Oh, Reddit, not again. So about a week ago, a woman posted what seemed to be a heartfelt and sorrowful confession to r/confession with the self-explanatory title “I cheated on my sweetheart of a husband for 3 years with my violent, abusive ex. This is the one secret I am taking to my grave.”
Now, r/confession purports to be a subreddit devoted to helping out those who confess their wrongdoings, and the sidebar warns potential commenters not to be abusive: “No personal attacks, we are not here to make people feel bad.”
But Reddit being Reddit – that is, a hotbed of resentful “nice guys” always looking for an excuse to vilify women in general or a woman in particular – many of the commenters attacked the OP as an evil “scumbag,” or worse. While the worst comments were deleted by the mods, many attacks on the OP remain, some with literally hundreds of upvotes. Those who expressed any degree of empathy for the OP found their comments roundly downvoted.
After a few days, the discussion died down.
But then, after several days of silence, a new wave of abusive comments started to appear. Like this one:
And this:
Oh, but there’s more:
I’ve saved the worst for last. (I’ve also included the response from the confessor herself.) TRIGGER WARNING for violence.
.
.
.
So how did a dead thread like this come to life again, and so unpleasantly? Well, you guessed it: it got linked to in r/mensrights and later in r/redpill, a smaller and even more extreme “men’s rights” subreddit. And indeed, if you look at the comment histories of the people I’ve just quoted, you’ll see that most of them also posted in either r/mensrights or r/redpill around the time they made these comments.
It’s a fair guess that many of the upvotes that these terrible comments got also came from visiting r/menrights-ers.
Back in r/mensrights, one commenter, disgusted by all this, chronicled some of the bad behavior of his MRA comrades:
A lot more people besides IBM2431 are going to have to stand up and speak out if they want to clean up r/mensrights’ well-deserved reputation as a net exporter of hate.
Not that r/confession is absolved of blame here. While commenters there piled on this woman, who seemed sincerely sorry for what she said she had done, the r/confession regulars found nothing wrong with the behavior of another commenter — a dude, of course — who confessed he’d “fapped” a number of times to cam footage he found of a friend of his sister’s masturbating — which was evidently recorded and put online without her knowledge or consent.
NOTE: By the time this post goes up, it’s possible and even likely that the mods of r/confession will have deleted the worst of the comments from the r/mensrights and r/redpill invaders. But they should still be visible in the comment histories of those who posted them.
i probably shouldn’t be reading about garbage people while feeling like garbage.
And they say they aren’t a hate group or abuser’s lobby. Uh-huh.
I wonder what they would say to a man who confessed to cheating with an abusive ex.
@inurashii, internet hugs if you want them. 🙂 And no, not a good place to go if you’re in a sad place.
Maybe this is their actual activism: they want the right to spew their hate wherever and whenever, without condemnation, and they’re posting their shite all over the place to try to change the norms around this behaviour.
Nope, just keeps showing the rest of us what awful human beings you are.
I’m starting to think someone needs to sit down and explain to these men what men’s rights issues really are, and maybe also a register-him page.
Alpha fucks, Beta bucks.
Oh, and should have posted this above: internet safety tip – don’t post confessions online. It is unlikely to make you feel better and you open yourself up for the shitstorm like David has copied here. No matter what you did, having a shitstorm come at you is Not Something You Deserve. It also doesn’t cancel out your deed. If you need to talk to someone, go see a trained counsellor.
/internet safety tip spiel mode disengaged
It’s kind of funny, I kind of got informally banished from reddit by some creeps who went through my comments history to dig up a bunch of embarrassing dirt on me, which because they now all have me RES tagged with it, means it may very well follow me everywhere on that site now. Oh well, I needed a vacation from it anyway.
Men’s Rights Activism: making sure every woman who’s done something wrong hears that she is a c**t who should die, oh and by the way if a man does the exact same thing it’s also the woman’s fault.
My partner and I used to put our blog posts on Reddit. After a bunch of these idiots attacked her over a feminist poem she published, we both ran screaming.
inurashii, hope you feel better.
I made the mistake of looking at r/redpill. o_o
Anon, being unable to visit Reddit is a blessing in disguise.
This r/redpill thread may be the saddest thing I have ever read. It’s just … I don’t know why it’s never occurred to these guys that women are human beings.
HB9? Was he dating a pencil?
I’m using a Mirado Black Warrior HB2. HYPERGAMY.
Seriously, it’s a nice pencil.
I’m not saying the MRA’s responses were appropriate, and it’s stupid to take THIS ONE woman’s behavior as indicative of ALL women, as some of them so love to do, but if I’m totally honest the person I feel most sorry for in this debacle is her “sweetheart of a husband”.
Sigh. I’m stuck in the Bic Zone.
It’s like an entire culture failed to tell them that there are ~3.5 billion people who are also human beings, and by the way they aren’t possessions or puzzle boxes.
Bloody blockquotes!
Really? “You’re a cunt you deserve to die” registers as less important than ” marital problems”?
You do realize that you can condemn her cheating on him while ALSO NOT PLACING A HIERARCHY ON WHICH IS WORSE BECAUSE SERIOUSLY SHE DOES NOT DESERVE THAT KIND OF HATE SPEWED AT HER, right?
And this is it in a nutshell.
This feels like the fandom boards at AMC. Male characters can deal drugs, murder and cheat and fans go easy. Women characters doing anything gets rounds and rounds of “cunt must die!!!!” I guess that’s a symptom of misogyny — even if the people in question are fake. Breaking Bad? Mr. White makes meth, kills his rivals and lies….no problem, his wife Skylar cheats on him one time before, and she gets a Facebook page dedicated to her called, “SKYLAR Must Die!” Betty on Mad Men? Pffft. The Andrea hate on Walking Dead is positively mind-boggling.
Niceguy shaming: because involuntary celibacy isn’t quite punishment enough.
As I read this I can’t help but thinking of the female MRA (can’t remember her name) who came to this blog and had wrote a blog post about how her male friend was practically a hero for cheating on his wife so she could feel like the good guy in a divorce. Seriously. Fuck these people with their painfully stupid black and white way of thinking. Men = good and women = bad is so oversimplified as to be useless to any meaningful conversation about any subject.
I’m being reminded of all those sad MRA lists of their requirements in a partner, like the (now deleted) one by Mr Neackbeard Chronicles:
You don’t need to read beyond Item #1, and I don’t need to add anything to this.
Why, that is a wonderful list which in way awakens in me the rage against injustice.
In other news in backwards land, it’s still wonderfully warm where I am and I am not currently wishing I could find my old ratty super-comfortable sweater.