Consider famous moments of moral crisis throughout the ages, real or imagined. Peter denying that he knew Jesus before the cock crowed, say; or Jean Paul Sartre’s former pupil in Existentialism Is A Humanism, torn between joining the Free French to avenge his brother’s wartime death and staying at home to look after his devastated mother. Or think of William Styron’s Sophie, facing the terrible choice between her children in a concentration camp. If only they’d all had the Am I the Asshole? website to help them out. Don’t say the modern world doesn’t have its advantages.
Called AITA for short, this enormously popular sub-Reddit — which celebrates its 10th anniversary this summer and now has more than nine million subscribers — describes itself as a “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us” and a “platform for moral judgement”. Its stated purpose is “to assign blame”. Anonymous posters describe the tortuous ins and outs of disputes with loved ones, friends or co-workers, soliciting judgement from strangers. Readers gleefully weigh in with “YTA” (you’re the asshole), “NTA” (not the asshole), “NAH” (no assholes here), or “ESH” (everyone sucks here). Those browsing are encouraged to upvote responses they like. As is probably obvious, the site is based in the US.
Most of the conflicts described on AITA are no less ferocious for being deeply trivial. As I write this, the stories at the top of the page include a man who told his wife on their wedding day that her make-up looked weird; someone who refuses to eat any food his cousin makes for him because she once tricked him into eating cottage cheese; and a husband who unfolded all the clothes his wife had just folded for him, because she hadn’t rolled them the way he likes it. (At the moment, the dominant verdicts are YTA, YTA, and YTA respectively.)
The site is sometimes touted as a tool for “conflict resolution”, partly on the basis that those who receive a YTA judgement sometimes come back to explain how much they have supposedly learnt from the process. As a profile of the site from 2020 put it: “It’s a place where accountability actually exists… It’s also a place for growth.” It’s really not, though. It’s a place where people get to feel good about themselves by judging and scolding others. It’s great fun, but nobody here is going to get a Nobel Peace Prize.
As with the current vogue for podcasts and programmes about relationship counselling, one motive for browsing AITA is the enjoyable glimpses it provides into the fantastic dysfunction and pettiness of other people’s relationships. Where else could you read about a woman being passive-aggressive because her sister refused to get the “family tattoo”? Or about a man intentionally ruining his wife’s favourite Garth Brooks’s song because she didn’t like his preferred rap music (“I pointed out that the song That Summer is about an old woman taking advantage of a 19-year-old virgin”)? Or how about a woman telling her future sister-in-law that the she had inadvertently chosen a song about genocide as her first wedding dance (“Carrie was livid, screaming that the whole family would think she was a white supremacist”)?
A lot of the commentators seem intent on getting revenge for their own past emotional scars by castigating anyone who vaguely resembles a real-life foe of theirs. Whether the majority verdict on a post is YTA, NTA, or ESH, there is always an asshole around somewhere, upon which to project one’s situation and so get cathartically self-righteous. Harassed wives queue up to snark at hopeless-sounding husbands with just a little bit too much enthusiasm. Those who must secretly think of themselves as perpetual doormats respond to tales of freeloading friends with DIATRIBES IN CAPS. People with mummy issues take the side of daddy, and vice versa. “No Assholes Here” is everyone’s least favourite and most anti-climactic verdict.
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