Deti, from a recent Just Four Guys comment thread:
Women cannot bear to see a Man experiencing negative emotions such as extreme anger, rage, fear, despair, despondency or depression for extended periods of time. You say you want to “be there” for your Man; but you cannot do it. If it goes on long enough, it kills the attraction; it sets off your hypergamy alarms; and subconsciously causes you to start hunting for a replacement Man.
A woman seeing a Male go through the above will seek to replace that Male immediately.
Women cannot listen to Men talking about or working out their dating/mating/relationship issues or problems. Women reflexively view a Man discussing such issues as “whining” or “complaining” or “bitterness” or “sour grapes” or “well, you just chose poorly, so sucks to be you” or “suck it up, no one wants to hear you bitching about it”.
As to both of the above principles; when a Male is involved, ratchet up by a factor of 5 the disdain and repulsion a woman experiences when seeing a Male do or experience the above.
Around the first week of August this year I suffered what’s commonly known as a ‘dancer’s fracture‘. For all of the risk taking activities I’ve engaged in over my life, I’d never had more than a hairline fracture on any bone in my body before this. This fucking hurt. Like edge of the bed, don’t turn the wrong way or you’re in agony kind of hurt. Forget about putting weight on it for 4-6 weeks, “holy shit I have a 2 story home” and my bed’s upstairs kind of hurt. The Doc explained that there’s really no way to set a dancer’s break so I’d just have to “tough it out” and take it easy. I refuse to take any kind of narcotic painkiller (Vicodin, etc) so it was ibuprofen and Tylenol for the better part of the first month.
After the first week, the pain went from “holy shit” to “ok, ow, ah fuck, yeah I can do this if I grit my teeth.” If a wild animal wanted to eat me, there’d have been no way for me to avoid it; I was literally hobbled for the first time in my life.
Sack up ya big pansy!
Now, do I sound like a big pansy to you? In my time I’ve squatted well over 400 lbs. I have benched 305 lbs. I’ve leg pressed the weight of small cars in my younger days. Most of the guys I know who’d broken a bone, or torn a bicep, or slipped a disc knew, and could empathize with, exactly what I was describing to them in great detail. However, my loving wife of 17 years and my fifteen year old daughter’s first reaction to my pain was “Oh, men are such babies! They all make such a big noise about how much it hurts. You think that’s hurt? That’s not hurt.” It was as if by their dismissing my injury I would get up and say “yeah, ok it’s really not so bad” and go back to mowing the lawn or something.
This has been a pretty consistent theme for Mrs. Tomassi – and every single woman I’d been involved with before her – women don’t want to accept that their Man could ever be incapacitated. Before I was Game-aware, I took this with a grain of salt. My wife has been a medical professional since she was in her early 20’s and she’s seen some pretty gnarly shit in various trauma centers so I had to take that into consideration. There’s a certain disconnect from human suffering in that line of work that has to be made or you lose it – I get that – but that still didn’t account for the default indifference to pain most every other female I know, including my own daughter and mother had ever had with regards to a man in legitimate physical pain.
The Mother-Nurturer Myth
One of the classic perceptions women, and even well-meaning men, perpetuate is the idea that women are the nurturers of humanity. They take care of the children, home and hearth. Theirs is the realm of the private and men’s that of the public – in fact this was one impression that early feminism took as its primary target, they wanted it all, private and public. Despite the statistics about abortion, despite the realities of Hypergamy and the War Brides dynamic, the classic characterization of woman as mother, nurturer, nurse and caregiver have endured, even as a complement to the Strong Independent® characterization feminism would reimagine for women.
Perhaps it’s due to a deeply enrgamatic hard-wiring of the importance of hypergamy into the feminine’s psychological firmware, but women cannot accept that any man, and in particular a Man worth considering as a suitable hypergamic pairing, might ever be incapacitated. The feminine subconscious refuses to acknowledge even the possibility of this. Perpetuating the species and ensuring the nurturing her offspring maybe part of her pysche’s hard-code, but ensuring the survival and provisioning of her mate is not. This isn’t to say that women can’t learn (by necessity) to assist in her mate’s wellbeing, it’s just not what evolution has programmed her for – it requires effort on her part.
