By David Futrelle
So a young gentleman turned to the Am I The Asshole subreddit today with a simple question that, at first glance would seem to have a simple answer: “[Am I The Asshole] for intentionally sending my mom a dick pic to prove a point?”
Oh dear. Obviously, unless you’re literally a modern day Oedipus who doesn’t know that your mother is your mother, there’s pretty much no circumstance in which sending a picture of your erect penis to your mother makes you anything but an asshole. So yes, he is by definition an asshole. But is he the asshole?
That’s where things get complicated.
So let’s wade into these murky depths.
I know, i Know. Hear me out.
I’m currently 20, going to college, and live a hour away from my parents. My mom has always been invasive. Living at home I had no privacy. She would always want to see what was on my phone, pc, laptop, etc. She insisted on me not having a lock on my room door and would barge in when ever and when ever. Now that I live on my own, this has only gotten worse. She demands to know everything i’m doing and stalks me on any social media she can find.
Holy crap. That’s not just invasive; it’s abusive.
I went home for christmas and during that time she found out through my sister that i’ve been seeing a girl on campus and have not told her. She has not stopped invading my life since and has demanded all the information she could get on her. I didn’t give her anything and did not let her look at my texts when she demanded to see them. Now that I’m back on campus she’s only ramped up.
It just gets worse.
Last night she called me prodding for more, and eventually she started to accuse me of “illicit” behavior with my girlfriend. She claims that “If i can’t show my mother my texts, then I shouldn’t be sending them”. My mom decided to lecture me for half an hour last night. I had enough and said I would send her a full log of our texts. After I hung up though, I sent my mom a picture of my erect penis and turned my phone of do not disturb.
Needless to say, his mother was not pleased.
I only just barley [sic] checked my phone and she had called me over 10 times last night and sent over 50 texts. My dad and sisters also blew me up with texts calling me an asshole.. I just called my dad and he said that it was way out of line and that i’m a major asshole. My mom left me multiple voice mails crying and saying that she went wrong while calling me a degenerate.
A bit excessive, but then again what on earth did he expect?
At this point our, er, hero then asks the assembled Redditors for a ruling on his behavior.
Honestly. she wanted this. She already assumed my texts had dick pics so I just gave her what she wanted. AITA?
Well, yes, you’re being a huge asshole. Sending anyone an unsolicited dick pic is asshole behavior. But sending one to your mom? Off the charts, asshole-wise.
But at the same time he’s right about one thing: she was demanding to see texts that she presumably knew would contain dick pics and other “illicit” material. So had he given into her demands, she would have seen the pic and perhaps even worse.
So I think it’s fair to say, in the parlance of the AITA subreddit, that this is an “Everyone Sucks Here” situation. And that, given her ongoing invasive and abusive behavior, the mother is the biggest asshole of these two big assholes.
Also, everyone in the family should immediately go into therapy, because holy crap.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @AITA_reddit for featuring this lovely post
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Am I alone in wondering what the point was that this, erm, fellow was attempting to prove with this maternal dick-pic?
As horrid as his mother’s behavior was, he is definitely the bigger asshole. Not even close.
My thoughts:
1. Boy shouldn’t have sent dick pic to his mom. Sending unsolicited sexts is not OK. I in no way endorse or excuse his behavior.
2. Mother sounds quite abusive and controlling. What she did to her son by violating his privacy and harassing him wasn’t OK either. Not excusing that either.
3. Sending dick pics to mothers to prove a point is not OK.
Verdict: son shouldn’t have sent the picture, mother is abusive, everyone sucks here. I concur with David. And it looks like most of the commenters reached that conclusion as well.
Though if I had to pick the bigger asshole, I’d say the son. Sexual harassment (which I would say this constitutes) is not OK.
Prob not alone, but I thought it was pretty understandable.
Your mom is incensed she doesn’t know what you’re doing with the person you’re dating and suspects the worst – horrifying things involving naked bodies.
