I'm still thinking about the Can Opener Dad and the viral response the thread got online and how badly he handled it by digging in

The one material fact that made the story unacceptable to most people was the six hours, and the thing is he stuck to it

He could make a ton of this smoke, though not all of it, dissipate rapidly if he just came out and said "Okay this was a bit, I was trying to be funny and colorful, I would never *actually* delay eating by six hours, in real life it was more like forty-five minutes"

The fact that he did not do this seems to be some combination of misguided pride and a devotion to honesty

...If the latter plays any role in it, then that means that whatever else was "exaggerated", it actually was six hours and the people upset about the six hours are correct

What he actually did say was exaggerated was the daughter's reaction

Saying "The 'I hate you' was in a sarcastic tone of voice, she was actually laughing along with me and into it a lot of the time"

...See, that's the part people are least willing to buy

There are SO MANY stories like this where the guy (and it's usually a guy) goes "I don't get it, everything seemed fine at the time and she (it's usually a she) was laughing and smiling and going along with it, and NOW all of a sudden she's pissed at me"

I dunno

I agree and empathize to an extent -- probably more than I should, which speaks to my own sins in my own past -- that it's fucking hard to get a read on other people's feelings, we're not telepathic, good intentions aren't magic

Relationships are hard work

When you have power and privilege over someone else, you don't always know the harm you're doing at the time

People will lie to you and hide their feelings to keep things going smooth even when you're doing something 99% of observers would agree is objectively fucked up

That's the responsibility that comes with having power

And it's almost impossible to have more power over another person than you do when you're a parent and they're a child

You have to "play it safe"

You can't "go as far" with kids when it comes to joking around and playing with their feelings and fucking with their heads as you might think is safe to do when you're interacting with friends as peers

Any more than you can tackle a kid as hard as an adult when playing football

I mean, like

Say he's absolutely right and his daughter right now thinks everything is fine and "That's just how me and my dad are" and that "You know I was unhappy a lot of the time yesterday but in the end I felt like it was all worth it"

She has the right to change her mind

This happens ALL THE TIME

Kids ALMOST ALWAYS defend their parents, no matter what the fucked up thing was, while they're still under the parents' roof and only change their POV later on with more context

That's almost what it MEANS to be a kid, that you don't have context

That's what we mean when we say kids are incompetent to consent, that they don't understand enough about themselves and the world yet, they don't have enough freedom yet, to be able to interact with adults on an equal basis

The people who chimed in to defend Beans Dad going "Okay well kids' brains aren't fully developed and they need grownups to supervise them to make sure they learn and grow"

THAT'S EXACTLY WHY THIS IS FUCKED UP

If this were him interacting with someone as an equal -- if this were his spouse or his best friend or something -- then it wouldn't be quite as fucked up

A lot of AITA readers would still go "YTA" and "You sound abusive and she sounds codependent", but it'd be less intense

Like let's imagine she came out right now and wrote her own post saying "You all need to leave John alone, I don't actually mind this crap from him, he knows I go along with it willingly"

It matters A LOT whether this is his 40-year-old wife or his 9-year-old daughter talking

His wife, presumably, actually would be implicitly consenting

We would all know that it wouldn't actually be the case that she wasn't "allowed" to eat, that she was buying into the game, that if she really felt like she was being bullied she could walk out and buy lunch herself

(Life is, unfortunately, more complicated than that and this isn't actually always true in abusive relationships among adults

But if she came out and said "This wasn't abuse, this was consensual banter" it would have a much higher chance of being true)

Like okay I'm gonna go there

David Bowie's famous scandal where he had sex with a 14-year-old and 15-year-old girl

The two girls in question -- now women in their 60s -- adamantly deny that what happened was rape or abuse, they say Bowie was an awesome guy who treated them well

That's as may be

They are, as adults, entitled to their own memories and their own account of events

But even if everything they say is completely true... all that means is that Bowie took a wildly dangerous risk and "got away with it"

