Diogenes the Cynic was an ancient Greek philosopher who adhered to the school of Cynicism. While this is the source of the modern English word ‘cynic’, it doesn’t have precisely the same meaning.
That said, it’s not clear to me that Diogenes hasn’t been acting in a Cynical as well as cynical fashion in this thread.
I’m not sure what this means, but if you know that molestation hysteria exists, why did you “Pit the Asswipe” in this thread?
This thread bugs me. . . a lot. I really tried to stay out of it. In fact, when it was sinking off the page, I prayed that I could watch it go, but since I’m not religious, I guess Og didn’t grant my request because I cannot let. it. go. And it bugs me so much that I can’t even articulate all the reasons that it bugs me. But everytime this thread popped up, my stomach would turn over.
It doesn’t bug me because I dislike olives. So far, I don’t personally dislike her.
And it doesn’t bug me because I think it’s untrue. Having said that, there’s not much “truth” to argue about. There’s just olives saying that her stepfather did something that she and her therapist are calling molestation. Whether anyone else would call it molestation is up for grabs, but that’s not the point. (And olives please, please, please, don’t tell us. I really don’t want to know what happened) olives is very hurt by this and so it doesn’t matter whether the action was a word or a look or if olives is hurting herself through her own perception of reality or something else happened. I have great empathy and compassion for people even if they’re just hurting themselves. Life is hard sometimes and I understand that.
And it doesn’t bug me because of the subject matter of molestation or child abuse. I’ve personally heard stories of children being thrown in closets without food, children being beaten and children being abandoned for days until they went for help and probably all were sexually abused in some way. And I heard these stories by the adults who now live with those memories.
And while I can’t put a finger on exactly what does bug me, I’d have to call this nebulous thing–emotional manipulation. And I’ll be the first to say that maybe this stuff is mostly my own stuff because my experience in this area just doesn’t fit with how this is all being described. But in my own small experience, people who have been abused as children may hate their abusers, but they’re rarely public about it. And certainly not in this way. And in my small experience, those who have, have done it for other reasons.
Because molestation is such a volatile topic in society today, (as mentioned by olives hereself) you really can’t question it. It’s like dropping a bomb in a conversation. When someone mentions it, all you can do is say, I’m sorry that happened.
It’s the same as if someone wrote a Pit thread called “I Pit the Drunk Driver that KILLED MY BABY!!!” Even if you got past the emotion of someone’s baby being killed, you still couldn’t ask if the drunk was at fault without being rude. And a skillful writer could write the story so that it seemed like the drunk driver caused the whole thing while the parent could have caused the accident. But given the high emotion involved, it would be impolite to ask. So it seems disingenuous to me to put this in the Pit. If the current thread were in MPSIMS, I would have no problem with it. Like I said, I have no problem sharing compassion, but in this case, it seems like we’re supposed to share in the Pitting of this “Asswipe” that we don’t even know and we don’t even get any details about. (And again, I didn’t and don’t want to know) And it seems like the individual “asswipe” in the OP is supposed to be the generic child molester (whatever that means). It feels like emotional manipulation to me to start a Pit thread where one can vent their anger but have little to no possibility that the thread OP can be questioned.
And this really is my own thing, but I really don’t like it when hate is being tossed around for its own sake. I think anger and negative thinking are bad habits that can turn into something resembling addiction. And there is no cure for it.
Well, that’s the best I can do at the moment to describe why I see red flags flying around this OP like fireworks.
You might want to consider alerting the mods and asking that it be moved to MPSIMS. That’s usually where even bad ragey stuff but only sympathy and advice is appropriate for goes, and I actually agree with you that most of this thread would be better suited over there. At the moment of the OP, it could have gone either way. I and other posters could have come in with some “fuckwits” and horror stories of our own and cussed a lot. As it happened, it took more of a “support olivesmarch4th” thread (mostly.) So I don’t think she was wrong to post it in the Pit, but I do think it’s become more MPSIMSy.
(In fact, nevermind, I’ll report it myself. Again, not that I think **olive **put it in the wrong place, but it’s become something the OP wasn’t. IMHO. We’ll see if the mods agree.)
Because there is a difference between molestation hysteria and paranoia and real, concrete molestation that fucks with lives, and it’s annoying attention-whoring pissants who make up abuse stories that create the kind of doubt you say is inappropriate to raise in a thread like this.
The Asswipe I pitted is a real actual person, not a generic social construct, who really actually molested me and whom I really genuinely loved and trusted, and when I wrote this I was really actually sincerely furious with him. That is not ‘‘hate for hate’s sake.’’ That is justified anger. That is pain and grief and I felt this was a safe place to put it.
I’m sorry your uncomfortable with me sharing this personal information in a Pit thread. As I stated in the OP, I would have done so in MPSIMS if not for the swearing. I find that many people are often uncomfortable when other people choose to share information they personally would not. I’m not soliciting personal information from you, so I don’t get why this bothers you so much.
By the way… please don’t patronize me. Nothing will get you on my shit list faster.
Okay, let me try this more rationally. What you are doing here is unfair.
Diogenes posted that he doubted the veracity of the claim that I was sexually abused based on that other post I made about ‘‘The Talk.’’ You said, ''Ha! I’ll see you one, Diogenes, and suggest that she might be calling it molestation when really it wasn’t. Now you have called into question not only the veracity of my claim but whether or not I am cognitively capable of understanding what it means to be sexually abused. You suggest with this statement that possibly my therapist has convinced me I was sexually abused or that somehow I’ve ‘‘misinterpreted’’ what happened. However, by insisting you ‘‘really don’t want to hear’’ what actually happened, you’ve cut off any possibility of me justifying calling what happened molestation. You have attempted to reduce me to a simpering, immature (pitiable! let’s not forget pitiable!) attention-seeker on the basis of your funny gut feelings. That is slimy and manipulative trying to pass itself off as ‘‘empathy and compassion.’’
