*Content warning for discussions of violence and sexual abuse*
I am a big fan of the podcast You’re Wrong About.
I realize that this is not a very niche recommendation. The show has at this point been endorsed by TIME and no less an authority than Jessica Chastain. Premiering back in May of 2018, YWA retells the biggest, culture-shaping news stories of the past with the nuance and level of detail that was sanded away in the original narrativizing of events. Or at least that’s the one sentence pitch.
Truth be told, I’ve struggled several times now to coherently recommend the show to friends, because while the structure of the show can be boiled down to what I’ve said, that doesn’t quite capture what Sarah Marshall (who is writing a book about the Satanic Panic) and her erstwhile co-host Michael Hobbes (who lives in a downtown hotel) are doing. Sure, the show is basically perfect for someone like me who wants to walk away from an hour-long lecture with a smug sense of satisfaction that they now “know better” than other people about a subject. This is not, however, the soul of Hobbes and Marshall’s project.
My hesitation is not just emergent from the fact that not every episode is strictly about correcting the record, telling us what we are “wrong about.” Hobbes jokes, for instance, at the opening of their episode “The Prom Mom,” “I just think for the next couple episodes we should name the show You’re Unaware Of,” alluding to the topic of discussion not being one well-known enough for the culture to have developed a widespread, wrong opinion about. Nor are many episodes even focused on single individuals or events, covering instead more general discourses around topics like sex offenders or homelessness.
Recently, however, I listened to a bonus episode of the show about the Westboro Baptist Church where Marshall and her guest, Chelsea Weber-Smith, discuss the notion that “empathy is not endorsement,” and something clicked for me:
Chelsey: I have been thinking about that idea of like empathy is not endorsement, right? Like you saying, here are the reasons that this person is probably like this. That’s not you saying that it’s okay that this person’s like it. Also for me, empathy is not a choice that I make. And I think that’s something that we should start talking about more where it’s like, it’s involuntary. Oh, I’m going to make fun of these clowns. And I’m going to talk about the pop. You know, I did not go in there thinking I’m going to bawl my eyes out, even remembering scenes of Shirley Phelps-Roper. You know, I did not want that, but it happened. And that means something important about something. And I don’t know what it is, but I want to err on that side of things, even if it feels scary, I guess.
You’re Wrong About, The Westboro Baptist Church with Chelsey Weber-Smith, Feb 28th, 2022
Chelsey’s comment nudges us to think, how are we using empathy that we think of it as endorsement? More specifically, we might look at the YWA catalogue and consider why listeners would conclude that Marshall, Hobbes, and their guests are asking us to cheer on, pompoms and all, the figures whose more complete history they share with us?
Bimbos Are People Too
It’s not the craziest conclusion to reach, especially if one looks at the early episodes. The show’s original co-hosts initially united after Hobbes reached out to Marshall to express admiration for her journalism on the maligned women of the eighties and nineties. Naturally, Marshall translated much of her established research into episodes for the podcast: Amy Fischer, Monica Lewinsky (this episode is actually chaired by both hosts), Lorena Bobbitt, Tammy Faye Bakker and Jessica Hahn, Anna Nicole Smith, and, probably most famously, Tanya Harding are all covered. After hearing these episodes, I personally came away feeling distinctly on these women’s side in the various scandals in which they were embroiled. I don’t think, either, that I have misapprehended the hosts’ intentions in these cases or that they have done a bad job communicating an ethically complex narrative.
It just isn’t inappropriate in most of these contexts to develop some protagonist bias for these women, because, Marshall contends, we only ever reviled them for the petty crime of being tacky–or a Bimbo, which as far as I can tell is just tackiness with a powdered sugar dusting of sex appeal. Says Marshall of her revisitations of these women: “So we’re talking about addressing the central myth that always comes up in our tales of maligned women, which is the myth of “Female Public Figure: Not Human Being.” My argument is always, “Female Public Figure: In Fact, Human After All.” Her point, I think, is that these women were not just an aesthetic. They also lived lives.
Everyone just sees a joke and I see a tragedy.
