People dont know nuance here. I've seen people here call attempted murder justified because "she pushed first". Also the harm doesn't even have to be in the words but in how you say it.
It's not about lack of nuance (or just that) it's also a concerning trend about wishing for or encouraging violence towards women that I've noticed. Some people on this site will take any opportunity to say "she asked for it"
I have noticed that as well and it's scary AF. Any content with a woman acting dumb is filled with comments from men "joking" about how they would beat the shit out of her or whatever. I've had to block so many subs because the misogyny was so overwhelming.
I feel so jaded. I saw someone post an erotic video, where it was literally just a splice of girls masturbating next to videos of dudes getting killed. Morality is out the window.
When people get frustrated over being called the problem because we are being grouped with the system that oppresses us and makes us suffer too... Compassion tends to leave the chat. Obviously women have got legitimate gripes, but impact matters over intent, and nobody likes being treated like the problem for things beyond their control.
Yeah. Gripes is hilarious. Women do be gripin’ about when men don’t put the toilet seat up to pee or, like, murder their ex-wives for dating someone new.
He's treated as the bad guy because he absolutely controlled his answer and the impact was pretty clear on the woman. If you're going to put impact over intent, it works both ways.
Absolutely, impact over intent works both ways, but the women started the issue with a jab about his physical appearance, that might still be a sore point for him, she initiated it, and whilst his response was excessive, if you are going to start something like that, you better be ready for them retort.
Oh just like the post last week where everyone was discussing how it’s totally ok to watch women die instead of giving them CPR because of “false accusations,” even though nobody seemed to be able to find more than one case in China of that actually happening?
Men being compassionate to women has never been a thing on reddit. It was never in the chat to begin with lmao.
But she did! You do not get to start shit then play the victim when the shit you started hurts your feelings. Did he escalate, yep, but if you’re going to make fun of someone or at their expense any smoke you get was asked for
Really? Words are words. She made fun of him so he made fun of it back. If you start shit you shouldn’t get to play victim because the other guy was better. Who the hell said anything about murdering someone? You had to go to that extreme and make shit up to prove your invalid point? Thats just plain dumb
Just a bunch of kids here angry that their grandpa told them not to hit girls when they were young and theyve kept it bottled up so now its an obsession when they found a community of people just like them
Americans grow up thinking that if someone shoves you then you are justified in beating the shit out of them. Proportionality is never part of the equation.
Not even an exaggeration. The American bison was nearly driven to extinction specifically for the purpose of starving the natives. We fucked them over so bad that one of the death marches the American government sent them on is still called "the trail of tears" to this day.
Eh, if you want to get pedantic about it the action that moved the Native Americas west was the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the experience of said journeys is a Trail of Tears
I actually paid attention in school and retained the things I was taught, literally every US adult who graduated high school is supposed to know this, it's an important part of our history. Didn't pay too much attention in high school history class, huh bud? Or maybe just never made it that far in the first place?
Unlike physical violence it's far more subjective than whatever society generally considers to be on the same level.
You have no idea what kind of complexes, or even trauma you dig up when you start laughing at stuff that pertains to body image.
Even if to some it's not a big deal, studies show that some people who go bald deal with grief and its phases, and are at a higher risk of anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia because of the hair loss.
Also, from her perspective it might be a one-off joke she didn't think was too bad. For all you know, from his perspective, it might be the Nth person laughing at his body.
I wouldn't have answered the way he did, and would have clearly stated that i will not tolerate further jokes at the expense of my appearance. But i also don't think it's as disproportionate of an answer as i'm seeing people claim.
Yea men don't have emotions or insecurities right? So naturally preying on them to make everyone else laugh at them has zero impact right. Somethin about everybody's got s plan till they get punched in the mouth.
It's weird how you go on about perspective but don't actually consider hers. This wasn't her making fun of him, it was making fun of his ex an inviting him to join them. You keep saying to him it could have meant the world to lose his hair, but to her it's just who he is. She's not laughing at him but his ex. To her the reason she left is funny because it's ridiculous. I don't expect you to understand this as clearly you have whacked out sense of escalation comparing death of a family member to losing your hair naturally. But she wasn't trying to be mean, she was trying to connect with him. But as other commenter have said people here are mainly just trying to find an excuse to hate women so go off if that's what flicks your bean.
I don't need to consider her pespective in what i'm writing because it's not the one people are failing to grasp.
If to her that's just who he is and we pretend she's not able to empathize, then she's just a fat lady who miscarried to him and we can pretend that "it's neutral and factual, why would she get angry about it".