That doesn't make it at all okay

This is what they call the "problem of moral luck" -- "no harm, no foul" is a shitty way to judge morality

If I get drunk and throw a Molotov cocktali at someone's house and burn it down and the homeowner says "Hey, good news! This place was an unsellable dump and now I can collect on the insurance! You did me a favor!" it doesn't mean I did something morally acceptable

You can't go around fucking throwing Molotov cocktails at people's houses and just hope that maybe they all belong to people who actually want their houses burned down

You can't go around taking advantage of kids for sexual pleasure and hope they all grow up to still say they had a great time and nothing bad happened till the day they die

The evidence that it doesn't usually work out that way is far too common to claim you weren't aware of it

And no, this isn't as extreme as having sex with a child, okay, I'm deliberately using the most extreme possible example

But that's the general response to adults arguing that you're demanding they "coddle" kids and act "too careful" with them

You HAVE to be careful

Maybe all the adults who argue that they were spanked regularly as kids and "turned out fine" are telling the truth

(I don't see much evidence that they turned out all that great, but whatever)

So what if you're fine

Plenty of people AREN'T fine

"I, personally, turned out fine" is not an argument for anything

It's pure mindless narcissism

"Well I don't ever wear a seatbelt and I've never died in a wreck"

"I didn't get my shots and I never got measles"

"I don't wear a mask and I've never tested positive for COVID-19"

I mean, shit, look, if you and your spouse have these weird little challenges with each other where you don't eat until you've finished solving some kind of puzzle, whatever

You're adults, that's your kink or whatever you wanna call it, you know the risks (RACK, as they say)

If *two kids* do this with each other, I think it's the kind of thing where an adult, reasonably, should step in and say "Hey this is unhealthy"

Fuck if I do this to *myself* I think most normal people would say it's your parents' job to remind you that it's unhealthy

I mean shit that was literally me

Left to my own devices I could easily play the same video game for 14 hours in a row with no breaks until I physically pass out

Or spend that time arguing online, or frantically writing some essay, or going down a rabbit hole reading links

(I was gonna try to make this less of a 21st-century digital boy thing by saying "reading a book" but let's be real there's no single book that would take me 14 hours to read straight through

And that's a humblebrag)

And you know what, it was my mom and dad's job to say "Hey, Arthur, you've been doing this a long time without a break, you need to take care of your body, come down and eat dinner"

(I wish they had done this with a better understanding of ADHD as a form of neurodivergence and not a character flaw called "absent-mindedness", but they still did it and I appreciate them doing it)

This is the exact opposite of that

It's him forcing the objectively unhealthy behavior on someone who clearly *does not want to do it* and *didn't have the idea to do it*

Like, Christ

Would you be okay with a dad going "You're too sober, kid, you should join me in drinking"

However badly I may treat my body now, as an adult, I would be pissed at a grownup in my past who *forced* his own maladaptive and unhealthy coping mechanisms onto me through some weird projection

His original thread says that he personally feels like he's failed at "perseverance" in the past, that he's projecting this onto his daughter so she'll succeed where he failed, and she knows this and appreciates it

Okay, I'm willing to believe all that

It's still fucked up

Of course I get what he means

I'm the stereotypical guy who won't ask for directions either

I know what it means to declare some meaningless task a matter of "honor" because you're running through all your life's past failures and you can't bear to fail one more time right now

The angel on your shoulder is going "Jesus Christ Arthur you don't know what you're doing, you're wasting your time on this, this old laptop is a lost cause, just buy a new one"

And the devil is going "Oh you're gonna GIVE UP, like you give up on everything, because you're WEAK"

"It's not even that much money, you needed a new computer anyway, you can afford it, and most importantly YOU'RE CLEARLY NOT GOING TO FIX IT EITHER WAY"

"Just like you couldn't GRADUATE on time, just like you couldn't get a JOB, just like you couldn't fix your RELATIONSHIPS"

"This has nothing to do with that! If you did miraculously fix it it wouldn't go back and fix any of those things either! Stop connecting things that aren't connected!"