-Sarah Marshall on Tanya Harding
Even in the case of Amy Fisher, who was guilty of an actual violent crime, the contemporary media narrative did not seem especially focused on her assault of Mary Jo Buttafuoco. “Long Island Lolita,” the name with which she was branded, does not exactly evoke assault with a deadly weapon. No, Long Island = trashy, and Lolita = sexpot. It was, rather, as if these qualities explained Fisher’s actions, that she was just too shallow and horny to know any better, an assertion that seemed to be supported when Fisher was candidly recorded saying that she deserved a Ferrari for all her pain and suffering. But isn’t it plausible, Marshall posits, that Fisher’s actions are better explained as those of a lonely girl feeling pressured to please the first man to ever have the means and interest to take her to a restaurant with real cloth napkins? Was she perhaps a vulnerable child and not just another vapid woman?
The empathetic argument here is one of granularity rather than endorsement. It is worth looking at the accurate causes of a person’s actions even if such details do not sway our judgement of their absolute wrongness, worth it because people who have actually done wrong generally still deserve to recuperate a sense of personhood that summary judgement can often strip away.
It is worthwhile also because the story of Amy Fisher and others like it expose our own vulnerabilities and implicate us uncomfortably in the vulnerabilities of others. We have all been lonely. That condition is fairly endemic. We can probably also recognize that in our periods of peak loneliness we become more precarious, less able to stave off bad decisions that are destructive to ourselves and others. Some intervention might have helped us if it was available and we were still secure enough to be open to it. And at the same time, I think it’s untenable to say that any of us individually are responsible for keeping other individuals from being lonely. It is an awkward reality to need so badly things that you cannot be entitled to and challenging to feel that the people whom you may not care for deserve and require care.
This kind of systemic view of problems tends to be covered more on the show by Hobbes, who often focuses episodes not around individual persons or stories that seized the zeitgeist but on a meta-analysis of trends in news media or more popular discourses. Of his episodes, I highly recommend “The ‘Ebonics’ Controversy” and “Sex Offenders.” The latter of these addresses what Hobbes sees as an overlooked narrative in the discussion of criminal justice reform, that we not only mistreat the innocent but also treat unfairly those guilty of what we accurately assess to be pretty heinous offenses. He argues that our systems of incarceration and especially post-release probationary restrictions on former prisoners are ineffective at protecting victims AND are inhumane to sex offenders. But “be more humane to sex offenders” is not a very winning slogan. It only becomes a more compelling argument when you can, say, summon the emotional energy to listen to an hour-long podcast episode titled “Sex Offenders.”
And Also the Men, I Guess
While Hobbes and Marshall take pains to generate empathy in us over pointlessly punitive lives we force onto child abusers, they are also careful in this episode to clarify that they do not mean to suggest we ought to be more forgiving of these peoples’ violent actions per se. “Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we don’t give a shit if people accuse us of loving pedophiles,” Marshall glibly tags the opening of the show to Hobbes’ nervous laughter. He quickly goes on to express anxiety that he could trivialize the experiences of victims by focusing on the injustices done to perpetrators.
Hobbes and Marshall’s concerns could appear overwrought to some, but it’s not as if others have not tried the endorsement-by-empathy maneuver before. Or that they haven’t succeeded.
Feminist philosopher Kate Manne coins a term in her 2017 book, Down Girl: the Logic of Misogyny, that is relevant here: “himpathy.”
“[H]impathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpatrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassments, and other misogynistic behavior. Given that misogyny often involves punishing and blaming a women for her “bad” behavior–bad by the lights of patriarchal norms and expectations, that is–you can understand himpathy as the flip side of misogyny; its understudied mirror image; its natural (albeit highly unjust) complement.”
from Manne’s subsequent book, Entitled (2020), pp. 36-37.
This kind of problem appears to be Hobbes and Marshall’s concern: that they might somehow knock a discursive scale out of balance. How best to ensure that one is being evenhanded? Manne names qualifying factors in her definition. Treatment must be “disproportionate” and/or “inappropriate” to count as himpathy. I don’t think that the YWA show treats its subjects with disproportionate or inappropriate empathy*, but it is worth interrogating why.
