 But not all feminists believe that the privileged can ‘world-travel.’ Laurence Thomas, for instance, argues that the privileged cannot come to know the position of their subordinates because they cannot even grasp the latter’s experiences (1999). According to Thomas, heterosexual men cannot imagine how a female rape victim feels, since they cannot imagine the fear of rape that most if not all women feel, and do not have to deal with social attitudes that make them targets of sexual violence. By the same token, a white person does not know what it is for a black person to experience a feeling of being a second-class citizen when attacked by a group of whites, nor can a white person come to know it if attacked by a group of blacks. Thomas believes that in oppressive societies, the privileged are socially constituted differently from the oppressed, and so have different emotional configurations, making them experience things in different ways (186). Being viewed as less than full and equal members of society, and having painful memories of these experiences, are necessary conditions for the privileged person’s being able to take the perspective of the oppressed, which he is simply unable to do given his social condition. Whether this absolves the privileged from responsibility for oppression is not something Thomas addresses in the context of this discussion, but he argues that the privileged have an obligation to engage in “moral deference,” that is, to defer to those who speak in an informed way about experiences specific to their position of subordination to which others do not have access. He asserts that any morally decent, self-respecting person should listen to another’s moral story and acquire sensibility to the way in which that person lives in the world as a member of an oppressed group (189).