"Don't you come at me with therapy talk, that's what they tell LOSERS to make them feel better about LOSING"

"Well okay, Arthur, if you insist on spending your whole weekend on this stupid project can you at least get some sleep and come back to it fresh? You're clearly not going to fix it in your current state"

"NO

That would mean I DESERVE to sleep, and losers don't DESERVE comfort"

It is, I think, not because I don't understand this kind of impulse but because I think I do, that I am so angry about him deliberately choosing to take this baggage he's carrying and dump it on a nine-year-old girl who doesn't have it yet

Just like I, myself, fully admit I was terrified of having kids because I did not want to take this baggage and dump it on a brand-new human soul, or take the chance of doing it by accident

Just like I'm still really fucking pissed that when I was nine I had it dumped on me

God you know what this reminds me of

Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and "Asian-American icon"

Just to prove this is "equal-opportunity" shit

I am angry at this guy because he's a white guy and because he presented his story with a certain white-guy insouciance, like he doesn't even realize it's controversial

But I hated Amy Chua's book more

I mean this was just a Twitter thread, that he tried to drop on the Internet as a cute funny innocent story

Chua wrote a whole-ass book about this shit as this defiant self-righteous manifesto

And she invested it with all this model minority Sturm und Drang

"This is how I HAD to raise my kids! I can't AFFORD to coddle them like those smug lazy white parents can! This is the only way I could give them the TOOLS to survive! This is the SECRET OF IMMIGRANTS' SUCCESS and what makes us BETTER PEOPLE" (her later book The Triple Package)

That's like my whole fucking childhood in manifesto form

God I was so mad

She was, literally, the author of all my misery

And the same litany of excuses for her (terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad) book too

"Look, I was using humorous exaggeration to make my point

Obviously I didn't stand next to my daughter during her piano lessons with strap in hand threatening to beat her"

"Obviously I didn't actually seriously literally go into my daughter's room and take all her frivolous purchases and smash them to bits in a fit of anger"

Yeah okay well

I would *almost* say that the attitude behind the acts is more important than the actual acts themselves

Moreover, it's not that obvious

See the thing is, and this is the important thing, that shit REALLY DID happen to me

I WAS beaten, I DID have my stuff taken and smashed to pieces in front of me, I LITERALLY WAS shoved out the door of the house and told not to come back

That's what people mean when you say you can't joke about this shit

I don't know that it's a hard and fast rule that you can NEVER joke about it, but people who do joke about it seem to think they're joking about wacky shit that only happens in cartoons

This is why people got so fucking pissed when we hit Peak Rape Joke in the 2000s, when the word "rape" was just used as an intensifier that was funnier than "kill"

"I got totally gang-raped in PvP last night"

Like it's just a colorful word like "eviscerated"

I dunno

It's not fucking funny to me, because it happened to me, and not only did it happen to me but -- unlike what I think would've happened if I were killed or eviscerated or a piano fell on my head or whatever -- *people acted like it was normal and okay when it did*

*I* acted like it was normal and okay when it happened

Not consistently or very well, but I pretended the way everyone else does

I never actually openly told anyone about my dad breaking my arm until I was in my 20s

My own sister found out it happened via the Internet

That's why it's so meaningless to me that Amy Chua went through this same litany of defenses

Her own children trotting out "Look Mom is just talking about her stormy emotions she had when I was a bratty teen

I love and appreciate her and feel lucky to have parents who care"

Yeah okay

I don't care, I'm still pissed

Best case scenario, you're like an actress who participated in some shitty rape joke on TV and then came out and said "Oh come on guys he didn't actually rape me it was a bit"

Maybe they're lying, maybe in ten years they'll turn out to be just as bitter and broken as I am now

