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 don’t know exactly what The Kittehs’ Unpaid Help meant when she said that ConfessThySins was fucked over by her Ex, but even if I did think she meant that ConfessThySins was somehow not responsible for her actions, the proper moderation of that view is not “she’s inhuman scum who deserves no sympathy, ever.”
Guess what, Douchecanoe420. This thread is about the very same misogynistic reaction that you’re displaying.
So basically when we detain suspected terrorists, they should be treated like all other arrestees? Due process, speedy trial, no cruel or unusual punishment, all that?
Unless it isn’t crime at all but a standard sort of act when resisting an invading army (which we are, whether my favorite asshat likes it or not)
And they, and everyone else in the countries we’re occupying, have certain Geneva protections? I’m guessing things like rations, housing, not fucking torturing them.
How the fuck do I begin to explain this to my racist asshat of a father? I’m so very sick of him ranting about how everyone in the countries we’re occupying are either terrorists, or terrorists in the making (yeah, by us [insert derision here])
Jon, you’re still boring, but…anyhoo —
Did someone cheat on you? So sorry, but stop projecting. You’re a teenager, aren’t you? Nevermind, you don’t have to answer that. You seem pissed that we think the online abuse the woman recieved was, among other things, unseemly and hateful. Why does this bother you? Angry mobs — even if online, can be disturbing. In other cultures, this woman would have been stoned. There are hints of this kind of overreactive rage online when women commit adultry or say, talk too much. It’s worth thinking about.
pecunium:I think her ex is scum too. I may seem that my anger is more harsh towards her but that is because she has allowed him to get away with this.
Jonny weedeater? that’s cute. Are trying that now instead of the “head up your ass” thing?
You may be familiar with the phrase “it takes two to tango”, yes? Well, it takes two to cheat as well.
I sure am getting a lot of responses for being “boring”.
@jonatma
And how, pray tell, is she at fault for him being abusive and manipulative? Since when is being a victim of abuse allowing the abuser to “get away with it”
Oh no, you don’t get to pretend to be moderate with a late-breaking “Hey, I think the ex is equally bad.” You don’t. This is all about your reaction to her, and how terrible it is that we have a problem with people calling for her to be violently assaulted and then kill herself. That makes us worse, apparently, than the people calling for violence against her.
Own your words, troll. You are outclassed here.
jonny weedeater: I blame the one’s with the penes[how THEY spelled that] for what they said to her).”
There was a mistake in there, you missed it. I should have written, ones’. Mea culpa.
But penis is latin. It’s a third declension noun (note the is ending, rather than the us which people tend to assume = Latin. As such the plural is es not i. I understand your confusion. Modern education tends to be lacking (and my mistyping of the plural possessive may have confused you; though the comma problem above [about which I was so thoroughly ninja’ed] does imply that true facility with English {I presume it to be your native tongue, yes? Please inform if this is not the case, as it could make for some allowances in the complexity of what I presume you to be able to comprehend} is somewhat less than complete.).
That there are other words which Latin borrowed from the Greek (such as radius) which have the plural of ii because the adopted more than just the root. And others, such as octopus confused, because they were, unlike radius, adopted from the Greek, but morphed into the latinate declension. So the plural of octopus is not octopi (as it would appear from the ending) but octopode.
Then we have modern uses of words like virus which was a mass noun, and as such was uncountable, and had no plural (if you wish to make a Greek [or Russian] speaker acquire a pained expression ask them for the plural of κόσμος/Ко́смос).
I trust that made things clearer for you and hope it will prove useful to you in your future endeavours.
As he is quite boring, besides Pecunium, who’s surely heard me say this before, how many of y’all realized that Pol Pot’s prisons used fundamentally the same torture techniques as Abu Ghraib? Except, afaik, Pol Pot didn’t tolerate sexual assault of his prisoners, and the US did…
Not trying to downplay Pol Pot’s evil, but fuck, wtf are we doing managing to fuck up badly enough for that comparison to be remotely valid?!
OK, OK, OK, jon, calm down…you’re not exactly good at banter. We’ve had better, trust me.
Correction. The plural of octopus is octopodes. I failed to type the ‘s’, and don’t wish you to make mistakes as a result of my tutelage. I will leave that to your own efforts.
