The author was being cheeky, but it definitely dates the piece. People are a lot more sensitive about that sort of thing today than they were 10 years ago. Back then it just came off as dark and sort of funny.
So comments and jokes that were never before conceived of as having any serious import, even subliminally, now map so closely onto serious threats and harassment, that they seem completely inappropriate.
People in relationships killing each other has always been a subject of humour, exactly because it really happened. In a way that hasn't really changed. What's changed is what is OK in specific mediums: especially in online written form (twitter, comments, blogs) where the context is full of the real hateful deal.
I've never really understood it as an increasing impetous to distinguish ourselves from the morons that, once the light has been increasingly shown on misogyny, hold firm to it.
Thanks for that, it's really help me better grok how to feel about these increasingly more common situations.
Wait... you do know we're not all Paul Graham... right?