flexibeast

This is interesting:

Galinsky and colleagues . . . . found that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, thus leaving them unable to adjust to another person's perspective and decreases one's ability to correctly interpret emotion.

i wonder if this doesn't suggest that privileged groups might literally not be able to comprehend how they are, in fact, in a privileged position? For instance, it might explain why so many males seem to have (what i regard as) empathy deficit disorder: years of privilege might have caused their minds have developed in such a way as to have difficulty seeing what life might be like without the power and privilege that often comes with being male. Such that, for example, many men don't seem unable to understand how a woman being pressured / harrassed / forced into having sex by a guy often has a more complex view of the situation than those men typically imagine. (E.g., "If i say 'no', is he going to keep going anyway? [See, for example,

naked_wrat's recent experience in this regard.] And if i then say 'no' more firmly and try to pull away, is he then going to get angry and use physical force on me?" And so on.) And further: in discussions about rape and sexual assault, many men seem fixated on discussing situation in which the perp is a stranger, when in actual fact, in a clear majority of cases, the perp is already known to the victim¹. This again suggests that these men have at best a minimal grasp of how the world may look to women - specifically, that strangers are less likely to be a concern than people they know. (Which further complicates matters, since a woman's social circles have no particular interest in taking sides with a stranger, whereas they may well have an interest in taking sides with a perp from their social circle.)

i think the crucial issue here is the desire of a privileged group to listen and at least try to understand what life might be like 'on the other side'. It's like when people mess up the pronouns they use to refer to me: i don't have a problem with it, as long as it's clear to me that the person in question is genuinely trying to get them right. It's when people don't appear to be even making an effort - or worse, to be actively emphasising incorrect pronouns - that i start getting upset.

Similarly, i feel it's one thing for men to have difficulty comprehending women's views of the world; it's another for them to not even bother to make an effort to do so in the first place. Which is something i see all too often. :-/ And how can any issue be resolved if one side believes itself to not have any need to comprehend any other sides' positions?

1. An e-brief entitled "Measuring domestic violence and sexual assault: a review of the literature and statistics" notes that, in Australia:

78 per cent of female victims of sexual assault knew the offender (in cases where there was sufficient data to identify the relationship of the offender to the victim). There is also a marked difference when comparing the rates of male and female victims of assault who knew their offender. Looking only at cases with sufficient data to identify the relationship, only 47 per cent of male victims of assault knew the offender while 81 per cent of female victims knew their offender in 2003.