Manne cites several examples that illustrate her concept, the most famous of them being the Brock Turner trial and the still more recent Kavanaugh hearing. Both men were accused of sexual assault, though only Turner was ever poised to face criminal consequences. He ultimately served three months of a six month sentence in county jail for the assault of Channel Miller. Judge Aaron Persky objected to more severe punishment, lest Turner’s future be too severely impacted. Kavanaugh was scrutinized publicly and questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee in the course of his confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court after a former classmate of his from high school, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, came forward with the allegation that Kavanaugh and another classmate, Mark Judge, assaulted her at a party.
(I just read that sentence back to myself and determined that this post is not meeting my ambition of fun and casual thoughts for this blog. Anyway!)
Despite most impaneled senators conceding that Dr. Ford’s allegations were credible, Kavanaugh was ultimately raised to a seat on the highest court in the land, though not before certain parties engaged in loud public whining that Judge Kavanaugh’s good name was being dragged through the mud. The same people did not offer the same concerns to Dr. Ford, at least not at the same frequency or volume even though the backlash she faced for coming forward was decidedly more severe.
I do not find it controversial to assert that the amount of lenience and benefit of the doubt afforded to Turner and Kavanaugh was disproportionate or that, in Kavanaugh’s case, it was inappropriate. Being harshly critical of the behaviors of someone poised to assume one of the highest positions of legal and moral authority in the country is plainly appropriate.
In Turner’s case, certainly the rhetoric used to draw sympathy to his side was/is disgusting. Manne cites the character witness testimony given by multiple allies of Turner’s assuring that he was a nice guy, ie not the rapist type, despite the straightforward evidence that he had definitely raped someone. Perhaps more galling is the testimony of his father, who bemoaned how upset his son was to be on trial for such a crime, acknowledging the crime itself only as “20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.” But, obviously, it is appropriate that Turner felt uncomfortable. He did something wrong. Only, as his father makes it sound, the real source of his upsetment was not really any internal shame but the discomfort of scrutiny and, perhaps, the looming threat of legal punishment.
And, so long as we’re practicing empathy towards even bad people, let us allow that, yes, that would be terrifying. As Hobbes thoroughly argues, the American carceral state can Fuck Up your life Beyond All Recognition or recovery. The horror of that potential should be acknowledged; it may not be relevant strictly within the context of determining someone’s guilt–and, again, Turner was clearly guilty–but generally we should consider whether the repercussions are, re: Manne’s own concerns about himpathy, appropriate and proportional.
None of this is to say that I think Kate Manne’s and the YWA team’s perspectives are necessarily at odds. The real trouble that Manne is identifying is that our institutions were never actually going to punish someone like Turner or Kavanaugh, white men from affluent backgrounds. They don’t really need more empathy shown to them. They were already protected by social institutions of entitlement that secured empathy for them, if not from the general public, at least from the relevant powers presiding over their cases.
What matters, then, is when and for whom are the protections of male entitlement operational. That is, does it work at full capacity for all men all the time? The more cogent criticisms of Manne’s work question the usefulness of her framework in more complex and controversial cases. What, for instance, of the men to whom our criminal justice system really is a threat? Audrey Yap in her review of Entitled points out:
“Entitled does a very good job at showcasing the ways in which relatively privileged men typically have their needs and wants met by society; and, when those are not met, they frequently receive more sympathy than others with less social privilege would in their situation. What we are left with is a situation in which it is clear that some people are receiving more care—himpathy, after all, is an excess of sympathy. And if this is an excess, then the obvious solution is that we would be better off according less sympathy to the Brett Kavanaughs of this world. In these obvious cases, this solution seems fair. But many situations are much less obvious, and many men who are most in danger of incarceration are not, by and large, having their needs met by society in the first place. Those men are not Manne’s intended targets, but by looking at discrimination primarily through a gendered lens, and by considering men’s gendered entitlements writ large, I think that the men for whom sympathy most risks being withdrawn are the ones for whom there was no excess in the first place.”