I propose this because women’s solipsistic nature (predicated on hypergamy) necessarily excludes them from empathizing with the male experience – and this extends to men’s legitimate pain. The idea that a man, the man her hypergamy betted its genetic inheritance on for protection and provisioning, could be so incapacitated that she would have to provide him with protection and provisioning is so counter-valent to the feminine imperative that the feminine psyche evolved psychological defenses (“men are just big babies when it comes to pain”) against even considering the possibility of it. Thus, due to species-beneficial hypergamy, women fundamentally lack the capacity to empathize with the male experience, and male pain.
Empathy vs. Sympathy
Now, before I’m deluged with offended women’s binary responses to the contrary, I very specifically used the term empathize rather than sympathize in my evaluation of women’s psychological coping dynamics here. There is a universal and comparative difference between sympathy and empathy:
Empathy is the ability to mutually experience the thoughts, emotions, and direct experience of others. It goes beyond sympathy, which is a feeling of care and understanding for the suffering of others. Both words have similar usage but differ in their emotional meaning.
Empathy Sympathy Definition: Understanding what others are feeling because you have experienced it yourself or can put yourself in their shoes. Acknowledging another person’s emotional hardships and providing comfort and assurance. Example: I know it’s not easy to lose weight because I have faced the same problems myself. When people try to make changes like this (e.g. lose some weight) at first it seems difficult. Relationship: Personal Friends, family and community ( the experience of others) . Nursing context: Relating with your patient because you have been in a similar situation or experience Comforting your patient or their family Scope: Personal, It can be one to many in some circumstances From either one to another person or one to many (or one to a group). Sympathy essentially implies a feeling of recognition of another’s suffering while empathy is actually sharing another’s suffering, if only briefly. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “put oneself into another’ shoes”. So empathy is a deeper emotional experience.
Empathy develops into an unspoken understanding and mutual decision making that is unquestioned, and forms the basis of tribal community. Sympathy may be positive or negative, in the sense that it attracts a perceived quality to a perceived self identity, or it gives love and assistance to the unfortunate and needy.
Women do not lack a capacity to sympathize with male hardship or pain, but they categorically lack a capacity to empathize with uniquely male experiences.
This needs to be made clear to both sexes. While I have no doubt that many a woman may have experienced the pain of a dancer’s fracture they’ve never experienced that pain as a man, and therefore cannot empathize with that experience. Now, extrapolate this pain to other aspects of a man’s life, or his idealizations about how he would want a woman to love him.
I constantly see the term empathy supplant the term sympathy when used by women; as if their feminine character uniquely transcends merely sorrow or compassion for someone in pain, but becomes somehow magically equitable with feeling that person’s pain. As an insulation against the cruel realities that their own hypergamy demands and exacts on men, women convince themselves that their sympathy is really empathy, and their innate solipsism only serves to further insulate them from even having the curiosity to attempt real empathy towards men.
It’s the Just Get It dynamic on a more subliminal level; if a woman has to put forth the effort to truly attempt to empathize with a man, he just doesn’t get it, she marginalizes his experience and continues her hypergamous search for the Alpha who doesn’t force her to real empathy.
This fantasy of feminine-specific empathy can be traced back to the Mother-Nurturer myth attributed to the feminine as well as the mysticism of the Feminine Mystique. If women are the unquestionably unknowable forces of nature that the Mystique constantly batters into popular consciousness, it’s not too far a stretch to accept that the mythical feminine intuition might also stretch to their literally experiencing the pain of others in an almost psychic fashion. If women are the “life-givers” (mother-godesses?) how could they not have some quasi-psychic connection to that which they’ve birthed?
That all makes for good fiction, but it hardly squares against the “oh, men are such big babies when it comes to pain” trope, or does it? If women are granted the authority to define what really hurts and what doesn’t for men – due to a socially presumed ownership of empathy – then this puts them into a better control of which men can best qualify for feminine hypergamy. In other words, women own the selective-breeding game if they can convince men that they know, by literal experience, what really hurts a man and what doesn’t, or what shouldn’t.
November 17th, 2013 at 2:11 pm
New Yorker, I think men are conflicted about getting a self-sufficient woman. It helps if she is able to defend or fend for herself, thus freeing him to concentrate on his own survival. But as the men here have stated here many many time before, men start to lose sexual attraction for these sorts of women. It most certainly dies if she beats up his tormentors like the way big sister used to come to your aid when you got bullied in the schoolyard.
