Objectify This

I found this article on broadsheet about Empathy. Catherine Price writes

“Here’s something that sounds like a joke, but isn’t: the Empathy Belly.

“It’s a pregnancy simulator designed to “enable men, women, teenage boys and girls to experience over 20 symptoms and effects of pregnancy.” (The Empathy Belly is not to be confused with the Empathy Lungs, put out by the same company.)

“The Empathy Belly’s effects include a 30-pound weight gain, pressure on your bladder to encourage frequent urination, shallow breathing, increased pulse and body temperature, other uncomfortable pregnancy-related conditions, and my favorites:

“Low backaches; shift in center of gravity; waddling” and

“Fatigue, irritability, and much, much more!”

Unfortunately, the Empathy Belly is expensive (its discounted price is $449) and isn’t available to the general public (something about how it’s designed as a teaching tool for medical, social and educational fields, blah blah blah).

But luckily for anyone curious about such things, a writer for The Boston Herald got ahold of one and wrote a column about the experience. The author was inspired by his wife, who said that she wished he could feel what it was like to be pregnant after he started treating an ultrasound appointment as a prenatal photo shoot. Unbeknownst to her, he went to the hospital to get fitted with the 33-pound apparatus, then met his wife for lunch. She was amused (and squeezed his fake body parts over the table). Then they went out to the movies, both pregnant. Something tells me that marriage is going to last.

On a more serious note, I’m glad that the Empathy Belly’s out there. As the Web site’s tag line says, “Tell me and I might forget. Show me and I might remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand and remember.” That makes sense — I’d imagine that having students wear an Empathy Belly would be a much better teaching tool than making them carry around a sack of flour.

And also: The simulator’s only meant to be worn for 30 minutes. To get to wear it for more than three hours, the author had to sign “multiple health waivers.” (He maxed out at 18 hours.) I wonder how many forms there’d be if you wanted to wear it for nine months.”

The thing that bothers me and intrigues me about this product is that it acknowledges the disputed idea that men are not naturally empaths. Why not? Really, what is it that makes us so sure that empathy is a female trait?

Surely, biologically, there is an imperative for a mother to empathize with her own children, but it’s hardly fair to pass men a free ticket to insensitivity or women a free ticket to sainthood without examining our data here. And frankly, things are not that simple.

The difficulty in teasing apart gender and behavior is that psychology does not (by definition) have truly objective controls. We would consider the methods required to observe how humans “naturally” behave without the benefit of socialization both cruel and irrelevant to the behavior of people in society.

In some ways, this debate resembles the long contended philosophical debate about free will, but i’m not really intending to “go there”. I just want to question the idea that males are necessarily in need of an “empathy” device to help them understand pregnancy. I mean, no one would ever propose that women need an “empathy” device to help us understand how it feels to get kicked in the balls, right?

We don’t bear our genitals externally, and believe me, that is wonderful. Take it from a rock climber who has taken a lot of falls and watched a lot of guy friends take falls- it is probably better.

But you know, even though it’s not like giving birth is a picnic, I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it some day. And when I’m pregnant, I sure as hell won’t be expecting my partner to use a placebo to induce empathy- I’ll be hoping that s/he will induce it his/her very own self.

I mean, that’s the point of a partner, right? Someone who thinks about you as an equal?