Ce n’est pas un gâteau: archived tweet from Janet Bloomfield to a half-dozen prominent feminists.
So our old dear friend Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield — you know, the A Voice for Men PR gal best known for her habit of calling people “whores,” including the underage victims of the late, disgraced British “entertainer” Jimmy Savile — has been suspended from Twitter, for reasons unknown.
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!”
Here it is, folks: the pastriarchal construct that got @Judgybitch1 suspended! #pastriarchy #FreeJudgyBitch1 #nomra http://t.co/poK1puKcrn—
Hannah Wallen (@Oneiorosgrip) August 30, 2014
And in her most recent post, Bloomfield seems to have decided to go with this “explanation” as well.
Yeah, somehow I don’t think that was it.
Let me offer an alternate hypothesis: Bloomfield was suspended for sending threatening and harassing Tweets to assorted feminists on Twitter and/or for spamming Twitter with graphic images of a baby boy being circumcised.
Now, this is just a hypothesis, but I do have some evidence that seems to back it up.
While Bloomfield’s “JudgyBitch1” account on Twitter is suspended, as a helpful reader pointed out to me, you can still see some of the pictures she’s posted to Twitter in an archive over on Twicsy.com.
If you go there you’ll see a mixture of pics and broken pic icons. The pics that remain seem to be pics that she’s retweeted; the others are ones she tweeted directly, and most link back to her suspended account.
But there’s an interesting thing about these broken pic icons: if you click on them, some of them will actually load.
So what does a little bit of clicking reveal?
Well, in addition to a few pics of the cakes she’s been baking, we find pics featuring threatening language and imagery directed at feminists. Like the one I posted above.
We also find a graphic picture of a boy being circumcised, which she reposted several times, and which I imagine violates all sorts of Twitter rules.
Most of her pics, alas, won’t load. But somehow I suspect we’d find a few more like these in the bunch.
And if it’s not always clear what photos she posted, it is clear that she has her own little army of followers who are happy to spam feminists with these pics. Here’s a link to an old post of hers archived on Topsy showing various JudgyBitch fans all sending Jessica Valenti the same hostile message and the same (now deleted) pic. Somehow I suspect it wasn’t a picture of a cake.
Here are other harassing tweets sent by Bloomfield to Valenti, most of them retweeted by her fans:
- A sexually harassing reference to oral sex
- A misleading misquotation of Valenti, pasted onto an unflattering picture of her, that completely distorts the meaning of what she really wrote. As you may recall, Bloomfield has a history of fabricating quotes out of thin air and claiming they came from Valenti.
- More tweets directed at Valenti that offer up alleged quotations of hers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
These are just in the past ten days.
Going through these pics not only suggests that AVFMers are being dishonest in how they’re trying to spin Bloomfield’s Twitter suspension; it also reveals a lot about the workings of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Twitter edition.
Consider this tweet I ran across, which tries to equate feminist writer Jessica Valenti’s “male tears” t-shirt with beheadings carried out by Islamic terrorists.
.@JudgyBitch1 @AppSame @PolitiBunny @JessicaValenti Differences between the two are? http://t.co/e4Jj57LVW2—
Andraos Al-Sulh (@AndrewV691) August 16, 2014
The original Tweeter, a reactionary antifeminist living in Canada, is clearly a reader of A Voice for Men and assorted alt-right racist websites. If you scroll down through his Twitter timeline, you’ll see that he retweets AVFMers like Paul Elam and Dan Perrins, as well as “dark enlightenment” Twitter accounts like the explicitly racist “hbd chick.” And as you can see, he included JudgyBitch1 in the list of recipients for his tweet.
The AVFMers also pay attention to him; if you look at the archive of this tweet on Topsy, you can see that Elam retweeted his graphic comparison of Valenti to a terrorist, as did AVFM fans Markis One and Cora Newbold. One of his other retweeters is a big fan of Roosh and a regular retweeter of assorted other “dark enlightenment” assholes.
[EDIT: AndrewV691 is perhaps better known, at least in Skeptic circles, as AndrewV69, a prolific contributor to the SlymePit, an online forum largely devoted to attacking feminist skeptics on FreeThoughtBlogs and elsewhere, where he has offered his considered opinion on topics such as "Ophelia Benson is a complete fuckwit!" Needless to say, his Twitter avatar is not actually a picture of him; it's of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.]
Now, MRAs like to pretend that they have no connection with the alt-right – that is, racist – assholes who populate much of the “manosphere.” In reality, MRAs and “manosphereians” intermix freely, and there are more than a few who are both MRAs and racist right-wingers.
It’s not just that these people share remarkably similar ideologies, similar obsessions, similar buzzwords, and similar misogynistic attitudes towards women. They also work together in a de facto alliance to harass feminists online.
In other words, MRAs and manospherians are both heavily implicated in what I call the Greater Internet Harasssment Machine. Indeed, as we can see from the above, notable MRA figures like Elam and Bloomfield are themselves part of the Harassment Machine.
Whatever it was that got JudgyBitch1’s Twitter account suspended almost certainly had nothing to do with cake.
