Ending the empathy apartheid: musing on the nature of gender dynamics
The dose makes the poison.
One of the very useful memes that has come out of the gender discourse in the last few years is a discussion of “toxic masculinity” or the traditional masculinity that teaches little boys to make themselves disposable for the sake of women, as distinct from an earlier demonization of “macho pigs” and masculinity in general.…
“Masculinities” is a buzzword that was going around a couple of years ago in the femmisphere and in “Gender Studies” departments on campuses. And since feminists feel entitled to pronounce to all the rest of us on all matters gender-related, they felt entitled to pronounce on masculinity and all its problematic aspects and to analyze it in their smug Moral Guardian way.…
A common accusation aimed at Men’s Human Rights activists (MHRAs) is that they are violent, that the movement is violent, that it is motivated by raw, raging misogyny. The response typically is that all the actual violence seems to be coming from feminists and that this accusation is just the product of projection.…
When I was a little kid there was a show on daytime television called Queen For a Day. Yes, this was a very long time ago. The premise was that several contestants, housewives and mothers, would compete for sympathy by telling their tales of woe to the audience – crippled or sick children, disabled husbands, whatever else they could garnish it with – and then after they had all finished their...
The hyperagency/hypoagency hierarchy – In the US we have a hyperagency-hypoagency hierarchy in the culture. The way it works is that if you are male you are deemed to be inherently stronger and less vulnerable, and so hurt you inflict is somehow inherently more hurtful and hurts you suffer are somehow inherently less serious than if you are a woman.…
Miguel Bloomfontosis discusses this in a post from last year, where he identifies a double standard when it comes to transactionalism in sexual relationships. And judging from the responses he got, he hit a nerve with this. In his post Miguel links to a post where a woman describes a dating experience that ends in a decision to stop dating “boys” and to concentrate from now on on “men” – boys...
By Dani Pettas
Prior to learning otherwise, I would have guessed Gillian Flynn is an anti-feminist. I got that impression from an exchange between two characters in her first novel, Sharp Objects. It’s between the main character, Kathy, and a detective on a date (starting with Kathy).…
This just in:
The virus, HPV, is best known for causing cervical cancer. But experts say it also is a growing cause of certain types of oral cancer, those in the upper throat. In the U.S., the American Cancer Society estimates there will be nearly 14,000 new cases of upper throat cancer this year.…
Empathy apartheid takes maintenance. If it isn’t maintained and policed, people’s basic humanity will lead them to show empathy for the people their society has deemed undeserving of it and the system will collapse. So these same people, sadly, use various deflections and dismissals – silencing mechanisms and minimizing tactics to maintain the system.…
Empathy apartheid refers to the caste system we have in our culture that determines whose suffering deserves empathy and whose does not. This system works along gender and racial lines. There’s not much question that when Natalee Holloway was kidnapped in Aruba and Fox News flogged the story the entire summer of 2006, that her story would have gotten exponentially less attention if she had been...
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