Or maybe they're lucky, maybe they're like Lori Mattix gushing about getting to fuck David Bowie maybe they *wanted* that house burned down

That just makes me madder at them

I went to her book signing in 2012 and I wanted to just go up and confront her but I was too chickenshit to actually do it in the end

But I heard her giving her defense

"Mainstream culture loves to dump on immigrant parents

We have a hard job, and people don't give us credit"

"Why do people always go looking for abusers to condemn instead of seeing people who are, for the most part, parents who truly love their children and are trying their best and may not always be perfect in expressing it"

Lady I know this excuse

I used to give this excuse

Of course you're trying your best

Everyone talks like they're trying their best, everyone thinks they're trying their best

A parent has to fall pretty far to just be comfortable admitting "Nah I don't give a shit"

Most abuse comes from people "trying their best"

What did Jesus say about the plank in your own eye

You all work so hard on the specks you see in these little kids' eyes, you're so desperate to save them from growing up to be a loser or a failure

You don't spend a second thinking about yourself

The charitable reading of the Tiger Mom book as a "satire" implies maybe Chua ends the book actually starting to introspect and think "Hey in what ways might my priorities not be entirely rational and not entirely objective"

But then she doubled down https://twitter.com/NaomiKritzer/status/1345904577640603649?s=20

The WSJ article came out and she started fielding all this anger from upset readers like me and she dug in her heels

"No, the people mad at me are all racist, they're all sexist, and/or they're all entitled lazy brats who don't understand my culture of success"

That's what upsets me most really

Jesus' mini-parable about the specks and the plank wasn't just about *hypocrisy*, it was about *distorted perspective*

It's why he specifically talked about *eyes* (not "the smudge on your face")

You DON'T EVEN KNOW if the other dude actually has a speck in his eye

You can't even actually see his eyes

Whatever you think you see is distorted by the great honking pile of baggage filling up your field of view, through which you can only see half-imagined ghosts

EVEN IF you actually think the cleanliness of the other guy's eye matters more -- "Look, I'm the parent here, she's the child, this isn't about me, it's about her emotional and intellectual development" -- YOU CAN'T FIX HER SHIT WITHOUT FIXING YOURS FIRST

YOU'LL DO IT WRONG

Like, Christ, I'm not a therapist, I'm just a Twitter asshole, but the whole saga of the Six-Hour Can Opening Tutorial does not feel like a healthy normal dude to me

It gives off all kinds of red flags

*His own* self-diagnosis ("I'm conscious of my own failures with perseverance and I don't want her to repeat my mistakes") is a red flag

That doesn't sound to me like genuine thoughtful altruism, it sounds like textbook harmful projection

Maybe my own little attempt at empathetic projection up there was self-indulgent but COME ON, a grown man skipping a meal to spend six hours doing anything is at least a little unhealthy

Spending those six hours on some bullshit you don't need to do for any kind of work or obligation but out of this sense of "honor"? You've got some kind of problem son

Dragging a nine-year-old girl into it? You've got a BIG problem my dude

The self-defensive argument "Hey I went hungry too, I wasn't putting her through anything I wouldn't go through myself"

That's the PROBLEM dude

Someone who's willing to put HIMSELF through that is already not okay, and now you're making her not okay in the same way

I dunno man

Most of the responses were very hostile and angry, a lot of them were performatively snarky, and people had the right to react that way

But a lot of them were also actively trying to reach out and be at least a little empathetic and compassionate to the dad

One lady who's a teacher who works in early childhood education did a long thread "This is why adults often misunderstand what children need based on our own baggage, even truly well-meaning adults, this is the way to acknowledge that you've messed up and apologize"

And what really depresses me is how it all just bounced off and got lost in the noise of "people trying to cancel me"

It makes me really sad

Because 99.9% of the time that's just what happens

The hardest damn thing is to admit you have a problem

ESPECIALLY for parents