I occasionally get pushback on my agreement with Florence Nightengale’s observation that women lack empathy. It’s never substantive, of course, and is usually met with that most retarded of all female responses to observations about women:
“Well, what about men?”
What about men? What about wolves? What about bears? What about the planet Neptune, while we’re at it, or the color blue?
This is one thing every woman would be well-advised to understand: the question of whether X is true of Y or not never has anything whatsoever to do with Z. So, you can dispute X if you like. But attempting to bring Z into the equation means that you have entirely departed the realm of dialectic and you have entered the realm of rhetoric, or, as I think of it, competitive emotional manipulation by and for retards.
And, of course, as it happens, most men lack empathy too. Alphas have it. Bravos may or may not, I’m not entirely sure. Sigmas may or may not, depending upon the Sigma. So probably around 10 percent of men, at most.
Feel better now?
Anyhow, this post on social media happened to strike me as a near-perfect illustration of the absence of female empathy:
The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms.
I have no doubt she is correct. I doubt she can conceive of anything in anything but childish terms.
Now, some might claim that this actually represents empathy, but it isn’t. It doesn’t even rise to the level of sympathy. It’s actually an insane, self-destructive level of self-obsession that is so concerned about what other people might think that it will perpetuate harm to itself and others rather than risk being thought a badthinker.
She’s not actually concerned about harming others. Her primary concern is being able to convincingly posture about how she is a very good person to the point of martrydom. A truly sympathetic person would want to prevent the harm that was done to her from being done to others. A truly empathetic person would understand the motivation of the rapist and be very well aware of the need to stop them from perpetuating more harm to others, and potentially, to themselves.
Whatever it is, it isn’t empathy.
The ultimate punchline, of course, is the very real probability that she was never raped in the first place.