November 17th, 2013 at 2:26 pm
Here’s the perfect example of how the social convention of women magically having higher pain threshold than men is spread by popular culture but is quietly debunked:
http://healthyliving.msn.com/health-wellness/do-women-have-a-higher-pain-threshold-1
November 17th, 2013 at 3:21 pm
There are a few determinants to the level of sympathy you get from a woman in the face of adversity:
-Your relationship with her. If you break your leg or get the flu in the first few months of dating her, she will be at your side with medicine, pillows, hot soup, reading material, sexual favors, whatever. Once you move in with her, marry her, or have kids with her, it’s a whole different story. Now you are expected to be a provider, protector, and handyman, and any injury or illness gets in the way of that.
-Your level of alpha, and the type of alpha you are. If you are a take charge, no bullshit, loud, sergeant kind of alpha, any pain or sickness shatters that image in her mind. If you are a sexy, charming alpha, she might shit test you, but will realize her error and make up for it double if you call her on it. If you are a beta in good standing, you might get motherly love and sympathy for awhile, but eventually that will change into scorn if you don’t man up. If you are a beta (or lower) that she has completely lost respect for, you will be ignored.
-How you handle it. If you struggle through the illness or injury and try your best, she will have sympathy and encourage you to rest. If you complain or feel sorry for yourself, it will piss her off.
-Her level of entitlement, crazyness, attitude, etc. This is the wild card. Obviously, a very entitled or bitchy woman will have far less sympathy than a kind, flexible, caring giver.
November 17th, 2013 at 7:15 pm
Since this is categorized under hypergamy, I’ll add this story that doesn’t have to do with pain. And I’ll try to keep it short but still illustrative.
Recently used facebook to get in touch with a female friend I knew. Had never used facebook before. This friend has been doing some modeling, saw her on tv, and now she’s getting more into acting.
We reconnected and have each other as friends and talked a little. Now since I’m new to facebook, I started exploring and found that you can look up post that people have made in a timeline for up to the time they first registered if they have you as friends. So I began looking, to see what’s been going on in her life.
Around 2009-2010, I see a post about having the most amazing boyfriend, wants to shout it from the rooftops, he’s a man not a boy, etc…Also read that while doing modeling jobs, the two of them are planning on leaving for Asia to join an English teaching program. The plan is to live together in South Korea for maybe a year. But a month before they planned on leaving, she gets asked to be signed by a modeling agency in another state. Change of plans. Both now decide(maybe both) to take the big chance. Both move to Florida, and live together. No more Korea
Fabulous boyfriend gets mentioned in few later post among the post of more modeling jobs, and now increasing acting jobs. Cut to early 2011, still living with boyfriend, notice a comment in post from friend saying they need to visit some time, still haven’t introduced me to your boyfriend. By mid 2011 see a post in timeline of new guy, who is working on being a director, being added as a new friend. Turns out they worked on a movie together in a small capacity while in Florida.
By late 2011, see in a comment of a post about a trip she’s taking out to California saying they should go out to eat sometime.
Move to early 2012, plans for her are now to move out to California. Director friend adds post to her timeline in mid 2012 that in a few months, he’ll be the happiest man on the planet. Late 2012, both call each other the love of their lives. Early 2013, engagement is announced. Slightly later, early to mid 2013, she now participating in two comedy short films he has written and directed.
With the volatility of the entertainment business, as woman you get too old too quick. As a director you’re only as good as your last project.
Will see how it plays out.
November 17th, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Man or woman… nobody wants to be around a moping loser.
November 18th, 2013 at 12:21 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/17/raquel-welch-governors-awards_n_4292091.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
November 18th, 2013 at 9:15 am
As any PUA will tell you – male-neediness is cryptonite to women.
In fact if Game were to be distilled down to one sentence, it would read – avoid appearing needy at all costs.
There’s no reason to expect this to change just because you were rash enough to put a ringonit.
November 18th, 2013 at 11:40 am
@ Not Carrie Bradshaw
I think that self-sufficiency can simply be a quiet confidence, which I think everyone likes, rather than batshit feminazism (which no one likes and is not really strength anyway). The upshot here is that to attract a strong woman, one needs to be a strong man in control of his life. Otherwise, one is stuck with an emotionally unstable wreck, which unfortunately is most women.
November 18th, 2013 at 3:27 pm
This is one incredibly revealing essay here. It’s one of those things that you never consciously thought about, but on reflecting your own past experience as a man, it’s all spelled out clearly.
