‘Himpathy’ Is a Societal Illness. But at Least We Have a Word for It

Let us now sing “A Hymn to Him.”

No, not a title drawn from today’s newspapers, but a number from Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 megahit My Fair Lady. Professor Higgins is uncomprehending in the face of what he regards as Eliza’s lack of generosity (she’s performed brilliantly for him at the ball; he’s treated her like a laboratory rat).

Addressing Colonel Pickering in a tone only a wounded superior male can muster, the professor shares his opinion concerning gender difference:

This is pretty squirmy stuff -- and that’s only the song’s intro. Try to unhear the cartoon fury of those lines as Higgins launches into his narcissistic catalogue of disappointments.

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” he asks. Men are honest, fair, companionable, unfussed, generous, warm-hearted. And so on.
The number, famously delivered in speaky-song (Rex Harrison established the role’s voice), always feels like a lecture. Yes, its sunny delusion and excessive chumminess are ironic. Fritz Loewe means for us to chuckle at Higgins’s final, “Why can’t a woman be more like me?”

Indeed.

We are now focused, with an acuity that revitalizes and expands #MeToo, on the ways in which powerful men imagine their powerlessness and demand that others sympathize with their dilemmas, even and especially if those dilemmas are self-generated.

To sympathize, from the Greek, is to share a feeling, especially a feeling of pain. It’s not always easy to distinguish sympathy from empathy, a late addition to the vocabulary of feeling. Psychologists began speaking of empathy in the 20th century, searching for a term that offered some resonance with the experience of another, without necessarily engaging on an emotional level.

The Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne has now given us the term himpathy, which she has defined as “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.”

To move from sympathy (or empathy) to himpathy is something else, too: to share a feeling of supportive bonding with a male individual, usually in a powerful position, and through him with the fragile, endangered male sex.

Borrowing Manne’s insight, we might identify a pathology, an illness within society that tilts people, regardless of gender, toward the powerful man. Let’s call them himpathizers. Male or female, they’re dogged supporters of the status quo and the power systems that maintain it.

Himpathy, though, is more than rooting for powerful men. What about race? There was no outcry of himpathy for Bill Cosby, the most highly visible black celebrity to be accused and convicted of sexual assault. And what about men whose sexuality isn’t “normative”?

It’s hard not to conclude that himpathy is an emotional connection with powerful masculinity of the white, straight kind. In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, theorist of gender with a particular affinity (I’m avoiding the word sympathy here) for the oppressions of gay male life, wrote with scalding politeness of a spectacle to be witnessed at one’s peril: the teary straight white male.

Here’s Sedgwick turning up the heat on male bathos:

“The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivaled only by the lacrimae Christi whose secretion is such a specialty of religious kitsch. What charm, compared to this chrism of the gratuitous, can reside in the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry about?”

Boys will be boys, Sedgwick’s writings explained, and many men will be boys forever, in complicated exclusionary ways that sustain a world of power relations held self-righteously apart from women’s complicating presence. A tear or two might be necessary to keep the doors shut, but that’s a small price to pay.

What a field day Sedgwick would have had with the kitschy protocols of himpathy.

The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, developing ideas proposed by the feminist critic bell hooks and others, gave agency to the neologism intersectionality. From the beginning, the term looked like something from an urban planning textbook, but it quickly took its place as the sign of race, gender, and class as inseparably interdependent. Himpathy shines as a prime object for intersectional analysis.

Professor Higgins may be many things, but no one has accused him of sexual assault. (Though rhyming rags and hags feels like just the tiniest hint that he has a problem with the female body.) And of course his maudlin appeal to another man for understanding is, finally, only a moment in a Broadway show, not a cri de coeur to a panel of judges. The curtain down, we go home.

Real life -- and the words we invent to endure it -- isn’t much like a Broadway musical.

One of those words -- Manne’s himpathy -- makes visible, as words are inclined to do, a force at play in the social imaginary.

It may not go away any time soon, but at least now we have a name for it.