So long as men aren’t stepping up, women’s empathy needs limits
May 25, 2018 11:27 PM   Subscribe

While everyone deserves love and compassion, women’s empathy towards troubled men happens too often at our expense. Women are sympathizing themselves into a never-ending cycle wherein men are excused for being emotionally cruel or irresponsible (or worse) and women are expected to be their caretakers, for better or for worse. There is no incentive within this for men to change — to change the way they deal with their suffering, trauma, or “loneliness” — so long as women keep picking up the pieces.
posted by Anonymous (7 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble



 
Is she talking about men, or Incels and bachelor party bros? How is the problem addressed? How do average broken men that want to make things right start to do so?
posted by Brocktoon at 11:43 PM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sometimes I read articles like this one -- not just about men vs. women, but about any characterization of a group or of sociological states and progress or lack of progress -- and want the author to go back through the entire article and write "all", "some", "a few", "none", or "most" before every noun. Not that the author has necessarily done anything wrong, but that people will just read whatever they fear most when it's not explicitly specified.
posted by amtho at 11:48 PM on May 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


When I was five, the school principal sat me down and lectured me about how the group of twelve-year-old boys who had assaulted me so severely on the playground that I needed to pee through a catheter for days would neeever had done such a thing if I had smiled more and been friendlier when they called out taunts to me as I went by, minding my business. He went on to tell how the ringleader was "fascinated" by me, and was known to be a troubled young man, and not only would any kind of punishment be too traumatic for him, but I should also make a better effort to be a little lady and show him a little more kindness.

I repeat: Five years old. Peeing through a tube. Already being assigned responsibility for boys' feelings.

(I didn't go back to that school the next fall.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:23 AM on May 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


Men act like colicky babies to bamboozle women into caring for them, then turn around and blame women for infantilizing them.
posted by jamjam at 12:40 AM on May 26, 2018


Not to get in anyone's face or raise the temperature immediately, but that even for this article, even on the relatively progressive mefi, the first two comments are 1) a demand for the author to be more specific about the exact type of men she means and to tell these men just what to do to fix themselves and 2) a request for the author to fix up her article to insert qualifications before every group in her article to save people's (presumably mostly men's) feelings, speaks to the gravity of the situation we're in.
posted by ominous_paws at 12:45 AM on May 26, 2018 [12 favorites]


I use a simple metric for myself: would a man in my position do/not do this? Would a man in my position feel guilty for doing/not doing this?

If a man in my position would say no to something and then carry on his merry way without a second thought, then why shouldn’t I?

If a man in my position would say yes to something and take it as his due, then why shouldn’t I?
posted by supercrayon at 1:08 AM on May 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


a request for the author to fix up her article to insert qualifications before every group in her article to save people's (presumably mostly men's) feelings

No, that's not what I meant at all. Not at all. Not even a little bit.

Looking at that comment, I can kind of see, if I squint, how it might be read that way, but that is NOT AT ALL what I intended. The failure is mostly mine -- in the writing, in my desire for concision over sufficient qualifications and explanations -- but please know that there is a huge disconnect between that interpretation and my thoughts/feelings/intentions.

I'm pretty sure this kind of thing happens to a lot of people.
posted by amtho at 1:56 AM on May 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


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