kill a lot of women because they hate them, like Rodger, who eagerly adopted MRA rhetoric. Similar to Lépine, Rodger’s spree was dismissed as the work of a crazy man, as if he had worked up all that hate in a bubble. We’re too ready to forget that the men’s rights movement has been actively trying to reframe the conversation for years, purposely feeding antipathy, acrimony, and sexism. I don’t doubt that some of these men are unstable: I once interviewed an MRA in a homemade superhero costume, surrounded by a Toronto SWAT team, who refused to leave the roof of a politician’s office until he had secured a promise of improved rights for men. It’s not an accident these men have found a home in the MRA movement, because the movement courts them.

  With Elam, the movement has taken even bigger steps out of fringe territory and into mainstream conversation. Through Texas-based A Voice for Men, Elam has brought the men’s rights movement online, connecting and unifying it, while at the same time working to shed its radical right-wing association. He remains inflammatory—in 2010, he named October “Bash a Violent Bitch Month”—but he was smart. In a true feat of doublespeak, he has endorsed the worst kind of locker room talk, calling it equality, and then using modern technology to foster it like a dandelion weed.

  Under Elam, the MRA movement began to court women actively for the first time, not just bringing them into the fold but propping them up as its shrewdest, most well-known personalities. Elam must have known that with their involvement the MRA movement could more believably claim to support human rights, even if critics still called that support a front for its true misogynist core. Following this new push toward the mainstream, the wider movement adopted a Melba toast attitude toward equality: we’re happily for men, but not angrily against anyone; we want rights for everybody, too! CAFE, especially, succeeded when it achieved official charity status in 2014. That same year, a week after the Rodger shooting, the organization coined Equality Day (or E-Day), a made-up occasion to, it said, “celebrate the gains made in advancing social equality.”

  This benign branding allowed CAFE to get pretty far in its celebration planning: it reserved an event space on Toronto Island, secured beer sponsorship, and even booked an (entirely male) line-up of Toronto indie musicians. But before the show could go on, feminists, and then media, caught wind of the concert. Soon everyone—except CAFE—claimed they’d been duped; nobody wanted their name attached to the MRA movement. Artists canceled, the venue canceled, and sponsors pulled out. CAFE volunteers ended up handing out pamphlets on the street instead, stationed next to the mall and a few fanatics who really loved Jesus.

  For feminists, it was a happy ending. And yet I worry it won’t always be this way; we can already see the shift. The MRA machine has directly powered some of the biggest campaigns and attacks against women’s rights. It has funded legal battles against rape victims, using its deep pockets to launch dozens of civil lawsuits in the US that discredit women but boost their accusers; its legions comprised Gamergate’s loudest, most dedicated factions (which I cover further in chapter six); and its anti–women’s rights rhetoric has leaked onto our screens and airwaves and into locker rooms and campuses, and even our legislatures. In October 2015, an Idaho high school boy threatened to “kill all the girls” at his school after the cheerleading team refused to send him nude photos. This is no longer an anomaly. Thank you, men’s rights movement.

  What the movement wants is at once completely vague—to secure men’s rights—and entirely simplistic: to end women’s rights, sending us back to a world of kitchens and babies, what the movement sees as our traditional, rightful, and honorable roles. I don’t think the question is whether MRAs will one day get their E-Day, or something like it, but, rather, how long until they do? How long will it take before they fully hide a culture of rape denial, patriarchy denial, abuse denial, and a general desire to return to 1952 behind the unobjectionable, huggable term “equality”? Not as long as I’d like, surely, which would roughly be around the time pigs fly and Satan’s bundled in a parka.

  This huge push to rebrand explains, in part, how we’ve wound up with Janet Bloomfield, Alison Tieman, and others, including Karen Straughan, the third star of the feMRA trio. But it doesn’t really explain how three women came to support a movement that encourages men to bash a violent bitch, or why they cheered MRAs through Gamergate and the creation of an on
line game that encouraged players to virtually beat up feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, merely because she had the nerve to say video games could stand to be less sexist. Why have they repeatedly called women and young girls who are raped “whores” who deserved it, or spearheaded the counterattack against the anti-rape campaign on Canadian university campuses? Why do they think men’s rights are a more pressing issue than women’s rights, which they don’t seem to think matter at all?