To build on what Rollo said, I think it’s a combination of two factors; one, that hearing about our pain and suffering is unwelcome at best and met with outright derision at worst, and two, any voicing of that pain and suffering in front of a woman will sound the alarm bells and immediately devalue your worth. It’s as if your pain is a personal affront to a woman’s judgment about choosing you as a mate in the first place; it calls into question her clinical ability to find the best provisioner. To quote Rollo, it’s the Man Up/Shut Up paradox illustrated quite neatly.
This is mind-altering stuff; please keep delivering these articles on a consistent basis and you’ll have a readership for life.
November 18th, 2013 at 4:07 pm
Nerd-Alpha
http://www.utrend.tv/v/1-one-chance/
November 19th, 2013 at 2:27 pm
Game, Set and Match,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html?ref=science&_r=1&
November 19th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
@Bourdonne (@Bourdonne)
Your terminology is fine, your reframing isn’t.
I have no doubt that childbirth is painful. However, modern medicine has few general painkillers quite as good as adrenaline, and women generate quite a bit of it during childbirth. Obviously if you entirely deaden the nerves in the pain path with specialized drugs, you can block pain entirely, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about naturally removing experienced pain while remaining conscious.
As an example, I broke my arm as a 14 year old, picked up the dangling end with my other arm, and managed to lay it flat on my other arm, then walked on my own about 30 yards home to show my mother. She nearly fainted. I remained conscious, though in significant pain, the entire time from the break to getting it re-set by the doctor (getting it re-set was about as high a pain I’ve ever experienced). The reason? Adrenaline. My conclusion is that childbirth, while painful, is not some otherwordly painful event that only women experience. If it were so painful that it routinely caused women to pass out during the process, We wouldn’t be alive as a species today. The reality is that modern women turn into big babies when it comes to childbirth and insist that doctors make a natural process as unnatural as possible (scheduled births, epidurals, c-sections), to make their lives more convenient. Being female and having children means pain, just as being a man means pain. Yet for some reason, the single-event pain of women must be removed because it is unbearable, while the sacrificial pain of men on a daily basis is “being a baby”
November 19th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
@M3
Not really. In neanderthal times, men were much better suited to surviving than women were. I can see this likely resulting in a skewed population ratio where 60+% of the population at any given time was male. Presuming this (correct me now if you’re the right ologist), you would have a situation where a male death or incapacitation could more easily be replaced by a surviving woman by simply “jumping ship”. She is strengthening the chances her offspring will survive by always seeking the most suitable provider, regardless of loyalty. It is contrary to her role to try to diagnose or fix her “broken” protector/provider, when each moment she spends time nursing him back to health she is making her kids vulnerable.
However, reversing the situation, a male would be selected to be a natural provider/protector because if he doesn’t keep his wife in top shape/food/warmth, she can’t pump out kids for him.
November 19th, 2013 at 7:11 pm
I, personally, have experienced both sides of this coin from women. What I find is that women are different. While some women will be very openly sympathetic to physical pain, they are likely very cold w.r.t. emotional pain, and vice versa in other women.
I briefly dated a nearly 6-foot tall blonde who was also my salsa dance partner on a few organized performance salsa teams at my university. She wasn’t just 6′, she was also packed with muscle and fat. Don’t misunderstand me, she had the right proportions, body wise (7 easy), but she is just big. She was the largest woman on the team, and because I was the tallest & strongest guy, she became my partner. She chose me specifically because she knew no other male on the team could possibly lift her, and she wanted to do tricks to show off. Amazingly, I managed to shame just about every guy on every other dance team, because I could do lifts and tricks with this girl. We practiced hard on our tricks, and I ended up badly screwing up my shoulder working out with her doing these things (what can I say, she’s just heavy). She was very sympathetic to my pain and always concerned about doing another run with the trick in it.
About three weeks after our first date, she’s been leading me on for that time, (no sex but we were making dinner and giving skin massages) she nice and awkwardly tells me she is really into another guy, then walks off. She didn’t give a damn about how I felt emotionally, was entirely willing to let me believe she liked me to feed her own ego, but was willing to be sympathetic to any physical pain she caused, even after her fairly cutting rejection of me.