Speaking of Pol Pot, many people don’t know that the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records of their own crimes, which they tried to destroy when their government was collapsing. But a large stash was uncovered being used to wrap meat in a butcher shop, and archivists swooped in to preserve them.
Yay, archivists.
I think the answer is “racism”. Attitudes towards both the race and the religion of the detainees were part of that whole mess.
To tie this back in to the current conversation, human beings tend to find it easier to mistreat people who they’ve been taught to see as “inhuman”.
I thought we figured out that octopodes isn’t right either? That aside, the -ii is because English fails to have a -ī (I don’t really care, beyond my elation at my iPad having such things)
And I need to check this, but I think virus is fourth declension, which would make -us both the singular and plural ending (well, for the normative anyways).
Also, by all the gods, of all the things to pick up from my writing you picked the parentheticals? I know you do it yourself but fuck even I had trouble following that and I’ve been known to nest them four deep!
Ok, off to check virus, one moment!
Virus is apparently tot Classical Latin as Wheelock’s does not have it, this is going to take a minute!
Per OED, octopuses and octopi are acceptable plurals; octopodes is a rare British variant.
Anyway, Shiraz I actually like your comment. No, that’s not sarcasm, I really do, because other than just jumping to insults like the others you are actually ASKING someone with a different opinion how they feel. I’ve been waiting for that ever since I got on this post. I think the violent threats made against her were WRONG. I guess I did get off the subject when I stated my unsavory opinion about her. I just feel very sad for her husband and how her keeping this secret from him will make him look foolish and ignorant. To a piece of shit like her ex this the most amusing thing ever. Though I could be wrong it feels like she is trying to play the role of the victim in her post. Many people(not just MRA’s) feel disgusted by this. Her husband is the victim in this. Thank you Shiraz, that was very mature of you.
‘Twas incorrect, virus is first declension and thus would be virī if it had a plural (as it is, virī is the genative form, ie of the virus // the virus’s [thing, symptom, whatever])
/Latin pedantry
jonny weedeater: It’s implied in your handle. It’s not “trying that now”. The one was insult, the other is derision. The difference isn’t that subtle. Mind you the level of quick on the uptake you aren’t showing is pretty good. It took four comments for you to notice.
The distance I said you’d stuffed your head up your ass only took two.
I think her ex is scum too. I may seem that my anger is more harsh towards her but that is because she has allowed him to get away with this.
Allowed? I could have sworn it took two to tango. If you think he’s scum you must be assuming he knew she was involved. He had the option of not having anything to do with it. The implication from her post is that he was more than willing.
Which means any blame is equal. You, however, ignored that until called on it.
You also haven’t explained the whole thing about how the loss of humanity scales. After all, cheating on someone is a moral failing, but it’s not a crime. Not like rape.
So how much less human than a cheater is a rapist?
“Yay, archivists.” Indeed!
Cassandra — oh fuck yeah it’s racism, that’s my father’d bread and butter. I was just hoping I could maybe get him to STFU on this one topic since it has a clear factual answer and no/little room for opinion.
Shiraz — apparently you were the only one to mention the threats she got and how her husband was wronged, congrats on managing to get through to jonatma what the rest of us couldn’t.
Being sad for one person doesn’t automatically lead to dehumanizing the person who (hypothetically, since he doesn’t know) made them sad.
DL Colvin –
You were wise to bow out when you did. Less wise to suggest that we’re being angry just to be angry. A piece of honest and well-meant advice to you: never say that to liberal activists of any kind, especially not feminists. Women and other non-privileged groups get their concerns casually dismissed all the time. If you do it in their space, you will not get a good reaction.
Another honest and well-meant piece of advice: I have never, ever heard “damaged goods” used the way you say you intended it. I have only ever heard it used to imply that someone was worth less for some reason – either because they weren’t in “factory new” condition anymore, or they were “malfunctioning” in some way. This will not earn you a good reaction either.
Wow, guys, jonama was just waiting for you to ask to share his feelings on the subject (except in regards to how he feels about evil cheating non-penis owner). If he appears to have a hostile tone you have no one to blame but yourselves for not realizing he needed prompting to get that particular opinion out of him. I guess you are the bad guys here, not jonmomissues.
Argenti: trust me, my parenthetical nesting isn’t from you. It’s long been the bane of my writing.
The existence of каторйи in Russian was a godsend to my speaking. I wish English had such a word.