  Janet Bloomfield is a gregarious stay-at-home mom who hates feminism. When she is not busy baking after-school snacks or cheering her young son and two daughters from the sidelines, she is often online penning vitriolic, click-baity criticism of the movement. In recent years, on her uber-popular, million-plus-hits blog, JudgyBitch, she has stated that underage victims in high-profile rape cases are “dumb fucking whores,” and that single mothers are “clearly really, really shitty at making life decisions.” She routinely calls women that advocate for their rights “little dumbass feminists.” When I met her in June 2016, her newest campaign, #WhyWomenShouldNotVote, advocated for disenfranchising women. Two years earlier, Salon writer Amanda Marcotte called her one of the seven scariest women alive “working tirelessly to attack equal rights for women.” Bloomfield loved it when her incendiary jabs went viral. “It’s fun,” she told me, laughing.

  Born to a Seventh-day Adventist family in rural Alberta, Bloomfield grew up the only girl among three brothers. She lived on a hobby farm, worked to eat, and was generally fearful of her evangelical parents, whom she describes as “crazy and violent.” She began to connect the dots of her anti-feminism later at the University of Western Ontario, where she completed an undergraduate degree in film theory. Much of the film criticism taught at the university, she says, took place through a women’s studies lens. Bloomfield learned how contemporary feminist scholars saw the world, and she hated it. To her, feminist theory mandated that everyone would be better off if women were in charge. She thought of her mother, who she saw as much more violent than her father, and shook her head.

  After graduation, Bloomfield had a lot of conversations lamenting her future. It was during one of these regular sessions she realized her biggest ambition was to be a wife and a mother. She wanted to create the happy, nuclear family she wished she’d had, but didn’t—to paint herself into a Norman Rockwell. “You can’t say that out loud,” she said. “I was immediately met with criticism: ‘You’re wasting your life; you’re taking such a huge risk; you should never rely on a man; you should never rely on anyone. You have to participate in the labor force.’” But Bloomfield was determined. Hedging her bets, she decided to pursue a master of business administration at the University of Victoria. She was, she told me in absolute sincerity, choosing her marriage pool. It turned out to be a smart choice. She met a man, also an MBA student, who was looking for a wife, “Not. A. Girl. Friend,” she stressed. She was happy. And whenever anyone criticized her choice to marry and stay home, she blamed feminism.

  Then, shortly after her son was born, her father attempted to reconnect. Bloomfield had distanced herself from her parents, who divorced when she was still a child. He arrived at her door with two boxes. One contained income tax returns, showing that, contrary to her mother’s claims, he had never missed a child support payment. The other was full of letters and cards meant for her and her brothers, but sent back by her mother unopened. Bloomfield forgave him. But she was furious that she’d missed what she saw as her window to properly reconcile. She took to Google: “How on earth did my mother have the power to do this?” As an answer, she found the men’s rights movement and its strong belief that fathers are unfairly disadvantaged during divorce and custody disputes. Inspired, she officially launched JudgyBitch in April 2013. It quickly amassed fifteen thousand page views and enough buzz to attract the MRA movement’s most prominent members.

  Today, as head of social media for A Voice for Men, Bloomfield is a master of branding and development, though, more and more, she’s been calling herself an anti-feminist first and a men’s rights activist second. The distinction is subtle. In addition to fighting for men’s rights, A Voice for Men preaches anti-feminism, calling feminists a “social malignancy” akin to the Ku Klux Klan. As a whole, the so-called “manosphere” is surely growing, steadily challenging the feminist conversation and building momentum to overthrow the movement’s biggest victories, particularly progressive rape shield and child support legislation. Already, its members have played a role in the recent years’ most successful anti-feminist campaigns, including the battle to weaken, or eliminate, women-friendly university policies on sexual assault.

  After our initial two-hour phone interview, I still wasn’t sure I understood her. I flew to meet Bloomfield on her close-knit, tree-studded street in Thunder Bay, Ontario. When I arrived at her house in a taxi, I discovered Bloomfield bent over her front garden, tending to a bed of zinnias, snapdragons, and daisies. She greeted me with a smile and an apology for her grimy hands. Bloomfield is a trim woman in her early forties, with an etched, tanned face and clear blue eyes. She was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” ball cap, snugly pulled down over her long blond hair. She is, as her hat attested, a huge fan of Donald Trump. (She also had a Trump phone case, emblazoned with the US flag.) Inside her house, framed children’s artwork decorated the walls. Chocolate chip cookies cooled on a wood dinner table that could seat fourteen, but was, at that moment, providing a hiding spot for the family bunny.

