The comments below brought up the topic of gays being more empathetic. That does seem like a widely held stereotype, but it only shows how debased our standards for "empathizing" have become.
Gays are nearly incapable of empathy with women (the only ones who seek out relationships with gays), something I touched on in a larger post about empathizing with imaginary people. I suspect that the rumor that gays are so good at empathizing initially spread from a self-selected group of women so profoundly disturbed that faggots could effortlessly understand where they were coming from, and resonate emotionally with them.
For empathy involves both a cognitive and an emotional component. The first is the ability to understand the other person's state of mind -- their goals, perhaps their history, their strategies, and so on. Once comprehended, the other's state of mind must give the empathizer a similar emotional feel. It doesn't mean they have to identify with the other, sanction their goals or feelings, or approve of their behavior -- and it doesn't mean they have to do the opposite either. It simply means they can both understand and emotionally resonate with another person's mind.
In the context of gays and women, there is a huge obstacle to comprehending the woman's state of mind because the goals and strategies to achieve them are so antithetical to the queer lifestyle. Women's looks and youthfulness are only part of what they worry about in themselves, and only to the extent that they impact their chances to find a monogamous stable relationship, even a lifelong partner with whom raising a family is at least a thought in the back of their minds. Gays focus almost exclusively on these qualities, and only insofar as they help get a hotter bod into their bed this weekend.
Put bluntly, women care about how marriageable they are, homosexuals obsess over how fuckable they are.
Still, there must be some more basic defect in their ability to empathize, since having opposite perspectives is only an obstacle, and truly empathetic people can understand and resonate with a perspective that's a long ways from their own.
Remember that the two principles that explain most of gay deviance are 1) having the mind of an addict, and 2) Peter Pan-ism -- being mentally stunted at around elementary-school age, aside from some further IQ development and obvious sexual interest.
Impaired ability to empathize could be chalked up to their addictive personalities: they are too focused on scoring their next fix that the concerns, thoughts, and feelings of others are just irrelevant. That pattern of lacking interest does not seem to be what we have here with gays. They socialize a lot with others, so the interest is there.
That leaves their Peter Pan-ism as the cause, and that sounds a lot more realistic. They aren't as profoundly lacking in empathy as a psychopath -- more like it never fully matures, and gets stuck in the quasi-narcissistic, somewhat autistic, and mildly sociopathic phase of children. Gays cannot get what makes other people tick, nor resonate with a random sample of humanity (only fag hags who share many of the same disturbances of the homos themselves). But it comes more from childish brattiness -- "Like omigod, why would anyone think that way or want that stuff? I mean it totally makes like no sense AT ALL. What a bunch of IDIOTSSSS."
I'm sure they'd pass the basic false belief tasks to test for empathetic development and autism, so they're not emotional toddlers. Again I'd say somewhere around elementary-school age.
What's going on when they occasionally do claim to understand and resonate with another's state of mind that is quite contrary to their own? It is what is observed in people with a highly anxious-preoccupied attachment style, or very clingy-needy in layman's terms. They tend to imagine similarities between themselves and the other person that don't really exist, probably as a way to feel more closely attached than they actually are.
This tendency tends to make others all the same -- namely, all like me, and therefore easy to understand and resonate with. "Omigod, I totally know that feeling -- it's JUST LIKE when I..." Of course, it's probably not just like that, and the clingy-needy person is erasing the other's unique features, putting his own in their place, and hallucinating a similarity. This is overwhelmingly the shape that the interaction takes when a homosexual doesn't vapidly dismiss another's state of mind, and at least claims to get them and feel them.
That shows up in what shallow interest they have in history or the future, which as I detailed in the post below is minimal. They can't accept the characters in literature, or the figures in history, for who they are. Everything has to have some kind of gay angle to it, or else they can't sustain interest. In a documentary for the DVD of Double Indemnity, some faggot critic almost welled up with tears talking in a breathy voice about the relationship between Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson's characters -- how intimate a tale it was of "these... two... guys," alone and relying on each other, like it was a flick about prison sex or something. And totally lacking in self-awareness that this is how he came off. Similarly, every cool historical or fictional character just had to have been gay -- just had to have been.
The extensive mental abnormalities of gays are worth thinking about at length because it shows just how sick the culture has become in encouraging them to do as they please. We're telling addicts to indulge their vices, and puffing up the egos of so-called grown-ups who watch My Little Pony, so it's only fitting that the super-hero of today would be defined by both addictive and Peter Pan-ish qualities.
Whatever you think about how far the Civil Rights movement went -- did egging on blacks vs. whites lead to riots, etc.? -- at least we were dealing with a class of human beings. Same with feminism, ugly as that got. We've taken a truly bizarre turn with the homophile movement, holding up the profoundly mentally disturbed as paragons of humanity, when they lack man's most defining quality -- the ability to empathize.
Gays are better adapted for an oligarchic society. they are far less ambitious - since they use looks to attract prospective mates and not power. They're more likely to accept the status quo - as long as they can party etc. - rather than aggressively try to gain money and power in order to attract mates.
ReplyDeleteA lot of what you say about selective empathy is true of people in general, not just gays.
ReplyDeleteIf evolutionary theory is true, than humans only empathize with those they perceive as furthering their own self-interest. This *tends* to be people "who are like I am", but not always. For instance, rich liberals typically empathize with illegal immigrants because they perceive these immigrants as empowering themselves. At the same time, said liberals typically have scorn for the white blue-collar class.