On another occasion, still at the university, I fairly suddenly (over a span of 2-3 hours) got terrible abdominal pain, the kind of pain that makes you think maybe your appendix has exploded. I went to the school nurse to get checked out. She took urine samples and x-rays. X-rays were negative but the urine sample showed a slightly elevated red blood cell count (for men, not for women). The backstory was that I was riding my bike home from class one day, going down a hill towards a right turn, and my back tire slid right out from underneath me, throwing me to the pavement with my notebook jamming deep into my right side. I also got a concussion from that, but never saw the doctor about it. This was three days later, and suddenly I had significant pain in my kidneys.
So, discharged from the school nurse with a urine analysis and referral to an ER CT scanner in hand, I had to try to make it to my car on the other side of campus, nearly a mile away. I was a walking wreck, wincing at just about every step, barely able to remain upright. Hundreds, if not thousands of men and women my age passed by me watching me slowly make my way. The only random person who asked me if I was ok was a man. The only person who offered to help was a male friend, he drove me to my car.
Certainly, it might be asking too much of the random woman to put me in her car to drive me to where I was trying to go, but it certainly wouldn’t be asking too much to offer some ibuprofen or call for a campus golf cart or something. The women were largely indifferent.
finally…
versus:
November 20th, 2013 at 5:57 pm
I’ve been following this site for nearly a year (maybe longer) and most if not all of these articles have resonated with me but this one hit home more than any other.
Nothing in my own life has been easy, I grew up in a home with a physically and sexually abusive father who drank way too much, when he wasn’t putting his hands on my mother, he was taking it out on me or my little brother (in more ways than one). So I grew up with a really jaded view of reality about how men were and how women were, their roles, what they were there for, what “good” families looked like versus my own, etc. My little brother grew up to be a criminal and he’s currently in prison serving his umpteenth year since he was a teenager. I chose to be meek, passive, focus on school, clinging to the few friends I had and tried to eek out some type of existence.
I fell in love with the first girl I laid eyes on and based on my own experiences growing up, decided I wouldn’t be the man my father was. I treated her like a queen, I bought her gifts, roses, took her out for dinner regularly, drove her too & from school/work, etc. She would be the one that I would marry and I promised myself that when I had kids I wouldn’t be the kind of father I had growing up. I got a good job, was responsible, didn’t have any vices (drinking, smoking, gambling), paid the bills, took care of my kids, did more than my fair share at home because I wanted to be exactly the opposite of what I had known growing up.
My wife eventually got tired of me, it is hard to reconcile in your brain how someone can get tired of being treated properly, respectfully, lovingly, etc but it happened. Her growing tired of me eventually turned into her being abusive towards me, first verbally, then emotionally, then physically. I became one of those guys people whisper about, ie. “his wife beats him up” – I couldn’t defend myself against her because I couldn’t allow myself to become the kind of man that hits his wife. Eventually her continuously treating me poorly became natural in our family and way of life and I just couldn’t understand why someone who “loved” you could hurt you this way on purpose. I would cry, I was depressed, I ran through every range of emotion possible in this type of situation. I went to personal therapy for myself, she was invited to some sessions, she came to one of them and the counselor had asked her if she was aware of my childhood abuse issues, both the physical and sexual – her response to both myself and the counselor was “if I had known I probably wouldn’t have married him”. She cheated on my several times with several different men, we eventually separated, she kicked me out of the home, I moved back in a few months later when my friends told me that she had no legal right to kick me out of the house. I moved back in and asked her to move out, eventually she did and moved back in with her parents. I fought for and have shared custody of my children (we share the kids 50/50, 7 days on, 7 days off) and I’m currently working with lawyers to make sure that I’m designated as the primary care giver – basically the parent that has the final say in decisions with regards to the kids, the custody situation won’t change.
Fast forward to today, we’ve been separated for 6+ years and I can honestly say that it’s been the happiest part of my life. I’m done with counseling, I don’t take her bull$hit anymore and I’ve become a different person altogether – I’m harder now, I don’t ever shed a tear, I don’t get emotional except unless it involves something happening to my kids. I’m a great dad and I’ve learned that it is my responsibility not only to pay bills and provide shelter, food and clothing to my kids but it’s also to prepare them for a world where people will potentially treat them badly and take advantage of them.
During my relationship with her, my wife had no empathy towards me at all. If I would ever get sick (cold, flu, etc.) she would look at me with no sympathy what so ever. If I was ever tired from long hours at work (hours that she has never had to work), she wouldn’t care about me getting enough rest, I could go for days without eating and she wouldn’t care about my health. When she found out about my childhood abuse issues she couldn’t care less, if anything it just cemented the idea in her head that she could get away with more abuse because I was easy pickings. I couldn’t fathom fighting with her or arguing back and something in me thinks she probably wanted someone who was strong enough to give her a taste of her own medicine, treat her poorly, be an a$$hole towards her, etc.
