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.
.
.
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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’m pretty sure Abnoy was Filipino, and GGG is Croatian.
Well yay, looks like I’m here for flounce, take two. He’s starting off throwing pretty wild- I think he’s going to gas out early in the second round.
DLColvin, don’t bother. You showed your ass the other day with the autism comment, and the hits just keep on comin’.
You can take the tone troll here and stick it. With “allies” like you…
Oh yeah, I saw that DLColvin comment earlier… I can’t have been the only one that was just waiting for a fuck-up like that, can I? It’s like AtomicGrizzly all over again.
natfantastic, you were not the only one waiting for a fuck-up. That train is never late with some people.
Jono’s whine seems a special version of ‘what about teh menz?!’ Feeling bad for someone being cheated on is something of a default setting. No one has to say ‘it’s wrong to cheat on someone’ for everyone to know it’s the case. But while people are talking about hate speech leveled at a woman who anonymously confesses to cheating, the cheating is secondary to a discussion about the disturbing things people have been suggesting she should be subject to as a form of revenge.
@pecunium
No, we are losers because we don’t agree with him on the immorality of cheating (even though that was never the subject as far as I can tell, sorry if I’m wrong)
He sounds very young, maybe 16 at the oldest. It’s causing me physical pain to point that out given my age has already been estaished. It’s times like this I look at my peers and the dumb things they do and want to shout “THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS”
He doesn’t understand time zones, but thinks we’re worried about his opinion of us?
Starla — if it makes you feel any better I know you said you were young, but I don’t remember how young. And I probably only remember that because it means I’m not the youngest one here 🙂
In other things, yeah, “cheating is wrong” is kind of one for captain obvious. We’re all losers for not prefacing every comment with that, every comment about how unacceptable the level of hatred and abuse this anonymous woman got from people who have nothing to do with her cheating.
hellkell — idk if it’s got my super brew coffee failing me, or what, but I can’t place GGG, what’s that an acronym of? (Fuck, that sentence is a grammatical nightmare, it’s past my bedtime >.< )
Re: Abnoy:
His comment.
Notice the way he dropped this–he was trying to pull a ‘gotcha’ about where he was from. I’d believe he was just fucking with us, fersure. He then turned it into a ‘I’m not a pedophile, I only engage in legal acts, heh heh heh.’
So I would totally buy him lying about it just as much as he lies about everything else. Certainly nothing about his participation at any point inspires me to give him the benefit of the doubt.
@thenatfantastic: they really aren’t comparable. DLColvin came in and said ‘Nifty place you have here! Oh, abused folks? Let me repeat uncritically the mainstream narrative about abused folks.’ It’s shitty, but it’s kind of a normal level of expected shitty.
@argenti
I am 20, how old are you? if you don’t mind me asking, I honestly thought you were mid thirties, you just carry yourself as a very wise person.
Oh, I fully believe he’s a lying sack of shit, except in this case, idk how much better that makes it.
Option a) he’s paid young teenagers for sex, called it love making, and finds our repulsion hilarious
Option b) he hasn’t actually had sex with young teens, he just finds our repulsion at the idea hilarious
Either way he finds the concept of having sex with *cough*raping*cough* young teens hilarious enough to try pulling a “westerners and their imperialism and pedo-panic, tsk tsk!”. I mean, given his track record it is, thankfully, likely that no minors were harmed in the making of this “joke”, but he finds pedophilia funny.
Can you tell that he’s gone from “fuck this kid is annoying” to “holy shit get it away from me mega creep alert!”?
Starla — 27, but thanks for the compliment 🙂
@Howardbann1ster I meant in the way they turn up and say a few side-eyey things but nothing you can specifically put your finger on, then BAM: ASSHOLE. I wouldn’t have been pissed off if they’d listened to why people didn’t want to be called damaged goods, but the ‘Oh no, I meant [exactly the same thing worded slightly differently], and my my my don’t you ladies all sound so terribly angry?’ is totally shitty.
I found abnoy’s comment (somehow I missed it then). Mind you he’s wrong when he says it’s the most catholic country on earth: Even if he’s right about the level of religious intrusion to secular life (not proven) Vatican City is more catholic.
But given his comments about hiring children for sex his railing about “pedo-priests” is somewhat laughable
And, a moment of Google (and if I’d been thinking I might have clued in sooner) Abnoy is a tagalog word.
thenatfantastic — funny thing is, neither LBT nor I are cis women (someone invent me a dangly bit swapper already?) — idk if anyone else said anything, probably but I’m too tired to check. But you’re right that the standard fare manspaining is probably behind that slight of hand there.
And here I had hopes ze’s listen, because ze knows more about fish keeping than me and damn!
Pecunium — that was during that conference you went to, if memory serves, I think that was posted while you were dealing with a pesky glass splinter. I know I emailed you it because you weren’t around that weekend.
“But given his comments about hiring children for sex his railing about “pedo-priests” is somewhat laughable”
I’m too stuck on the repulsive nature of his comments to get to the laughable contradiction, but maybe it’s less despicable to read it later, rather than be an active part of his disgusting rant?
Sorry Argenti, I know that, I was just imitating a clueless tone-troll.
Yeah, ABNOY disturbed me that much with that comment (and I was really hoping you’d give him one of your exquisitely crafted verbal eviserations)
And now I’m going to bed, or a nap I guess, considering my mother expects me to go grocery shopping with her when she gets off work. Whatever, sleepy time for the Argenti. G’night!
Btw, autocorrect thinks eviserations should be excise rations.
thenatfantastic — I guess I failed to convey that well in my sleepy state. I got that you were mocking the nature of the troll, I was saying it’s a step stupider than that even, as that’s just me more level of troll makes assumption, troll fails and lands on face.
I find it extra funny that the troll is attempting to tone troll, almost certainly going on the assumption that we’re all or ostly women and oh hey, not only are there plenty of men around, neither of the people (I remember) responding to him are cis women.
Seeing how I could compete with Cicero for longest most complex sentence structure, I’m going to bed for realz now. Enjoy any chew toys that may drop by!
Cool. Someone around my age. Starla is 22 and I’m 20!
Okay. I’ll be gone for a bit. I’ve gotta get in a 3 hour nap before getting up and going to work again. I swear all I do these days is work.
I’m making money, but have no time to spend it. 🙁