THE ODOR CONTROVERSY

The fight started with a smell, and it ended with a son calling his mother racist.

"I (45f) feel like I need to say this," the poster began, before trying to head off the obvious accusation. She said she was a white woman herself, and that when she sweats a lot, she stinks. "I don't think any race stinks more than any other," she wrote. The point, she insisted, was not race.

Her 22-year-old son had recently started dating a 26-year-old woman who, as she described it, is "an American from Korean parents." The poster said the girlfriend is pretty and seems like a lovely person. But there was one problem that kept coming up: "she smells like armpits all the time."

The poster said she wasn't the only one who noticed. Her husband, 48, had also talked about it with her. So she decided to address it directly, but carefully. "I tried to privately talked about it one-on-one with my son," she wrote.

That conversation did not go the way she expected.

Instead of treating it as a hygiene complaint, her son accused her of being racist. "He called me racist," she said. The accusation left her stunned. "I don't know where that came from," she wrote. "I don't know any stereotype of Koreans smelling bad."

She said she was genuinely confused by the reaction, especially because she believed she had gone out of her way to avoid making the issue about ethnicity. In her telling, the concern was simple: the girlfriend had a persistent body odor, and both she and her husband had noticed it.

Still, once the son tied the comment to race, the situation turned into something much messier than a private complaint about smell. The poster was left questioning whether bringing it up at all had crossed a line.

By the end of her post, she was still stuck on the same question: "Am I the asshole?"