EmpathyFail 101

[bellatrys]

"She lied! She lied to us!"
--Grand Moff Tarkin, Star Wars, (1977)This is something that I've been kicking around for a very long time, and which I suppose doesn't really need a good "hook" to tie it to, as the problem never seems to go away. We talk a lot about "empathy," defined in Webster's as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being

Comments

[packbat]

Thank you for posting this!

[fledgist]

People who try to move where good jobs go on trees are called "illegal immigrants" and blamed for everything bad that happens in the known universe.

Or even legal ones - the H1 Visa/Green Card resentment, too

[bellatrys]

In a bitterly hilarious twist, I read an article last week in which business analysts were exclaiming in horror over the prospect of a "reverse brain drain" as Asian tech students increasingly plan on going back home after they get their degrees, because they're homesick and even if they don't expect to make as *much* money as they would here, they figure they will still make *enough* money to keep them comfortably, and it was hard to tell from the article what was more distressing to these Usonian commenters - the rejection of "America's The Bestest Place In The World", or the rejection of "Money Is All That Matters," or the ostensible reason for the article, the loss of high-tech talent

Aw, c'mon--

[bellatrys]

Nobody gave in and said "I know EXACTLY how you feel" --?

[violaswamp]

- "Of course all of us being women just care about shoes/can't think analytically/care about clean homes, tee hee!"

This is always infuriating to me, and my instinctive response is, "Maybe you're an idiotic fluffhead, my dear, but I am not."

Thus, by stating the difference between us, a bridging has been made, an attempt to imagine the experience of another has had the result of a humility of interaction,

Well-described. Yes. This is the inherent balancing-act of empathy. You need to imagine and enter into the feelings of another because you can, because we're all human. Yet you also need to acknowledge that this is only imagination and you can't fully experience the reality, because we're all individuals with our own unique relationships to our cultures, and a failure to acknowledge that is domination and appropriation of the other person's experiences.

It's even better when they combine it with "and I'm an artist"

[bellatrys]

This is always infuriating to me, and my instinctive response is, "Maybe you're an idiotic fluffhead, my dear, but I am not."

There were times as a teenager/college student in art classes filled entirely with older women when I wanted to stab my eardrums out with my 4H pencils, because I could only take so much gabble about fat fat fat fat obnoxious children fat fat stupid husbands fat kids these days fat fat fat shoes fat sale at Jordan's fat before hitting my limit - and THEN to top it all off by saying "tee hee, of course I can't find my car keys/use a map/assemble a DIY bookcase/figure out politics or economics, I'm an artist and I think with the RIGHT side of my brainasdfjhlkl;now *which* paint is the most toxic? OMNOMNOM -- Honestly, it made finding feminism all that much harder, because between them and the parish council women it was damn hard to argue against the idea that only exceptional women cared about anything beyond the narrow confines of domesticity or had any interest in abstract thought or a wider world of any

Re: It's even better when they combine it with "and I'm an artist"

[greyladybast]

I'm an artist and I think with the RIGHT side of my brain!"

Gawdawmitey, I hate that shit! It always makes me want to sneer, "Well, I'm a person and I think with BOTH sides of my brain!"

Re: It's even better when they combine it with "and I'm an artist"

[violaswamp]

I've always hated the expressions, "Women turn into their mothers" and "The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree" for exactly this reason: It isn't always true.

What these women don't get is that there are TWO ways of being a rolemodel: 1) Being a person that a child wants to emulate, and 2) Being somebody they don't want to emulate. By constantly complaining about their lives in front of you, they clued you in to the fact that they weren't happy with said lives. Naturally, you decided to not copy their sorry examples.

What they also don't get is that some things are usually within a person's control, like whether or not they will marry and/or have children. Circumstances may force you to live in a given area or work in a certain field, but you still have some say over your life.

Besides, why shouldn't you try to be "exceptional"?

--Architeuthis

[anna_wing]

Yes. People are in most ways very similar in their motivations, but the ways in which those similarities are expressed vary drastically from culture to culture, even within a single nation and a single language, never mind across linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries.

I think the archetypal personal example will always be

[bellatrys]

the time when my father insisted that I was just malingering after a particularly bad PAP smear experience (they rarely go well for me but that was one of the worst, worse than the time I slammed my hand in a car door and had to go to the ER for it) and he KNEW what it was like for a woman to have a pelvic exam because - I kid you not - he'd accompanied my mother to OB-GYN appointments and been present for the births of my siblings! So obviously it just *couldn't* be that bad and I just needed to stop shamming and/or grit my teeth and carry on, how did I ever expect to have babies if I was such a *wimp* about things like routine checkups and menstrual cramps