I learned to date during the relationship, devoured websites like this and every other source of content in the “manosphere”. I won’t be some kind of prick that treats women poorly but I will always be guarded and I’ll probably never “love” again and I’ll definitely never let a woman treat me poorly again. I’ll look out for myself, my kids (son & daughter) and my mom but I won’t waste a squirt of piss on caring about my ex-w ever again. I have to undo the damage that I’ve done by letting my kids witness their dad being abused for years, they have to know that no one is allowed to hurt them in that way.
This process of taking the red pill wasn’t easy at my end and I’m glad I know everything that I do know now but sometimes I do long for the days where I didn’t know any of this. Maybe it’s just the romantic in me that longs for those days long past glamorized in old tv shows about the perfect family, a husband and wife that love each other and grow old together and become grandparents to their children’s new families that also experience the same success. I now know that my children will probably not have successful relationships or marriages and I warn my children that marriages are very unsuccessful and more times than not end up similar to how things are now. I can’t live their lives for them but I will give them every iota of information available so that they can make the best decisions possible.
Ignorance is bliss isn’t just a catchy phrase, just like that scene in the Matrix movie where that guy wants to get plugged back in and he asks that his memory be wiped completely – sometimes I wish for that.
Thanks for letting me rant and I wish you continued success on this website and I appreciate the content you provide to men on this topic, in the future you will be able to look back and know that you probably saved a few lives and improved countless others.
November 20th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
This might be something you’ll want to read:
http://therationalmale.com/2012/11/21/promise-keepers/
November 20th, 2013 at 8:26 pm
“…One common theme I’ve encountered amongst the more zealous beta White Knights I’ve counseled over the years has been this determination, bordering on fanaticism, with outdoing the life-performance of their asshole fathers. Before I go on further, many of them had legitimately rotten, alcoholic dads, who were abusive to them and their mothers.”
– that’s crazy shit right there, every time I read something on this site it feels like it’s talking directly to me – thanks Rollo.
November 21st, 2013 at 11:10 am
@ Rob
Congrats on getting your life in order. As a divorced Dad, what finally broke the camel’s back was seeing my wife’s crazy tantrums. What pushed me to finally call it quits was the idea of raising my son with an uncontrollably hysterical/abusive mother. Totally agree that life is never better when you are liberated to raise your kids without that negative influence.
November 21st, 2013 at 3:36 pm
This squares with my experience. In both of my LTRs with women, I have been accused of not being “empathetic”, yet I know for a fact that I am deeply empathetic. What I fail to express – sometimes – is sympathy. I *feel* the pain of others, but I do not often express it in a way that communicates it – perhaps because when I am in pain, I don’t need or want words of sympathy; I just want someone to understand.
Both my ex-wife and my current GF believe that they are superior in empathy, yet I can say without hesitation that neither has an empathetic bone in their bodies. Both are much better than I at saying things like “oh, I am sure that hurts”, but I almost certain that neither understands what the word “empathy” means.
For the longest time I thought I was just with women who used the wrong word, but now I wonder if it is in fact a common characteristic of the female of the species.
November 23rd, 2013 at 4:55 am
Whatever…women still have more sympathy and empathy for men than other men do.
November 23rd, 2013 at 10:22 am
Solipsism alert, but my wife would never have called men “babies” or belittled my pain. But she was from a far away land where the grand old bargain struck between the sexes still stands.
November 26th, 2013 at 3:15 pm
“If you allow yourself to get weak, then only bad things can happen.”
In other words, no matter your relationship status you are alone in the world.
If you lose your job or get hurt you’ll soon find yourself alone.
All the more reason to go it alone without the added financial burden. That money you waste on foolishness for her could save your life.
Let’s face it, if you are that fit you don’t need a wife, you can get pussy when you need it.
If she only loves me when I don’t need her – why do I need her?
There’s no value being offered.
November 26th, 2013 at 10:52 pm
“…Whatever…women still have more sympathy and empathy for men than other men do.”
– Nice response, how “empathetic” of you ;)
November 27th, 2013 at 10:07 am
Or one could say: Men do not lack a capacity to sympathize with female hardship or pain, but they categorically lack a capacity to empathize with uniquely female experiences.
