I often find myself reading here that women are incapable of empathizing because of their solipsistic nature. Rollo himself wrote an article on the matter in which he states:
...women convince themselves that their sympathy is really empathy, and their innate solipsism only serves to further insulate them from even having the curiosity to attempt real empathy towards men.
The reason I'm asking is because while I was reading the wiki article on the female menstrual cycle, in the mood and behavior section, you'll find the following reference:
The menstrual cycle phase and ovarian hormones may contribute to increased empathy in women.... When completing empathy exercises, women in the follicular stage of their menstrual cycle performed better than women in their midluteal phase. A significant correlation between progesterone levels and the ability to accurately recognize emotion was found. Performances on emotion recognition tasks were better when women had lower progesterone levels. Women in the follicular stage showed higher emotion recognition accuracy than their midluteal phase counterparts. Women were found to react more to negative stimuli when in midluteal stage over the women in the follicular stage, perhaps indicating more reactivity to social stress during that menstrual cycle phase.
Naturally I got curious and ventured into the source material, whereupon the researches explain that, while there are two known identifications of empathy
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Cognitive empathy: Being able to tell what another person feels and what they might be thinking. A mostly deliberate process. Sometimes called theory of the mind.
- Emotional(Affective) empathy: Feeling physically along with another person, as if their emotions were contagious. A mostly automatic process. Also called affective empathy.
They chose to base their study on the latter, and so it has me wondering. Are women incapable of cognitive empathy, and are they confusing their sympathy for affective empathy?
[deleted] 10y ago
Empathy is watching a video where a guy gets hit in the nuts by a baseball and feeling your own scrotum tighten up and saying, "Gah!"
Sympathy is seeing a guy get hit in the nuts and saying, "Wow, that must really hurt. Are you okay?"
Sympathy doesn't really require emotion or even genuine feelings. It is a social construct.
Empathy is identifying with someone and having a physical and emotional reaction to their situation.
Women do not empathize with men and their sympathy is merely parroting what they think is expected by social conventions.
The only time a woman's feelings for a man's condition approaches the truth is when his wellbeing is linked to her own. If her breadwinner gets sick and cannot work/earn then she is grief struck. Her grief is because her future income is in danger and she is afraid, but she could really give fuck all about the man himself. She is incapable of distinguishing between the two.
Women usually give fuck all about men who must pay draconian child support, but when they find themselves in a relationship with such a man and his income is being siphoned off then suddenly she feels his pain and becomes an advocate for child support reform.
Why? Because in all things women care about themselves first and usually only align with men's issues when men's issues align with her.
Manducor 10y ago
This is what I was not understanding, thank you. So sympathy is a show of compassion either with or without weight(emotion) behind it.
[deleted] 10y ago
[deleted]
Manducor 10y ago
Why do you say that empathy will often times prevent compassion? Is it because empathy requires a personal experience to assist in the understanding of another's situation?
And another question, when I see young men getting themselves into trouble by committing a crime be it theft, murder, etc. Despite the fact that I have never had any inclination to do these things, and that I know nothing about them, I still manage to feel sorry for them; is this empathy or sympathy? I always imagine what kind of childhood I would have to go through in order to end up like them, I accept the fact that if the conditions had been different, that is to say more like theirs, I might very well have ended up like them.
[deleted] 10y ago
Sympathy is more like pity - feeling bad for someone. It's more like a specific emotion experienced through affective empathy, which would encompass more emotions. That's how I see it anyway.
They certainly are capable of cognitive empathy - only severely socially inept persons and retards are incapable. It's how we're able to effectively interact with people and women do it very well. Now, if you mean being considerate of others or having an ethical lens in how you filter and act on the information you get through cognitive empathy, then it depends on the person in general and the relationship.
I know, not the simple answer you'd like. Mature women do exist. Women in love are almost never mature though. The daughter-father relationship forms the template to a large extent.