This tactic makes her even more frightening: she’s a smart, savvy woman who has overcome terrible things in her life, but whose smartness, savviness, and tenacity have convinced her that feminism is no longer relevant for women—that, in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, feminism is harming women and destroying the world.
Unlike many of the men in the movement, Bloomfield also knows how to play the attention game against feminists and win. None of her myriad PR costumes—pundit, mom, daughter, wife, radical, conservative, liberal, activist, debater, businessperson, and so on—are that of an angry man. As much as feminists dismiss her, other women (and men) listen. It’s like feminists are playing an impossible game of Whac-a-Mole; on the defensive, they can’t possibly crush all the anti-feminists Bloomfield is encouraging to rise up. Some would inevitably hear her and ask: If she’s saying no to feminism, why shouldn’t I?
Bloomfield gives feminism its due for getting women where they are today but echoes the common anti-feminist sentiment that the movement has gone too far. “I believe in equality of opportunity,” she told me more than once, “but I do not believe in equality of outcome.” Like every anti-feminist I spoke to, Bloomfield argues that feminism, while once needed, has now built its message on the idea that women are perpetual victims. Anti-feminists also argue that feminism creates a moral panic around rape culture (which they don’t believe exists) that in turn encourages man hating. Bloomfield contends that feminism limits women (in that it devalues motherhood), sets them up for a life of misery (in that it was responsible for selling the myth that women “can have it all”); and does nothing to empower them (in that it stresses what women can’t do, when, in fact, equality of opportunity meant they could do anything).
Many feminists and even members of liberal-minded media have tended to dismiss such criticisms as the rumblings of fringe online hordes. But those who dismiss the anti-feminist movement underestimate the dissatisfaction many women have with feminism’s perceived messages, in particular the idea that it seeks special privileges for women. (Take, for example, the Canadian Club panel, or the many comments from young Hollywood actors such as Shailene Woodley.) To many ordinary women who are followers of bootstrap can-do-ness, anti-feminism is like a clarion call that promises that, for once, the only thing that matters is their own hard work, sexism be damned. Bloomfield gave interviews to Gavin McInnes’s Rebel Media Show, NBC’s Today Show, and the Dr. Phil offshoot The Doctors. Everywhere her core message was the same: feminism is dangerously past its best-before date, and women now flourish better without it. Or, more to the point, as Bloomfield said: feminism is cancer.
Back in Bloomfield’s happy home, this message played out over a post-dinner game of Jenga. A family friend had learned I was interviewing Bloomfield about anti-feminism and wondered what Bloomfield’s youngest daughter, Jane, a whip-smart and impish seven-year-old, made of the word. (She has no idea what her mom does online, though Bloomfield has made no effort to shield her children from her views.) Bloomfield turned to her daughter: “What do you think the word ‘feminist’ means?”
Jane didn’t miss a beat: “Girls who think they are better than boys.”
“Do you think that’s right? Are girls better than boys?”
“No, boys and girls are the same.”
“The same but different,” Bloomfield suggested.
“They’re both human, so that’s the same.”
“Do you think girls can be soldiers?”
“If they want to.”
“Do you think most girls want to?”
Jane paused. “Some do.”
“Do you think some boys want to stay at home and be dads?”
Again: “Some do.”
“Should they?”
Jane repeated that it was okay if they wanted to. Dads should care about their children. Bloomfield asked her daughter again what feminists think, and Jane repeated her earlier answer, adding that it wasn’t fair for girls to think they’re better than boys. “Where did you learn that feminists think that?” Bloomfield wondered. Jane responded with a crooked grin: “I learned from you, Mom.” Her mom answered with a proud grin of her own.
For insight into how an effective feMRA is created, I could have easily picked any of the other female men’s rights activists (what a mouthful) in North America. In the US, twentysomething Tomi Lahren catapulted to fame thanks, in part, to her feminist “takedowns” on the “Final Thoughts” segment of her show on Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. She believes the term “feminism” has been hijacked but, like Bloomfield and others, strongly advocates for women’s empowerment, blurring the rhetorical line between anti-feminists, post-feminists, and the “I’m not a feminist, but…” crowd. She’s called feminists “bitter” and the movement “a giant contradiction.” “Women could rule the world,” she’s said, “if we stop dragging each other down,” but she’s also said that if, thanks to feminists, “the world is subjected to Lena Dunham’s naked body,” feminists should not be able to “pick and choose what type of women fit [their] agenda.” Feminists don’t criticize the damaging reinforcement of narrow body norms, Lahren asserted, but are jealous fatties intent on tearing down women with “hard bodies.” She liked to use air quotes, flicking her fingers at “mystical women’s issues,” ridiculing the pay gap, birth control, maternity leave, and sexual assault. To Lahren and her followers, strong women aren’t whiners. Strong women care about law enforcement and military readiness, economic growth and national security, and family values—as if none of those things align with the feminist movement.
