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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.
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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.
@katz
Sorry for doubleposting, but HBI kind of holds a bit of nostalgia as it was one of the major factors in my ceasing of being a Nice Guy[tm]. Though I’ll agree a lot of the advice there seems a bit overly specific and problematic. But being able to filter through the bad bits to the genuinely positive stuff was one of the big things that set me on the path to who I am today.
OK, just went and read the OP. She cheated the first couple of years of the relationship. Basically, the ex was her obsession, she knew he was bad news, but still had that whole, “I so want them to pay attention to me!” thing. (Run hot and cold, don’t be consistent about affection but really intense with it when you do, and lots of people get hooked on you. It’s the same psychology as slot machines.) Eventually she realized it was BS and she broke it off, but the fact it took her so long to do so makes her feel guilty.
I agree with you, but I can understand why it would be a dealbreaker for most people.
If cheating is part of an overall pattern of abuse, that’s definitely NOT OK.
pecunium – makes you wonder if all unemployed, young, single women are to be forced into this. Because even if it wasn’t pushing rape, what about the women who don’t want to date or have a relationship or sex with men, ever?
I suppose they don’t exist in this disgusting little gobshite’s world.
RE: emilygoddess
I actually have a major thing about cheating due to personal insecurities. I would be the worst poly person ever. And for me, cheating WOULD be grounds for immediate relationship or marriage termination, though I would be willing to talk about it and hear my partner out. But I wouldn’t fucking BASEBALL BAT him.
I admit to not taking a high opinion of the woman in the OP, and I hatehateHATE the excuse of “I was in love.” But you know, she’s a stranger on the Internet, and it’s not really my business to wish her personal harm or troll her. What happened is between her, her partner, and her ex. However I feel about her, trolling isn’t of interest to me.
Still a low opinion of her, though.
@emily: You are not alone in thinking that. Cheating is not the end of the world. I mean, it’s not *nice* to be lying to your partner and abusing their trust, but there are suitable punishments for it – eg no longer being in the relationship, not being trusted by other people, etc. It’s more complicated of course if you expose your partner to STDs, but at no point does a cheater deserve physical punishment.
lightcastle – kudos for doing the dirty work. Sounds like that poor woman was well and truly fucked over by the ex.
Here’s some brain bleach:
http://youtu.be/xx3J-oUs_0A
Actually I wasn’t trolling, I wanted to see if anyone would show any sympathy for her husband instead of undeserved sympathy for her. Please show me a comment that does if I missed it. And whats up with that Arnold Schwarzenegger comment? I Don’t think any better of him for cheating if that’s what the comment was even about. Please people, Your are now boring ME, just go back to eating your snacks.
Kitteh’s: It’s not just women. He as sought out two of my blogs to make comments to me. One of them was prefaced with, “I don’t want to comment to you but…”
He also referenced me in a blog post (IIRC). I did a fire and forget session to let him know what I thought.
boring troll is still boring
The post here is about how this woman is getting a near-constant wave of abuse and nastiness, just because of a confession she put online. No one deserves the kind of abuse she’s been getting.
Sympathy for her husband doesn’t come into it.
Boring Troll I Can’t Be Assed to Name: you ARE the snack.
Boring, and also obtuse. He kind of didn’t get the point of this blog post, which wasn’t about defending the woman but about critiquing misogyny — and then didn’t get the point of the Schwarzenegger comment. Sigh. We need smarter trolls.
Boring Troll I Can’t Be Assed to Name: you ARE the snack.
That picture is terrifying…
Actually I wasn’t trolling, I wanted to see if anyone would show any sympathy for her husband instead of undeserved sympathy for her. Please show me a comment that does if I missed it.
Show me why this sympathy for what happened to her is undeserved? Show me where sympathy for what happened to her means discounting her behavior.
You were trolling. You did it by comparing their plights.
That’s bullshit. Show me that he has suffered. Show me that he knows? Show me that her cheating is, objectively, worse than the things done to her in that thread.
Do you think Arnie is just as bad and evil as those posters said she is?
You’re a troll, self admitted.
palmedfire – yeah, and it’s just the sort of critter I imagned when I read hellkell’s comment!
Kitteh’s: that pic is going to give me nightmares.
I could try being a troll, but I don’t think I could keep up the act for very long, and I’d probably get too caught up in the sarcasm.
“Sounds like that poor woman was well and truly fucked over by the ex. ”
Excuse me……… Are you serious? Was that comment actually serious? Is your head really THAT far up your ass? Really???
What part of “abusive ex” do you not understand? Yes, I pity her husband, but she has been in an abusive relationship, and now when she confesses to cheating she has a mob of men saying she should be beaten and abused still more.
If you can’t see anything wrong with that, anything deserving of compassion, I’d guess it’s because you’re an abuser or abuse apologist yourself.
@Kittehs’UnpaidHelp — I think that last pic undead all the brain bleach from the Corgis.
And I’m just going to put “OK with cheating” and “Poly” on separate axes, personally. As many problems as I have with “Capital P Poly”, the premise is multiple loves/lack of exclusivity, not “it’s ok to cheat” (at least, not officially)
Is that cat part gremlin?
New troll is not very nommy, he’s all gristle.
Oooo… A rex kitty. At least I think it’s a rex.
jonatma: Is your head really THAT far up your ass? Really???
Did you, someone apparently able to see daylight out your neck seriously ask that question?
Someone who thinks the abuse piled onto that woman, in a space which is declared safe for one and all, is somehow fair because you disagree with what she did?
Asshole much? Yes, 24 carat, and diamond studded. May you need a plaster of paris enema.