A NYT illustration scoffs at the very idea of empathy for men... Is heartlessness now required to demonstrate #MeToo good faith?

What could justify this embarrassingly crude and desperate propaganda?



The illustration reminded me of the sarcastic childhood rejoinder "Oh, boo hoo hoo" — aimed at someone whose tears are not worth sharing. It is a proper accompaniment to the column, which offers the coinage "himpathy," to refer to empathy for men. The column-writer Kate Manne is a philosophy professor (at Cornell).

She defines "himpathy" as "the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior." So... it's only himpathy and deserving of our resistance if it's "inappropriate and disproportionate." In which case, we're just restating the question: How do we respond to accusations against a person? What is appropriate? What is disproportionate?

A charitable reading of Manne has her saying merely: Take care that your empathy isn't skewed, as it very well may be in a system in which men have so much prominence and women have traditionally been kept from speaking out about sexual subordination.

In that light, let me try to give a sympathetic reading to the illustration: The man is gigantic, like a movie star on a big screen, and the woman is tiny, so his tears fall like buckets of water on her tiny head. We see his pain because he's so big, but what about her? We need to see how she feels. This shows, the sympathetic reading says, why our empathy gets skewed: He's so big his pain is plainly visible, and she's so inconsequential, we're tempted to indulge ourselves and keep our own lives simpler by not seeing her.

Newspaper illustrations are often hastily done and not successfully expressive of the idea the artist hoped to convey. This one particularly bothered me because I, subjectively, perceived it as expressing hate, the way a gang mocks a cowering victim. That might be me and my "himpathy," and I suppose I'm meant to worry that the #MeToo movement will hate me too. Me, the big traitor. (But I'm okay. I learned how to live with that internalized intimidation a long time ago.)

But let's look at the text of this column. It's the column that drives the illustration, not the other way around:

Once you learn to spot himpathy, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere....

You mean, you become skewed in the other direction? Template in hand, how do you know when your ideas are inappropriate and disproportionate?

What the Kavanaugh case has revealed this week is that himpathy can, at its most extreme, become full-blown gendered sociopathy: a pathological moral tendency to feel sorry exclusively for the alleged male perpetrator — it was too long ago; he was just a boy; it was a case of mistaken identity — while relentlessly casting suspicion upon the female accusers. It also reveals the far-ranging repercussions of this worldview: It’s no coincidence that many of those who himpathize with Judge Kavanaugh to the exclusion of Dr. Blasey are also avid abortion opponents, a position that requires a refusal to empathize with girls and women facing an unwanted pregnancy.

In the context of seeing what is big and not seeing what is very small, Manne brings up abortion. All of the above paragraph strikes me as straining exaggeration, but I'm stunned that it ran headlong into the problem of abortion. Can we coin a word that means the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy born individuals often enjoy in cases of violence against the unborn?

What makes himpathy so difficult to counter is that the mechanisms underlying it are partly moral in nature: Sympathy and empathy are pro-social moral emotions, which makes it especially hard to convince people that when they skew toward the powerful and against the vulnerable, they become a source of systemic injustice. So, for those for whom himpathy is a mental habit prompted by biased social forces, and not an entrenched moral outlook, the first step to solving the problem is simply learning to recognize when it’s at work, and to be wary of its biasing influence.

Is that "himpathy" specific or is Manne saying that we should always examine our empathy and analyze whether we are just shallowly doing what works in going along to get along or whether we really have deep roots in morality? There are many ways to be shallow. We could be in thrall to the patriarchy, but we could also be hoping to catch the upsurge of the #MeToo movement.