In Canada, the ranks of female anti-feminist leaders include YouTube celebrity Karen Straughan, who, when I visited Bloomfield in mid-2016, had nearly 130,000 followers, and Alison Tieman, leader of the women-led MRA group called the Honey Badger Brigade (a nod to both the vicious animal and the viral meme “honey badger don’t care,” in which said vicious animal doesn’t care what you think of it). Another high-profile woman in the anti-feminist movement is BC-based Lauren Southern, a fellow blond provocateur and contributor to Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media platform. Then there’s Diana Davison, who runs the YouTube channel Feminism LOL; she gained more than 42,000 followers by purporting to debunk the sexual assault case against Jian Ghomeshi, which she believes was a media- and feminist-produced hoax. On the establishment side is, of course, Janice Fiamengo, the English professor at the University of Ottawa and the anti-feminist who believes university rape culture is dangerous make-believe. Anne Cools, a former Liberal Party member and current independent, and the first Black woman appointed to Canada’s senate, believes that feminism is a “personality disorder” and opened A Voice for Men’s inaugural international men’s rights conference with a galvanizing call to arms. “The cause that is before you and the things that you fight for are valid and just,” she said, urging MRAs to remember they were at war.
Some of these women were once feminists. Take Theryn Meyer, a transgender woman and former president of Simon Fraser University’s MRA campus group. “I used to be a feminist, and I was a fucking wreck,” she told Xtra in late 2015. “I was eating up everything that feminism fed to me: that the world was out to get me, that the world was structured to not accommodate me.” She admitted that while it’s true she faced discrimination, she didn’t hold with feminism’s “constant harping” about it or what she saw as the message that she had no power to change it. Feminism might be relevant in the Middle East, a shadowy, backward place where, the anti-feminists allowed, women needed more rights. But here in a democratic West? Stop your crying, baby girl.
In the past several years, many of these women who challenged feminism have expanded their influence. When I started this research in 2014, Straughan and Tieman, both based in Western Canada, worked part-time jobs to make ends meet while they focused on their anti-feminism and MRA advocacy work. When I interviewed them again in 2016, both said they were more sought after and connected than ever. Karen Straughan’s videos, in particular, routinel
y got hundreds of thousands of views, and sometimes more than one million; fans often stopped her in the street and at work. Her most popular video was called “Feminism and the Disposable Male,” a critique of how feminism devalues men (in other words, feminists are all man bashers). The video has made the front page of Reddit multiple times and prompted requests for her to speak across North America.
Straughan is an unapologetic university dropout who punctuates her sentences with profanity and the word “right”—the last to such a degree that even those on MRA online forums have called her out on it, begging Elam to tell her to cut it out. Long before she became a professional anti-feminist, Straughan made a living writing and publishing “dirty books” for women. She formed a strong community around an online group of erotica authors. Swigging red wine and puffing an endless chain of cigarettes, she told me how, in 2011, a small but persistent number of men from the anti-feminist website The Spearhead began to troll a website she wrote for, leaving disparaging comments about the “feminization” of literature. Straughan eagerly joined the retaliation committee to comment-bomb the offending website. But she found too much with which she agreed on the offending website. Instead of flooding the site with pro-women messaging, Straughan turned coat.
“So often,” she told me, “what feminists think is just completely woo-woo.” She soon began to see feminism as a dangerous social movement that devalued both genders, and she decided it must be stopped. Three years after her inadvertent toe dip into the seas of anti-feminism, Straughan swapped her “dirty book” community for the wild world of women against women. At the inaugural men’s rights conference, the T-shirt depicting her as a superhero sold out; she couldn’t even find one to bring home to her boyfriend. As her popularity first spiked in 2014, and urged on by the same culture that had incubated Gamergate and the surging on-campus rape culture denialism, people started to stop her on the street. They pumped her hand like she was a war hero and told her never to stop the good fight. The recognition was weird, Straughan confessed to me, her voice briefly dropping velvet-soft in reflection before rising to barroom boisterous again, but it was also thrilling; her message was spreading, connecting. By our next interview in 2016, Straughan had been able to quit her part-time restaurant job thanks to increased revenue from her website’s ads and public speaking demands; her talks routinely brought in $5,000 to $20,000 per engagement, though she joked she was no Anita Sarkeesian and sometimes she was lucky that her expenses were paid. She lives in Edmonton and is routinely recognized on the street, at restaurants and, recently, at the grocery store, where a man took a selfie with Straughan to show his girlfriend, who, he told her, “would get a kick out of it.” She was even spoofed in an episode of Bones that focused on men’s rights. “It’s very, very different now,” she told me. “And it’s all positive.”
The feMRAs all had similar theories of why women might abandon feminism and join them instead: feminism encouraged women to play the victim, always complaining about things they didn’t have or ways in which they thought they weren’t treated fairly, and women were, quite frankly, done with being victims. Victimhood was a lie, and they were done being lied to. In North America, women had access to the same rights as men, at least on paper; if they couldn’t make it happen, it was their own fault. Feminists were “snowflakes,” demanding special attention and melting under criticism. As Tomi Lahren claimed in 2017, feminists had “a victimhood mentality and a snowflake exterior.” They were pathetic.
