The Empathy Chip
Plankton, secret conservatives, more LIB analysis no one asked for, and my future on wellness farms.
Last week The Plankton Movie came out on Netflix (Plankton of Spongebob Squarepants fame, of course). This was a big event in our house – for weeks my son had been counting down the days to the premiere.
When you’re a mom you do things like sit through an entire Plankton movie and endure multiple rewinds of the “funniest” parts on a Friday night. I was biding my time until he went to sleep so I could watch the final episodes of Love Is Blind (LIB).
The cliff notes version of Plankton is that Plankton’s computer wife, Karen, goes on a world-domination rampage after years of neglect, mistreatment, and general under-appreciation. Plankton discovers her “empathy chip” fell out of her motherboard and assumes that is the cause for her escalating violence (instead of the more obvious answer: his own actions). Eventually, Plankton ingests the empathy chip (an ayahuasca-trip montage about feelings ensues) to learn what it means to actually give a shit about other people so he can find a way back to Karen’s heart, re-install the empathy chip in her, and stop her from destroying the earth. The big reveal is that Karen never needed the empathy chip, she still had empathy without the chip and was just pissed at him for being a jerk.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, it was the “empathy chip” that I couldn't stop thinking about after finishing LIB.
This season of Love Is Blind (again, LIB) ended with three out of four women saying NO at the altar, citing their fiancees’ conservative values as the key dealbreaker.
Can I get a hell-fucking-yeah?! The female audience of this show collectively breathed a sigh of relief at each “No.” This is art imitating life. This is also why straight people aren’t finding matches these days and are more alone than ever.
There’s plenty of men out there who proudly put “conservative” or “libtards swipe left” on their dating profiles. At least they’re being honest, it makes for a quick swipe left. But behind them is a much larger, more sinister contingent: men whose dating profiles say “moderate” or “apolitical” (or nothing at all), because they know “conservative” is not a hot commodity with the women they’re attracted to.
I say sinister because they are smart enough to know that their political leanings won’t get them laid (ironically, these types of men aren’t usually attracted to the pick-me contingent of conservative women), but also don’t care enough about what women want to actually change or consider having empathy for other people.
I think they expect that women will compromise on their values. They take us that un-seriously and think women are that desperate to get married.
Women might have been once upon a time (see what I did there?), but not anymore. Women in different eras might have been OK with looking the other way, but women today know there’s too much at stake. Political beliefs are not just a difference of opinions anymore, to our most vulnerable communities it’s literally life or death. Most women would rather be single than be with a man who doesn’t care about how their choices affect other people (… right?)
And men are flabbergasted by this! Men are having less sex and fewer relationships than any previous recorded generation. Women are literally screaming out that this is why. And they still don’t get it.
The truly insidious part is they are smart enough to know that being outwardly conservative and Trump-supporting is repulsive to most women, but also don’t care to change or do better. They lie and pretend and downplay their way into serious relationships. They wait to let the cat out of the bag until you’re in too deep. To me – and also the women on LIB, it turns out – that is actually more terrifying than the ones who are out and proud (see, I said that on purpose too).
The Plankton Movie trying to teach kids about empathy is admirable. But people can’t just swallow a heart-shaped computer chip and have an empathy awakening. I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t teach a man who lacks empathy how to grow it. What starts as small red flags of lack of empathy can actually foretell future malicious and even dangerous behaviors.
Back to LIB, I’ll start with Devin and Virginia. Devin is a high school basketball coach who collects $500 sneakers. Any girl who’s ever dated a “sneakers guy” knows that this habit is directly correlated to catastrophic credit and not having a 401k. Virginia is successful and smart and asked for a prenup while they were engaged, which he reluctantly agreed to. Her instinct to have him do that was correct: turns out he received a large check as a wedding present intended to be for both of them and hid it from her.
When she wanted to talk about values and politics before the wedding, he told her he didn’t want to talk about it on camera because HE KNEW HE’D BE PUBLICLY SHREDDED FOR BEING A TRUMPER, a trump supporter of color at that, which she later admitted caused her to feel like she had to protect him. Oddly, on camera, he felt bold enough to act very “her body, my choice” when they talked abortion rights and didn’t seem to understand what she meant when she asked him if he voted according to his values.
This isn’t a related detail, but the funniest part about Devin was how he tearfully admitted to having “beat” an “addiction” to ibuprofen, a notoriously non-habit-forming, over-the-counter substance.
What Virgina slowly discovered is that, although he had purported himself to be someone who cared about equality, he really only cared about it when it came to how it affects him.
The footage of their wedding ceremony has the tension of a horror movie. Her body language looks like she’s being held captive, and her relief when she finally tells him “No” during their vows is palatable. She looked much more herself - confident and beautiful - at the reunion where she thoroughly dressed him down:
On to Sara and Ben. Sara was very clear from their earliest meeting that she wants a partner who stands for equality and does not want to be with someone conservative. She asked him where he stood on the BLM movement and he said he hadn’t thought much about it. They were from the same town as George Floyd?? She told him her sister is a lesbian and she can’t be with someone who doesn’t support the LGBTQ community.
The way this man proceeded to LIE THROUGH HIS TEETH to get her to get engaged to him... He said he was only somewhat religious and he supported equality in all forms. Once they were out in the real world, Ben said he really wanted Sara to attend his megachurch with him. She quickly found out the church had wildly and very public anti-gay views. When she probed him on it, he said it had never affected him, so he never thought much about it.