You are (actually quite reasonably) trying to insist on your privacy. Maybe you’re not having sex with your dating partner, maybe you’re not, but either way your mom is assuming the worst of you, and demands to see what she believes is the worst of you.
You’re freaked out, because what will mom do if she actually sees the worst of you? Plus, fuck her and her abusive invasiveness.
So, as a defensive measure, you send her the worst of you — because if you send her something worse than anything that’s actually in your chat/text history, then if she ever breaks into your phone or browbeats you into unlocking it, she can’t see anything worse than what she’s already seen, right?
I had an abusive mom (I have to admit that she got better, though I don’t think I’ll ever be really over it), and I totally understand the impulse I’m describing (even if I’m not 100% sure that’s what this person actually felt). Tell your abusive parent the worst and take whatever your parent dishes out and you can be much, much less afraid going forward, because you finally have a good idea what the “worst” is going to be and that you can survive it.
So, your mom is looking for the worst of you, and you show it to her, and hopefully the anxiety ends, or at least goes down by quite a lot.
This is my guess at what’s going on for that person, though I have to admit that when I showed my mom the “worst” of me all I did was skip school to ride my bicycle around town and then go eat oreos in the attic (my teenage rebellions were the patheticest).
God, she sounds awful. Agree @Crip Dyke – this is an understandable reaction. He’s human. He snapped under what seems to be unbearable pressure. I only hope he has the good fortune to break away from her altogether. She sounds like a horrible control freak.
@Amy E
I agree, this is probably the best solution if possible.
i’m with crip dyke on this, especially since this abuse was going on for years & years.
I wonder if he was hoping that this would precipitate a break: he does the worst thing he can think of in the circumstances, in the hope that his parents say “we want no further contact with you”. Given that he’s still at college, that may be very difficult for him, though.
@jsrtheta & naglfar:
and
I really don’t think that you understand the power of child abuse. Yes, the child is an adult child of that abusive parent, but they are still vulnerable to the coercive power of the parent in so-many-ways.
And, yes, it’s sexual harassment to tell people that they aren’t allowed to have a private sex life and insist on hearing every detail of every sexual relationship. It is BEYOND fucked up. This is shit that scars you for life.
Don’t neglect the power dynamics here. Disproportionate self defense is not as bad as attacking in the first place. Punching up is not as bad as punching down. When there is ongoing child abuse by a parent, the fact that the child sometimes reacts badly to the abuse is the fault of the parent.
After all, you might be appropriately critical of this young man’s disrespect of reasonable boundaries, but who the fuck was supposed to teach this guy about boundaries in the first place?
Look, the actual story could be different than the single side of the story we hear about here. But from everything we hear about here, the mom is DEFINITELY the bigger asshole. Not even close.
As an aside, consider this story from my own childhood:
My little sister (4 years younger, and about 7-8 at the time) decided that she would play the game of trying to punch me in the genitals. Why? Who the fuck knows. Kids do stupid things. I told her not to. I begged her not to. I deflected her hands. I curled up to protect myself. I yelled at her to go away. Then I relaxed a moment when i thought she was going to go away and WHAM she hit me square in the genitals.
IT HURT LIKE FUCK.
I made a conscious decision – don’t minimize that – but I didn’t think about it. I didn’t have this great mental process about what was a good idea and what wasn’t. I made a decision in far less than a second, but I made the decision to punch her back and punched her in the stomach.
Immediately she made a shocked face like she couldn’t believe that I would actually hit her (and I’m sure it was surprising, because I was the least violent of the three kids in a family that had learned violence from a pretty violent mother). It hurt her, I’m sure, but she wasn’t so hurt she couldn’t immediately run upstairs to fetch my new almost-step dad (he’d moved in just a couple months before, but hadn’t married my mom yet).
My step-dad came thundering down the steps. I’d never heard the steps make noise like that. I was terrified. SD came in, loomed over me and loudly demanded to know if I’d hit my sister and what the fuck was I thinking because HOLY FUCKBALLS didn’t I know that I was stronger and could really hurt her and was older and was supposed to know that you just don’t do that?
