"Women have no empathy for men" line

[2xx1xy1JD]

While this was mentioned in another topic, I'm spinning it off into a new topic because that line seems to exist in several MRAs and SSM mentions it.

 

Needless to say:

 

1. Most generations about 50% of the planet (ie. over 3 billion people) cannot possibly apply to everyone.

2. This one in particular seems to have no basis in reality. Evolutionary babble about tribes? I'd like to see an actual scholarly article in a real peer-reviewed journal (and no, blog posts on the manosphere do not count).

3. It's just anecdote, to be sure, but I see the opposite issue in my practice: women with TOO much empathy for men, who feel that they desperately want to help and fix a partner. Unfortunately, some end up with violent partners who are simply beyond their ability help, and they (and sometimes their children) get hurt along the way.

[Artemis]

empathy

ˈɛmpəθi/

noun: empathy

1.

the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Technically and semantically it's possible to say that NO-ONE is capable of empathy, neither men nor women, since it is totally impossible to be in someone's head and experience their feelings: true telepathy not existing outside the pages of science fiction.

However, given that the common meaning of empathy encompasses less than this total degree of understanding, then MOST human beings are capable of empathy in the sense of understanding and sharing the feelings of other to some degree; that degree depending on the extent to which their own neurological functions and relationship paradigms have enabled them to develop a functioning theory of mind.

Also given that initially we begin to experience empathy extended both to us and by us in an early familial setting as babies, in an environment where gender is relatively unimportant, empathy is directed at boy children by both males and females, and at girl babies by both males and females. It's a human thing, not a gender thing.

Blanket statements such as 'women can't show empathy to men' therefore take no account of the vast generality of human experience and social development, and probably mean not what they say but are statements that could more accurately be decoded as 'I find that not enough women demonstrate enough empathy to me' where 'empathy' is defined as 'a state in which I personally experience the feeling of being completely understood'. 'Empathy' is also re-defined in this case as 'uncritical adulation'.

Properly socialised children who have had empathy directed toward them can direct empathy to others regardless of their gender. Improperly socialised children who have not had empathy modelled for them will find it difficult to demonstrate and sometimes to feel empathy with others regardless of their gender. People without a functioning theory of mind, or with blunted or flat affect, will show as deficient in empathy no matter what their gender is.

As far as I can see, anyway.

[jaynie]

While this was mentioned in another topic, I'm spinning it off into a new topic because that line seems to exist in several MRAs and SSM mentions it.

Needless to say:

1. Most generations about 50% of the planet (ie. over 3 billion people) cannot possibly apply to everyone.

2. This one in particular seems to have no basis in reality. Evolutionary babble about tribes? I'd like to see an actual scholarly article in a real peer-reviewed journal (and no, blog posts on the manosphere do not count).

3. It's just anecdote, to be sure, but I see the opposite issue in my practice: women with TOO much empathy for men, who feel that they desperately want to help and fix a partner. Unfortunately, some end up with violent partners who are simply beyond their ability help, and they (and sometimes their children) get hurt along the way.

In the thread in question, I did a little summary of the data from abstracts assembled via google scholar (this appears to have bounced off the MRA in question, who deftly refuted science by ignoring it completely :lol: ). Anyway, the abstracts consistently point to "no difference in empathy between genders" or "women are more empathetic". In my opinion, it's likely that a skew towards women (EDIT: inasmuch as it actually exists and isn't an artifact of testing procedures) is probably due to sociocultural factors (wherein women are expected to be more empathetic, and thus learn the behaviour more), but it's quite difficult to tell at this stage. Even when there are demonstrable gender differences in any facet of psychology (which is rarer than you'd think), there tends to be a lot more within-sex variability than between-sex variability, so generalizing on the basis of gender is, frankly, absurd.

