A couple weeks ago I noticed that I had a new follower on Twitter. It was a pretty girl in her twenties, or at least that was the profile picture selected for the account in order to get the attention of guys like myself. To be fair, it worked. I clicked the link to my new follower’s profile and realized that its tweets consisted, essentially, of badly-misspelled clickbait, and the same tired memes everybody seems to be sharing on social media these days.

Still, I’d ventured this far, so I thought I might as well delve further. I checked out the pictures on the account’s profile page in the hopes of finding something sufficiently sexy, funny, insightful, or even mildly interesting that it might justify my having investigated the account in the first place. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t ultimately find anything that fit my criteria. Actually, I don’t remember exactly what I found there, with one exception. And the exception proved enough to make me regret straying from the happy status quo of my Twitter feed in the first place.

If you can’t tell what’s going on in the photo, or rather what some ignorant bros-before-hos misogynist wants you to believe is going on, allow me to explain: On the left side of the image are several rows of spectators at a football game. We are meant to focus on the woman in the foreground, who appears to be sending a text message. On the right-hand side is a note, hastily-scrawled on a strip of receipt paper, ostensibly warning the guy on the woman’s left – the one in the blue jacket and baseball cap – of a dire situation he’s too immersed in his Thanksgiving matchup between the Chicago Bears and Detroit Lions to notice:

hey bro, I don’t know you & you don’t know me. When you get home check your girls phone. She’s been texting “Jason” saying she wishes she was with him all day!

The story quickly went viral, with numerous media outlets picking up the ball and running with it. I found a very in-depth story on the non-event at something called Mad World News, which I’m sure is reputable based in part on the pop-up herpes treatment ad that greeted me when I opened up the story in my browser.

The story includes an interview with the supposed good samaritan, identified here as “Lye”. Okay, seriously? You come up with a likely fabricated situation clearly designed to make you look like a hero just so you can crow about it on social media, and your name is “Lye”? Dude, come on.

I’m not even going to comment on his use of loaded phrases like “being the man that I am” or “his woman”, nor the implausibility of Lye actually encountering the couple on their way out of a crowded football game. Have you ever tried finding somebody in the massive exodus that follows a concert or sporting event?  It’s damn near impossible, even if you’re sitting in adjacent rows.  In fact, why didn’t he just give the note to the guy as he was getting up to leave his seat?  And would anybody reading this really take the direction of a complete stranger upon being handed a mysterious note and wait until you got home before reading it?

Lye claims in his Facebook post that he was tipsy, which may be why he felt comfortable approaching complete strangers. However, I opine that the same factor could contribute to his having mischaracterized the situation. Maybe the three ballpark beers on which he dropped $27 clouded his judgment. He’s responded to critics who suggest that the couple might have actually been siblings by stating that from his vantage point behind them, with a bloodstream full of alcohol, he felt comfortable judging the situation. He claims that the woman turned away or otherwise hid her phone at any point when her supposed partner might have been able to see what she was typing. What if none of that happened, and the alcohol merely made it seem that way? Hell, maybe he just misread her phone, which a stand-up guy like Lye shouldn’t have been reading in the first place. But I’ll address that later.

I’ll be honest, I doubt that any of this ever happened. But if it did, I’m guessing that Lye was trying to break the couple up so he could fuck one or the other without worrying that it was technically cheating. If so, I’d love an update. Did either of them ever get in touch? The guy is doing media interviews – sorry, “media” interviews – so clearly he’s reachable. Part of me is inclined to believe that he’s a hypocrite who wanted to bang the woman (since he’s certain she sleeps around), but his care and concern for her supposed partner betrays an inborn sensitivity to his fellow man; I’m guessing he gives an out-of-this-world blowjob, and that that was his primary motivation for writing the note in the first place. After all, per the interview at the above link, Lye’s sole regret involves “the fact that I didn’t leave anything for him to be able to contact me on.”

It may come as a shock, but things that strangers type on their phones in a public setting are not the concern of some drunken stranger sitting behind them. If such an individual sees fit to read over a person’s shoulder, regardless of circumstance it makes that person an asshole as opposed to a good samaritan. Additionally, just because you’re too narrow-minded to attempt it yourself, understand that some people live their lives differently than you do, with contrasting notions of what constitutes fidelity.

I wouldn’t dream of reading my wife’s phone because I trust her implicitly, and I know that if she does happen to flirt with someone via phone I’m completely confident in our marriage. Besides, I’m probably doing it too. Anyway, if I wouldn’t invade her privacy like that, what do you think I might do to some snooping bag of dicks who thinks it’s okay to read over her shoulder? I’m not a violent man, but I kind of wish the guy had read the note as soon as Lye gave it to him, stated that the woman who’d been sitting beside him was a co-worker, his cousin, his poly girlfriend, or otherwise not sexually beholden to him, advised him to mind his own fucking business, and maybe kicked the shit out of him just to drive the point home. I would have absolutely loved it if that Facebook post went viral.

Officially, I still believe that none of this actually happened. As far as I’m concerned it’s a clear attempt to fabricate something for personal gain, in this case having the story go viral so that people – okay, men who are unconfident in themselves and in their relationships – think that he’s out there fighting the good fight. Much like the Stephen Glasses and the Jayson Blairs of the world, Lye was in the right place at the right time and saw something nobody else did. In posting about it, he betrays not only his own inherent misogyny and lack of trust in women, but also his feelings of inferiority as a man in a world where women fight every day for agency against the male establishment.

Maybe he got cheated on. It happens. In fact, maybe his mother cheated on his father when he was a kid, which would have led him to believe at an early age that women are untrustworthy, and perhaps set him up for a lifetime of disastrous relationships that would almost certainly involve infidelity. This would explain where such ambitious, large-scale paranoia as this Facebook post – or even his miscategorization of the couple at the football game – might have come from. But at the end of the day, he’s still just a prick sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.

Bottom line: Don’t assume. Asshole.