I told him that she had been purposely attacking my genitals, and that when she finally hit them, I did indeed lash out back, hitting her in the stomach.
He turned to my little sister and asked her if this was true. She shrank back, obviously embarrassed and unable to figure out what to say.
SD took a breath, turned around, and walked up the stairs without saying anything more to anyone.
I’m not saying that it was **right** to punch my little sister, who was smaller than me and who didn’t have as much brain development to understand right and wrong. But was I the bigger asshole in that situation? Was my step dad wrong to leave the room without punishing me?
Now imagine my little sister being my mom, with more brain development, more ability to know right from wrong. Imagine she’s been abusive for YEARS (because you know that the behavior the OP describes doesn’t just show up suddenly for a week and then disappear – if it was a pattern for this significant period of time, then abusive intrusiveness and violating boundaries was a pattern for years). Further imagine that this is the person who is literally teaching you right from wrong.
I get that my sister was 8. I don’t think I was the bigger asshole in that situation. It’s not like I planned out revenge, I reacted. Sure, there was some conscious thought in there, and you can critique my decision and say that punching my sister in the belly was wrong, but I did my absolute best to avoid exactly the kind of outcome that occurred. I pulled away. I tried to isolate myself. Nothing worked. She didn’t go away. She was hurting me and I had no expectation that she was going to stop hurting me. My behavior, even though punching = punching constituted an escalation because of my extra 4 years of growth so even though punching = punching, my punching >> my sister’s punching. (Though perhaps it was only a small escalation, because she engaged in repeated punching targeting my genitals, not one-time in a less vulnerable area …but still, it was probably an escalation.)
My sister created that situation. She had all the information she needed to cut that shit out. She pushed the situation forward into crisis.
The mom in this story created the situation. She had all the information she needed to cut that shit out. She pushed the situation forward into crisis. And she was the parent.
No, in a real life situation that is actually like the story here, the parent is to blame. The parent is by far the bigger asshole.
You don’t want to have the responsibility for teaching kids right from wrong? You don’t want to be triggered by horrible thoughts that your kids might have their own lives, independent of your control?
DON’T FUCKING HAVE CHILDREN.
Honestly, the most fucked up part of this whole thing for me is that David doesn’t report that anyone recommended this young person seek out help for people being abused.
David, please, if you can still comment over there, bring up the issue of child abuse and how patterns of dominance and submission and abuse can easily carry over into young adulthood. Link some resources for adults abused as children (there are many). Let that person know that even if they made a fucked up choice, they really, really don’t deserve that shit and it’s really unhealthy and they deserve better.
Seriously, if someone was telling me that a boss at work was yelling at them trying to get them to let the boss see their intimate conversations with their dating partners, and kept up that behavior for weeks, and then finally the employee snapped and sent a genital pick hoping to shock the boss into leaving them the fuck alone, would any of us here say that the employee was the bigger asshole?
Why are you making excuses for a parent?
UGH. This whole thing triggers the fuck out of me. Abuse victims don’t need to handle their abuse perfectly in order to receive help, and they certainly don’t need to handle their abuse perfectly in order to not be the bigger asshole.
I’m sorry everyone. I finished typing up the long thing and then saw people agreeing with me (whose comments weren’t up when I started typing that rant).
It was just that when I started typing that thing, there were only people saying that the kid was the bigger asshole and that just freaked me out. I fully admit to being triggered, and if I went overboard in my rant, I’m sorry.
Ugh. This kind of situation doesn’t usually end without death or outside intervention.
Even when the “break” finally happens, it won’t last. Eventually it gets to the stage of “come back and let your parent abuse you because it makes them happy, and also it’s not actually abuse because it makes them happy. What? You don’t want to? You are a horrible person and will do it anyway.” And even later, the attempted kidnapping of your children…
I mean, if it is that bad, then the poor dude *really* needs counseling.
Not speaking from firsthand experience, thankfully, but I’ve known people in that kind of nightmare.