I think both sides are capable of dismissing the pain the other partner feels as a denial/protection mechanism. That would mean not that they don’t empathize with each other, but that they do and are unable to come to grips with it. It isn’t so much a matter of gender difference as a disparity in fortitude. In the case of your wife, I’d say its more of an occupational hazard that she has less empathy to go around as she is using so much of it at work. Its good that you know this does not equate to her not loving you.
@Sam: Is there any possibility of reconciliation between you and your wife?
November 29th, 2013 at 1:55 am
am a 48 yr. old female i used to scuba dive- -run track -play basketball-take care of 7 kids –Now i have MS and in constant PAIN i have a hard time walking-dressing etc. but my guy thinks nothing is wrong-it is all in my head. NICE ! i quit defending myself.-he is not worth it!! GOD BLESS-jky-
December 6th, 2013 at 2:00 pm
I really feel for a man like this. He needed to exit almost immediately from this relationship. Most of us have been in a situation like this at some point but the depth this man went is pretty painful even to read. All young men do need education on this matter but articles like this confirm the stereotype that the manosphere is full of fat, angry old limp dicked losers who blame women for the losses. The blame doesn’t fall on the women but the man. None of us deserve to sit on the top of the pyramid and very very few men get there by birthright.
December 16th, 2013 at 3:24 am
[…] very apparent the whole episode thoroughly disgusted her. This was one of the rare times I really needed her to understand and just love and help me help our family get through these hard yet temporary challenges. […]
December 19th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
[…] friend of mine told me that women do not like to see a man struggle. This is a very true statement, because women have no empathy, regardless of the relationship dynamic. Even though C was asking […]
December 23rd, 2013 at 12:26 am
[…] a more amused mastery in my future relationships because ALL WOMEN ARE IN FACT JUST LIKE HER and women do not have any empathy for a man’s problems. She had to make she also told me she always had money to pay for her […]
December 23rd, 2013 at 10:48 am
[…] Rollo writes on his experience. Sunshine Mary posts of repentance after the fact here, as well as reposts here, but has the attitude of deserving a medal for doing the bare minimum her marriage vows demand. The comments are full of like stories, every one worth a read. It should be noted that if the situation she writes were reversed (she injured, he not run right out and care for her at every moment), they would be divorced, and he would be in jail as an abuser. Iron-clad guarantee. But men are pond scum on the shoes of women, so that and more is okay. […]
January 20th, 2014 at 11:25 pm
[…] second (symbolic?) mistake Redlum makes is making an appeal for sympathy. In Empathy I outlined women’s gut-level, evolutionarily selected-for, lack of empathizing with the male […]
January 22nd, 2014 at 7:59 pm
Instead of making this a gender issue, it could be as simple as you can’t see a dancer’s fracture, and it just doesn’t look that bad.
When I was 8 I broke my pinkie toe, and my parents chastised me for crying, until they found out it was broken then my dad got me icecream or something because he felt bad about yelling at me. Then when I had to wear sandals (because closed toe shoes put pressure on it and made it HURT) which was against school dress code, I got little sympathy from anyone and people thought I was exaggerating. My mom had to explain to the principal that it was broken because I got yelled at for breaking dress code. I still didn’t get much sympathy, it was more like “Well, when it’s healed wear regular shoes”. I was an 8 year old GIRL and this was the attitude from both men and women.
Talk to women who have endometriosis (your periods will hurt severely), they don’t get help right away because other women say you’re being a baby and men don’t know what’s normal or not in that area. My cousin suffered the entire time from puberty on until she saw a doctor as an adult because everyone told her to suck it up.
So… It’s not just men that are told to suck it up. It’s a human attitude towards anything they themselves haven’t experienced.
January 22nd, 2014 at 10:01 pm
Tiffany, thanks for the input, but I think you’re missing the larger point of the essay.
I’ve never had endometriosis and I will never know what it feels like because I don’t menstruate. So it would never occur to me to presume I could empathize with your unique experience of pain. I may sympathize with you, and try to comfort you, but I cannot ‘know’ what it’s like and therefore empathize with you.
The gender-disconnect here is that through some magical feminine mystique women presume they can uniquely ’empathize’ with men’s experience of pain.