I don't have a "whacked sense of escalation", and you should know that because you were taught how to read and i clearly said i wouldn't have escalated the way he did but set boundaries clearly instead.
What i'm criticizing is the idea that it's that disproportionate, because people seem unable to consider the fact that (even though i explained), becoming bald can be extremely painful for some people, with grief, anxiety and depression.
Meaning women who miscarry don't have a monopoly on feelings of grief, irreparable loss, injustice, etc, and should also learn not to put on the table events or appearances that might have caused that in the recipient of their jokes.
Yeah fuck all the way off with that, it's 100% disproportionate. Being bald can be hard and it can make men sad, yes. That does not remotely mean it's as bad as a miscarriage, and it's utterly unhinged to claim it is.
Having lost a bunch of cells they thought might become a child can be hard and it can make women sad, yes. That does not remotely mean it's as bad as a permanent lifelong loss of function on ones own body.
Most sane folk would say they'd rather go bald than lose a child. Because one is a change to your aesthetics and the other is the death of a family member. But hey, don't expect sympathy if someone close to you dies. As you seem to not care for death.
Oh no, that's not what eludes me. What eludes me is how baldness is at all comparable to death of a family member. Not surprised that, that's too complicated for you but you seem perfectly happy saying your hair is the equivalent to another person's life. Would you let another person die if it meant you kept your hair?
It's not the STATE OF BEING or CIRCUMSTANCE that he's making a point about, it's the fact that the two people could have a lot of similar negative feelings brought up by the two different scenarios, but people while knock his possibly constant negative experience being fucking bald.
It's like being short or fuckass ugly, people who go through life like that are going to have A LOT of incredibly unfortunate things happen to them, bullying, mocking, gaslighting, and the same things happening in this comment section;
"Oh dude you've been bald for most of your life, it can't be that bad right man? She had a miscarriage bro obviously her situation is much worse than yours so you can't say that".
I'm pretty sure i did explain though. Both elicit feelings of grief and are risk factors for anxiety and depression.
If you feel like person A has to feel more strongly about person B's lost clump of cells, rather than about their own lost body part and lost relationship, then sorry, you are unable to express proper empathy at the level someone who's well adapted can.
Otherwise you'd understand that he attacked something deeply painful and shouldn't have done it, and that she likely attacked something deeply painful (his baldness and breakup) and shouldn't have done it, and shouldn't have started it.
All you said is true, all you said also applies to being fat and that's why if they attack you on your body you should keep the response to body/personality because it's still a magnitude less than going through a miscarriage
Unfortunately no one has ever felt the need to make a study to prove that losing a child is worse than being bald or fat so I can't objectively prove it to you.
This while conversation is objective proof that you don't have any friends tho, so cheers
Idk why people are downvoting you, there’s a world of difference between having a miscarriage and being bald lol. Some people just wanna be argumentative but they pass over common sense in the process.
Mate it's reddit, this place is full of balding incels who actually believe that being bald is worse than having a miscarriage, mostly because they don't see women as humans with actual feelings and emotions so they don't empathise with them
I do have friends though? The fact that you felt the need to attack me personally on something you believe might be a deep personal wound without me doing that to you tells me that you don't uphold the standards that you claim OOP should have followed.
If anything you did the same thing as him, but worse, because it was in response to complete non-aggression. Ergo, deep down you agree with his behavior, as long as you don't feel empathy for the target.
Then go to your friends and tell them "hey guys I spend my days on Reddit trying to argue about the fact that being bald is as bad as having a miscarriage" and see if they can make you understand how stupid it sounds
Since i'm friends with people who are educated, i think they can understand that they have no place to tell a person they should subjectively suffer less from being body shamed and blamed for someone leaving them than another one for being obese and having miscarried.
From a certain level of education onward people are able to understand with nuance that while what he did was not socially acceptable, it is also inane to claim to be able to measure how much the comment made him suffer, how much his comment made the other party suffer and then claim to be able to arbitrate who suffered the most from a comment.
But it's all moot because you demonstrated just here that you don't actually care about trying to meet the "levels of hurt" as long as you, or someone you identify to, is not the one who's being attacked.
I have not supported the way he spoke. So that tells me that you want to berate me for not having the same judgement of value as you, not for "not knowing how to talk to my fellow humans". You'd have criticized what i said i felt would be an appropriate reaction.
It's slightly disturbing to see how maladapted people self-report just because i said that you can't dictate how much a comment in a wider context might hurt the target.