Do you see it now? The missing empathy chips? Devin didn’t support a woman’s right to choose and Ben happily listened to anti-gay sermons because they don’t think those things affect them, so - to them - what does it matter. This is a microcosm of the majority of young men out there in the dating pool today – and women are, thankfully, getting wise to it.
Before I hear the whiny “not all men”, I didn’t say all men – I personally know maybe a handful of men who won’t report me to the Slut Gestapo when our government makes its final descent into fascism in a few months and starts rounding up the non-desirables like in The Handmaid’s Tale.
But I’ve come across way more men who are like Devin and Ben. Who never cared about their LGBTQ neighbors, friends, and family members enough to think twice about how they might be hurt by who they voted for. Or who never stopped to think how supporting “pro-life” candidates might affect the women in their lives. A lot of these men can’t make a woman orgasm, do we really think they’re smart enough to know enough about reproductive health to have an informed opinion on abortion rights?
They could understand, they just don’t care to. It is a pandemic-level, missing-empathy-chip crisis. Just like Plankton, they aren’t capable of thinking outside of their own little skull-sized universes. They end up letting down, neglecting, and many times abusing their partners just like Plankton did to his computer wife Karen.
That missing empathy that enabled Devin and Ben to vote obliviously with the male privilege of being able to just skate by unaffected in their lives is the same lack of empathy that would also be responsible for their other failures as romantic partners.
Typically, men are on best behavior during the honeymoon period (this is another sinister phenomenon). It’s not a coincidence that all three of the men who were dumped at the altar had been either found to be inappropriately DM’ing with other girls online or receiving letters from ex-girlfriends while engaged, and - you can’t make this shit up - outed as having a long, documented history of giving out business cards with his face and links to his YouTube channel to girls at bars and being such a notorious fuck boy that multiple women had taken to TikTok to decry him.
I’m not perfect and I’ve certainly gone through my own trial and error.
I don’t make a habit of explaining my poems, that’s a slippery slope. But R*publican (in my book) is about exactly what these women on LIB went through. It’s not even the worst example I have, but at least one I can write publicly about.
I had a relationship a couple years ago with someone who just left things out, who said nothing when I complained about Trump, who changed the subject when I talked about how worried I was about Roe falling.
Like I said in R*publican: “there were signs, I guess.” He did casually admit to never having gotten the COVID vaccine after I’d made a comment about anti-vaxxers. I think it gave me pause, but in the moment it seemed less like a sign of missing empathy (which it was, it totally was) and more like simple ignorance.
It wasn’t until we were a handful of months in, past too-soon “I love you’s”, getting quite serious when I was bemoaning something MAGA-related and he blurted out: “Well, I’m a Republican, is that a deal breaker for you?”
I can’t remember what I said in that moment. I was overwhelmed by the montage in my head of the many, many times he could have brought this up in conversation months earlier when I was talking about my feelings openly… and he didn’t. He could have easily slipped it into conversation before it got that serious. It was deliberate: he knew that if he’d said that early on I might have felt differently about him. It was a lie of omission, because he knew the truth might lead me to make choices that wouldn’t serve his interests.
I’d like to tell you that I stood on business and ended it because of that. I didn’t. Turns out it feels really hard to break something off for something like that once they’ve already weaseled into your life. I’ll just say I learned my lesson shortly after when he taught me that being a r*publican was not even close to being the worst thing about him.
The truth is, it’s not your political affiliation that makes you a bad person, though it is often an accompanying symptom. Under normal circumstances, I’d like to think people of different parties can make a relationship work. But the 2020’s are not normal circumstances.
I have a bone to pick with LIB, because they let these loser-ass men off the hook at the reunion. Nick and Vanessa threw softballs to the men in question and even applauded them for being open and vulnerable. Fuck all the way off, Nick Lachey.
They seem to be trying not to lose a segment of the audience who I’d bet also lack empathy chips. They also conveniently didn’t show the specific conversations the women allude to where the men are caught with the DM’s, the letter from the ex’s, when they SAY OUT LOUD to the women that they don’t want their political views on camera.
Ben, notably, received a ton of right-wing support on twitter following the reunion. A lot of red-hat bro’s and a few pick-me’s insisting that he dodged a huge bullet. In a way, this backfired on him majorly. I don’t think it’s a good look to have the worst people on the internet placing you on their side.
I guess I don’t really have a central thesis. This is the way it is, I don’t make the rules and I don’t have the answers. I think it’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out ten years down the road. I’ve taken the temperature from the women in my life and online sentiment (I’m too online). The Plankton Movie may just be prophesizing what happens when women are pushed too far. Because I don’t think the movie expects you to think Karen the computer wife is the villain, you kind of understand why she destroys the town and builds herself into a mega death robot.
I won’t say “I told you so” when women revolt and destroy like Karen or when I’m proven right from the “wellness camp” I’ll surely be put in soon.
I’ve seen more Spongebob content over the years than is normal or healthy for a woman my age. My son is going through a Spongebob fixation, which makes sense if you know that I was an early Spongebob devotee. The first episodes that came out when I was about 13 were hilarious and WEIRD and kooky. I was drawn to oddball content like that ever since I was a kid. The Adventures of Pete and Pete was cannon in our house. Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, the movie Heavyweights (I recently showed this to Tyler and he’s now watched it seven more times since December) all got a ton of play.
I hope my son takes that humor and weirdness with him. I know he has empathy and I hope I can be a good enough mom to keep that little spark going into his teens and young adult years. I’m comforted to some extent that he’s also being guided in his development by Spongebob, who famously had Keanu Reeves in one movie play a spirit-guide-like tumbleweed named Sage. I think he’ll be OK.
(RIP Nona F Mecklenberg <3)