this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Given that the receiver has a boyfriend, it's safe to assume they are a woman. And also, given the context of the post, that regardless of the receiver's gender, the sender is a man, because they are going for that position, the position of boyfriend.
Although you're correct that it isn't specified, it's nitpicking unless you know what the genders are.
Ok, but in your very example, and this one as well, it's only passive aggressive if you as the reader choose it to be so. It's a pretty good rule of thumb not to take something as passive aggressive unless there's proof that they meant it that way, because that can easily backfire and you'll end up looking like an ass.
This is a round-about way of saying that straight guys' expectations of women are primarily romantic in nature. Which is true for a lot of them, but not all of them. There are straight men out there who are capable of being platonic friends with straight women. And more to the point, the ones who aren't capable of that shouldn't expect women to adhere to their expectations of how that communication should go.
I disagree with you. The only way what she said wasn't nice is if he went in with the expectation of being in a relationship with her, which is again, not her fault.
She didn't tell him to fuck off. She didn't say "I have a bf don't do that", she said, "wow that was nice, we really enjoyed it, love you buddy"
She's clearly trying to keep the door open as a friend, if he wants that.
If what I said was a knee-jerk reaction, you should look at the several paragraphs you just wrote as a retort to the simple assertion I made that she was being nice, and tell me who's knee-jerking.
And lastly, and finally because it feels really stupid arguing this point in the first place, I'm not going to entertain the notion that she wasn't being nice just because you have a penchant for reading passive aggressive intention between two people that neither of us are ever going to know about beyond the words on the screen.
Occam's razor dictates the simple answer is often the correct one. She was being nice. Reading passive aggressiveness from that is an extra step that you added.
I was going to point out how you misrepresented my arguments in every one of your retorts, but quite frankly, this argument over a funny text meme has already gone too far and I have better things to do. However, I would like to point out more clearly than last time that to assume that the sender is a man and the receiver is a straight woman is the view heteronormative worldview. This could easily be read as a lesbian trying to get with a woman they didn't know was straight, a man trying to get with another man who is gay, or any other perceivable combination of queer individuals where one member has a boyfriend.
I will admit that I also used the flawed premise in one of my arguments, and I was being a bit of a pedant originally, but honestly your arguments have been less than insightful and that one detail kinda ticked me off.
Also, you used occams razor wrong.
Actually, one last thing:
when faced with competing explanations [obvious politeness vs subtextual passive aggression] for the same phenomenon [choice of wording for a rejection text], the simplest [the one that doesn't involve the extra step of assuming malicious intent] is likely the correct one.
Please tell me why this is an incorrect usage of occam's razor.
Occam's razor shouldn't be used as a rhetorical tool. An important requirement of using the razor is to have two hypotheses of equal possibility. Let's say you are deciding whether to worship the flying spaghetti and practicing scientology. While they both have the same amount of proof, none. This seems like a good use for Occam's razor, but it isn't. You can't assume that the simpler answer, the flying spaghetti monster, is correct because they are, by the premise of using the razor, equally plausible.
Even without this in mind, it makes no sense to choose the simper hypothesis. If you had no knowledge or data of atoms, so both earlier models and current models should f the atom seem equally possible. Occam's razor claims that the simpler earlier models are true, but we now know the more complex current models are truer. The world is complicated, too complicated to assume simple answers
Instead, Occam's razor is used in science to decide which hypothesis to test first. You choose the simpler hypothesis, because it is easier to prove. For example, if I had recently invented a machine that can answer any yea or no questions truthfully, the flying spaghetti monster theorum would be easier to test, so you should test that first. It is a time management tool