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.

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I'm about to put up a series of Kavanaugh posts.

There are so many bloggable Kavanaugh headlines right now. I was going to collect them all in one post, but I want to react to them separately, so I'm going to string them out to avoid one long post. And this post is just a place-keeper to tell you that's what I'm about to do.

So when you see the first in the series, don't see it as a signal to dump everything you currently have to say about the ongoing Kavanausea.*

As these posts go up, please react to the specific post and, especially, please don't initiate discussion of another article that I haven't gotten to yet. If you're seeing an article you'd like to see in this forthcoming series of posts, you can drop the link to that on the comments on this warning post.

This is, I think, the first time in the 15-year history of this blog that I've ever done a post like this.
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* I was going to ^TM that word but I see that ZeroHedge noticed the portmanteau potential yesterday.

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Cory Booker and Brett Kavanaugh — Chris Cillizza pushes away whataboutism, but we might reach for it anyway.

"What makes Cory Booker's groping incident different than the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh."

That's the CNN headline for a piece by Chris Cillizza.

The automatic, easy, snarky answer: He's a Democrat.

I still haven't read the article, and I hadn't previously noticed there was a "groping incident" about Cory Booker. Is it an allegation or something we know happened? Anyway, to give an nonsnarky answer — again, before reading the article — I'd say: Cory Booker has a limited term and faces reelection. Brett Kavanaugh is up for a lifetime appointment.

Let's read this piece now:

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote in the early 1990s -- while a student at Stanford -- about an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed.

"With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast," Booker wrote of that night. "After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark.'" The point of Booker's column was how that moment, and his work on the issue after, had changed him -- and his views on women, consent and assault -- forever. "It was a wake-up call," Booker wrote in his Stanford column. "I will never be the same."

You're already consensually kissing. You try to touch her breast and are pushed away, and you try again and — what? — the end of the story is missing. But, holy God, if that's what ruins your life these days, the world has gone mad. I wonder whether college-student Cory was bullshitting when he claimed to be changed forever by this "wake up" call. But, again, I don't know the end of the story. Did the woman take him to task for trying again? And what's the "Top Gun" slogan? Maybe Cillizza isn't telling the story straight.

So the difference between the 2 stories — and this is my opinion, not Cillizza's — is that Booker's story was a story he told on himself, as part of posturing and instructing about how to be a good man. I don't know if it's true, but he chose to tell it and tell it that way. What really happened? I have no idea. Kavanaugh is suffering through someone else's telling of what is purportedly his story, and it's not told in the template of how he became such a good man, but to frame him as secretly evil. Within that other person's story, he is brutal and ugly, not boyishly copping a feel that he later lavishly regrets.

Back to Cillizza:

The rise of the #MeToo movement and the cavalcade of high-profile men admitting to behavior that ranges from boorish to criminal has opened eyes and forced uncomfortable and important conversations. The accusations against Kavanaugh are another moment to examine our assumptions and talk openly about how we should bets [sic] approach these situations -- both now and going forward.

Oh, yes. Let's have a conversation about everything! Talk openly! How do you think that will go? Place your "bets."

What we don't need amid all of this is an epic bout of "whatboutism" [sic].

Yeah, don't come after my guy while I'm going after your guy. That's whataboutism! I want you to stand down while I take all my shots. Funnily enough, that's how all these "conversations" tend to go when we're encouraged to have a conversation about some hot subject.

What Booker did as a teenager wasn't right. And he has been and will be judged by voters on them. But to turn Booker into a political missile to prove hypocrisy misses the mark. This isn't about Booker. This is about Ford, Kavanaugh, and how we, together, figure out the right way forward.

Yes, tell us what this is about.  You call out "whatboutism" — AKA whataboutism— but I'm going to call out your "what-it's-about-ism." You don't get to restrict the subject to exactly the scope you like. When you do that, it's "what-it's-about-ism" (my coinage).

But of course, everything's different from everything else. We can talk about differences and samenesses. Don't tell me what to do.

IN THE COMMENTS: Nonapod said:

"an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed. 'With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head'"

Top Gun came out in 1986. This whole story is an anti-strawman.

Wow. I found 2 typos in Cillizza's piece — "whatboutism" and "bets" — so maybe "1984" is another typo.

Anyway, checking the release date of the movie — it is indeed 1986 — I found the "slogan," I believe. It's "I feel the need... the need for speed!" That's such a stupid sex slogan.

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