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 found this article at Heartless Bitches International through Sjöberg’s piece:
http://www.heartless-bitches.com/rants/niceguys/misogyny.shtml
It’s not necessarily new stuff, but it does crystallize certain things in a way I hadn’t quite thought about before.
HBI was awesome back in the day. It’s where I first read about the Nice Guy (TM), and their articles about abuse really shed some light on a relationship I had just gotten out of at the time.
One of the things that finally made me stop reading HuffPo was the swarms of NiceGuys in the comments in every. fucking. article. in the women’s section. Gods know the women’s section was crap anyway, but these arseholes, and the ones who weren’t even pretending to be “nice,” just spat their resentment of women having any sort of attention in the paper at all.
I dunno, HBI strikes me as kind of…shallow? Not that much of what they’re saying is wrong, per se, but it just seems neither as insightful nor as well-written as other sites that have said the same thing.
Also, maybe it’s because I myself have difficulty with stairs, but I didn’t like this:
Katz: possibly, but I stumbled on it in 2002, so there wasn’t exactly a wealth of that being said at the time.
This lady is an even lower piece of shit than her abusive ex. She deserves no sympathy yet this article is giving it to her. Her husband is the victim in this and he would do so much better without garbage like her.
Hey everyone, jonatma420 wants some attention. Bring snacks!
Someone needs to tell jonatma that there isn’t actually a prize for Most Boring Obvious Troll of the Year.
Now now, guys, I’m sure jonatma420 is constantly going on about how Arnold Schwarzenegger deserves to be beaten with a baseball bat because he is the lowest piece of shit in the world ever, right? I’m sure jonatma420 would not be a complete hypocrite, oh no.
“Just watch, I’ll get a rise out of those bitches,” he probably said to himself, typing. But you’re right, Kitteh. Boring as hell.
I don’t know, B_____n was allowed to hang out here for an awful long time! 😉
I guess that’s a prize in itself! 😀 I was lucky, I didn’t come on till after B—–n had been turfed.
Nice try Boring Dude. You’re going to have to up your game.
Ok, I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I wanted to say I’ve known for a while that redpillers really are the ultimate form of popped-collared polo-shirt wearing with ed hardy t-shirt underneath, orange tanned skin, blowout haired, brotastic broness. These men are truly contemptible, they’ve literally given up their entire worldview to complete and utter misogyny, but that kind of misogyny where they deny that there’s anything misogynistic about it because “hey guise, evolutionary psychology of wolves says that women actually want us to treat them like this”. Why couldn’t they just be MGTOWs and just have gone their own way instead of stealing ideas from one of my favourite movies to use as a metaphor for their disgusting, and genuinely toxic little cult.
Unfortunately, references to The Matrix are kind of a magnet for two-pence schmucks whose radical notions about women/government/whatever have already occurred to others, and been rejected, but who think they’re shaking the pillars of heaven anyway.
Sinfest did a kind of good comparison between Patriarchy and The Matrix, but it was a one-off. Dear lord, I would facepalm so hard if some group of feminists started calling themselves “the red pill crowd” or something like that. It’s so self-important.
Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain human sexual behavior. It does not seek to justify it. Natural is not the same thing as “good”, or even acceptable. Civilization requires us to control our impulses for the benefit of others(and even ourselves).
First, aworldanonymous was not talking about working scientists. He’s talking about random sexist dudes on reddit.
Second—ideally, yes. In actual practice, it too often winds up as a masturbatory exercise in “confirming” sexist tropes with “science.” Hence people criticize it as simply seeking justifications for bigotry in a shallow view of nature.
I can’t be the only one who thinks cheating isn’t the end of the world. I mean, obviously it depends on the parameters of the relationship, and maybe I’m a little more poly-leaning than a lot of folks, but I just don’t see how cheating makes a person the lowest of the low, worse than an abuser, deserving of a baseball bat to the head. Am I being insensitive to people who’ve been cheated on? I’m open to being told that I’m in the minority on this one.
I definitely don’t buy that it means the woman in the op doesn’t love her husband. And did we all miss the part where the person she cheated with used to abuse her? Are we certain ze didn’t abuse or manipulate her into sleeping with zir?
I, for one, am super duper interested in the magical color changing kaleidoscope that is the avatar of An Inconvenient Truth.
Yeah, Katz, the HBI stuff doesn’t age particularly well, but it was my first introduction to the Nice Guy ™, in sort of a proto form that would be taken by others and turned into a more developed idea. So I cut them a bit of slack due to that.
emilygoddess – the whole “worse than abuse” is typical MRA abuser apologist shit, of course. Cheating’s worse than abuse if a woman does it. Anything a woman does is worse than anything a man does; if she buys the wrong brand of deodorant for him, that’s worse than if he abused her. (Or with these guys, probably bought deodorant for him at all, since that’s obviously a misandric attack on his manly man armpits.)
On the cheating issue … too many variables. My father was a repeat offender, so I have a pretty sour view of it, and I really don’t know if I’d ever forgive someone who cheated on me. But yes, I totally agree with your point about the likelihood of this woman’s cheating with the abusive ex having been due to coercion, or him messing with her head in some way. I haven’t read the OP but I’d be willing to bet her husband, even if he knew, not taking the same attitude as these murderous MRAs. It might end the marriage, yes, but not the way they’d fantasise.
@emilygoddess
I would personally agree with you that cheating is nowhere near as bad as abuse, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s the sex with someone else itself that bothers people about it, rather the elements of dishonesty and betrayal that surround it.
@emilygoddess, My first thought involved the ex manipulating/coercing/pressuring her as well. I suppose I could go and brave reddit to try and see if there’re more details.
freitag: He’s one of those who think that women never, ever have problems getting a date, but somehow he thinks that they will still eagerly sign up to go on a blind date with someone like him.
How do you hold these ideas at the same time?
He doesn’t. He figures women who are unemployed will do it for the money. Then they will be required to “show some commitment” (he insists he doesn’t mean they have to put out), or they will be fired, and paid nothing.
This isn’t coercion, no, not at all, after all, at least one of the 30 guys whom they meet through this gov’t agency, will have to be nice enough to be worth establishing a relationship.
katz: Emma the Emo comments there.