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himpathy: the way powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual violence or engage in other misogynistic behavior often receive sympathy and concern over their female victims.
misogyny is typically (though not invariably) a response to a woman’s violations of gendered “law and order.”
understanding misogyny as more about the hostility girls and women face, as opposed to the hostility men feel deep down in their hearts, helps us avoid a problem of psychological inscrutability.
himpathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior.
Himpathy often radically distorts the framing of men’s violence against women, as well as children in some cases.20 Himpathy imaginatively transforms presumptively brutal murders into understandable acts of passion or, alternatively, warranted desperation. And it imaginatively turns other crimes, such as rape, into mere misunderstandings and alcohol-fueled mishaps.
“How do you assert your agency when its price is the pain of others?” the author asks. At the time of writing, I have no real answer to this question.
In the United Kingdom, women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack. And young women who suffer from heart attacks are almost twice as likely to die in the hospital, compared with their male counterparts. Yet in the United Kingdom, research funding for coronary artery disease in men far exceeds that for women.
In view of such disparities, medical researchers have coined the term “Yentl syndrome” to capture the way women may have to present with typical male symptoms before receiving appropriate treatment.
As a result, many women face a potent double bind: Don’t ask, and you’ll be saddled with far more than your fair share of material, domestic, and emotional labor. Do ask, and you’ll be violating the implicit social code that tells women to keep the peace, nurture others, and not be too demanding. Hartley:
The more the Left loves them (partly on the grounds of their extraordinary communality in fighting for future generations), the more the Right resents it—especially in view of their sense that this girl or woman is actually hurting people’s (read: their own) interests and impugning their good character.30
We must make room for different ways of manifesting communal moral virtues.
A potent double bind presents itself to women in this position: embrace the hope that you’re exceptionally communal and risk flaming out, when people are inevitably disappointed by some aspect of your history, views, or platform.
We expect too much from women. And when a woman we like or respect disappoints us, even in minor and forgivable ways, she is liable to be punished—often by people who think they have the moral high ground, and are merely reacting to her as she deserves, rather than helping to enact misogyny via moralism.