Before I joined Reddit, I never thought of myself as a masochist. The great thing about Reddit is that you can subscribe to particular subreddits that represent your interests – in my case, that might be skepticism, atheism, feminism, science, and pictures of baby animals – and ignore the subreddits that make you angry, like Men’s Rights, Beating Women, Space Dicks, and [Choose Prefix] Jailbait. The problem is that Reddit is infested with shitty, racist, sexist, bigoted people, to the point where it’s nearly guaranteed that some of those people will post in your special interest subreddit. The larger the subreddit, the better the chance that this will happen.*



And so it is with r/atheism. R/atheism is very large, and so it is jam packed with assholes. And yet! I continue to read it every day. I read it even though I usually learn nothing new from it and it only serves to create and foster inside me an intense hatred of my fellow atheists.

Two days ago, 15-year old Redditor Lunam posted a thread called “What My Super Religious Mother Got Me For Christmas“, in which she linked to a photo of herself holding Carl Sagan’s Demon-haunted World:

What a cool thing to happen! A touching tale of religious tolerance. I’m sure the comments will be appropriately celebratory and, seeing as she’s 15, nonsexual. LOL.

“The jeans I’m wearing right now are older than her. But then again, they’re full of holes.” “Aaaaaand so is she…” “I was trying not to, but it needed to be said.”

Look you guys, it needed to be said! Obviously someone had to make it clear that this 15-year old girl has various orifices that these grown men could stick their penises into. Swimmerhair is just the man who took the fall. He’s just saying what everyone’s thinking, as made clear by the 167 upvotes he got [the numbers to the right of usernames are net points, then the breakdown of upvotes in orange and downvotes in blue. That breakdown is not necessarily perfectly accurate but it is close].

But hey, you know, in some countries it’s totally legal for a grown man to have sex with a 15-year old. So let’s add abduction and rape to the mix:

There are about 900 more comments to get through. Get comfortable.

“Relax your anus, it hurts less that way.” (+1715, -648) “Blood is mother nature’s lubricant.” (+570, -175)

“BITE THE PILLOW, IM GOIN’ IN DRY!”

“Tears, natures lubricant”

I won’t show all of these, but there were several dozen “clever” scientific double entendres about having sex with the 15-year old in question, all of which were heavily upvoted:

But hey, at least some of the Redditors in the thread were the right age** to be sexualizing a 15-year old girl who had the temerity to post a picture of her face on the Internet:

If it’s not enough that the 15-year old girl is getting a nonstop flood of rape offers from grown men, there are also plenty of posts trying to make her feel bad for being such a stupid fucking female:

SinghNYC has been holding onto that image for WEEKS just waiting for some dumb fucking female to post a picture. POW, take that, female! These examples showing otherwise mean nothing. Nothing! Also, I’m sure this is not a guy but is actually a stupid female:

And this guy, too:

And this guy:

CMETRIQ took it to the next level and linked to PROOF that only stupid females include their stupid faces in their pictures:

Which linked to this:

See? Ignory_is_bliss doesn’t show his face! He even used a throwaway account to post that picture and he doesn’t even give away whether he’s a man or a woman in any of his posts with that account. Because that’s what a man does! Like a man.

These examples only came from the top voted comments on the thread – there are more than 700 that I haven’t even looked at. There are also several threads that were started to mock the original, like:

That’s 21-year old motivational speaker Lizzie Velasquez, who has a debilitating syndrome so rare it doesn’t even have a name. HA HA.

Don’t worry, though. I’m sure that none of this had any negative impact on Lunam, the 15-year old girl who posted her picture on an atheist site in the hopes of enjoying a conversation with her fellow atheists:

“Dat feel when you’ll never be taken seriously in the atheist/scientific/political/whatever community because you’re a girl. :c” “well, if you will say things like “dat feel”…”

Oh right. It’s her fault for writing like a 15-year old. Not for having all those holes for men to stick their dicks in or for being a girl who took a chance to join an online discussion. Fuck you, r/atheism.

*Every subreddit has moderators, and there are some subreddits where the moderators actually moderate discussion and keep it from turning shitty. r/atheism is not one of those subreddits.

**J/K, there is no right age to be that shitty.

EDIT: I feel like I should once again mention that r/shitredditsays makes Reddit worthwhile.

EDIT 2 (1:43pm ET): On Facebook, Boozer Brödy linked me to this thread, in which another hilarious jokester posted a parody with porn star Sasha Grey. Awesome.

I’ll also add a quick note for those of you (not yet in the comments below, but elsewhere) who cry, “So what! Terrible people are everywhere! It’s the Internet!” You? You are awful, too. R/atheism is a huge community of atheists, and here is an example of a young woman attempting to join it, to get more involved, who is sexualized and mocked for being a girl. Why would she ever want to be a part of any atheist community, if that’s how she’s treated? The next time you look around your atheist events and wonder where all the women are, think of this and know that there are at least some of us who aren’t willing to just accept this culture without trying to change it.