You see this with women too, where they fawn over the dominant man who stubbed his toe, but heartlessly ignore the subdominant man who was molested as a child.
All that being said, I don't think gays totally lack empathy. Its more that they only empathize with a very small portion of the population. The question should be "who are gays actually capable of empathizing with, and why?"
-Curtis
Of course, I have some ideas about who gays empathize with. We have only to study gay media.
ReplyDeleteA key example is "Sex and the City" - written by gay men . The show sympathetically portrays four "high-testosterone" women, all of whom work professional jobs and promiscuously date into their 30s(and even 40s, in the movie).
Also portrayed sympathetically, is "Mr. Big", Carrie's boyfriend. Mr. Big's occupation is never given, but its clear that he's a "MAster of the Universe" type - one of the men who runs our country. A plutocrat, in other words.
Here's another example: "Mad Men". Andrew WEiner, the guy who created the show, is gay. In the show, high-charging, professional men are portrayed sympathetically. As is Christina Hendricks' character, a high testosterone woman. The more traditional women in the show are seen as being stupid and weak..
We see a pattern emerging: Gays sympathize with high-testosterone women and the small number of financial elites who run the world.
Gays have contempt for high-estrogen women("girly-girls"), as well as virtually every man who is not a billionaire(that includes, obviously, masculine-but-coarse men such as outlaw bikers)etc.
Now why are gays empathy systems aligned in this way? It beats me... maybe you can figure it out...
Has Bailey written anything on the subject?
ReplyDeleteOff-topic, but you may be interested in this news article:
ReplyDelete"New Zealand suffered a series of major earthquakes last year, several being within the city of Christchurch. Now, matchmakers in the area say the disasters have changed the way locals view dating.
Rosie Bowie, who runs the New Zealand-based dating service Matchcompany, says residents are now more open-minded about their potential partners.
"Before the quakes, people were fussy about what they wanted. They would say they wanted someone who went to Christ's College, and there was a sense nobody was quite good enough for them. Now they are much more realistic about the fact they won't ever meet the person they expect to meet. They meet people who are available.""
http://living.msn.com/love-relationships/love-sex/singles-shake-up-dating-scene-after-earthquake?ocid=OTD_0313
Don't know if Bailey's done anything. I googled around and didn't find much on gays and empathy. Wouldn't be surprised if they scored higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, probably just on the subset that measures egocentrism, perhaps not the delusions of grandeur part.
ReplyDelete"A lot of what you say about selective empathy is true of people in general, not just gays."
But most people can and do empathize with others not like themselves. Think of anyone who has ever played a mediating role, getting two sides to come together, overlook differences, etc. It takes an empathetic person to understand and feel both sides.
I don't believe I've ever seen a homosexual do that. Their extreme clingy-neediness keeps them from standing apart; they pick a side and hunker down.
"All that being said, I don't think gays totally lack empathy."
Not totally, but like I said they do seem stuck in childhood in this way. They don't have a very advanced systemizing mind either -- few gay geeks. Whatever part of the mind is involved in this empathizing vs. systemizing stuff seems to stop developing in gays at around 5th grade or so.
Perhaps that's another source of the stereotype -- on an absolute level, and especially compared to normal people, they're not very good at empathizing. However, they're less stunted there than in the systemizing style, so their profile may still lean heavier on empathy than systemizing.
I think empathizing vs systematizing as measured by the Baron-Cohen scale is currently inconclusive regarding gay empathy -
ReplyDeletedspace.uel.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10552/570 - "Homosexual males reported significantly lower levels of physical aggression and higher levels of empathy but report similar levels of indirect aggression, and other forms of direct aggression, to heterosexual males."
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/bjp2.pdf - "The results show that whilst the non-heterosexual men in this sample do not depart significantly from the SQ-EQ profile of heterosexuals, the non-heterosexual women have sharply increased SQ scores.
There was also a trend towards lower EQ amongst non-heterosexual women, whose lack of significance may be due to small sample size.
As predicted, non-heterosexual men and women differ from heterosexuals in their interests in certain ways that shift them toward the opposite sex. Thus, nonheterosexual men have greater interest in aesthetic domains than heterosexuals, whilst non-heterosexual women have increased interest in technology and computers. The latter differences are largely explained by the increased SQ of non-heterosexual women. The former difference, however, like the greater female interest in the arts in general, cannot be explained by SQ or EQ differences and must be due to some other factor"
Interest and ability are not the same thing of course.
agnostic, you're a psych grad student, right? Sounds like you've got some low-hanging branches to investigate overlooked by the profession.
ReplyDeleteAny research into how little empathy gays have in a real-life setting (not a questionnaire), plus trying to pinpoint where the mental defect lies, has about zero percent chance of getting funded or published.
ReplyDeleteActually, establishing the basic facts wouldn't be so taboo. But then you'd have to embarrass yourself by doing a dance about how it can't mean what we think it means, etc. etc.
Or you go be honest and get hounded forever just because of some fleeting, peripheral hunch you once had.
And just reading some of the stuff about Mad Men -- those are not high-charging men at all. For professionals, they're fairly meek and rudderless, even Don to some extent. Roger's the only one who comes off as high-charging.
ReplyDeleteRemember they're showing the era of the company man, the man in the gray flannel suit, not Jay Gatsby or Alex P. Keaton.