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.
@cloudiah
I can’t stop laughing at this!! And the icing on this delicious red velvet cake is that this is straight from the paranoid fantasies from the MRM that David used to blog about back in the day!! The image of the more paranoid MRAs’ reactions to this has me in stitches!
@DColvin
Yeah, like Hellkell said, he wasn’t looking for sex workers, I can’t really remember why. My shaky memory of it is that sex workers aren’t going to have any intention of becoming girlfriends, but I could be confusing him with some other incel troll (we’ve had our share)
Re: cheating
I’m generally of the “if you cheat on me more than once then I’m an idiot if I trust you not to cheat on me again” school (the administration has already hired someone to come up with a better name for it). Based off what she wrote, I would consider her actions to be that of a really shit partner, even though she may love her husband. Still, being a shit partner doesn’t deserve that level of vitriol obviously, especially on a board for confessions.
Fast-setting and in a Lego mould.
“May you need a plaster of paris enema.”
Mixed by me, as I fail miserably at making a smooth mix and end up with sharp air bubble edges all over the place!
And seriously? He should probably leave, or at least get marriage counseling, but that’s their problem, not the internet’s. That level of vitirol in a supposedly safe space is simply unacceptable (fuck, “you should shoot yourself” is unacceptable in any space!)
RE Cheating, I don’t like it, and would consider it grounds for ending a relationship. Grounds for going after someone with a baseball bat? No. I don’t care how upset you are, you don’t get to beat people up.
RE: lightcastle
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)
Yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to equate the two. In my case, poly would be a big nasty mess for me, for similar reasons to cheating, but that’s because of ME, not because the two things resemble each other. Because they don’t.
In case any one wonders, plaster of paris enemas are a medial treatment; meant to prevent invasive surgery/resecting the lower portion of the descending colon. The guy who invented them got a prize.
One almost always gets them for being stupid, they are almost always a self-caused problem.
They do, however, give a different gloss on the phrase, “shit a brick.”
Re poly: there are as many ways to do it as there are people doing it. Cheating is still very possible, it’s just that what defines cheating is idiosyncratic to the people involved.
She is responsible for her own choices and actions. Tho she is scum I don’t agree with the physically threatening comments on the thread. What she did was despicable and I would still feel the same if the genders were reversed. “He would always tell me shitty things about my husband, and he liked being the other guy, as fucked up as that is.” Yes, and it’s even more fucked up,disgusting and inhuman that she would suck him off after he would talk that shit. Her loser ex now has something to gloat and joke about with his pathetic friends as he shows them family portraits of her and her poor husband. Abused or not, she still made the choice out of her own free will to do this WITH the scumbag who abused her. She deserves no sympathy. I’m sorry If this doesn’t entertain you people enough, but this is is about action and consequence. Don’t just put all the blame one the one with the penis.
To me, the woman in the article is damaged goods. With an an abusive ex, plus who knows what abuse she had as a child to find that behavior attractive in any way.
She did not deserve the filth up there on top of her major psycho issues. But then , it IS the internets. The gathering of scum and villainy and all. what did she really expect?
Personally, I would not seek advice as she did. The net is public after all. Sorta like how there are certain places that I wouldn’t walk alone at night through. At least without a big ass knife or something similarly pointy, that is.
I’m a bit miffed at her whiney tone. Yeah she cheated. Own it then, and stop the bad behavior.
Just how I roll.
Still boring pecunium. Try harder
Duder, I’m going to try to explain this to you so simply that even you can understand. No one is blaming her husband. One person wondered if maybe her abusive ex might have manipulated her. Several people DID in fact criticize the woman for cheating. But who was to blame for the cheating really wasn’t the focus of this post of the comments. The focus was on the appalling, violent misogyny of MRAs who went after her viciously in a place where that wasn’t supposed to happen. Your response is, basically, the misogyny was deserved.
I am willing to bet good money that you weren’t motivated to leave similar remarks attacking Schwarzenegger, because you are clearly a garden-variety misogynist who believes that women should always be punished more harshly than men for the same transgressions.
Yanno what jon, I think people who call other people scum need to rethink just what it is that qualifies them to judge a stranger on the interwebs.
Would feel the same. So lets see you going on about Vitter, and Arnie, and all the other men who are known to have cheated.
And she does deserve sympathy; because what has been done to her is horrible.
That you don’t see that speaks volumes. It says more about you than you have said about it.
Who has blamed “the one with the penis” for anything (assuming by this you mean the partner she was unfaithful to. I blame the one’s with the penes for what they said to her).
You are projecting your idea that we think there is nothing wrong with what she did, because we don’t think that she deserves the abuse you are praising, what with the apologia (“this is about action and consequence”).
We do think it terrible there has been no consequence for the actions of the shitbirds who were abusing her. But that is contrary to the narrative you see, where her being less than perfect means she ought to be pilloried and abused, just because you have issues.
RE: DLColvin
To me, the woman in the article is damaged goods. With an an abusive ex, plus who knows what abuse she had as a child to find that behavior attractive in any way.
Fuck off, dude. She did douchey shit, but that makes her a douche, not damaged goods. I got abused too and took a while to understand how non-abusive people treat you; it didn’t make me damaged goods.
RE: jonatma
We aren’t talking about that, though. We’re talking about the douches on the Internet. There are plenty of people already talking about her douchey behavior; go talk about it there. See the tagline? “Misogyny. We mock it.” It’s what we’re HERE for.
Do you go to football games and demand they discuss rugby?
“Still boring pecunium. Try harder”
Please do, as Cassandra very politely requested I not talk about the plague.
For those keeping score, this is yet another example of “consequences” meaning “arbitrary punishment meted out to women by men.” Misters are very predictable.
What’s news to me, though, is that doing a bad thing now means you’re no longer human.
Her action was to make a confession in a space purported to be safe for confessions. The consequence was misogynists like jon the troll verbally abusing her and telling her to die. That kind of abuse is not welcome here Jon the troll. Go away.
Tulgey, That depends on HOW bad a thing you do.
WTF? damaged goods? She is not a commercially available product. She is a human being.
Actually, without the all important comma, I read this as troll’s note to self that he was still boring pecunium and would need to try harder. 😉
Jonny Weedeater: Still boring pecunium.
Why yes, you are.
Oh, wait… did you think I was trying to entertain you? Shit son, you need to look at the header and see if it has a section which says, “amuse synaptically challenged, morally deficient idiots who have stuffed their heads so far up their ass the world can see it again (sort of the reverse of the magician who pulls his foreskin over his head and disappears).
Because trust me, you aren’t whom I’m trying to amuse.
If you’d like you can poll the crowd for their opinion.
Okay, so if cheating means you no longer deserve any sympathy from anyone about anything ever, what does theft get you? Shot out of a cannon into the Sun?
Consequences, sure. A reasonable consequence for cheating would be something like your partner deciding that they don’t want to be with you any more. It’s the introduction of requests for suicide and fantasies about baseball bats that took things into oh hell no territory.
So cheating makes you no longer human. But telling a woman they should be violently assaulted with a baseball bat, and then kill themselves, that’s just reasonable corrective action, right?
Sigh, dude, you’re not even making this a challenge for us. Try to be smarter.