WomensStuff

I do think some men try to understand, but it's hard without lived experience - they essentially have to trust others accounts, but the emotional impact is just not the same. But then I don't think this is special to men - there are women who are victimized and despite having those experiences they reject feminism and embrace those oppressive attitudes.

And this issue of empathy and lived experience is true of so many other forms of oppression - it's hard to know what it's like to be Black in America if you're perceived as white. It's hard to know what it's like to be poor or living in a third world country if you have economic privilege. I might read about the history of slavery and accounts about police brutality, but that doesn't give me the same experience and emotional understanding as lived experience does.

I might visit a third world country and meet kids who are growing up in a place that has no schools, has no colleges, has no jobs or opportunities - kids who watch the same TV shows as you, and who dress like you, but are working as cheap manual labor on farms owned by major U.S. ag companies and have no future outside that. What would make middle class Americans recognize and understand that oppression and align with them?

In my experience, emotional appeals can help. TikTok videos showing the genocide of Palestinians radicalized a lot of middle class Americans. But it's a lot easier to radicalize people when you have videos of those kinds of acts - it's harder to capture all the ways oppression changes you. Even so, discussions about microaggressions and implicit bias have entered the mainstream discussion, just not always with the desired impact of raising consciousness. Alliances have to be formed sometimes with compromise and mutual cooperation and understanding, and that can be difficult between a privileged group and an oppressed group, especially when men are typically viewed as the oppressors.