“The whole framing of feminism disenfranchises women,” Alison Tieman told me. “Instead of building what they want, feminism teaches women-learned helplessness.” Tieman runs the podcast and YouTube show Honey Badger Radio and quit her day job in 2016 to focus full-time on the Badgers. Midway through the year, the show was raking in around a minimum of $10,000 in monthly donations—enough, said Tieman, to keep her going and to also employ two other full-time and two part-time staff. She hoped that she could soon bring on some more people. She even offered Honey Badger merchandise: comic-book versions of the women on T-shirts, and stylized honey badgers on mugs, posters, and pins.
Whenever Tieman talks about why women have turned against feminism, she sounds like a self-empowerment wall hanging. A blend of pep talk and sermon, she preaches individualism, the power of creativity, and a can-do attitude. She believes being a woman in the West is the best thing to be. FeMRAs do women a favor by attacking feminism. To illustrate the lie of feminism, they often use the analogy of a frail, old, widowed aunt living alone. She lives in the safest neighborhood in her city, but an unscrupulous home alarm dealer targets her. He exaggerates the crime statistics in her area, and he harasses her constantly: she’s a victim, she’s a victim, she’s a victim. The abuse in this situation, stresses Tieman, is so obvious. “We see it immediately,” she added, “and yet this is what feminism is doing toward women.” This is why her movement will never stop until feminism is dead. To feMRAs, they are setting both genders free.
The feMRAs’ own con job is remarkable: convincing women to shun victimhood without actually doing anything to make us not victims. Of course, nobody wants to be a victim. Like, “Hey, please rape, harass, and objectify me, make me feel generally unsafe, and while you’re at it, pay me less, limit my opportunities, and shut me out of lucrative industries! K THX PATRIARCHY BYE!” Just no. By definition, victimhood ain’t fun. Yet our fundamentally unequal status in society means women are daily victims in so many ways, all of which the men’s rights movement reinforces. Let’s not forget it works to exploit human frustration; let’s not forget how powerful and potent legitimizing hate can be; let’s not forget Marc Lépine, Elliot Rodger, and those like them; most of all, let’s not forget that we live in a society primed to believe the lie that equality means men need more rights and women fewer.
The feMRAs are wrong. Women can be angry victims. We can be strong victims. We can be victims on a rampage of change. What we can’t afford to be is women who sweep our victimhood under the proverbial rug and, in pretending it’s not there, forget the mess. Because whether we choose to see them or not, the dust bunnies of patriarchy are still screwing us. That’s why we need feminism: to reach a place in which women aren’t 24/7 victims of sexism.
The more I met feMRAs, or got stuck in the Tumblr vortex of movements like Women Against Feminism, the viral women-and-girl-led selfie-meets-anti-feminism campaign, the more I felt like I had caught a perpetual flu. If this is what post-feminism looked like, then I didn’t want anything to do with it. For all its talk about empowering women to achieve their goals, the men’s rights movement has done little to encourage women to support each other, preferring to wedge a vampire-sized stake between them. It assumes the status quo is that way for a reason. That’s an insidiously dangerous assertion, least of all because it’s so easy to agree with.
Here’s an example of how this works. Straughan told me such low numbers of women are in STEM simply because women aren’t interested in science, technology, engineering, or math. It was the same reason why, she argued, there are more women in other professions, like teaching and cleaning. Men prefer to put up drywall, and that’s okay. Straughan knew this, she said, because she has always been the type of woman who was more comfortable with men—you know, because she could never adapt to all those weird affects and catty behavior that embody womanhood. “How far are you willing to push people to do things that they otherwise would not do?” she cried. “If everybody has the same choices, and they’re happy with those choices, then what injustice has been done?”
And that’s why MRA logic works: it tells us to do nothing. It doesn’t matter that the movement’s criticisms might have some validity, or that its monsters might not actually be monsters. This is why we should be afraid of what it’s selling. As much as it tries to paint itself as forward-thinking and visionary, the MRA movement isn’t really presenting us with any alternatives for a new world. It’s demanding, instead, that we accept the current status quo as the best poss
ible outcome, nay, the most natural outcome. They’re like the Houdinis of discrimination and hate, conjuring up amazing illusions. Underneath it all, though, the message is essentially: Let’s keep things unequal for women, so everybody wins!
Um, what?
At the end of my first conversation with Bloomfield, she had told me A Voice for Men was preparing its war chest, a fund to launch legal challenges against all the things feminism has wrought. “We are at the consciousness-raising stage,” she said, “and we are moving at light speed.” Then, I would have been tempted to dismiss the boasting as wishful thinking. Now, with women as the face of its movement and Donald Trump as the American president, I am convinced we no longer can, or should. As Bloomfield talked about all the rights the organization would fight once it raised the money, my mind drifted back to high school. It struck me that, for all their eloquence and research-heavy arguments, the feMRAs sounded a whole lot like the boys I knew then, all full of machismo and black-and-white derision whenever the f-word dropped, like a stone, into the conversation. Suddenly, I knew what the world would look like if the men’s rights movement won: not a utopia of base equality, but a planet full of teenaged boys.
F-Bomb Page 10
