A very good friend of mine posted a link on her Facebook account yesterday about a news story concerning the tragic news that a father of seventeen children had lost six of them in a house fire. I posted a comment under the link saying it was sad and I also said that I could not imagine someone giving birth to 17 children and I bet the mother was glad of a rest.

I was immediately flooded with notifications from some of her female friends chastising me for making jokes about dead children.

Apparently saying “It is very sad. I can’t imagine someone having 17 children, I bet she is glad of a rest” means that I was making jokes about the six children dying. I received comments like “shame on you Dean for laughing at the death of these children”, “You are the worst type of human for making jokes about dead kids” and the lovely “I hope your children die in a more horrible way”.

I argued back that I was not making any jokes about dead children; I was merely saying how I could not imagine a woman giving birth to seventeen children and raising them. If I had made any type of faux pas then it would be that I assumed that his wife was the mother of all of his seventeen children.

But the women had their pitchforks out and they were adamant that I was making jokes about dead children and every time I tried to politely explain that I was wasn’t it just fuelled their mind that I was making even more jokes about dead children.

After an hour of solidly trying to politely tell them that they were reading something that wasn’t there I had had enough. Enough of them trying to twist a perfectly innocent sentence into something else. Enough of their “I hope your kids die in a more horrible way” comments. Enough of their insults and prodding me with their metaphorical pitchforks. I decided to be Dean; I decided to be a cunt. 

You cannot argue rationally with idiots, the kind of people who fly into a rage at the drop of a hat. These are the kind of people that would be out in front at witch-hunts or chasing people out of town with pitchforks back in the day. (I love the pitchfork analogy  )

So when they started replying to me I started to respond in a sarcastic & irritating tone. Calling them “sweetheart”, making sexist comments (“shouldn’t you be doing the housework instead of being on Facebook?”), insulting their intelligence, and generally anything else I could think off to get their blood boiling.

A typical comment from one of them women:

Go fuck yourself. Done. You poor fucking excuse for a fucking man. Who says. It is very sad. I can’t imagine someone having 17 children, I bet she is glad of a rest. you know what you fucking meant that’s why you got so fucking defensive about it you cunt.

My rebuttal:

I’m afraid I’m not nimble enough to fuck myself. You finally produced my comment, now please go ahead and produce the bit where I made jokes about dead children. What you have done here is you took a quote and twisted it to try and mean something else. You are a deluded fool who needs to get the housework out of the way and get herself laid, it might loosen you up a bit. See, I can throw insults as well, sweetheart.

Then some of the women got their daughters to wade in as well. I had a 15 year old girl, who has two children by the way, threaten to come to my house and burn it down with me and my family still inside if I didn’t stop PICKING on her mum, obviously not seeing the irony in making that kind of threat.

My friend then came along and deleted the post to stop it. Some of the women then turned on her and said that because she didn’t come in and attack me with them that this meant she took my side and they all deleted her and told her they would never talk to her ever again.

This left my friend in tears, she was busy working, looking after her children, and disabled partner to fart about on Facebook all the time. In fact me and another friend had to spend the good part of a couple of hours trying to calm her down as she was really upset by what they had said.

I know I should have walked away but it irritates me how these people act not just on Facebook but in real life.