Or: ‘the culture compensatory regime of polite avoidance and wishful thinking’ (Jess Row, see below)

Texts do communicate with each other, and so do words, and a few times even letters. But not in the way we usually think of communication when trying to transmit our intentions to others.

It is surprising how many men (because of women I simply don’t know) describe themselves on dating platforms as “emphatisch”. What they presumably want to say is something pretty different, that is to say “empathisch”, also presumably because they have learnt somehow that this is a characteristic women like in men. So, they just don’t bother about what they are saying. To be emphatic is not even a word for describing a person. What does it mean? You can say something emphatically. The Oxford dictionary says, you can close a door emphatically, or you can feel emphatically English, though born in California. But definitely, you can’t be emphatic. Now, you might say, oh, that is just misspelled. Yes, in some way it is a question of spelling (because they don’t know better). But the problem arises when the mistake lets us understand something completely different.

In November 2018 Jess Row published an article in The New Yorker by the title ‘Why is being held accountable so terrifying under patriarchy?’ It is about the hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, now associate justice in the US Supreme Court, accused of sexual assault which he was denying. Asked by the US senator Dianne Feinstein if the allegations were wrong, he answered: “Yes, that is what emphatically what I’m saying, emphatically. The Swetnick thing is a joke. That is a farce.” At the beginning of the same article, Row writes that the behavior of Kavanaugh opened up that vein of reflexive empathy that conservatives often reserve for white men in positions of power.

Empathy is an attitude towards others, especially others who are different from us, because that is the exercise here, to understand something which is different from what we normally assume. In this case, it would be the woman, the vulnerable woman who was the victim of his own assault. However, what he is asking is the empathy towards himself, the offender, not the victim, and this in an emphatic way. That is the scandal.

When men claim that they are empathic, but actually are saying they are emphatic, what they are claiming is the role of the victim (in the mask of an empathic person), but in reality being the offender. Like the guy claiming that for his whole life he has been the victim, starting from his mother up to all the women he had relationships with (the women always the offenders), claiming now that she can decide, but at the first opportunity he took the decision for her ignoring her refusal. In Klaus Theweleit’s “Männerphantasien” it reads as follows: ‘Getarnt als Stier (als Opfer) begeht von Selchow einen glatten Mord an dieser Frau, der ihn tief befriedigt.’

One solution I have seen is to skip the difficult letter at all: empatisch. But my top candidate is emphatisches Bewusstsein (emphatic conscience). I would like to see the guy “having it”.