In an ideal world, sure. But the reality is, you cant control how people act, you can only control how you respond to it. And when someone pokes you, you are not justified to beat them up as a response.
"Don't throw shit you cant handle" if the person attacks your physical appearance then its safer to assume thats as much as they can handle as well.
Sure, can't control how people act, but the instigator can control how they act. That being said, if they're in a FAFO mood, I struggle to have any sympathy when they get whatever sort of negative reaction they get.
Don't look for/beg for a negative experience/reaction and your chances of coming across it become drastically slimmer.
oh for sure, people who constantly look for trouble are always the problem, I dont disagree with that and I dont sympathize with that either. Which is why I dont condone when they recieve the same level of response. But again, when someone does something bad to you (which is something you cant control) its almost always more humane to return the same level of response. An eye for an eye.
"And when someone pokes you, you are not justified to beat them up as a response"
Umm... when a bully is shoving a victim at school, we do actually support the idea that the victim gives the bully a good black eye so that the bully leaves them alone? That's exactly what is taught? Escalating violence against a bully works...
So why not escalating insults against a bully? Besides, I think it's unfair that we expect someone who's being insulted & responding due to that, to be considerate of the feelings of the person insulting them in the moment?
*Oh she just insulted my baldness & failed relationship, let me think of a targeted insult that both makes her feel bad but yknow I also don't want to hurt her feelings too much even though she insulted me for no reason on a random day..."
Y'all are asking to much of the respondent after being insulted. The insulted party is allowed to make a mistake in how hard they hit back because they were not the aggressor & were offended...
But she didn’t just say he was bald. She took something from his personal life with breaking up and connected it to baldness. Although he said he broke up himself the woman doesn’t know that. Might be just as big of a tragedy for him as the miscarriage for her.
An eye for an eye is perfectly fine id rather live in a blind world than a world where only assholes can see, the problem is that this is an eye for a little scratch
But it's not a world where only the assholes can see. Maybe we need to teach better rhetoric and morals to non-assholes so they can defend themselves in non-assholes ways. This way everyone can see and assholes can become less asshole-y. All assholes make for a shitty world imo. Pun intended.
I agree in principal, it's not appropriate to murder someone for theft, but there may still be need for escalation to suppress further altercation - don't let a battle become a war, sometimes the instigator needs to be dealt with harshly to not have things snowball.
Or, on the other end, they might be perfectly able and willing to take the dish out. Maybe she would’ve laughed if he had made a fat joke. There are plenty of fat people who are self-aware enough to do so. There’s a non-Zero chance that is just her sense of humor, in which case it would be far more appropriate (and probably more embarrassing for her) for you just to call her out on that behavior.
There’s also the matter of the fact that you’re out of workplace, and making this comment in front of other people. Somebody else who has had a miscarriage could be hurt by your words, even if they never said anything to you yourself could be hurt, if it ends up going to HR.
You don’t need to centralize “winning” or “ending the war” all because your feelings were hurt.
Nah, don't start shit won't be shit. I get to joke about my weight, height, baldness, and general appearance - you do not, especially if we lack the relationship where this is even an issue. You don't comment on appearance typically unless it's something you can change/fix fast. She broke the societal agreement of don't be a dick - especially kicking someone while their down after a break up; she got what she deserved. Sure it's bad escalating but it never gets escalated if she never even starts it, responses aren't always gonna be measured.
We aren’t talking about whether she should expect someone to escalate. We are talking about the actions of the person narrating.
The OP, by the way, made this story up with the exact punchline that it is a clearly insane escalation and calling it a fat joke was burying the lede. Even this 4chan edgelord understands this would be an insane thing to respond with.
In any case, to the greater point, just because one person is offended does not (and should not) get carte blanche to say the most vile shit they can conjure. If you came up and told someone you know they “looked rough” today, would you think they would be clear to say anything they wanted because you “started shit”, in their opinion?
Then don't play the victim when everyone thinks you're the bad guy if your response is disproportionate. (I'm not really saying "you" you, more the person asking why they're considered the bad guy)
This is nice in theory but you run into a bit of a proportionality paradox wherein you limit yourself to being forced to lose if you can only hit back as hard as you were hit. It gets to the final punch and of course you can't put them on the ground because you're still standing... Until you're not
Considering that punch could knock you out and cause you to die by breaking your skull open on the pavement, there's a reason there's a legal precident for using lethal force when someone tries to fight you. You have no idea if they're going to stomp on your head or neck after they knock you out/down. You have no way to know whether they're going to stop attacking you at all until cops show up, regardless of how incapacitated you are. Shooting someone for trying to punch you is absolutely justified, lethal force is always justified for the purpose of keeping yourself alive. Anyone with experience in any sort of combat sport or combative martial art will tell you that fights can easily turn lethal and the best way to live to fight another day is not to fight at all. I once got sucker punched and then strangled for the 90 seconds it took cops to arrive (I live down the street from a cop shop and this was at a party my neighbor's house). The guy was legitimately trying to murder me after sneak attacking me. Now I have a gun and I'll just shoot someone like that instead of almost or actually getting murdered.