  Janet Bloomfield is not her real name, though it’s how she’s known to both her fans and her enemies. Initially, she kept her legal name secret to protect her family from her controversial persona; she’s received regular death threats. A male MRA activist, affronted when Bloomfield objected to blow-up penises at an event, revealed her identity, and the public outing led to a letter-writing campaign against her husband, Tim, who is an associate professor and assistant dean in Lakehead University’s business department. While the letter-writing campaign fizzled—as Tim said, he doesn’t control his wife, or even really read most of what she writes on JudgyBitch—she still preferred to go by Janet Bloomfield. The pseudonym has become her brand, and because this is how she’s known, it’s also how I’ll refer to her here.

  In person, Bloomfield was a more thoughtful, less singularly offensive version of her online self. She reiterated the ideas she posted online but was prone to discuss them with more civility. For instance, one of her closest friends and neighbors was an Indigenous woman who described herself as a lefty and who disagreed with most of Bloomfield’s political assessments (though she confessed to me over dinner that she also had reservations about where she fit into feminism). As I watched them debate climate change and unionization, Bloomfield suddenly exclaimed: “See, if we were online, I would have called you a cunt and you would have called me Hitler!” But as much as she lamented such knee-jerk name-calling on social media, she wasn’t about to stop it.

  Often a bundle of twists and contradictions, Bloomfield told me she can’t support anything that declared it a woman’s duty to be a mother and homemaker. She believes it should be a choice and that, if given that choice, most women would happily opt to stay home. She is strongly in favor of abortion rights, allowing that Roe v. Wade is “the absolute stunning achievement of feminism.” She has rejected her evangelical upbringing and is not religious. Yet when I asked her to elaborate on why she believes women shouldn’t vote, she argued that it was because they cannot be drafted, they make bad economic decisions (particularly when it comes to military defense), and they are too pro-immigration. Or, as she put it on JudgyBitch: “Women have had the vote in the West for almost 100 years, and all they have done is vote to destroy and destabilize the world men built for us, while protecting themselves from the blood consequences.” She’s since added a few exceptions to her rule, clarifying that women can earn the right to vote if they are in the military, mothers of sons, wives of men, officials, or elected by men. This would suggest submissi
on, but like many of the feMRAs, she was also emphatically against the murkier corners of the men’s rights world, such as the red pill movement.

  “Red pill” is a geeky reference to the Matrix movies, in which courageous main character Neo took a cherry-colored pill and saw the world as it really was. These MRAs see themselves as Neo, and the real world as one feminists have ruined. Red pillers argue for a return to strict gender roles, in which men have sexual dominance over women in return for providing financial stability. Women should support them in all ways in return for the ability to “make house,” which is all women really want anyway. Men who buy into the philosophy also claim women who say no to sexual advances don’t really mean it: men should listen not to what they say but to what their actions show, which pillers invariably interpret to mean “yes.” Bloomfield told me she believed such messaging tarnished the movement; women should always have choice (how very feminist of her). If the pillers weren’t silenced, she feared, they’d drag the movement out of the reaches of the mainstream conversation and back into the dregs of internet message boards. None of the feMRAs wanted that.

  When I told her I was surprised she would find something offensive, Bloomfield confided that much of her bluster on social media and JudgyBitch is, essentially, click bait. Bloomfield saw her extremism as part of spreading the anti-feminist message. Her decision to write outrageous headlines—“The world’s most retarded feminist: I have found her” and “Why are feminist women so fucking pathetic?”—is a tactical one. Moments before, Bloomfield had proposed that women shouldn’t have nuclear weapon codes because their periods make them emotionally unpredictable. Her website’s headlines, Bloomfield said, while slicing through strips of bacon for the pizza we were making, are purposely written to grab attention. She laughed: The more riled-up feminists get, the more she pokes at them. While she admits her shouty tone may be too over the top for some readers, her hope is that JudgyBitch provides a portal into the diverse world of anti-feminism and that, when compared to her, its other stars may even seem more measured. A successful movement, she figures, needs both to flourish.