Empathy on Demand?

Composing recent entries brought to mind this scene from a movie I checked out from the library not long ago: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The character "Trillian" has a line which I think may have been one of the main reasons for the existence of a rather significant subplot.

Here's how Wikipedia describes it.

"The point-of-view gun is a fictional device created by Douglas Adams for the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

"According to the film, the gun was created by [the computer] Deep Thought prior to its long pondering of the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. When used on someone, it will cause them to see things from the point of view of the person firing the gun. According to the Guide, the gun was commissioned by the Intergalactic Consortium of Angry Housewives, who were tired of ending every argument with their husbands with the phrase: “You just don’t get it, do you?”

"Near the end of the film, Marvin uses the gun to save the crew from hundreds of Vogons. After the Vogons see things from Marvin’s chronically depressed point of view, they all collapse.

"When the gun is [first] discovered it is playfully used by Ford Prefect and Zaphod on one another, and eventually taken by Trillian who uses it to force Zaphod to understand why she was upset over the destruction of Earth.

"Following this, Zaphod threatens to fire the gun at Trillian, to which she replies that she is “already a woman,” and therefore it will have no effect on her."

Of course this is Douglas Adams so the whole thing is quite tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately the sexist stereotype in the bit about Trillian does not hold up under close scrutiny, does it? Wouldn't it be good for the world if it did? If at least half of us human beings were naturally in tune with other people's perspective? Since this is, alas, not true, we all have to be more patient with one another and work at understanding and being understood.