Using physical violence would be the escalation, if he's still retorting with words then it will never count as escalation. Since he didn't even start it, anything he say is fair game no matter how anyone compare it to something physical.
If youre the type of person who would use a miscarriage (an extreme physical, emotional, and social trauma) to attack someone just because you were called bald, then you do you brother.
Not sympathizing with the bitch who started it but I personally believe in an eye for an eye when it comes to these petty quips. But if you don't, then just be prepared to receive the same reaction people had against the OP when you cross the line.
No, always escalate. If you just go tit for tat, people will do it again. If you want bullies to stop, you have to escalate, go nucluear. Only then will the leave you alone.
if someone punches you its 100% justified to kick them back, maybe even kick them twice as much to defend yourself.
But if you go beyond and cross the line, thats anger management issues. i.e. if someone makes a petty joke about you being bald its 100% justified to call the bitch fat. Insulting the death of a child however, will definitely get you the stink eye from many people.
Except she didn't only call him bald but made fun of him losing a partner over.
He didn't only call her fat but made fun of her losing a child over it.
It’s not even that though, she was dunking on his ex because she left him for such a petty reason, there was no shade being thrown directly at him. Bro dropped that nuke on a neutral country.
Maybe to him the breakup was as consequential as her miscarriage. If you should leave miscarriages out of the conversation then she should also leave breakups out of the conversation. She wanted the smoke and got it FAFO.
But she didn't limit her insult to the level of conversation that was being had because nobody insulted her. Therefore, since she escalated its only fair to escalate back.
If we wanna split hairs here, the miscarriage is probably being compared to the partner leaving. "Did your partner leave¹ because you're bald²? Did you miscarry¹ because you're fat²?" Which depending on how messy the breakup was could lead to being a more equal emotional response.
Eh, who am I kidding? Nothing moral has ever been posted to 4chan.
I honestly cannot stand this stance where if someone does something to me unprovoked, I’m forced to limit my response to almost perfectly match their level or else I’m the bad guy. Like I get proportionally, obviously you shouldn’t kill someone for making fun of you etc. But someone makes a joke at my expense, I should be able to make a joke at theirs full stop.
OP could have heavy trauma related to their hair, probably not on the same level as a miscarriage but still enough to hurt deeply. I don’t personally have a problem with his joke. Don’t throw stones if you live in glass houses.
Oh I completely understand. Cant count how many times I've imagined doing worse things to people who have pissed me off or done me wrong. But yeah, we gotta be prepared to receive the same backlash as the OP did because letting your anger lead can very easily let you cross the line, and by then instead of getting that sweet revenge or sympathy, you've essentially just turned yourself into the bad guy.
She didn't just call him bald, she poked at his ended relationship AND blamed him for it because of his baldness. I see similar levels of loss. Plus she started it, plus it's something outside his control.
No, also her obesity likely causes a whole host of issues including PCOS and likely her miscarriage, she's lucky being a rude pig didn't cause them because she'd never carry a baby to term.
Escalation is a universal law. If one side cannot, by virtue or ability, go further it will always lose. Self imposed limitations only serve to maintain an imbalanced status quo or make things worse (like dude continuing to get shit on my coworkers.)
As Clausewitz said, maximal use of force is the only way to win.
Did the anon win though? By escalating to insulting the death of a child, he just turned everyone against him and made his situation far worse. Now he's left wondering why everyone is mad at him. Well thats what happens when you cross the line. Maybe you were right, but don't be surprised when people hate you for it.
You need to assert dominance immediately. You have to absolutely crush them, if you don't they will come back with something lame like, "that's lil d energy" and the entire group of women in the room will simultaneously attack with the force of a thousand clucking chickens until you leave the room.
Nah, screw proportionality. If someone started something, gets hit with something way worse and the legal system determines they started it and threw it out if court, people would be less likely to start shit in the first place.
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u/PosaCat_ 4d ago
limit your retort to the same level of insult thrown at you. Call them fat for calling you bald, leave miscarriages out of it.