women, please tell your experience. some men do not get it. 19, 10pm, college campus

[zazen]

134. jumping in late, but I get his questions about objectification

and to me they're perfectly consistent with the radical feminist anti-pornography critiques with which I'm familiar.

I don't think he's trying to trivialize objectification at all.

There's this concept of "theory of mind"--what some say is where we begin to differ as human toddlers from the other primates (though that's debatable). It goes to our belief that someone else has a perspective, has an inner life, and our drive/behavior/motivation to understand that for whatever reason.

Knowing that someone has an inner life, and speculating as to what that is, is not synonymous with empathy. In fact, it can be the basis of sociopathology. I've always personally maintained that sociopaths and autistics are polar opposites in terms of theory of mind and empathy.

Think Michael Corleone--GREAT theory of mind. Ability to understand what someone else is thinking in order to strategically manipulate it. Zero empathy. Sadistic sociopaths in fact _enjoy_ wallowing in the pain they think someone is experiencing. They are quite aware that their victim is a "subject"--the thrill is reducing that subject to an object (a tool) while the SUBJECT KNOWS IT.

Asperger's sufferers (don't know about autistics), however, from what I've read and my limited experience, have poor theory of mind. The idea that someone else is thinking something differently than they are rarely occurs to them. When it does, however, and they realize they've hurt someone, they're often terribly upset. It's not that they mean to hurt people-it's that they don't know the ways in which people can get hurt.

Men who sexually violate (across the continuum) are getting off on the fantasy that a woman is seeing them the way they want to be seen, and experiencing herself the way he wants her to experience herself. Hence, an acknowledgement of subjective production on the part of the woman is _essential_. But then a narrative is projected onto her.

Now, all humans fail to fully get someone else's inner experience--that's the primary moral and ethical challenge of our lives--so we all project to greater or lesser degrees. It's the systematic projection by most males onto most females of a particularly distorted, narcissistic fantasy that's the problem.