January 23rd, 2014 at 2:03 pm
Right, I get that men have different social expectations when it comes to pain. But it’s not just from women. From what I’ve observed, and from what my husband has experienced, men are the worst at telling each other to suck it up or grow a pair. Is it right? Probably not. If anything it stops men from going to the doctors when they should. But it’s not really a women vs men issue if guys are perpetrating the attitude as much as women.
Women do the same thing to other women. Women by all accounts should be able to empathize with someone with endometriosis. But we don’t, because the majority of us don’t have it, so when we hear a fellow woman complain about her cramping, our first thought is “What’s the big deal? Take some midol if it’s so bad”. We tell other women what should and shouldn’t be hurting them. It’s not just guys we do this to. Quite frankly guys are better at giving women sympathy once a month than other women. (Granted, you’ll never hear this conversation in front of men, we have a girl code just like you guys. So if a guy *god forbid* ever suggests menstruating isn’t a big deal he will always, always, always get pounced on by every woman in the vicinity, because girl code obligates us to).
To your point, the guys giving you sympathy were guys that had previously pulled muscles or had invisible injuries that really hurt so they could empathize with you. What about guys from different social circles that don’t work out? Do you think they would have been as sympathetic? Women rarely pull muscles because we generally don’t bench press, so we have little experience with this area, so it makes sense that women would lack understanding and sympathy for those types of injuries. But I have yet to see a woman start shopping to replace a man because he hurt his foot.
What I don’t understand is that if two people break their arm, how a set of genitalia would stop them from being able to empathize with each other’s pain.
March 13th, 2014 at 9:03 am
[…] you are worse than useless. You are a drain on the people around you. Few people have the combined empathy and tolerance to put up with such toxic people for […]
April 3rd, 2014 at 5:57 pm
The retard that wrote this article has the IQ of a gold fish. Wait that’s being too nice; gold fish aren’t this stupid.
Anyone who agrees with this article is just as stupid. Women aren’t loving and nurturing? In what fucking looney universe you live in? The sky must be green in your world. Yeah American women aren’t nurturing and loving, but real, traditional women are. Take foreign women for example, particularly Japanese women. American women are thoroughly fucked up by feminism. That’s why AMERICAN women aren’t the warm, tidy, loving, nurturing creatures women are supposed to be. I hate when people spread bullshit when they don’t know what they’re talking about.
September 10th, 2014 at 12:18 am
[…] Empathy […]
September 23rd, 2014 at 1:00 am
[…] performance. To believe so is to believe in women’s mythical capacity for a higher form of empathy which would perdispose them to overriding their innate hypergamous filtering based on […]
November 24th, 2014 at 3:08 pm
Just saying, I never once held a moment’s consideration for my wife’s condition during pregnancy and childbirth. It was just a thing that she went through and it was completely off my radar of empathy because I had absolutely no frame of reference for her experience. Her first pregnancy was a c-section due to complications. Nurses recommended I walk her around the ward every couple of hours to keep the blood flowing to help with the stitches. What did I do during the walks? Kept her laughing to the point she suffered from extreme abdominal pain. Never once, even years later, did she ever complain about it.
February 20th, 2015 at 12:53 am
[…] I published Empathy I figured I’d get some backlash from women in the oversimplified binaries I’ve come to […]
March 6th, 2015 at 7:00 am
[…] we begin begin to empathize with his situation (females can only sympathize): losing the love of his life and hopping on the hedonic treadmill of casual sex with the women who […]
March 21st, 2015 at 7:14 am
What a cruel and shitty world we live in. What a shame women make it this way.
March 22nd, 2015 at 12:06 pm
Yep.
Amazing a woman’s inability to empathize at times.
When their sex is often given almost exclusive use of the term, in regards to social behavior.
I am highly empathetic male. But also a highly logical one.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Neither are such traits exclusive to one gender or the other.
I think for many women in today’s society it is easier to replace a man, than it is to nurture the one you have. Clearly this is the case.
I saw a study recently about cheating behaviors. It said that women in committed relationships were 40% more like to cheat today, than 20 years ago. Clearly, social aspects of behavior have far more bearing than we have been led to believe in regards to gender differences on this and a whole host of other issues.
But then, it’s always our fault. I think much of this goes back to the daughter/father relationship, that they also carry into adulthood. It’s reassuring to think that daddy is bullet proof even though it’s obvious it isn’t the case.
Try, as a man to carry such mommy dependence into adult hood. Socially, you had might as well have acquired the plague as far as relationships with women are concerned.
March 31st, 2015 at 7:33 pm
That was a good read..