@Crip Dyke
That gives me a different perspective. I hadn’t really thought of the situation that way and now I see that the mother was more at fault there. Thank you for taking the time to explain the situation and form an analogy.
I’m sorry you suffered and I’m sorry if my earlier comment was inappropriate or triggering.
@Crip Dyke:
The reason why people like that have children is absolute control. It doesn’t matter what kind of control or what effect it has on their kids, or even that their kids will pretty much have to be independent some day, what matters is keeping that control as long as they can. Most of them are shocked to find that their kids are leaving them, that’s just inconceivable. They worked so hard to keep them from becoming independent. When the control is no longer possible, and all attempts to reassert it has failed, their children become just meat sacks for spawning replacement kids.
My mother had the same “no closed doors/I can enter your room anytime” policy and the same “no private communications” policy.
She gave away or sold some of my possessions because she didn’t really see them as being mine.
She demanded detailed accounts of everything in my life, but conveniently forgot to tell me things that were important to me, such as the time my cat was killed by coyotes while I was at college. I didn’t find out until I went home, my cat didn’t greet me, and I asked where she was.
She sabotaged my dream career path that I worked towards for years, completely changing the course of my life.
And yet, despite all of this and more, I have never sexually harassed her in return.
The guy is twenty. He can grow up and handle the situation like an adult: without dick pics.
@Crip Dyke, thanks for your posts here. You’ve already covered everything I wanted to, and much more eloquently than I would have 🙂
People need to look beyond the dick pic. Parents who attempt to control every aspect of their kids’ lives, and repeatedly expect the worst of them, are abusive, and do lifetime damage. I can attest to this and it’s why I try so hard not to do it with my son.
You don’t need to condone what this guy did, but he is not the main offender here, not even close.
Holidays and family dysfunction go together like something and something.
P.S., I agree with Mish and Crip Dyke. Controlling behavior is abusive. Too many people don’t seem to understand that.
Well, I don’t know what happened to the edit function, but I was specifically referring to controlling behavior by parents.
Re: Crip Dyke’s long post,
Totally agree about the power dynamics and the danger of lasting damage from being an invasive parent.
It’s vaguely reminding me of my mom, who tried desperately for many years of my childhood to “cure” a mental illness I have through aggressive behavioral correction. There were definitely times I pushed against that by “showing my worst,” as it were, with regards to the mental illness.
nthing agreement with Crip Dyke.
Reminds me of how my great grandmother was to my grandmother. The woman had her out of wed lock and became obsessed with her daughter not doing that. She tracked my grandmother’s menstrual cycle the second she had it. Took doors off the bedroom and the bathroom when my grandmother started developing. And if my grandmother hate a late or missed peirod which is normal for young girls that are getting their cycles regulated my great grandmother would call her horrible names. Accuse her of doing stuff with any and ever boy that was remotely in her life and would have my great grandfather beat her with a belt. As a result my grandmother was very repess sexually and couldn’t even explain puberty to my mother when she went through it. She bought her a book and signed a parent permisson form for health class. She would never talk to my mom about anything with her body. She even would get upset with my mom if she breast feed in public.
I really hope this guy can get out of this abuse he’s in. It seems like he has no safe person in his family. Not even his own sister.
Yeah, I think Crip Dyke basically nailed it.
The son is AN asshole. But, his mom’s definitely THE asshole. I just hope they get the help they need, because… yikes.
… is it wrong that I think this all would be a lot simpler if he’d just sent a pic of someone else’s dick ?
Joke aside though, seconding everything about parental abuse will drive you to weird ends – and the further out of line the behaviors you have to deal with get, the less of an actual grasp you have on where the line is.
@Crip Dyke
I might have developed earlier in some areas as a child, but I’d have thought by 8 it was common knowledge NOT to hit someone, let alone a sensitive area.
At 8 I knew exactly what right and wrong was.
But again, you did mention your horrible mother and I assume nobody taught your sister not to do that.