I really don’t believe you have as much knowledge as you think you do if you seriously think it would be unusual for someone to make an internet post like I have semi-publicly expressing my anger toward my abuser. Do all those ‘‘Take Back the Night’’ marchers who parade through the streets claiming to have been raped and sexually abused give you funny gut feelings too? How dare we address a social issue because we’ve been personally impacted by it! How dare we express anger publicly that this has been done! We should be hiding our faces in embarrassed shame! The horruh, The horruh!**
(**That’s how to say it with an Oxford-educated Bostonian accent, for those who wondered.)
Well, like Heffalump and Roo, I tried to stay out of this. And part of her (?) reaction is one which I share, and I know that it’s partially my own stuff. I was also abused as a kid, and I went through a period of time where I just shared that with everyone. It was my identity. And I think the fact that you posted so much, so soon after joining, really brought back for me what it was like when I couldn’t let that go. It reminds me of when I was taking Principles of Group Therapy in graduate school and one of my classmates shared within the first hour of class that she had been molested. I did not assume that she was making it up, but it sure did derail the class.
But your timeline is confusing throughout your various posts, and I think that you can’t blame people for being confused. You just turned 24, according to your profile. The original post of this thread states that you have been married for 5 years, which brings us back to 19. And somewhere else in this thread you say that you moved back in with your family when you were 20 (and, per your OP, married). So, if we look at your abuse ending when you were 17, the fabulous blow job when you were 18, therapy also starting when you were 18 (because you mentioned 6 years of it), married at 19, despite the fact that after 6 years of therapy you are still having the kind of flashbacks that leave you lying on the bathroom floor…it is just confusing. And I’m not saying that it didn’t happen, but I am saying that it is not at all surprising to me that people might doubt you.
That’s actually a really good point. It is very difficult to have an honest exchange on this subject because of how emotionally loaded it is. What kind of person questions whether or not another person was sexually abused, what forms that abuse took, and if it really happened the way they say/think it did, the way we would question someone about, say, their habit of drinking too much (other than a Cynic, of course)?
Note - I am in no way saying that Olives’ story is true or false - just that Heffalump’s point is valid.
Tell it to someone who cares. heh.
Listen, olives, you’re on a message board. You posted something really intimate, personal, and with enough detail to engage sympathy but enough ambiguity to make people wonder. If you’ve read the board for long, you know that skepticism is very often the order of the day, and for good reason, as people DO lie about stuff like this and worse. You pays your money and you takes your chances when you post personal shit like this, replete with details to be scrutinized, pored over, and cross-checked. If people think things don’t add up, for whatever reason, you will be called on it, esp in the Pit.
I’m sorry for whatever suffering you’re going through. The way this thread has gone is indicative of how things often go around here, for good AND ill, depending. This is a lesson about the SDMB you should probably take to heart.
I completely agree. That’s partially why I got myself in trouble a ways back and why I’ve reported a couple of threads in the past. I don’t nowadays because as Rico [post=8273859]said on page 1[/post]:
I think regardless of the anger level of the OP, extremely personal threads that can be expected to garner well wishes should be moved to MPSIMS. Simultaneously, I re-request you wake up and change the name of that forum so people intuitively know that they can post important personal stuff. FFS, have an MPSIMS contest thread to rename the forum (suggested contest rule: keep the MPSIMS initials).
Suggestion:
“Miscellaneous or Personal Stuff I Must Share.”
Sorry to do so late in the game, but this thread is better suited for MPSIMS. I’ll move it there.
Great, now I’ll never be able to share my opinion. But I will anyway.
Let’s just say I’ve been reading message boards and Usenet since 1991, and a post here has made my top five most egregious, disturbing, and rude posts I’ve ever seen.
So congratulations but with a certain bittersweetness that you’re not number one. But there’s still hope. You can always post your incredulity in A.S-A.R. or ask in Alt.pictures.children where the risque photos are, which are about the only things I’ve seen to top that.
Then edit the title, please.
Hey thanks! That helps. And thanks to fluiddruid for moving this thread.
I didn’t realize I could request someone else’s thread be moved to another forum. I’ll remember that for the future.
You can report any post but your own. If you need your own post looked at for some reason (say, it’s past the editing window and you discover you left the word “not” out and inadvertently posted: “**fluiddruid **is the worst mod ever!”), then you report the post above or below yours and explain in the alert box what you’re actually reporting.
Whether or not the mods do what you want is up to them, of course. Reporting it just means they’re likely to see it sooner, as there are a lot of threads and they can’t possibly read every post in all of them (can they?). I think the most common reports are for spam, spoilers and jerkitude, but the system’s not limited to those. I’m sure if you decided to get insane and, say, report every post with the word “vagina” in it, they’d tell you to knock it off. But I report quite a few things, and I think most of them are appreciated. I haven’t been told to cease and desist, anyway. 
Generally, when you say in a thread “Why do the mods XYZ?!”, your best bet is to report or email to them. They may not notice, for instance, a post asking for a thread title change.
You’ve misinterpreted the intention of the paragraph you quoted. My intention was not to doubt the veracity of your claim, nor to confirm it. The point of that paragraph was that the veracity of the claim is irrelevant in the context of a support thread. In a support thread, people are hurt and others sympathize, generally without question.
I’m sorry that your experiences were harmful to you.
May you find peace and healing.
Man, you are so right. That was completely fucking stupid of me.