Empathy

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.