Rebecca Solnit looks at the pathological absence of empathy it takes for men to exploit or destroy women in the horrifying way we see from the chopping up of Kim Wall to the reported abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
Underlying all these attacks is a lack of empathy, a will to dominate, and an entitlement to control, harm and even take the lives of others. Though there is a good argument that mental illness is not a sufficient explanation – and most mentally ill people are nonviolent – mass shooters and rapists seem to have a lack of empathy so extreme it constitutes a psychological disorder. At this point in history, it seems to be not just a defect from birth, but a characteristic many men are instilled with by the culture around them. It seems to be the precondition for causing horrific suffering and taking pleasure in it as a sign of one’s own power and superiority, in regarding others as worthless, as yours to harm or eliminate.
Or perhaps it’s an extreme version of masculinity that has always been with us in a culture that gives men more power and privilege than women; perhaps these acts are the result of taking that to its logical conclusion. There must be terrible loneliness in that failure to perceive or value the humanity of others, the failure of empathy and imagination, to consider oneself the only person who matters. Caring about others, empathising, loving them, liberates each of us; these bereft figures seem to be prisoners of their selfishness before they are punishers of others.
Loneliness and beyond – emptiness, meaninglessness, nothingness. Can you imagine considering yourself the only person who matters (and who has ever mattered)? You don’t have to be gregarious or an extrovert to find that idea a horror. There would be no meaning in books, in stories, in dramas, in art, in history – there would be little meaning in anything.
(Do I suddenly for the first time feel sympathy for Donald Trump? No.)
Much has also been written to explain why the mass shootings are not terrorism (except when the shooter is, as he is rarely, Muslim), but perhaps terrorism can be imagined as a cultural as well as political phenomenon, a desire to instil fear, assert dominance, devalue the rights and freedoms of others, assert the power of the violent and of violence. There is an ideology behind it, even if not an overtly political ideology, of self-aggrandisement, cruelty, the embrace of violence, and hate.
I would call that not so much an ideology as…what, an urge, a preference, a permanent mood? A great many people like that kind of thing but it’s not by itself an ideology.
It’s the authoritarianism of violence that seems too often overlooked, the acts that are the opposite of the democratic ideal that all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights. There is no greater authoritarianism than that of someone who violates the will, the body, the wellbeing, or takes the life of another.
Yes. That’s why I keep repeating the word “authoritarian” (and the word “dictator”) when I talk about Trump. It’s important – more so than whatever passes for the ideology that attempts to justify it. He doesn’t really believe most of the bullshit he talks; he just likes to boss and destroy.
That powerlessness of others seems to be desired and relished in these cases. It’s time to talk about the fact that many men seem erotically excited by their ability to punish, humiliate, inflict pain on women – the subject of a lot of porn. When you jerk off while cornering an unwilling woman, you’re presumably excited by her powerlessness and misery or repulsion. Another of Weinstein’s victims told the New Yorker, “The fear turns him on.” Fox News founder and CEO Roger Ailestook pleasure, according to his victims, in degrading the employees he sexually exploited and harassed.
But that stuff gets called “sex-positive” and feminists who criticize it get called the other thing.
We’ve also recently had a host of obituaries for Hugh Hefner. Some included the arguments that Hefner and his magazine were harmless or liberating. But they insisted that women were for men to use if they met a narrow definition of attractiveness, and to mock or ignore if they were not. While often portrayed as part of the sexual revolution, the magazine and Hefner were instead part of the counter-revolution, figuring out how to perpetuate women’s subordination and men’s power in a changing era.
The young women who lived in – and sometimes described feeling trapped in – the Playboy mansion were there to please the old goat at the centre of it and his friends, and not the other way around.
His male friends. Men are people, women are things for people to have sex with. Sex isn’t mutual, it’s For Him and By or In or On her. He is Man, she is thing.
Negative empathy is a bad thing.
