Twisty quoted a commenter who said “You just need to get your lost empathy back.” The commenter was talking about his experience of breaking out of assessing people in terms of their fuckability or non-fuckability. (See, for instance, discussions of Governor Palin, Secretary of State Clinton, former Attorney General Janet Reno, performance artist Anne Coulter, or… pretty much any woman who shows up on the internet fully dressed.) That seems like an astonishingly important insight.
Sympathy is often defined as an emotional reaction to someone or something else’s experience. I can sympathize with someone who gets spammed, flamed, or trolled on line because I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is an expression of sympathy. So it’s not like sympathy is unimportant.
Thing is, though, that you can have sympathy for just about any old thing including the giant poisonous centipede Twisty found dead in her carpet the other day, because chances are it had little baby giant poisonous centipede babies waiting at home for it somewhere and so we can all sympathize with how that must be for them.
Empathy on the other hand is defined as an identification with someone else, of being able to be, at least for a moment, in that person’s shoes. To haul out another 2,000-year-old phrase, “As ye do to the least of my brothers so you do unto me” is an expression of empathy. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony of the gendered expression.)
Thing is, though, and it’s important, is you can only empathize with another human being. You can’t empathize with a lord-and-master, or a lady-is-a-tramp, or an old ball and chain, or a hot patootie, or a stud muffin, or a dude, or a chick, or, really, even with a “husband” or “wife.” You sure can’t empathize with an “other,” or a “them,” or a “these people” Or with someone who’s just a stereotype or class to you. You can only empathize with another human being.
And you can love things that aren’t human beings (the way people love their pets or homes) and even love them in ways that passeth understanding (the way small children love their blankies or stuffies) and so of course you can also love your “husband,” or “wife,” or “mistress” (or, WTF? I just realized gender construction provides no male-sexed counterpart to “mistress!?!?”) or “main squeeze.” But you can only empathize with a human being.
And if you can’t empathize then all the porn-scornifying or consensualizing, all the doing-it-with-girls-insteaderating or celibacy-izing, and even all the equalityating in the world is just different coats of paint on the same old patriarchy.
What keeps me going back to Twisty’s place is that however accessibly or aggravatingly she puts it, she’s all people needing to be human beings before anything else. There aren’t a lot of other folks online who do that.
The important thing is that if you can’t recognize people as human beings, and empathize with them and not just sympathetically say “ooh, that’s gotta hurt” when you see someone hurting, or just hoping it doesn’t happen to you, then you can’t be fully human either.
Anyway, I don’t know if anyone else sees it that way, but that’s why that bumper-sticker slogan saying “feminism, the radical proposition that women are people” isn’t just for or about women.
The word of the day is empathy.
Submitted by 2704 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-02-11 08:55.
The seldom-used masculine equivalent to "mistress" is "consort".
[Consort? Cool! Thanks, MissQuickley! --fl]
Submitted by 2704 (not verified) on Wed, 2009-02-11 09:44.
So ... are you now creating a no-humanity class too, in addition to the no-sex class?
I really have to take issue with your second-to-last paragraph there. On one hand, you're absolutely right that a lack of *capacity* for empathy is the way of the sociopath. On the other hand, someone's unwillingness to engage that capacity at any particular moment does not in any way make them less human.
Perhaps I am reading your post out of context ... I don't follow Twisty Faster because she reminds me a little too much of the aggressive reductionism of my own Andrea Dworkin phase. However, this idea that empathy is a necessary requirement for humanism seems exactly backwards to me. It is precisely when we're *not* in a swoon of empathy and do the right thing anyway that makes us human.
When applied to sexuality, I think your position gets scary even faster. For example, it pleases me to oogle cute guys. I am appreciating them for their sexuality, not their worth as a human being. Does my oogling in and of itself make me inhuman? Or is the unhumanity line crossed when I look at their muscles when talking to them instead of their eyes? Or does the line reside where I discount their ideas because they're merely beefcake?
Now, I would fully agree that line 3 is definitely unempathic. I would argue, though, that line 1 is fully within the bounds of other-human-respectfulness *because it's in my head*.
Whether it's sex or CNN or daily interaction, it's scary-judgemental to me that you deem me inhuman because I'm not thinking the right thoughts.
["So ... are you now creating a no-humanity class too" No. Actually "No!" It's totally fine to ogle each other, top and bottom each other, marry each other, be hot for, have hookups with, call each other "honey pie" and love and hate each other. That's not only not wrong (certain protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) it's *normal.* What I was responding to, specifically, was a particular but prevalent attitude towards other people that's (erroneously I think) short-handed as "porn culture" but that also includes discussion of human athletes as "a 'product' of Gonzaga," and political opponents as "magic negros." Or, for that matter, of unreflectively dismissing all men (as partisans over at Twisty's sometimes do) as "doods" and/or urging women to refuse to nurse or nurture, as a class, infant boys. I'm hella busy just this moment, Spinster, but later today I'm going to promote your totally sensible concerns, and my answer, to a separate post. Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 2704 (not verified) on Thu, 2009-02-12 06:38.
You may not realise it, but you're retracing some of the steps that Marx took in explaining and justifying his vision of a communist future, and what he saw as a fundamental problem with capitalism.
[Hmm... That's not *too* surprising. He objected mightily to the idea of individuals being valued only for their labor and I object to the idea of reducing individuals to the value of their anatomies. I'm... pretty sure both the scope of the problems, and our proposed solutions, are pretty different though. :-) Thanks, SE. --fl]