Evopsych is such utter nonsense that it's hard to even dispute (the phrase "not even wrong" springs to mind). The basic premise -- that parts of our behaviour result from our evolutionary history -- is fair enough, but there's no actual way to go about proving any of it, which makes its position as a science rather suspect. In my experience it tends to work in the same way as creation "science" (ironically) -- start with a conclusion and then creatively justify it. Often they do this without bothering to consult with historians or anthropologists (or even biologists specializing in primate behaviour), which means that quite a lot of evopsych "theories" are contradicted by known facts. (My favourite is the notion that women like pink because its the colour of the fruit our ancestral tribeswomen would have been picking, even though a) women don't really like pink in any significant numbers and b) pink was a mans colour in western society until around the 1930s).

Having said that, the evopsych prof at my uni seems to support the "women are more empathetic" conclusion on the basis that women belonging to the Alleged Prehistoric Tribe actually had to make and maintain social relationships, where as Tribesmen were independent and apparently had no need of social support. Just goes to show you can rationalize anything, I guess.

[Peppercorn]

Well, relying strictly on my own opinion (while appreciating the thoughtful replies above), I give a big old shrug and put this asshat theory right up there with "Men need respect; women need love" and "Sluts and hypergamy blah blah blah" and "Women are like children. No, dogs. No, worse than dogs." All equally ridiculous.

2. This one in particular seems to have no basis in reality. Evolutionary babble about tribes? I'd like to see an actual scholarly article in a real peer-reviewed journal (and no, blog posts on the manosphere do not count).

Has any manosphere claim ever been backed up by scholars or legit journals? They only seem to cite themselves, mangled statistics, or at the best some very dubious "experts". I once read an AVFM commenter using "But it's in our FAQ section!" as proof. :lol:

[Pam]

Has any manosphere claim ever been backed up by scholars or legit journals? They only seem to cite themselves, mangled statistics, or at the best some very dubious "experts". I once read an AVFM commenter using "But it's in our FAQ section!" as proof. :lol:

Your above comment reminded me of a comments thread I was involved in back when I was a regular and frequent commenter at manboobz. It took me a while, but I was able to find that particular thread which, to my amusement when I found it, was comments for a post about MRA/MGTOW rantings over women's incapacity to love.

manboobz.com/2011/08/17/maybe-shes-just-not-that-into-you-because-women-are-incapable-of-love/comment-page-2/

An MRA commenter posted

Women aren’t incapable of love. They love their parents and children. They’re just incapable of loving men. I saw a study just a couple of months ago that showed that men are very likely to be left when they suffer unemployment while women’s employment status has no effect on her risk of divorce. That whole thing about “sickness and in health†does not apply to women.

He didn't provide a citation for that study, even when asked, but I located it at ScienceDaily and quoted from the article I located in order to display for him that his takeaway from that article wasn't quite what the study showed, which was:

For a man, not being employed not only increases the chances that his wife will initiate divorce, but also that he will be the one who opts to leave. Even men who are relatively happy in their marriages are more likely to leave if they are not employed, the research found. … That men who are not employed, regardless of their marital satisfaction, are more likely to initiate divorce suggests that a marriage in which the man does not work “does not look like what [men] think a marriage is supposed to,†the researchers write.

To which the MRA commenter responded back:

@ Pam

None of what you quoted is different from what I said. I don’t understand your point.

So even when they do provide some type of backup for their claims, outside of their own FAQ section, it's readily apparent that they suffer from a failure to comprehend what they're reading.

Having said that, the evopsych prof at my uni seems to support the "women are more empathetic" conclusion on the basis that women belonging to the Alleged Prehistoric Tribe actually had to make and maintain social relationships, where as Tribesmen were independent and apparently had no need of social support. Just goes to show you can rationalize anything, I guess.

I have come to the conclusion that evopsych proponents also believe that The Flintstones was an animated docudrama series.

[RosyDaisy]

MRAs are nothing but a group of whiny men with a sense of entitlement who can't and won't accept the fact that what women want is equality not domination.

[GolightlyGrrl]

MRAs are nothing but a group of whiny men with a sense of entitlement who can't and won't accept the fact that what women want is equality not domination.

This pretty much sums up MRAs in one perfectly pithy sentence.