Audrey Yap, 2020
A more nuanced and intersectional take on these issues can be found in Amia Srinivasan’s recent book, The Right to Sex. In one essay from this collection, titled “The Conspiracy Against Men,” Srinivasan, like Manne, is harshly critical of the common defenses raised by powerful men when called out for their transgressions (pp. 21-22). But she is also much more interested in the fraught sexual dynamics experienced by women with un-powerful men, where the thing that has gone wrong may be harder to name or pin on any individual, as in the story of a 2014 Title IX complaint (pp. 24-28). Neither party in this incident really makes “the wrong choice” at any point, which is a real speed bump for justice systems built around the idea of punishing people for making “the wrong choice.” But harms and wrongs, argues Srinivasan, often happen totally independently of individual choices or even coercion. The psychic webs and patterns of gendered power require a challenging amount of empathy, extended in various directions, to fully unpack.
Challenge Yourself, Goddammit
There is much more that we could say about the subject of responsible empathy, both to whom we owe more and whose appeals for empathetic understanding are really attempts to dodge scrutiny. I will wrap this post up here, however, and say that if you want to continue to develop your own thinking on the topic, the You’re Wrong About podcast is a great, free resource to work with. I highly recommend their four-part series on the DC Snipers, which quickly break down the true crime style pattern of narrative and delve into the biographies of Mildred Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. This is, for most listeners, probably going to be another “You’re Unaware Of” entry in the catalogue, but it is a classic YWA topic in the sense that it demonstrates how easy it can be understand a person who committed acts of seemingly-random violence if you care to. Granted, the project may take over four hours, but it is not difficult.
I sometimes catch myself wondering if the subjects that the show covers and the way they cover them should feel more difficult, more challenging. I get the sense that “challenging,” in the popular consciousness, is often associated with feelings of frustration or upsetment, and the show has not generally made me frustrated and never made me upset. I have come around recently, though, to rejecting the idea that something challenging will often be upsetting. That seems more and more like the puerile logic of someone trying to pass off an insult as a simple harsh reality.
Maybe the YWA lessons in history and empathy are not “challenging,” but if so, I think it is because they are in the hands of talented guides. I hope that Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes keep taking us to new and old places in this and other formats for a long time. I will keep signing up for the journey.
Chelsey: Before we finish, though, will you say what you’ve been thinking about as your mission statement? Because it seemed like you’ve been thinking about like, do you have thoughts on that?
Sarah: I have been trying to think about it lately, because I feel like the show is in this interesting growth period where it’s sort of like exploring. I picture it as like a little baby bunny or something is sniffing around, figuring out what’s out there, because when you’re reborn into a transitional moment, it’s like, you have to think of stuff that wouldn’t have occurred to you in the past. And then it comes back to like, what am I trying to do as a person? Because to an extent, the show and I are not the same entity, but there’s a lot of overlap. And this is probably something I do to make myself feel more in control, but I’ve really been focused on the fact that I feel like I can reliably be funny. I can’t reliably be smart or right. Or as hardworking as maybe I need to be to, to fair it out. The truth, that’s like underneath whatever layer of bedrock I got stuck at, but like, I can be funny. And I think that essentially, I feel like we’re all on this big backpacking trip, trying to figure out what’s going on and how to relate to the world that we’re in. And I feel like I will walk with you, and I will tell you jokes, and when it gets dark, I will hold the flashlight. And if you need some gorp, I’m going to give you some gorp. And I feel like I want to help take people through a scary trail that they have to go down, and just be a kind of a cheerleader and a hand-holder through it.
Chelsey: I love that. I think that’s perfect. And I think we can also find some geocache fun facts along the way.
Sarah: we’ll spot some in the woods, and we’ll be like, we never would have found this hen of the woods if we weren’t out today.
Chelsey: If we hadn’t gone down this dark trail, which is like, I think a beauty and the beast, right. Where Felipe, the horse is choosing between. And it’s like, no, let’s go this way. No, we won’t go that way. But then you fucking idiot.
Sarah: Felipe was the smartest character in that movie
Former YWA co-host Michael Hobbes can still be heard on his TWO other podcasts, Maintenance Phase with Aubrey Gordon and If Books Could Kill with Peter Shamshiri. He can also frequently be found on Twitter railing against hollow “cancel culture” news stories. Sarah Marshall also hosts the movies and feelings podcast, You Are Good, with Alex Stead.
*I acknowledge that there are technical and connotative differences between empathy and sympathy, but for this discussion I think it is appropriate to treat them as roughly synonymous in the sense of being moved to imagine someone else’s mental state.
Cognito Mode 