Women, sympathy, and violence

Women, sympathy, and violence (Part 1)

In my life, I’ve found women to be unusually sympathetic. But I think there is one group that women, in general, find it very difficult to have any sympathy for, whose sufferings don’t really matter to them.

Men.

Women can sympathize with other women and with children unusually well; they are uniquely gifted at it. Even when their subjects make it hard for them. Most women want to sympathize with you; they invite you to be worthy of their sympathy. Only, not men. Actually, let me qualify my earlier statement…women can sympathize with men, if they can see them as children. But if you are identified as a man (not just a male, a man), you are, by your nature, excluded from their sympathies.

I think there is an adaptive reason for this. Men exist to be selected against, to be thrown into the ash heap of history. Men exist to be fired like arrows at the world, to be lost and not recovered, only sparing those who hit the mark. So humanity needs some capacity that lets women, a group that is especially sympathetic, be able to do this. They need some psychological trigger that puts their attitude in a very different mode. A mode that allows them to view men as something else that does not arouse sympathy.

Of course this lack of sympathy isn’t complete, and doesn’t apply evenly to every woman any more than it is applied evenly to every man. But women require a battle mode, like that which men go into when facing an enemy, that allows them to dissociate from the humanity and sufferings of those who must suffer. And while men trigger it in one another, men also trigger it in women.

This is why it is so uncontroversial when, on the eve of a war where everyone involved will be deliberately avoiding harming women and children, and where men are being forcibly prevented from leaving so they have to stay and fight, I heard a public commentator opine that in all such conflicts, the “real victims” are the children. Not to dismiss the suffering they may endure and how sympathetic the suffering of children is to us all, but I’m fairly sure that men also make up a decent portion of the “real” victims in a war.

And yet how easily we dismiss their suffering and deaths as somehow not counting or justified or tolerable. How little respect or sympathy we owe them, those brutal monsters who are collectively, even those fighting to defend us, part and parcel of the same inhuman group. How easily we imagine men sitting back and relaxing securely in their strength, forgetting that their biological function on a species level is to die by the masses, both actively through suffering and death and passively through selection, leaving us with an acceptable remainder.

We rarely mourn the missing half of all male genetic lines that have perished through the centuries. Women least of all, because from our standpoint they deserved to perish. It was necessary. The survival of our species depended on it, the happiness and safety and provision of women and children depended on it. The unfit and unacceptable didn’t deserve to be perpetuated. The competitors and threats needed to be removed. The perpetual genocide of half the species is the price we paid to have things as good as they are.

Far from resisting this urge to purge, men embrace it. And women support and expect it and even demand it, while also lamenting and despising it. Men that they can come to view as extended children, helpless dependents, can earn their sympathy. But that will only turn them the harder against those other men they see as predators and oppressors of their adopted children. No mercy or understanding will be reserved for them.

I don’t blame women for this lack of sympathy. The species needs it to survive, just as the lack of sympathy men have for one another and the sympathy both sexes have for women is a survival instinct. We may resent it, but we can’t easily avoid it. It’s built into the meaning of the sexes. It’s pre-conscious, it’s pan-mammalian (and to some degree pan-animalian).

In just a handful of generations a population of genetically compromised fruit flies can purge their impurities and stabilize their genome. They do it with a single trick: they select heavily against the males. By allowing only the desired males to live and letting the rest die off, they redefine the future of their species, with minimal impact to the overall population.

Humans engage in this process, as with so many things they do, on a more abstract and multidimensional basis. But the effect is the same. You can change the future by who you kill and who you let die and who you choose to perpetuate into the future among the males of the species. Whether you do it militarily or economically or socially or in the realm of ideas, the marketplace is an arena where some rise and others fall, fighting for the future of humanity.

Women too create change, and not only through the power of their selection and demand, the conditions and expectations they set. But there is no change like the change you can bring by living or dying. Women change the future most powerfully by perpetuating life, by nurturing it and conserving it. Men change it most by ending it, and by risking being ended in themselves. And in this way we’re really not so different from the flies.

All you need this strategy work is some capacity in both sexes to tolerate such genocidal engineering for the sake of the species. And both sexes, absolutely both sexes, have that capacity. Men make it necessary. They can’t be men without it, it’s part of the reason why the male sex exists across all species. Women, too, make it necessary. They can’t fulfill their sexual role of stability and conservancy and productivity properly without it. They want men to compete and die for the future; they need them to. And men, for all their faults, are happy to oblige.

There is a profound callousness in accepting, and even demanding, such a gift. I don’t expect men or women to recognize it any time soon. It’s a necessary blind spot we are all born with. We may forget about it in times of luxury and safety, but it is always present in the great mass of undesirable men that are shoveled away into prisons or into social and sexual exile. And our prejudices of sympathy are constantly revealed through our prejudices of blame and advocacy, and it’s not at all clear that they’re wrong.

You can have innate prejudices for very good, very necessary reasons. If there wasn’t any utility to them, you probably wouldn’t have them. We all fear and hate men a little. We all want to see them judged, to see the worthy preserved and the unworthy and dangerous perish or be exiled. Women don’t want it to get too messy or disruptive, but it’s definitely what they want and will even demand as a condition of their acceptance of whoever remains.

I have seen this genocidal anger on the face of many women, raging against the depradations of men. I have seen this callousness written large in the faces of many women, who barely even see the unworthy and exiled men as existing, the sooner forgotten the better. They do it all very elegantly, very nobly, with all the best reasons in the world. They are no worse than the noble knights who go to do their duty against the vandals and brigands, but they are also no better. They may not cut many throats themselves, but they make the cutting necessary.